Fuel

Many demolitions are actually renovations.

-Jalaluddin Rumi, poet and mystic (1207-1273)

We must embrace pain and burn it as fuel for our journey.

-Kenji Miyazawa, poet and story writer (1896-1933)

Don't surrender your loneliness

So quickly.

Let it cut more deeply.

Let it ferment and season you

As few human

Or even divine ingredients can.

-Hafiz, poet (1315-1390)

Over that edge

We all have our own ground to work, you know. You have yours, too. You just have to find out what it is. But you know what? It is right on the edge of yourself. At the cliff edge of life. That's the edge you go to. Put yourself in conversation with that edge no matter how frightening it seems. Look down over that edge. It's a bit terrifying to begin with but then you'll recognize a bit of territory that you can work, something you can step out onto. It was there all the time for me, when I look back, just on the other side of a too, too familiar window, out of which I had not been looking.

- David Whyte...Crossing the Unknown Sea

Germs again

I’ve talked before about the benefits of exposure to some ‘dirt’ and germs. A webmd article reports on a recent study that gives another nod to the idea.

“Just as a baby's brain needs stimulation, input, and interaction to develop normally, the young immune system is strengthened by exposure to everyday germs so that it can learn, adapt, and regulate itself, notes Thom McDade, PhD, associate professor and director of the Laboratory for Human Biology Research at Northwestern University…

In a recent study in print April 2010, McDade's team found that children who were exposed to more animal feces and had more cases of diarrhea before age 2 had less incidence of inflammation in the body as they grew into adulthood.

Inflammation has been linked to many chronic adulthood illnesses, such as heart disease, diabetes, and Alzheimer's.

"We're moving beyond this idea that the immune system is just involved in allergies, autoimmune diseases, and asthma to think about its role in inflammation and other degenerative diseases," McDade says. "Microbial exposures early in life may be important… to keep inflammation in check in adulthood." -McDade, T. The Royal Society, 2010; vol 277: pp 1129-1137.

Nature's rebirth

"I think that no matter how old or infirm I may become, I will always plant a large garden in the spring.

Who can resist the feelings of hope and joy that one gets from participating in nature's rebirth?"

- Edward Giobbi

I was just saying to a friend that even as I age and someday get less mobile and hardly able to do lots of harvesting, I'll still want to put seeds in the ground in the spring. I LOVE watching those little seedlings sprout and watch the plant grow – it is absolutely therapeutic for me. I believe God is amazing for thinking it all up!

"As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. As the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return to it without watering the earth and making it bud and flourish, so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater, so is my word that goes out from my mouth: It will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.” Isaiah 55:9-11

A leisurely pause and wonder

“Because we do not rest we lose our way... Poisoned by the hypnotic belief that good things come only through unceasing determination and tireless effort, we can never truly rest. And for want of rest our lives are in danger.”– Wayne Muller

I am needing some rest after an extended push of doing many tasks over the last seven months. So, I went looking for research to support my felt need for some R&R. (Did you know that there’s a whole journal dedicated to the cause of leisure? Yep, it’s the Journal of Leisure Research; now, never mind that the National Recreation & Park Association publishes it, still it has the revered “journal” label!)

In an article THE NEGLECT OF RELAXATION (Journal of Leisure Research, 2000 1st Quarter, Vol. 32, Issue 1, p.82-86), Douglas A. Kleiber draws attention to polar views of leisure, contrasting a more “doing” way of leisure described as “rather high intensity activity as being a source of satisfaction, self-realization, and even a sense of community”; with a more “being” kind of “leisure found in an attitude of ‘non-activity’ and receptivity.” He goes on to quote an author of a ‘classic’ book on leisure: “Leisure is not the attitude of mind of those who actively intervene but of those who are open to everything; not of those who grab and grab hold, but of those who leave the reins loose and who are free and easy themselves." [(p.41) J. Pieper, Leisure: The basis of culture. New York: Random House, 1963, 1952]

Kleiber asserts: “Committed and serious effort, joyous activity and celebration, and re-creation may emerge from leisure, but I share Pieper's view that leisure is most essentially a position of relaxation, of faithful openness to immediate reality and ease of movement and thinking… disengaged and relaxed, open to possibility, receptive to the world around and comforted by the conditions of our lives that allow us to be that way.” {Kleiber also notes that, “For Pieper, faith in God is needed for true leisure. Perhaps that is so. But I would argue that disengagement and emotional security would be enough to give leisure meaning and value in our time.”}

Additionally, the article’s discussion on pause gives me pause--

“In Freedom and Destiny, psychoanalyst Rollo May (1981) discusses the significance of the pause as a critical element of freedom and creativity. The pause, which is more relevant to eastern than western thought, signifies what is not rather than what is. The pause signifies appreciation and opportunity; it is time pregnant with possibility…. Pause is the prerequisite for wonder. When we don't pause, when we are perpetually hurrying from.., one "planned activity" to another, we sacrifice the richness of wonder (p. 167, Freedom and destiny. New York: W. W. Norton).

May notes that musicians are especially aware of the power of pauses in giving notes meaning and clarity… The pause takes advantage of the capacity to appreciate. In everyday thought reflection requires pausing; and yet pauses can last for longer, as in an evening, a weekend, a vacation or a sabbatical. But May also notes that the American sense of leisure does not make particularly good use of the pause--in some contrast to Europeans as well as people in non-western cultures--preferring to define the freedom of leisure in the action that can occur, in movement and becoming rather than in contemplation and being.”

Giving pause; being free and easy, relaxed, open; living in wonder, contemplation, and being – these all sound especially appealing to me today; maybe also to you?

May your summer hold ample opportunity to live leisurely – to give pause so that you might wonder, and enjoy being.

“In silence all of our usual patterns assault us… That is why most people give up rather quickly.” – Richard Rohr

I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother… - Psalm 131:2

Rest in the Lord and wait patiently for Him… Psalm 37:7

Now, O Lord,
calm me into a quietness
that heals
and listens,

and molds my longings
and passions,
my wounds
and wonderings

into a more holy
and human
shape.

- Ted Loder, Guerrillas of Grace