If you’ve been following my blog for a while, you know that I sometimes like to post glimpses of nature that I find in my home state. Today, however, I’m changing it up. I recently arrived home from a week in the Bahamas. It was a gorgeous experience, and I thought I would share a bit of the journey.
It’s strange and surreal to get news on a delay. I’ve been away for a week without internet access.
It’s devastating to learn about Uvalde. This morning, I’m thinking about people in Texas as well as everyone feeling this pain, loss, and anger.
–Renee Roederer
Whenever a person or community does something specularly kind or creative — the kinds of moments that end up being shared widely on social media — a mentor of mine likes to say, “I want to live in a world where (insert story) happens. Wait, I do live in a world where (insert story) happens!”
I think about a time when a whole neighborhood learned ASL for a deaf child who lived nearby.
I think about a time when a dog started running a race alongside runners and everyone cheered on this dog as he ran the whole course.
I think about a time when a massive amount of people chipped in to care for a large family that had just lost a parent quite suddenly.
Plenty of garbage happens every day. But these forms of kindness, playfulness, and generosity exist too. We do live in that world.
— Renee Roederer
Henri Mattisse says,
Don’t wait for inspiration. It comes while working.
Whatever you’re creating in the world, keep at it. Even if it doesn’t feel wildly creative every day, a mundane, everyday creativity continues to build, form, and transform.
–Renee Roederer
After a caterpillar spins itself inside a silky chrysalis, it turns into goo. It liquifies inside the cocoon. Between its intricate life as a caterpillar and its intricate life as a butterfly, it is truly a gooey mess. It’s hard to believe that something so beautiful emerges, but this is indeed the messy, mystical process.
So if any part of you feels like goo right now, you might be transforming.
–Renee Roederer
This piece of art really grabbed me. It’s called Flock by Pamela DeTuncq. The description says, “Six teenagers are dressed in identical wool, unprocessed outfits including hoodies and pants. Although there are small differences in clothing — hats, glasses, shoes — they appear as if in uniform. Each of them holds a cell phone in hand, either to their ears or eyes as they are busy communicating with someone else.”
It’s fitting for us as adults too.
Flock is at the Dennos Museum Center in Traverse City, Michigan.
In the morning, I watched lake gulls fly across the sky, and it felt so majestic — the beautiful sight, the sounds of their calls, the calm water, and the cool breeze.
“But to them, they’re just trying to find food. Every day stuff,” I thought.
I know we humans do a whole lot that that could be compared to crapping on cars, also a pastime of gulls.
But if we zoom out, a bet a lot of our every day activities are pretty majestic too.
–Renee Roederer
This morning, I’m sharing words from Farm Church, a congregation in Durham, North Carolina. As they shared this week on Facebook:
When has someone offered a question in conversation that was so lovely, so inviting, and so spacious that it was, to you in that moment, sacramental? Can you remember a time when someone’s curious, non-anxious questioning presence created for you “a glimpse of the almost unbearable preciousness and mystery of life”? (Frederick Buechner’s words to describe the witnessing of sacrament.)
Perhaps some of Mary Oliver’s questions come to you as sacrament, especially that last one…
“The Summer Day”
by Mary Oliver
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean –
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down –
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
Smuggling Grace 