Clearing
by Martha Postlethwaite
Do not try to save
the whole world
or do anything grandiose.
Instead, create
a clearing
in the dense forest
of your life
and wait there
patiently,
until the song
that is your life
falls into your own cupped hands
and you recognize and greet it.
Only then will you know
how to give yourself
to this world
so worth of rescue.
I'm always curious to know what I'm going to write about each week. I sit down on Friday and review the week and see what happened, what I read, listened to, and watched. I look for what stood out. Where the pause was, what sparkled or caught my attention. I let that be the inspiration.
This week the pause is the inspiration. We stumbled into a pause or a clearing this week. After a busy month and a half of golf tournaments and travel, we've entered a few weeks of respite before the last flurry of summer golf in August.
I felt the relief of the pause, this clearing of our schedule. My kids felt the consolation of the pause too. It's sort of amazing how three days with little on the calendar can be so refreshing.
What surprised me the most was watching my son unwind. He entered this pause wound tight from competition and all that entails for him. On the third morning, I watched as he settled into the pause. It was such a profound lesson. It felt like watching a cup of sandy water settle. When it's all stirred up, the sand and silt floats and makes the view cloudy. Yet, slowly as the water calms, all the sand settles, and the water that once was murky suddenly becomes crystal clear.
He entered this clearing a bit agitated. He was reflecting on the flurry of tournaments, his technical skills, mental skills, physical skills, and challenges. He was murky. He was seeing the dirt, the sand, the silt. Yet, as the days passed this week. A day away from golf. Hours (and hours and hours) of reading. Bike rides, swimming, and lawn mowing: through living his life in all its fullness, all of his golf life settled and became clear. On the third morning, he found me with new energy and excitement and shared new insights about his challenges and opportunities. He had wisdom and understanding that was exciting and profound. Something switched as a result of embracing a pause. Where he had been living reactively, he was able to step back and start to see things with new eyes. A few of the revelations to him were things that have been obvious to the rest of us for weeks. But it wasn't until he stopped and let the sand settle that he was able to see what the rest of his (his biggest fans and cheerleaders) had been seeing for weeks.
Pauses, margins, clearing-whatever we call it is so important. A pause, margin, or clearing invites us from being reactive to reflective. It takes time. One day wasn't enough; it took him three days of pausing before the sand settled, and he started to find the lessons. The clearing opened up after he sat and turned his attention to other things. It was a deep and beautiful thing to watch and experience. When we intentionally paused and embraced it, we all found the gift.
Pause: “Create a clearing in the dense forest of your life and wait there.”
Sometimes this is easier said than done. Our pause last week wasn't stopping everything and sitting in silence. It was just a subtle shift in focus. Find a pause or a clearing in your week. Shift your focus from doing to being, from competing to breathing. Maybe it's reading the above poem, Clearing every morning or evening, and just sitting with the words for a few minutes.
Currently Reading:
Eating the Sun: Small Musings on a Vast Universe by Ella Frances Sanders
This is a small book of essays and illustrations, just as the title suggests: small musings on a vast universe. I read this book slowly; I kept it by my bedside and read an essay or two before bed. I loved it. I'm not a science person, but this book made science interesting, accessible, and important.
"Your luminosity is intrinsic, but your brightness will depend on who is looking at you."
― Ella Frances Sanders, Eating the Sun: Small Musings on a Vast Universe
A Book I can't Stop Thinking About:
Tattoo's on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion by Father Greg Boyle
Father Greg Boyle is the founder of Homeboy Industries, a job training and recovery center for gang members in Boyle Heights in the heart of Los Angeles. He shares true stories of gang members, mothers, and church ladies. It's a beautiful, tragic, and hope-filled book. If you haven't heard Father Boyle speak, look him up on YouTube. He is just so inspiring, and for sure, add his books to your reading list. You won't be disappointed.
"Sometimes resilience arrives in the moment you discover your own unshakeable goodness."
― Gregory Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion
(I try and pay attention to words or phrases that stand out to me in my reading and listening. There is a spiritual practice called Florliledgium that collects short, interesting pieces {words that “sparkle” up} and put them together. This is kind of like that. Watching for things that sparkle. Gathering them and seeing how they work together and what message, mantra, or new idea might arise.)
A Practice:
Read slowly.
Notice if a word or phrase stands out to you.
How do the words make you feel?
Is there an invitation?
(I’m sharing in italics the lines that stand out to me in these passages. Maybe it’s the same, or maybe it’s different, there is much food for thought in each of these passages)
"In bullfighting, there is an interesting parallel to the pause as a place of refuge and renewal. It is believed that in the midst of a fight, a bull can find his own particular area of safety in the arena. There he can reclaim his strength and power. This place and inner state are called his querencia. As long as the bull remains enraged and reactive, the matador is in charge. Yet when he finds his querencia, he gathers his strength and loses his fear. From the matador's perspective, at this point the bull is truly dangerous, for he has tapped into his power."
― Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha
"Patience is an inner pause, a brief stillness, a moment we give ourselves to breathe through our initial reaction so we can move to the place where a calm, thoughtful response is born. Patience is a gift of time we give ourselves so we can give the gift of peace to others."
― L.R. Knost
"Human beings are settlers, but not in the pioneer sense. It is our human occupational hazard to settle for little. We settle for purity and piety when we are being invited to an exquisite holiness. We settle for the fear-driven when love longs to be our engine. We settle for a puny, vindictive God when we are being nudged always closer to this wildly inclusive, larger-than-any-life God. We allow our sense of God to atrophy. We settle for the illusion of separation when we are endlessly asked to enter into kinship with all."
― Gregory Boyle, Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship
