Time travel

We are all out of our own time much of the time. But I don’t want to - here on this page - to lament this human condition, for time traveling is what we all must do. It is true that it is good to be in the moment – to be yourself, here and now. But to be human, we must extend ourselves back to who we were and on out to who we might become.

And so I sat in a coffee shop, sipping on a straw that was anchored in a pink, fizzy, creamy drink. The dishwasher, on break, sitting next to me, blew the end of the paper wrapper of his straw into the hair of the barista on the other side of the counter. She looked up at him and her eyes said it all. But I won’t tell you what. Then this is what the other barista said - first her pony tail swinging to the music, then her hands scrubbing clean the lipstick from a white coffee cup at the sink: “I’m nostalgic for the summer I haven’t had yet.”

It was early spring. The sun bright against the bagel shop across the street. The shadow of a lamppost low on the pale yellow wall looked as if it might walk on down the sidewalk. But the air was still late winter cool. And I was drinking pink and eventually I would be sucking on ice.

How could anyone so young be nostalgic?  I thought. And then my mind slipped and I was young. I was something of a fool then, not because I was young, but because I had failed to learn what, at a more advanced age, would seem like some small wisdom. Actually, I am often amazed at what children and young people know that I never knew, although maybe I did know more then than I now have recalled that I did or did not know then. But never mind. I think the lamppost shadow might have moved.

A scene flashed into my mind. Young people – call them kids. Our faces I cannot now see, but we are sitting in the Pizza Hut, waiting for a pizza. We are blowing the ends of the wrappers of our straws at each other. What did our eyes say to each other? I cannot tell you - because I cannot clearly remember so far back in time, although I think that I just caught a glimpse from the window of my time machine as we passed by. There must have been, back then, some of what I now think that I saw through my older eyes as I sat here at the counter.

But you see, it doesn’t really matter. Now I’m already nostalgic for the summer I haven’t had yet. I would tell you all about it, but if you can remember, I haven’t lived it yet. But it will surely be as sweet as a strawberry-peach cremosa. Or maybe an egg crème. Or maybe I’ll fall in love again. And then too soon I will be sitting here again, the lamppost shadow long gone, looking back on this very day and wondering how I could have possibly been so young.

- for Alejandro, Cheyenne, and Bailie

To change your mind is human

So one Senator changes his mind about same-sex marriage. My first reaction is to say that a true believer turned into human being when someone he knew and cared about told him what it was like to be gay.

Except that it is extremely human to believe things. In a world that is extraordinarily complex, all of us make our way in it by simplifying it into generalizations and organizing concepts. Religion is only one way of reducing this world to a relatively few ideals and rules to live by. And if we are not members of an organized faith system, then we have picked and chosen or slid into a collection of beliefs that works for us.

Among other worldviews, I like empiricism for the way it tries to closely tie actual experience to concepts but I still don’t escape large and small leaps that are essentially speculative.

And so I favor the way the Senator’s experience falls into my somewhat haphazard system of beliefs based on a mix of experience and reason and imagination. When he, with his principles, was forced to confront a bit of that complex world in the fact of a gay son, he changed his mind.

But he might not have done so. That too would have been an entirely human reaction.

And so we all move along with our lives.

Opening ourselves to the realities of our existence is for me a more faithful way to live, but in my experience, this approach leaves you with fewer comprehensive beliefs that you’re sure of.

I’m personally fairly confident that changing his mind was a good thing for the Senator to do. Of course, there were also times when I changed my mind - but not all of it or all at once. That’s a human way to live. But we don’t all do it the same way.

To be human is not always a compliment. But neither is it necessarily an insult. For now let’s call it a condition. Still, good choice, Senator, from one human to another.

Ritual

When I was growing up, a family ritual at the breakfast table involved passing around a plastic loaf of bread with a hundred or more strips of cardboard stuck into the rectangular opening along the top, each three-inch strip a pale green or pink or some other color. I don’t recall how we knew which was the front and which was the back, but we would draw a strip from the front, read out loud the Bible verse on one side and a thought for the day on the other, and then we’d stick it into the back.

The poem, Mindful, by Mary Oliver on Elise’s poetry Friday blogpost brought this all back to me. I didn’t read the poem out loud, and I was alone in front of my computer screen, but I thought to myself, what if I started my morning with a thought like this every morning? Would it make a difference?

I remember the plastic loaf, the colored strips of cardboard. Did I absorb what was read? Did those words change my life?

Ritual is an act of faith. For any number of reasons you can decide to do something, to repeat doing something. When words like ritual and faith are used, our minds tend to be diverted to churchy things, ultimate things, but I am only really talking of ritual as a simple process in which we might consider consciously trying to implant some thoughts into our minds by repeating some actions and words with a little intent. Faith, in this case, only means we don’t know what will come of our actions.

In Oliver’s poem, she writes of seeing the things that ‘instruct her over and over in joy.’ Of course, that takes some paying attention. What could I do to remember to pay closer attention each day to the things that bring me joy?

It seems somewhat impractical to collect bits of writing, store them in some sort of box, and pick one out each morning and read it out loud. But with our family ritual, we never poured milk onto our cereal until we were finished reading so sogginess wasn’t an issue. It didn’t take much more time than teeth brushing. But did it do us any good? Or perhaps if you don’t pay some attention to more than the plastic and the cardboard, the ritual itself is as empty as many of the other things we do in our lives. But at least I learned something about what a ritual is. Choosing what to focus some attention on and what the impact will be remain open questions.

Still, I’m trying to pay more attention to things that bear repeating. I intend more often to try to recognize what satisfies my soul – to attend.

But forget my words for a time, here’s Mary Oliver’s:

Mindful

Every day
I see or hear
something
that more or less

kills me
with delight,
that leaves me
like a needle

in a haystack
of light.
It is what I was born for--
to look, to listen,

to lose myself
inside this soft world--
to instruct myself
over and over

in joy,
and acclamation,
Nor am I talking
about the exceptional,

the fearful, the dreadful,
the very extravagant--
but of the ordinary,
the common, the very drab,

the daily presentations.
Oh, good scholar,
I say to myself,
how can you help

but grow wise
with such teachings
as these--
the untrimmable light

of the world,
the ocean's shine,
the prayers that are made
out of grass?

--Mary Oliver