Parker J. Palmer on Another Way of Seeing & Two Poems by Lisel Mueller
Here's a poem by the brilliant Lisel Mueller. She reminds us that what the world calls an aberration, or just plain crazy, might be another way of seeing, a way that reveals a beauty few can see.
Monet, van Gogh, and Picasso saw the world thru eyes that led them to make art that people found bizarre, and worse. But over time, their vision and their work came to be treasured.
You may not be a visual artist. But maybe you're one of those "crazy" people who sees possibilities in situations that others have declared hopeless. If so, the message of this poem is, “Don’t let the doomsayers do eye surgery on you!”
You won't become as famous as Monet, but you'll achieve something more important. You'll help open other's eyes to the fact that there’s a “hidden wholeness” beneath the broken surface of things, a profound connectedness that cannot be shattered by the fragmenting forces of history.
Keeping faith with that wholeness—and spending time with other “crazies” who share that vision—can contribute to the recovery of the Beloved Community. So keep the faith and act on it in ways that reveal and revive the love, truth, and justice our world needs to survive and thrive.
As Mueller suggests, "all islands are the lost children of one great continent..."
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P.S. Monet painted 19 versions of “Houses of Parliament,” including the 2 shown here.
Parker J. Palmer on Poet Jeanne Lohmann & "Duty of Delight"
“Jeanne Lohmann is one of my favorite poets—I wish more people knew her work. She died in 2016 at age 93, and was writing to the end; she published her last collection in 2015. The few emails we exchanged during her final years were real treasures.
This poem—one to read slowly and savor—will give you an idea why I value her voice. The pictures she paints here take me hither and yon, reflecting all the contradictions of real life. In a world riddled with more fictions than I can count, I can’t get enough of reality!
I’ve known folks who bristle at Jeanne’s reference to Ruskin's "duty of delight," as in “Don’t tell ME I’m obliged to be delighted!” But this is a poem, not an advice column! For me, those words are a prompt to search my soul.
Amid the grimness of our era, I want to keep my heart open to the delights that come my way every day: the crescent moon hanging like a begging bowl in this morning's sky, the little girl I saw yesterday skipping down the sidewalk without a care in the world, the server at the Thai restaurant who lifts everyone’s spirits, the hot cup of coffee I’m sipping on this 32-degree morning. Taking all of it in helps with the heavy lifting we all have to do.
As Sojourner Truth said, “Life is a hard battle anyway. If we laugh and sing a little as we fight the good fight of freedom, it makes it all go easier. I will not allow my life’s light to be determined by the darkness around me.” To which I say, amen.
Anne Lamott on Misery and Miracles
Via Facebook: www.facebook.com/AnneLamott
Miracles can be just awful, so painful and involving tears, not the cute dewdrop kind, but the wracking, snotty ones that leave you looking like Peter Lorre with poison oak.
I got my miracle yesterday, and the swelling is going down.
Wednesday, for reasons I won’t go into here, everything that could go wrong went wrong, mentally and in my most important relationships. While one friend got chemo, another broke a bone.
My life became an after school movie.
I felt that all of life is shit and men are pigs and America cannot make a comeback, plus my mind is going and my body has turned into grandma pudding and I shouldn’t have had a child and the mysterious four-pound weight gain since Thanksgiving was almost certainly a massive abdominal tumor.
I was in what they used to call “a state” when I was coming up, which meant with you were a walking Florida panhandle of self-righteousness victimization. Also, very sad, scared and lonely, which is the same thing.
First I did what one does if raised by the English: I put a smile on it. I stuffed down the victimized self-righteousness. I fluffed up the moral superiority. I did what my friend Marianne calls pouring pink paint over it all. And it was good. Until it wasn’t.
The pain, fear and anger of the present began to shimmy inside me, in harmony, like a Goth girl group. So I came up with a plan, even though I know that if you want to make God laugh, tell Her your plans. My plan was to eat my body weight in sugar and fats to numb out. I headed to Safeway to but three individually packaged servings of their great carrot cake, because buying and eating a whole cake would indicate a disorder. But I prayed the great prayer “Help!” and somehow bought sushi instead.
I went back home, where They lay in waiting. “They” were the people whose behavior had caused poor darling innocent me such distress. I am not going to name names but I was the younger sister to one of them, who told my parents “Take it back” when they brought me home from the hospital; gave birth to one of them; and married the other. If I were God’s west coast Rep, I would change their hearts so that they would come crawling to me, asking my forgiveness for their insensitivity, finally wanting to do the things and be the way that I am positive would make them less infuriating to others, ie me.
Regrettably, that does not seem to be the way miracles work.
I resent this more than I can say.
Instead, miracles seem to begin when all hope of one’s best thinking fails, and you are forced to tell someone (not the bad people) that you hate everyone and all of life. Horribly, you always see a dear friend love you anyway and in fact, love you even more, because of your pain and vulnerability. Being loved like that changes you molecularly.
Then you have to be what they call in English prisons “a personal well-being officer” to your own prisoner self. In English detective shows, a personal well-being officer helps you get gluten-free food so you are not violently ill all the time, or more books from the cart. I got more food and the new issue of People.
I let myself keep feeling sad and damaged for awhile because it was in the natural order of things. Life is just too goddamn lifey sometimes. But I prayed, rather bitterly, for grace to meet me right where I was, because it always does, and to load me into its wheel barrel, because again, it always does, and wheel me away from the slag heap of teary, angry existential exhaustion.
And it did. It used a friend’s profound love—the main source of my religious faith—and the willingness to be in the truth of terrible feelings to bring me first to tears and then to loving and forgiving everyone, even (pretty much) me.
If that is not a miracle, I don’t know what is.
Now my plan is what my grandson’s 5th grade class used to do every Thursday, on Condiments Day. Mustard was what each kid must do that day, ie turn in their history paper. Ketchup was what they needed to catch up on—studying the week’s spelling words, cleaning out their desk, whatever. And Relish was something they loved and had planned for or could improvise—reading a comic book while eating a snack, sitting outside on the bench with a best friend, giggling too loudly. So yeah, maybe I have the psycho-spiritual evolution of a ten year old, and yeah, I’ll take it. I really must start my taxes, catch up on emails, relish my little cloth-coat miracle of peace restored, and give thanks.
Source: https://www.facebook.com/AnneLamott/posts/488486552639856
