I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.
? Jorge Luis Borges

Last week I was driving near my neighborhood library and realized I had not been there in a while so I turned in. I didn’t really need a book…I had one or two I was reading…but I felt like I could just use a good dose of library. Summer and the library are inextricably linked in my experience. I have fond memories as a child of riding my bike to the library on hot, sweltering, southern Ohio summer days. The library must have been air conditioned and walking through those doors brought instant relief from the heat while filling my nostrils with that library smell. What is it? Paper? Leather? People? Words floating in the air? Stories just waiting to be told?Wisdom to be discovered?

Walking in I noticed a dad with his three sons. They were lugging an enormous bag of books, that IKEA sized bag that holds nearly everything but the kitchen sink. They were in their summer uniforms of shorts and t-shirts and the older one, a new teenager I imagined, was exhibiting his independent streak by wearing one running shoe and one bright red Croc with mismatched socks. I smiled and silently wished the father all the best. Lugging the bag through the door, the younger one stood with his parent and put the returned books one at a time onto the conveyor belt that took them to that mysterious place that would prepare them for their next reader. The dad exercised great patience and presence.

As I roamed around the library I noticed those who sat at computers and those in some quiet listening areas with large headsets over their ears. In the children’s area, some little ones read with a parent while others worked with puzzles and a few played games on a screen. I thought of the great gift of this institution and how it has shaped not only individuals but our culture. So it was with joy that I watched a story on CBS Sunday Morning about the importance of libraries and the many ways they have grown and changed over the years. No longer a place for simply borrowing books, libraries have become a center of a community. They have always been and continue to be one of those safe havens for so many…different generations, people living on the margins, the curious, the searching, the creative, the shy, the hopeful. Choosing a book and taking it home to explore without cost is a freedom not to be taken lightly.  In fact T.S. Eliot said: “The very existence of libraries affords the best evidence that we may yet have hope for the future of man.” 

And aren’t we all looking for a little hope in a future for us all? With all that is happening in our world, I will take any good glimpse of it that I can. The library seems a very good place to start. 

As I was checking out the stack of cookbooks that I will likely never use but whose pages give me great joy to flip through, the dad and his sons were checking out yet another huge stack of books and packing them into their big bag. They were laughing and enjoying their time together. Much happens at a library and this is just one snapshot. They headed out the door to the reading that will happen this week, these summer days, that will be, before we know it, autumn days.

“One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” 
? Henry Miller

For the last two weeks I have been traveling. I was privileged to spend time in the south of England before walking along a path known as the Cotswold Way. Spending my days among places and people I did not know allowed me once again to remember one of the true gifts of travel. Navigating streets and fields, hills and valleys that have known a life outside anything I had experienced confronted me with the fact that we live in a diverse, multi-layered world filled with people whose lives are so very different than my own. Ways of getting from one place to another is different. Clothing takes on a variety that can be startling and surprising, beautiful and eye-stopping. Sounds fall in new ways on the ear. Foods common to those in the place you are visiting seem exotic. 

All this combines to create a sense of humility in me. Noticing the ways that other people move through their world in ways that are so different than my own helps me to realize how wide my lens needs to stretch to be a true citizen of the world. Coming face to face with all I don’t know about the wants and needs of others is humbling. The French novelist Gustave Flaubert puts it this way: “Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.” 

Of course, a person really does not need to leave home to realize this. Yet I am feeling thankful for the opportunity because in the every day walk of my life it is easy to think others see the world pretty much the same as I do, experience it with the same enthusiasm, boredom or anxiety as I do. When placed on soil not our own, challenged to navigate language and life with the hope of being welcomed or at least tolerated, I believe our hearts and minds expand. And in the world in which we are living right now, this seems a very good thing to me. 

Travel writer and novelist Pico Iyer says: “We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again- to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.” 

