Oranges

October 12, 2009

Instead of trying to name it, I just stand there and try to savor it, to figure out how to hold that peace in my heart and how to take it with me, if I can. Rick Bass

People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life. I don't think that's what we're really seeking. I think what we're seeking is an experience of being alive. . .of the rapture of being alive. Joseph Campbell

You never know what you're going to encounter in route. (So, now) I don't miss a thing. I touch everything. Andy Merrifield

Kathleen Norris (in her book Acedia and Me) writes about her niece. When her niece was three, Kathleen's brother would drive her to day care in the morning, and her mother, who worked as a stock-broker and financial planner, would pick her up in the afternoon. She always brought an orange, peeled so that her daughter could eat it on the way home. One day the child was busying herself by playing "Mommy's office" on the front porch of her aunt's house, and Kathleen asked her what her mother did at work. Without hesitation, and with a conviction to relish, she looked up and said, "She makes oranges."

In a world where what you do (achievement, celebrity, notoriety), makes you "somebody," "making oranges" doesn't compute.

Well. Maybe we need a different way to measure.

I've been traveling for some time. I returned home to piles on my desk. We all have piles on our desks. Or, maybe just in our minds. Either way, there's something that's tardy and needs our attention.

My trick is to move the piles around. You know, rearrange them. If it looks tidy, it makes me believe that I'm getting some work done.

And then people ask me, "Did you have a successful trip?"
"I'm certain I did," I tell them, because it sounds like the right answer.
Although truth be told, I don't always know. There is some kind of pegboard in our heads where we hang our worth or value. And it's too easy to get worked up about finding the right peg.

Maybe success is about "making oranges."
Showing up.
Being present.
Connecting.

I did a workshop where I asked the participants to describe life. One woman said, "Life is so. . .life is so. . .life is so. . .daily."

Yes. She's right. That is the secret.
Here's the deal: The miracle is that there need not be a miracle--just the slow drip of experience. Being mindful of small things. If there are truly no unsacred moments, then the sacred is infused into this moment. This conversation. This person. Even the smallest or most banal thing deserves our undivided attention.

Or, in the words of William Kittredge, "Moments when nothing happened. What sweet nothing."

In other words, we don't run from the moment,
We don't suffocate the moment with stuff,
We don't sanitize the moment with platitudes.
We sit. We listen. We look. We taste. We smell. We see.
We look for the light of God in the most ordinary, and even the most dull, of contexts.
(I know that I preordain, when I hope or try to orchestrate, rather than just experience. Whether it be experience or relationship or liturgy or prayer or meditation, if you don't bring it with you, you're not going to find it there.)

After a week away, the changes in my garden are striking, and I spend time walking the pathways savoring the tapestry. When I left, the leaves on our trees still shades of green. Now, six days later, my garden is in full metamorphosis. And I am in third grade, thinking about crayons.

In the third grade, I had a Crayola Box of 12. I did not consider our family poor. But I knew that there were two classmates in my grade from "rich families." One had the Crayola Box of 48. Another showed off her deluxe box of 64, with the built-in sharpener. We stood around her desk and marveled (our equivalent-in 1962-of a new iPhone). Do you remember the box of 64? Mercy. Did it get any better than that?

The picture in my mind is vivid, standing in K-Mart, on our family excursion to buy school supplies, late August, holding that box (knowing it was out of our family budget) and coveting. I never did own a box of 64-with the exotic shades of Mulberry, Goldenrod and Raw Sienna-and I made due with my 12, always making sure to color inside the lines. After all, I wanted to be somebody; and I knew the rules.

Thankfully, my garden has changed me. Today, as I walk the pathways, I have my own box of 64. Our Vine maples look like a jellybean jar, leaves vary from milk chocolate to mustard to Marilyn-Monroe-lipstick. Nearby, the Katsura tree poses with an elegant posture, its leaves like miniature post-it notes and the color of peach-yellow. It stands out against the blood red leaves of Ninebark. And the licorice red leaves on the Sweetgum, and the scarlet Sumac. It's an outrageous palate that calls for giddiness. And just being.

Thankfully, on this warm October afternoon, nature does not worry about coloring outside the lines.

Learn by little the desire for all things
which perhaps is not desire at all
but undying love which perhaps
is not love at all but gratitude
for the being of all things which
perhaps is not gratitude at all
but the maker's joy in what is made,
the joy in which we come to rest.
Wendell Berry

Poems / Prayers

Maples and Aspens
Maples and aspens know -
they boast a dying yellow and flame a glorious orange
they flaunt their final color
when morning sun enlives and setting sun glistens
off their brittle leaves
then the air chills and breezes whisper gently "come"
and down they shed til softly mattressed is the forest and the road
the ground is then assembled
with yellow hearts and orange red and golden leaves
with brown and green from grass and weeds and crackles under foot
the end comes with winter rains
which mat and soak and finally wash away
the aspens and the maples found going not so hard in all this glory---
but then aspens and maples believe in spring
Mark Murphy, FSC

Prayer--
I will not Hurry.
I will not hurry through this day! Lord, I will listen by the way,
To humming bees and singing birds, To murmuring trees and friendly words;
And for the moments inbetween
Seek glimpses of Thy great unseen.
I will not hurry through this day, I will take time to think and pray;
I will look up into the sky, Where fleecy clouds and swallows fly;
And somewhere in the day, maybe I will catch whispers, Lord, from Thee!
Ralph Spaulding Cushman

Wild Geese
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
Mary Oliver

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