What is and What Will Be (vol. 6, no. 11)
Here are a few things I’m sharing this month:
1. Question:
Every year we have been
witness to it: how the
world descends
into a rich mash, in order that
it may resume.
And therefore
who would cry out
to the petals on the ground
to stay,
knowing as we must,
how the vivacity of what was is married
to the vitality of what will be?
Excerpt from Lines Written in the Days of Growing Darkness by Mary Oliver
2. Quote:
- “Blessing are always mercifully short; blessings bless us in the very act of moving on quickly once they have been said, leaving us alone and surprised into thinking: what might we be, or what might we want, or what we might give; that we had been, until now, and until the moment we were so blessed, too afraid to admit.” – David Whyte (Consolations II)
3. Poem:
Excerpt from On Meditating, Sort Of by Mary Oliver:
Of course I wake up finally
thinking, how wonderful to be who I am,
made out of earth and water,
my own thoughts, my own fingerprints —
all that glorious, temporary stuff.
4. Something Inspiring:
- This haiku by Kobayashi Issa “In this world we walk on the roof of hell gathering blossoms” and Jane Hirshfield’s reflection: “…when I first encountered that haiku, I thought it was a portrait of a kind of bitterness; that, you know, here we are on the roof of hell, and what do we do? And my feeling about it has completely changed over the years, because I now feel, you know, every inch of ground on this Earth has seen unfathomable suffering, some of it human, some of it not human, but there is no inch of Earth which is not soaked in suffering. But there is also no inch of Earth which is not soaked in joy and in beauty and in radiance.”
5. No new project updates; however, here’s a reminder about keeping Thanksgiving in perspective:
“Now, in all fairness, I do not know for sure whether or not my mom was chasing that ideal. But, I am not going to let Norman Rockwell off the hook. And for those of you with children, let me be presumptuous enough to speak for your kids if only for a moment.
We don’t care if the turkey comes frozen from a box. We don’t care if the cranberry sauce slides out of the can shaped like a cylinder. And we don’t care if the mashed potatoes are made from a powder. In fact, a lot of us like it that way. But, here’s the thing.
All we want is you.”
Read more: https://shawnhumphrey.com/meditations/i-blamed-norman-rockwell/
Thanks so much. And, have a great day! – shawn
P.S. If this resonates, would you consider forwarding it to one person who might value it too?