Today I am grateful to have been ‘taken in’. I am feeling blessed to have sensed my heart and eyes opened even a little, to have looked past headlines and news stories and seen the beautiful humanity with which we spin on this globe. It is a sacred wake up call. I hope I offered what I could… in my ignorance and what little I know. And I hope and pray that it has brought me to the place of being a young fool again, one who can fall in love once more with this world, this planet, these humans, this life with which we each have been gifted.

The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.”
~Pablo Picasso

“People are hungry for it.”, I said to the two women standing before me. “Oh, no, we are desperate.”,one replied. These words were spoken at last weekend’s Art in Bloom at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. This event which showcases floral arrangements interpreting pieces of art from the many galleries had been on hold during the last years. It was another treasured spring ritual that had been sidelined by the pandemic. But this year it was back and in full force as people came in droves to bask in the color and creativity of both professional floral artists and those who simply love art and the opportunity to do something with flowers that is perhaps a little out of their comfort zone.

Desperate. While the women and I laughed a bit at her rather dramatic statement, her words have stuck with me. She made this statement after remarking that she felt there were more people than ever in attendance this year. She could have been right. I don’t know. But I do think she was on to something about the deep desire and need that brought the crowds to this four day event. Even with masks hiding partial expressions on faces, their eyes told the story. The sheer joy at being at something that focused on beauty, that lifted people above the ordinary of their days. With the memory of quarantine and daily doses of bad news in the not too distant review mirror, perhaps there was a certain desperation that people carried with them.

As people we are created for making meaning of our lives. Over the last years that meaning has taken on some very sharp edges. I, for one, do not always like what I see and how I interpret the movement of the world. And so, to be surrounded by art that spans backs centuries is a good reminder that we humans have prevailed, we have come through many terrible things and are still here. To add the gift of taking those pieces of art…paintings, sculptures, statues, masks, tapestries…and asking people in the here-and-now to make a likeness of them in flowers carries with it a balance of sorts. These floral arrangements last only a few days. The pieces of art continue to tell their stories from all over the world, from cultures that no longer exist and those that have thrived and evolved. Together they speak to the fragility and the strength of the human experience.

The great artist Georgia O’Keefe said: ”I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way – things I had no words for.” As people roamed the galleries last weekend they were likely looking for things they had no words for. Some of it may have been a healing of the desperation that can come from being bombarded by the messages the world is sending daily.  Some of it may have been a pursuit of color and shape that has been so remote in this spring that is slow to arrive. Some of it may have been a starvation for beauty that can stay hidden in the cold and brutal temperatures of a Minnesota winter, that gets shut out by media messages that focus on all the negative things happening.

Of course, I write all this knowing that the desperation I may feel is minute in comparison to that which others feel around the world. Looking at the women and children standing in lines to escape from Ukraine and those of the men who have been pressed into military service from what had been a normal, regular life gives new meaning to the word desperate. Their stories and lives haunt us and should cause us to count our blessings and offer whatever aid and prayer we can. Actress and artist, Stella Adler, remarked that “life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one.” Maybe another thing an experience of an exhibit like Art in Bloom does is to nurture our souls so we might be more caring and generous to those who are in pain, those who suffer. 

Outside our walls, spring is generously arriving now. How we name and hold our own desperations and hopes will help us tell our stories of this particular year, this particular spring. In the meaning making we do, may we wrestle with both the fragility and the strength we carry within from a long line of ancestors…artists… on whose shoulders we stand. And may we find some morsels of beauty and art along the way.

Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.
~ Aristotle

April is National Poetry Month. These designations that focus on certain things for certain months always boggles my mind. Black History Month. Women’s History Month. It seems we ought to be aware and in celebration of both black history and the history of women all the time, every month. And as far as I am concerned, every month, every day is a time to be in awe of poetry and those who struggle to write it. 

Poetry is the beautiful collection of a very few words that can tell a story. A good poem can make us cry or laugh and sometimes all in the reading of a few, short lines. Poetry makes us feel in ways long paragraphs cannot. Poetry expresses our love, our longing, our devotion, our hopes, our dreams, our failures, what haunts us and what fills us with sacred knowing. 

As someone who existed for a long time in a profession that is often given to using too many words, for too long, the gift of poetry cuts through all the banter and brings the hearer to a stripping away of all that is unnecessary. The talent of the poet is in the choosing, the careful choosing of just the right combination of words that create phrases we can remember perhaps for a very long time. And poetry is often the words that rides the lift and fall of a tune in a song that lodges itself in our heart and stays there till our last breath.

Many Thursdays I make my way to the Landmark Center in downtown St. Paul to the Schubert Club’s noon concert series. This respite in the middle of an ordinary day never fails to lift my often downcast spirit especially on a day like today when the snow is flying and the wind cuts through my refusal to add another layer. Today’s concert featured the choir ComMUSICation, a group of singers of various ages whose mission is to ‘amplify young people’s voices and cultivate skills for success through equitable access to music, collaboration, and opportunity.’ Today’s performance featured these young people singing with professional singers from MPLS (imPulse). The music was luscious and seeing one young girl given the opportunity to conduct the singers and doing so with such precision and grace gave this former music teacher a very full heart. 

The final piece of music sung by the choir was a musical setting of the poet Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem ‘One Boy Told Me’ set to music by composer Timothy Takach. One of the young women introduced the song and, after saying the title, beamed: “I just love this poem!” This poem is really a compilation of phrases spoken by Naomi’s son as he was growing up. She had kept a notebook of all his statements…something many parents think they will do and never actually get around to doing. I had heard her tell this story at a workshop I had attended. To hear the poem set to music was thrilling. 

On this gray, April Day with snow spitting onto the daffodils that are trying desperately to push their way into the world, I am thankful for poetry. I celebrate its creation every day but especially today. And I celebrate the musicians who can take the poetry and make it sing. 

Happy Poetry Month!

One Boy Told Me by Naomi Shihab Nye

Music lives inside my legs.
It’s coming out when I talk.

I’m going to send my valentines
to people you don’t even know.

Oatmeal cookies make my throat gallop.

Grown-ups keep their feet on the ground
when they swing. I hate that.

Look at those 2 o’s with a smash in the middle—
that spells good-bye.

Don’t ever say “purpose” again,
let’s throw the word out.

Don’t talk big to me.
I’m carrying my box of faces.
If I want to change faces I will.

Yesterday faded
but tomorrow’s in BOLDFACE..

When I grow up my old names
will live in the house
where we live now.
I’ll come and visit them.

Only one of my eyes is tired.
The other eye and my body aren’t.

Is it true all metal was liquid first?
Does that mean if we bought our car earlier
they could have served it
in a cup?

There’s a stopper in my arm
that’s not going to let me grow any bigger.
I’ll be like this always, small.

And I will be deep water too.
Wait. Just wait. How deep is the river?
Would it cover the tallest man with his hands in the air?

Your head is a souvenir.

When you were in New York I could see you
in real life walking in my mind.

I’ll invite a bee to live in your shoe.
What if you found your shoe
full of honey?

What if the clock said 6:92
instead of 6:30? Would you be scared?

My tongue is the car wash
for the spoon.

Can noodles swim?

My toes are dictionaries.
Do you need any words?

From now on I’ll only drink white milk
on January 26.

What does minus mean?
I never want to minus you.

Just think—no one has ever seen
inside this peanut before!

It is hard being a person.

I do and don’t love you—
isn’t that happiness?

To hear Naomi Shihab Nye read the poem:

“Art is to console those who are broken by life.”
~Vincent Van Gogh

This past weekend I listened to an interview with Krista Tippett and author Kate DeCamillo. It was a charming and inspiring conversation between two people that seem to truly admire and appreciate one another. During the interview in response to a question, Kate DiCamillo said:“Life is chaos. Art is pattern.” These words pierced both my heart and my imagination. And they hit home to the world as I know it these days. Her statement also sent me to the dictionary to refresh my memory about the actual definition of chaos. “Complete disorder and confusion. Behavior so unpredictable as to appear random, owing to great sensitivity to small changes in conditions.” And of course, there was also the definition that exists in the beginning of the sacred texts many of us hold dear…“the formless matter supposed to have existed before the creation of the universe.”

