I was in a community setting when someone said this lovely sentence to everyone who was there:
“You make me fall in love with the world because you’re here.”
When we feel love particularly, we are enabled to feel love expansively.
To give another example, while officiating a wedding, I once heard someone say,
“May the love between you say yes to the Love beyond you.”
When we feel love particularly, we are enabled to feel love expansively.
When we’re rooted deeply, we’re connected broadly.
“I’ve had so many rainbows in my clouds. I had a lot of clouds. But I have had so many rainbows. And one of the things I do when I go stand up on the stage, when I stand up to translate, when I go to teach my classes, when I go to direct a movie, I bring everyone who has ever been kind to me with me — Black, White, Asian, Spanish-speaking, Native American, Gay, Straight — everybody. I say, ‘Come with me. I’m going on the stage. Come with me. I need you now.’”
— Maya Angelou
I was driving around my town. With a smile on my face, some words just spontaneously tumbled out of me. “I know you,” I said, and then I smiled some more.
I spoke this to Ann Arbor, the place I’ve called home for the last ten years. My car windows were down, and I took an enormous, intentional breath of air. Then I put my arm out of the window to feel the breeze. I felt very alive.
The reality of spring called those words forth from me.
“I know you.”
I continued to enjoy the warm air, but the visual scene was most responsible for bringing those words into being. In Michigan, we have entered an aesthetically gorgeous time of year. The six month period from April to October brings continual changes in scenery.
Each week shifts as a variety of flowering trees and plants emerge, soon accompanied by the newborn leaves of trees which grow in gradual ways. After these leaves progressively paint our town bright green, they rustle in the wind for a few months and finally give us a swansong, bursting into a variety of colors as they shed their photosynthesis process and reveal the red, orange, and yellow colors hiding underneath it.
For this half of the year, every week is gorgeous, and every week is gorgeous differently.
I’ve experienced this many times in Ann Arbor, and I’ve lived here long enough to know the order of this unfolding process of change. That’s why the words tumbled out of my mouth that day in my car.
“I know you.”
I know how one set of flowers and blooming trees emerge and seem to reign for mini-era of time, only to be replaced by another set of flowers and blooming trees. It’s a beautiful procession.
I know that the daffodils,
soon give way to the bradford pears,
which soon give way to the tulips,
which soon give way to the tulip magnolias,
which soon give way to the day lilies.
This process continues to unfold.
In the midst of so much collective distress and disruption, I’m glad to observe this procession right now. It gave me an impromptu burst of joy when I spontaneously said, “I know you,” to Ann Arbor on that day.
Sometimes, we need to feel at home in the predictable changes, especially when so much is changing unpredictably.
The Summer Day
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?
by Mary Oliver,
House of Light
Beacon Press,1990
I snapped a photo of the sky, seen above. There’s no filter here. Through the clouds, the sun is shining like a rainbow halo. Apparently, some call this “sundogs.” That’s new information I had never heard before, and upon cursory googling, I still don’t know how this phenomenon got its name.
Its scientific name is parhelia, a concentrated patch of sunlight that can sometimes be seen at 22 degrees on either side of the sun. This is refracted light through hexagonal ice crystals in cirrostratus clouds.
When I looked up to take this picture, I only saw the sun and a very blue sky. I suppose there’s usually more than we can perceive with our own senses.
–Renee Roederer
“Everyone longs to be loved. And the greatest thing we can do is to let people know that they are loved and capable of loving.”
― Fred Rogers, You Are Special: Neighborly Wit And Wisdom From Mister Rogers
Smuggling Grace 