Solitude’s Gift of Grace

Solitude’s Gift of Grace

Last week I made an impromptu visit to a state park. My sister and her husband are avid birdwatchers, and while I’m not, they suggested we could enjoy dinners and evenings together after having filled the day with what feeds our souls.

The simple change of scenery lifted my spirits. While the lodge that sat on the edge of Maumee Bay and Lake Erie had no long beach to walk, there was a large body of water. Constant wind off the lake lifted and swayed the graceful branches of weeping willows just beginning to bloom. And though the boardwalk and marshy land around it had changed drastically since my last visit decades ago, it provided a place very different than my suburban neighborhood to walk and observe nature.

I wasn’t sure exactly how I’d fill my time, so I brought Mary Oliver’s collection of poetry, Thirst, colored pencils and watercolors, a sketch pad and journals, and pastries from my favorite bakery. Even though I live alone, the solitude and quiet offered by this space felt different, more intentional.

In the mornings I sat outside on the small patio sipping coffee and eating a palmier. I read the first half of Mary Oliver’s poems aloud, imagining the wind carrying the words to the dancing willow trees, the Canada Goose on the pond, and skimming them across the water. The words, like Tibetan prayer flags, releasing grace as the wind blew them along.

An arthritic knee kept my walks on the short side, but I took lots of them. White tail deer and I startled one another along the marshy patch where they were wading and nibbling tender sprouts. A muskrat, finding the spring greens irresistible too, pushed aside watery plants, leaving dark trails behind. A black snake slithered from rock into water, smoothly curving its body this way and that and disappeared into leafy growth on the opposite side. Turtles sunned themselves on a log. Ducks hung around in little cove, and birds flitted from branch to branch.

I ended up with some sketches—the bench beneath the willows, my mug of coffee and a palmier resting on a napkin, a small feast I required myself to draw before eating it, and buds of the willow and a tree I’d need leaves to identify—none great art, but I did pay more attention to how the palmier dough was looped into its butterfly shape and how leaves and buds appear in the spring. The process was a mindfulness exercise reminding me of a favorite book, The Zen of Seeing: Seeing/Drawing as Meditation by Frederic Franck.

bench under three willows by lake
pen sketch palmier and mug
sketch of willow and other bud

I read all of Thirst, pondering some lines: “My work is loving the world / …  which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished….” (from “Messenger”); “And they call again, ‘It’s simple’ they say, / ‘and you too have come / into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled / with light and to shine.’” (from “When I Am Among the Trees”)

I ate a delicious walleye dinner and some creamy Easter chocolate from home. My sister, her husband, and I watched the new episode of Ted Lasso and shared walks and conversation in the evenings.

All in all, a lovely time. I didn’t accomplish anything particular. But that was the point. What I needed. To be still with myself and with God, wasting time together with no goal in mind other than being who I am.

Too often these days, I am overwhelmed with sadness and anger and a sense of not being enough. I think many of us struggle with this. It’s easy when we live in a world where so much is broken. Where suffering and injustice surround us, and we feel powerless to change it. Where communication and connection are fraught by deep ideological divisions, both political and religious. And then there is Covid, still hanging around.

When I returned home, I listened to this season’s last podcast of On Being’s with Krista Tippett and U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, titled “To Be A Healer.” His words resonated, as if he had known just why I needed that short time away.

Dr. Murthy said he believed our greatest source of strength comes from our ability to give and receive love. He talked about the importance of having a sense of self-worth, of trusting who we are and what we hold inside. Our mental health, he suggests, is the fuel we need to function at our best. We need a “full tank” to be present to ourselves, to one another, to our communities, and to the world.

Sometimes I’m running on fumes.

He suggested four things to help people improve their overall sense of wellbeing and social connection that combat the stress of loneliness and disconnect with ourselves and others. Listen to the podcast to hear them all. The last surprised me: Solitude. It shouldn’t have. Isn’t that what intentional quiet time, quiet prayer, or meditation is? His explanation: “The solitude is important because it’s in moments of solitude, when we allow the noise around us to settle, that we can truly reflect, that we can find moments in our life to be grateful for.”

For me, it’s also a time to be still and open to the Grace always given. A time, as Mary Oliver’s trees suggested, to be filled with light and to shine.

What are your times? Where are your places?

Sources

Thirst: Poems by Mary Oliver

Messenger by Mary Oliver

The Zen of Seeing: Seeing/Drawing as Meditation  by Frederic Franck

Vivek Murthy: To Be A Healer   Interview On Being with Krista Tippett

Photos: Mary van Balen

Bonjour!

Bonjour!

Poppies along path Jardin de Plantes, Paris

Photo: Mary van Balen

Cool air slides into the apartment through open windows. No screens gray the view of a Parisian morning. Bird song, motorcycle growls, and car hums signal the city is stretching and meeting the new day. It’s Saturday, my first here, and I don’t know just how busy the morning will be. I’m enjoying tea and baguette smeared with a bit of jam. A bright bouquet of flowers, a gift from my daughter, sits on the table where I write. Another daughter just left, on her way to the Jardin de Plantes to paint.