It seems that over the last two and half years chaos has been the food of the every day. Some days I find myself overwhelmed by it all. Am I alone in this? Yet in those feelings I have found myself drawn more and more to art. And not just art we might find in museums or on stages and between the pages of books though that has been particularly helpful in counteracting the experience of disorder and confusion. The every day arts of cooking a meal or arranging flowers in a vase have lifted me out of what seems the randomness of it all. Taking time to pay attention to how I wipe the kitchen counters or arrange books on a shelf also has done the trick. And in just a few weeks (please, God!) spring will be here and the art that is the garden will begin to take shape.

“Art is pattern.” I had really never thought about it in that way before. But the patterns of the buildings we know to be great gifts of architecture can bring a grounding to our world. Noticing how a chair we have housed for years is put together with form and purpose speaks to the patterns of bringing wood and design together. The coat we have worn all winter and are desperately tired of was fashioned from patterns of what fits on our needy, welcoming body. That favorite recipe takes random ingredients and through the process of weaving them together feeds us, even delights us. 

No matter your faith tradition the stories shared round fires and passed down from generation to generation all begin with some kind of disorder that moves through the acts of creativity to birth patterns that bring order, calm, purpose and even beauty. “The earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface”…and then light was called forth and the patterns of Creation began to build.

So why did those six words spoken by the great teller of stories for children capture me so? Perhaps it was a challenge. A challenge to take what often feels like the chaos of thought and experience and find a pattern that will make something more of it, perhaps even art. If we take seriously these traditional stories that ground us in who we are as humans, it seems a central message is to create. So on these days that seem to want to hang on for dear life to the grayness of winter and in the face of those voices who want to stir up evermore chaos, there might be the challenge to begin to see, to create the patterns that can make artists of us all. 

It’s worth a try.

Hello, sun in my face.
Hello, you who make the morning 
and spread it over the fields
and into the faces of the tulips
and the nodding morning glories,
and into the windows, of, even, the
miserable and the crotchety –

best preacher that ever was,
dear star, that just happens
to be where you are in the universe
to keep us from ever-darkness,
to ease us with warm touching,
to hold us in the great hands of light-
good morning, good morning, good morning.

Watch, now, how I start my day
in happiness, in kindness.

This beautiful poem by the beloved Mary Oliver, is a piercing reminder of the fullness of the nest in which we find ourselves. This thing called life holds the macro experience of being alive in the vastness of the whole universe…the Sun which opens to us every morning, the darkness that can threaten to overwhelm us. It also contains the micro…the faces of tulips, the surprise of opening morning glories. Each day we walk the balance beam of both the enormous and the minuscule.

At this time of year, I try to have tulips in my house at all times. They are one of the first signals that the season is turning and their color keeps on telling me to calm down, all shall be well. The truth is they were the first flowers my husband ever gave me and so have always held a special place in my heart. Right now there are orange and yellow ones in the living room and red ones in the kitchen. Their minute petals hold a whole world within if you have the time to look at them. A sunrise in the center of their unfolding.

Lately I have been thinking of this macro/micro world we inhabit. My ability to hold the pain and suffering across the world has limits. Watching as families flee the horrific devastation in Ukraine is too heart breaking for words. The anger and despair that accompanies those feelings could undo any ability to move in any ordinary day. And the privilege with which I say this, not being in their shoes, observing from such a distance is not lost on me.

