Many of us are grappling with anxiety and worry at this moment in time. We see troubles in every part of the world. Our own political divisions threaten to destroy the best—however imperfect—form of government humans have every devised. Some are at a stage in life where what’s next in this journey is much closer than how we began. As I was reminded at yet another funeral last week, we don’t get to make that choice. It almost always comes in unexpected ways.

And even though we knew it was coming, the eclipse was eerie enough to bring on its own special type of anxiety.

In a 2023 On Being podcast with Krista Tippett, the best-selling author, teacher, and Episcopal priest Barbara Brown Taylor describes the tumultuous times in her past. She called upon something John Claypool once said that helped her sort through the challenges. He simply asked her, “What is saving your life right now?”

“I love the right-now-ness of it . . . I think that’s the answer. What’s saving my life right now in my early 70s, married to a man who turns 86 next month, going to more funerals than baptisms, with all that we’ve talked about that there is to lament. ‘Right now’ has become a place where I can find, every day, great joy if I don’t get too ahead of myself. If I get way ahead of myself, I’ll need to take more drugs or something.

But if I can stay right now, there is something every single day that is worth staying alive for and worth increasing the life available to everything and everyone about me within a local radius. So what’s saving my life right now is this locality I’ve been talking about. I am at this moment a better grandmother, aunt, sister, spouse than I’ve ever been by my own measure because I’m attending in ways I have not attended . . . staying in the present as best I can and being amazed that life, as it unrolls every single day, is more than scenery as I rush from here to there. That it’s the real deal.“

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Every single day “is more than scenery.” I love that thought. Life brings a continuous stream of unimaginable wonders. Our job is to pay attention, focusing on the wonder of what’s around us and acting in the locality of where we are. Our local actions—as Isabel Wilkerson reminds us—are one way we participate in the great dramas of our day. How we interact with those in our immediate presence, how we talk about those present and those not in the room, how we seek to grow in knowledge—these are among the ways we save ourselves on this journey.

Rigidity in mind and spirit can be a challenge. We’ve all seen examples of people who fear what’s next and want to hang on to what they have and what they wish to be true. Yet it is with an open spirit that we best see the wholeness and love that is around us. Among Taylor’s work is an essay on physics called “The Luminous Web.” In it she writes of the evolution of science and then of physics in particular. Krista Tippett spoke of it in their interview.

“’The deeper revelation’ of physics in our time . . . is one of undivided wholeness, in which the observer is not separable from what is observed. Or, in Heisenberg’s words, ‘The common division of the world into subject and object, inner world and outer world, body and soul is no longer adequate.’”

“Is this physics or theology, science or religion?” Taylor asked. “At the very least, it is poetry.” Which seems appropriate to consider here on Earth Day 2024.

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Poetry comes in all different forms. “Poems arrive ready to begin. Poets are only the transportation,” writes Mary Oliver in Humility.

Felicity (2015) by Mary Oliver is a wonderful work, released a few years before the poet’s death, with poems that help save me in this moment. “Here, great happiness abounds,” writes one reviewer. “Our most delicate chronicler of physical landscape, Oliver has described her work as loving the world. With Felicity she examines what it means to love another person.”

And she begins with the very first poem and the notion that love, like time, works in ways mysterious and wonderful.

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Don’t Worry

Things take the time they take. Don’t
worry.
How many roads did Saint Augustine follow
before he became Saint Augustine?

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She reminds us in Storage that the things we accumulate over a lifetime are, in the end, unimportant. Burn those things that clutter so you can, “Make room in your heart for love, for the trees! For the birds who own nothing—the reason they can fly.”

Perhaps we need to throw caution to the wind.

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Moments

“There are moments that cry out to be fulfilled.
Like, telling someone you love them.
Or giving your money away, all of it.

Your heart is beating, isn’t it?
You’re not in chains, are you?

There is nothing more pathetic than caution
when headlong might save a life,
even, possibly, your own.“

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There is a strangeness and wonder of human connection, and with Felicity Oliver “honors love, life, and beauty.” And in the spirit of Taylor’s focus on presence and locality, nothing is too small.

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Nothing Is Too Small Not to Be Wondered About

The cricket doesn’t wonder
if there’s a heaven
or, if there is, if there’s room for him.

It’s fall. Romance is over. Still, he sings.
If he can, he enters a house
through the tiniest crack under the door.
Then the house grows colder.

He sings slower and slower.
Then, nothing.

This must mean something, I don’t know what.
But certainly it doesn’t mean
he hasn’t been an excellent cricket
all his life.

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Oliver provides useful instructions for life:

“Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.”

When we do so, we may also find it wise to follow another of her suggestions and keep some room in our heart for the unimaginable.

More to come . . .

DJB

Photo by pine watt on Unsplash