To paint! We are both enjoying the biggest gift of this adventure: time. Time to savor the morning breeze and the sweet taste of breakfast. Time to walk slowly through huge public gardens, watching poppies nod and dance as people strolled by.

young woman sitting on bench painting in Jardin de Luxembourg

Photo: Mary van Balen

“What do these people do?” I asked my daughter yesterday as we carried our chairs to a shady place in the huge public garden. So many adults filled the park on a Friday afternoon. What about their jobs? Do they take long lunches? Not all of them could be tourists.

We settled in. Kathryn pulled a pencil, paints, a tablet, a collapsable water pot, brushes, and a bottle of water from her Longchamp bag. I pulled a journal, pencil, eraser, and pen from mine. (Thank goodness for Longchamp bags. They not only help us blend in a bit since so many women carry them here, but they hold everything!)

Pink tree in the midst of green trees and grass in Jardin de Luxemburg, Paris

Photo: Mary van Balen

A bright pink tree rose flamboyantly in the midst of green and caught our attention. My daughter began to sketch out her composition. For a while, I sat and took in the sight of the pink flame, wondering what kind of tree it was and how it came to be there. Deep breaths. In and out. No hurry. Time to savor beauty and to be present to the Holy Mystery that held us all there.

After writing  a bit in my journal and making a sketch of the tree, I took some close photos of its leaves thinking I might discover its name one day. Lots of people stopped to look and take photos of the tree that was simply being its beautiful self. Perhaps it would not have been as striking if the chestnuts and grass had not provided such cool, green contrast.

A line from Thomas Merton came to mind. I couldn’t remember it verbatim, but the thought was about how naturally trees were able to be just what they were made to be, yet how we human beings struggle to do the same. Those trees in the park were saying “yes” to their Creator, catching sunlight on their green (or pink) leaves and stunning all who saw with the beauty of pure being.

My daughter and I, witness to the glory, were relearning the grace of simply being who we are.

 

This Business of Being

This Business of Being

yellow wild flowers and a rock near bay on Whidbey Island

PHOTO: Mary van Balen Whidbey Island

Originally published in The Catholic Times

A few weeks ago in Barnes & Noble, while browsing through the bookstore looking for an old book they didn’t have, I wandered into the poetry section and picked up a slim, hardback volume with “Felicity” and “Mary Oliver” writ large in white across the soft gray sky on the cover.

I stood and read a poem about St. Augustine. “Take heart,” it said to me. Augustine didn’t become himself overnight. There was one about a cricket, finding its way into a house in the fall.

I’ve been on a Mary Oliver jag ever since, pulling out books I already own, ordering Felicity and the second volume of “New and Selected Poems.” She’s a master of attention and mindful living. Her poems are prayer, savoring the Sacred in our midst, perhaps in an armful of peonies or a heron’s flight. “I want to make poems while thinking of/the bread of heaven and the/cup of astonishment… (from “Everything” in New and Selected Poems – Volume Two).

There is something about the grace of her poetry that anchors me when reports of violence, hatred, and fear threaten to overwhelm. The news we hear most often is bad, and while my daughter assures me that we live in a world with less, not more, violence than in centuries past (We just hear about more of it, she says), some days this planet seems a dangerous place careening towards disaster.

Yet, in this same time and place there is hope. There is goodness and love that refuse to give in to despair. There is mercy and forgiveness. There are people who, little by little, replace darkness with light by simply living as best they can, showing kindness and compassion along the way. They speak the truth they know and go about the ordinary tasks of life. There is Spirit, shared with each of us, who draws us to goodness if we allow, and empower us to make life’s journey as partners with the One who is transforming the world.

Poets express in words (and the spaces between them) something of this mystery and their experience of it, inviting readers to participate. I suppose, now and again, a line or two, or even a complete poem moves quickly and effortlessly from heart to word, but that is a rare mercy—the inbreaking of Spirit to a practiced soul, aware and open to such things.

Poets I’ve known and my attempts at writing verse, have taught me that writing poetry is work. Ted Kooser, U.S. poet laureate 2004-06, once surprised my adult GED students by sharing his writerly routine (up early every morning for fifty years, writing an hour and a half before leaving the house) and the revelation that he had revised one of their favorite, very short poems 50 times.

The same daughter who assures me the human condition is actually improving can’t imagine why anyone would want to write—for her, it’s agony. But, as poet Maya Angelou’s quote on a postage stamp states, “A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song.”

Poets write because that is what is they are made to do, and they are faithful. A poem in “Felicity” moved me to remember that we all are made to be a particular reflection of God in the world and that we, the world, and the cosmos are better off when we’re faithful to it. Jesus is the perfect example of such authentic living: He is God’s own life, and he shares it with us.

Wld rose bush with pink bloomsThe poem is “Roses.” Oliver writes of the quest to answer life’s “big questions” and decides to ask the wild roses if they know the answers and might share them with her. They don’t seem to have time for that. As they say, “…we are just now entirely busy being roses.”

How glorious if all humanity could know themselves as honestly and be themselves as genuinely as those roses. But we are wounded, and there is evil, and taking time to be still and listen to the Spirit within is difficult in the busyness of daily life.

The universe suffers from this disconnect. We see that in the eyes of the poor, marginalized, and war-weary. We see it in eyes reflecting anger, hatred, and fear that fuel violence. We hear it in the groaning of our planet with melting icecaps and water and air that poison its creatures

April is national poetry month. What better time to listen to the poets among us, past and present, who speak their truth and encourage us to do the same.

© 2016 Mary van Balen