And yet…and yet…I walk by those tulips and I am drawn to their beauty and their grounding. I try, if only for a few minutes, to stand with what they have to offer in one hand and my feelings for those so far away moving across uncertain paths in the other. Those two outstretched hands form a prayer that is filled with both gratitude and lament. To be human is to live in both worlds, macro and micro. We hold out our hands and our hearts to the beauty and the terror and pray that somehow our intention makes some measure of difference. 

As the poet says…’Good morning, good morning, good morning.Watch, now, how I start my day in happiness, in kindness.’ Here we are, all of us, held ‘in the great hands of light.’ Again. And again.

“You recall those times,I know you do, when the sun
lifted its weight over a small rise to warm your face,
when a parched day finally broke open, real rain
sluicing down the sidewalk, rattling city maples
and you so sure the end was here, life a house of cards
tipped over, falling, hope’s last breath extinguished
in a bitter wind. Oh, friend, search your memory again-
beauty and relief are still there, only sleeping.
~Molly Fisk

For those of us who make our home in the Christian household, the season of Lent paid another visit beginning last Wednesday. It is a season that is not always a welcome guest. Depending on the brand or branch of this tradition in which you were raised or find yourself, it can be forty days of deprivation, penance, furrowed brows, resignation, or all manner of soul dampening things. We so often forget that these days we have infused with often misplaced theology really gets its beginnings in the word ‘lecten’, an Old English word meaning ‘lenghten’ and referred to the season of spring. And when spring arrives, and the days lengthen, we experience that amazing gift of…light, more light. 

And aren’t we all hungering for that? Because the fact is this Lent could be shaping up to be the lentiest Lent. I don’t know if that is a word, in fact I am sure it is not, but it is the thought that keeps coming to me. I may have thought something similar last year when the isolation, deaths, and illnesses that surrounded us had no end in sight. While some of that reality is still with us, now we are confronted with a war that is evil and unjust and has most thinking people wondering what can possibility happen next. 

All this may just be why a season like Lent has continued and stood the test of all these years. Marking Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness and the temptations endured on the journey toward Easter are meant to help us mark our own forty days in our own lives. Our own hope of having the light lengthen into something brighter and more hopeful than where we are right now is important work and life-giving work. Spending some time with this notion of ‘lengthening light’ has had me watching for ways in which the sheer goodness of light emerges and is helping me see what this Lent may have to teach. 

Light comes in so many forms. There is, of course, the pinnacle of Light, the Sun. And there are those actual rays of light that have begun to melt some of the ice and snow that is stacked in our yards and have encrusted our spirit. And there is the light that bursts forth in our hearts when we hear good music or read a turn of phrase that seems filled with a light of knowing coming from another world. There is also the light that happens when friends family speak with laughter and understanding. There is even the light of silence that can hold us when the words of the evening news threatens to darken our tender, fragile souls. 

The poet says: “You recall those times,I know you do, when the sun lifted its weight over a small rise to warm your face, when a parched day finally broke open…Oh, friend, search your memory again-beauty and relief are still there, only sleeping.” In these days, these lentiest of days, life does seem “a house of cards tipped over, falling, hope’s last breath extinguished in a bitter wind.” 

But as those who have the ability to recall, may we find the courage to embrace the beauty and strength of the sunflower, the national flower of Ukraine, lifting our faces toward the light, standing tall in resistance and power. May we mirror the resilience we see on the faces of those who flee and have been forced to fight.  Lent…lecten…lengthen…light. May we awaken what is only sleeping and have the grace to find our way toward a brighter time.

Today I am thinking of Miss Neff. She was my high school history teacher and in those days we said “Miss” not “Ms.” She was somewhat of an enigma to me, small, very thin with bird-like features she always dressed as if she might be going to a business meeting later in the day. Maybe she was. I never knew much about her except that, once on her way to school, she had been involved in an accident where a young child was involved. To this day I wonder what happened. But today I am remembering Miss Neff for a particular moment in our World History class, one in which I was paying marginal attention, because all we ever studied was war, right? and I was tired of it and I was a teenager full of myself, of my dreams and of a narrow view of the world.

