Daily Dose (Sept 23 – 26)
TUESDAY SEPT 23 — “Why am I afraid to dance,
I who love music and rhythm
and grace and song and laughter?
Why am I afraid to live,
I who love life and the beauty of flesh
and the living colors of the earth and sky and sea?
Why am I afraid to love,
I who love love?”
Eugene O’Neill
Today, it’s not that we “choose” to dance, so much that we “choose” to give up being afraid.
We give up being afraid by responding to this melody—or love of the Beloved, the voice of Grace—that tells us we are more than our labels. Our dance is the interplay with that voice. And because we are enough, our hearts are alive.
Former Trappist George Fowler writes, “I have come to realize that a mother lode of strength lies waiting in all of us, unmined gold yearning to gleam in the sunlight.”
How does it begin? What allows us to put on our dancing shoes?
This is not easy because our instinct requires instructions.
I teach writing. And the first lesson is the most difficult: Write. Write, without editing, censoring, rewriting or revising. Simply write.
And in one of my sessions during a retreat, a young woman confessed, “I wondered when you were going to move on from the laughter and move on to the more important stuff.” I wanted to tell her, “Just so you know, that was the important stuff.”
Because that’s just it isn’t it? Our dance—a wholehearted interplay with life—happens when we give up our need to quench the spirit.
When we laugh from the gut.
When we see with our heart.
When we taste with our imagination.
When we touch this moment—the sacrament of the present moment—with our delight.
Yes. Embracing the sacrament of the present moment.
With my whole self—heart and spirit—I am invested here now.
I read a statement made in the Irish Times by a Connemara man after he was arrested for a car accident. “There were plenty of onlookers, but no witnesses.”
And this week we’ll be talking about—and embracing—the effects and consequences of wholehearted investment.
Catherine of Siena,
“I won’t take no for an answer,
God began to say
to me
when He opened His arms each night
wanting us to
dance.”
And “Shanah tovah”—which means good year in Hebrew—to all my Jewish brothers and sisters. Rosh Hashanah begins tonight and ends on the 24th. Some teachers ask of us to think of it this way, “It’s the beginning of the Jewish calendar, and like all new years, it is a time for sort of taking stock, right? What do I want to choose, where do I want to invest, and improve?”
And speaking of dancing, it is also a time to celebrate. This makes me smile, and I do love that the Jewish new year is often celebrated with “delicious festive meals.”
And today, the first day of autumn (for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere), marking the autumnal equinox. This astronomical event marked by the Sun crossing the celestial equator, resulting in nearly equal hours of daylight and darkness across the globe. And the beginning of our season with beautiful—yes, often stunning—color in the leaves. As a Michigan boy growing up, Autumn was hands down my favorite time of year.
We dance for laughter,
we dance for tears,
we dance for madness,
we dance for fears,
we dance for hopes,
we dance for screams,
we are the dancers,
we create the dreams.
WEDNESDAY SEPT 24 — One of my favorite movies is Shawshank Redemption.
And there is a scene, when Andy locks himself in the warden’s office, puts a record on the turntable and sets the prison intercom microphone near the speaker. The music pervades and suffuses the entire prison.
Red, the narrator, standing in the prison yard, says, “I have no idea to this day what those two Italian ladies were singing about. Truth is, I don’t want to know. Some things are best left unsaid. I’d like to think they were singing about something so beautiful, it can’t be expressed in words, and makes your heart ache because of it. I tell you, those voices soared higher and farther than anybody in a gray place dares to dream. It was like some beautiful bird flapped into our drab little cage and made those walls dissolve away, and for the briefest of moments, every last man in Shawshank felt free.”
Yes, even and maybe especially in those times and places that feel mind numbing, and uncertain, we can embrace Marcus Borg’s reminder, “Given all of life’s ambiguities and the reality of impermanence and suffering, our existence is remarkable, wondrous. It evokes awe and amazement. We need to pay attention. Really pay attention. Lest we become blind to the awe and wonder that fills our days.”