Miss Neff, standing in front of the room with her clipboard containing her notes resting on her bony hip, was outlining yet another war when she said:”At this same time in history, Mozart was writing music.” My head jerked up and, I could have fabricated this memory over time, but I thought our eyes met in a knowing way. She knew that I was a ‘music kid’ and that my plans were to study music in college. She then went on to name some artists that were creating and some writers that were writing. It was a moment when history became ‘both/and’ and not ‘either/or’ for me. I began to formulate a world view that encompasses all the many connections and complexities of how humans move in the world.

Today, when we are reeling from the news of what is happening in Ukraine, my heart is breaking for the people there. Mothers, fathers, children, grandparents, all holding a collective breath to see what will happen. Our minds trying to understand what possesses people to do what the leaders in Russia are doing and the feeling of helplessness that accompanies this. The fact of the matter is that we have lived a long time now with one foot ready to send us into the pit of despair. Four years of daily whiplash perpetrated by a president drunk on power. Then a pandemic that sent us into our homes, isolated us from those we love and those daily acts that made up our lives, that brought us a modicum of joy. A reckoning with the ways racism and injustice has been the food of our neighbors , of those whose lives have always been pushed to the margins.  And now war.

This is the moment to own the privilege with which I move through every day. That during all this time I have lived comfortably, knowing warmth and having everything I needed to eat, with resources to re-imagine ways of still being in community with friends and family. That privilege extends to the color of my skin and the resources that are always a click away. 

And yet today, with Miss Neff’s gaze etched in my memory, I am also naming the despair I feel. The knowledge that there will always be bullies and that their need for power and dominance causes others to pay a huge price. History books and sacred texts are full of their stories. While that gaze dusts itself off, I am also reminded that there are good things happening, things are being created, beauty is being born, compassion is being extended, healing is possibility. The both/and of the world still reigns.

So, today I will try to embody the lesson of my teacher and not allow the despair for the world to overwhelm. I will send fervent and gentle prayers to all that is Holy to be present to the Ukrainian people. The helplessness will still be there but I will also do something to remember. Here is a poem by Jane Hirshfield that might help:

Today, when I could do nothing.
I saved an ant.
it must have come in with the morning paper,
still being delivered
to those who shelter in place.
A morning paper is still an essential service
I am not an essential service.
I have coffee and books,
time,
a garden,
silence enough to fill cisterns.
It must have first walked 
the morning paper, as if loosened ink
taking the shape of an ant.
Then across the laptop computer -warm-
then onto the back of a cushion.
Small black ant, alone,
crossing a navy cushion,
moving steadily because that is what it could do.
Set outside in the sun,
it could not have found again its nest.
What then did I save?
It did not move as if it was frightened,
even while walking my hand,
which moved it through switftness and air.
Ant, alone, without companions,
whose ant-heart I could not fathom-
how is your life, I wanted to ask.
I lifted it, took it outside.
This first day when I could no nothing,
contribute nothing
beyond staying distant from my own kind,
I did this.

The life of expression is the tuning fork by which we find our way to the sacred.
~Mark Nepo

It was time. In fact, it was past time. My piano was in desperate need of tuning and my beloved tuner is no longer with us so I had to find someone new. After a thorough internet search, I arranged for someone to come and restore the sound that lifts my spirits.

Of course, I had forgotten the sounds that have to happen before the beauty arrives in the touch of the keys. I sat in my kitchen as the tuner worked his magic in another room. The ping and plop of pitches echoed off the ceiling and into the room where I was trying to write. High pitches sounding like cats raking their nails across a chalkboard. Low pitches grating out like belches of middle school boys. Over and over again, until with some finesse, amazing patience and maybe a dose of magic, the pitch slides into the ‘just right’ place. For more than an hour I listened as the technician did his work. Work that astounded me at his ability to endure such scratching and belching until he landed in the home of tonal beauty. 

Captive at my kitchen table as I was, I began to think about how these last months and years have been a little like this tuning. Most of us have felt off, strident in sound, not knowing if we would ever be able to stay on pitch again. Some days we would find a word, an activity, a glimpse of something that would pull us up from the pits of disharmony. Other days, we were just strings plucked by an angry, inept hand. 

Sitting there, I was reminded of another experience of tuning I had a few years ago. I had anticipated walking the labyrinth at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco and arrived expecting a quiet, calm and contemplative time. Stepping onto this stone path modeled after the labyrinth in Chartes Cathedral in France, I was only a few steps in when sounds like I had never heard before began. The huge, beautiful pipe organ was being tuned! If you have never heard an organ going through this adjustment, let me say that it is a primeval-like animal sound until it makes its way into its homeland. As I walked, I remembered reading that “Everything that happens to you on the labyrinth is metaphor.” And so, I continued to walk, surrounded by beauty, watching the unfolding path without being able to see exactly where it led, held in the sounds of tuning…blessed tuning. The experience allowed me to enter into a place of adjusting myself, of reflecting on the places that needed that very turn of an instrument that brought me back to myself. 

We are all still in the tuning stages of this pandemic. Each of us will find our way into a new harmony that has yet to be discovered. Tuning is not pretty. But it is necessary. So, let the patient hand of the tuner be gentle with us all. I trust, and I hope you do as well, that we will find our way eventually.

Last week I took refuge from the frigid temperatures by going to the Landmark Center in downtown St. Paul to hear a concert hosted by the Schubert Club. These Thursday events held at noon in the large, open space there seems as safe an opportunity as I can imagine to soothe a wintry heart. All folks are masked so it is impossible to see the beauty of their faces but the spirit of people in the presence of live music has the ability to remind us that we are still community, hungering for the sounds and silences that have had the power to lift the heart and heal the soul since the beginning of time. 

This particular program contained two song cycles performed by a string quartet and the beautiful soprano of Maria Jette. In her description of the songs we were about to hear she talked of how the composer, Robert Schumann, was given to ‘weltschmerze’, something she described as a feeling of melancholy, world-weariness, even pain for the world. The masked faces around the majestic space seemed to all nod in a collective ‘ahh, yes’. Jette was the only unmasked person in the room and so her face mirrored our own pandemic knowing. Weltschmerze…sometimes a different language can say just what needs to be said. We are all in a certain state of weltschmerze.

I am not sure if this German phrase is what caused me to begin to push back at the melancholy of it all but I began to think of the ways in which it is possible to lift one’s self above the world-weariness if only for a moment here and there. In a  bag I had been keeping in the basement were paper white bulbs I had intended to do something with. So, I brought them out and began to create a way for them to grow and bloom. Not today but in some future that will come. Around the bulbs I placed some shells I collected on the beach a few weeks ago when the Sun was beating down and the sound of the ocean was filling my ears and nostrils. And then I placed the butterfly that I found last June on the pavement of a parking lot. The winged one was already no longer living when I found it but still has the ability to thrust its beauty into the world. Before I knew it I had created a shrine to whatever is the opposite of weltschmerze.

Then a few days later, the world lost the beloved Buddhist teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh. The wisdom and presence that he inspired seems the very antidote to weltschmerze. His teachings are a very call to see the gifts of every moment…even those wracked by a virus that does not want to leave us. Even in these times he can call us embrace whatever is happening in the world and to see it for what it is. 

“Breathing in, I know that I am breathing in.
Breathing out, I know that I am breathing out.

Breathing in, I see myself as a flower.
Breathing out, I feel flesh.

Breathing in, I see myself as a mountain.
Breathing out, I feel solid.

Breathing in, I see myself as still water.
Breathing out, I reflect things as they are.

Breathing in, I see myself as space.
Breathing out, I feel free.”

Winter days are threatening ongoing cold. There are shrines to be built to remind us of what endures. Deep breaths, my friends…deep breaths.