I once asked my analyst why I was in therapy. He told me it would make me a better gardener. Gardening can be strong medicine—an elixir that nurtures and shapes the soul. For that reason, it is a tonic seldom taken straight with no ice. Gardening has a way of seeping into your soul, and one day you find yourself, in the words of poet May Sarton in Plant Dreaming Deep, spending the first half hour of the morning “enjoying the air and watching for miracles.”
This I do know; in the garden I am invited to, and free to, dance—awake to awe and wonder.
And dancing involves total investment, and presence. I give myself fully to this moment.
A Zen roshi is dying. All of the monks gather—an eagerness restrained—around the deathbed, hoping to be chosen as the next teacher.
The roshi asks slowly, “Where is the gardener?”
“The gardener,” the monks wonder aloud. “He is just a simple man who tends the plants, and he is not even ordained.”
“Yes,” the roshi replies. “But he is the only one awake. He will be the next teacher.”
The Talmud reminds us all, “Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. Do justly now, love mercy now, walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.”
A “work” that is fueled by, and sustained by, courage.
This week, I choose to invite this self, this vulnerable broken Terry, to the table to speak. The sacrament of the present becomes a place for the “work” of honesty, and confession and learning, and empathy and mercy, and healing.
And here’s the good news:
we will not lose laughter,
we will not lose wonder and awe,
we will not lose gratitude and gladness,
we will not lose empathy and compassion.
we will not lose the healing power of dance.
They will all be strengthened. And the gift? Courage spills when we embrace and reassure the joy in our soul.
THURSDAY SEPT 25 — “My deepest vocation is to be a witness to the glimpses of God I have been allowed to catch.” This makes me smile big. Thank you, Henri Nouwen.
And yet, as Confucius reminded us, “Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.”
Which brings to mind the question: why do we see only what we want to see?
It’s all about the paradigm we choose.
Do we choose open, or do we choose closed?
As we’ve been saying this week, it’s not that we “choose” to dance, so much that we “choose” to give up being afraid. Okay, not that we choose to “be open”, so much as we choose to give up “being closed”.
Yes, and amen. I choose to give up being closed.
Now, open to beauty. Open to glimpses of the sacred.
This choice gives us a new way to see. And a new way to “measure”.
Have you read The Little Prince?
If I have told you these details about the asteroid, and made a note of its number for you, it is on account of the grown-ups and their ways. When you tell them that you have made a new friend, they never ask you any questions about essential matters. They never say to you, “What does his voice sound like? What games does he love best? Does he collect butterflies?”
Instead, they demand: “How old is he? How many brothers has he? How much does he weigh? How much money does his father make?”
Only from these figures do they think they have learned anything about him.
If you were to say to the grown-ups: “I saw a beautiful house made of rosy brick, with geraniums in the windows and doves on the roof,” they would not be able to get any idea of that house at all.
You would have to say to them: “I saw a house that cost $ 20,000.”
Then they would exclaim: “Oh, what a pretty house that is!”
And Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel helps us with the paradigm change. “Our systems of education stress the importance of enabling the student to exploit the power aspect of reality. To some degree, they try to develop his ability to appreciate beauty. But there is no education for the sublime. We teach children how to measure, how to weigh. We fail to teach them how to revere, how to sense the wonder and awe.”
The paradigm shift is our permission to change the questions about how we “weigh and measure”.
So, my friends, let us be on the lookout today…
For glimpses of the sacred.
For the gifts of beauty.
For the gooseflesh from wonder.
For the permission to dance.
FRIDAY SEPT 26 — During a noon-hour rush on a steamy July day, two men were jockeying their way through the crowd on a New York City avenue. They practically shouted as they tried to hear one other above the din. One man, a native New Yorker, the other, a Native American from Oklahoma. The Native American stopped suddenly and said to his new friend, “Listen! Can you hear the crickets?”
His friend was incredulous. “Are you kidding?” he laughed. “How could anyone hear a cricket in this bedlam? You just think you hear a cricket.”
The Native American didn’t argue. They walked ahead twenty yards to where a large clay planter stood in front of a hotel, holding full-sized shrubbery. The Native American pointed toward the dead leaves at the base of the plants. To his amazement, the New Yorker saw crickets.
“You must have an extraordinary pair of ears!”
“No better than yours. It just depends on what you are listening for. Watch this.” The Native American reached into his pocket and pulled out a handful of quarters. He threw them into the air. Heads turned at the sound of change hitting the pavement.
“You see. It all depends on what you are listening for.”
Or looking for, as the case may be…
I have written before about scotoma, which can be translated, selective blindness. In other words, we see what we want to see. Or, in the story; we hear what we want to hear. (Although selective hearing may have its benefits. My father used to tell me that he didn’t mind his diminished hearing, because what he thought people were saying is more entertaining than what they actually said.)
In the play Through the Garden Gate (based on my book Soul Gardening), English gardener LR Holmes introduces his neighbor, young Lucy, to the possibility of garden fairies.
Lucy: I was wondering, do you think fairies are becoming extinct? You know, like endangered species?
LR Holmes: Oh, no, no. People are just moving too fast to catch sight of them.
Here’s the deal: I am too often, completely unconscious about the effect of this growing world of distractions (or interruptions or craziness or exhaustion or commotion).
Plato reminded us, “What is honored will be cultivated.”
Not what is spoken or believed or taught. What is honored.
The Native American honored listening, or attention without judgment. And I love this: when we pay attention—when we are present—we create a fabric in our soul which absorbs the gifts of exquisite and diminutive daily miracles.
Which means that we are grounded in the moment—what Jean-Pierre de Caussade (18th Century) called the Sacrament of the Present Moment—seeing each “present moment” as diffused with the sacred.
“Living humanly will be its own reward,” Rabbi Harold Kushner reminds us. “The person who has discovered the pleasures of truly human living, the person whose life is rich in friendships and caring people, the person who enjoys daily the pleasures of good food and sunshine, will not need to wear herself out in pursuit of some other kind of success.”
Absorbing daily miracles takes root in the soil of the simple sentence, “I never noticed that before.” I am welcoming, inviting life in, not allowing internal censors and judges to scrutinize, making certain that this moment passes muster. In moments of amazement, we render our internal scorekeeper mute. There is a good deal of conjecture about who merits this streak of luck and why. Some people get all the moments of astonishment. Or perhaps, like young Lucy, or the man in New York, they’ve allowed themselves to see, and to hear, and to notice.
So. Let us be pause. Let us pay attention. And here’s the gift: We choose from this place, because we are no longer detached, or victims to yesterday or tomorrow.
Yes. Presence is the currency for embracing, listening and reclaiming (with “new eyes” or ears) that which has been forgotten—the fruit of the sacrament of the present moment… light, understanding,
kindheartedness, tolerance,
gratitude, mercy,
inclusion, second chances,
hope, open heart, open mind.
Prayer for our week…
May the light of your soul bless your work
with love and warmth of heart.
May you see in what you do the beauty of your soul.
May the sacredness of your work bring light and
renewal
to those who work with you
and to those who see and receive your work.
May your work never exhaust you.
May it release wellsprings of refreshment,
inspiration, and excitement.
May you never become lost in bland absences.
May the day never burden.
May dawn find hope in your heart,
approaching your new day with dreams,
possibilities, and promises.
May evening find you gracious and fulfilled.
May you go into the night blessed,
sheltered, and protected.
May your soul calm, console, and renew you.
To Bless the Space Between Us, by John O’Donohue
Photo… The leaves on the Katsura tree, outside my front door, greeting me on my return home today… happy autumn… and thank you for your photos, please send them to tdh@terryhershey.com
