Terry Hershey

In This Issue:

• Bliss
• Read, Watch, Share
• Featured Product
• Sabbath Thought
• Poems
• Words to Live By

FEATURE ARTICLE
by Terry Hershey

Bliss
or, taking possession of my life in the ordinary

There is a slight lifting of the air so I can smell the earth for the first time, and yesterday I again took possession of my life here.
May Sarton

Music is my bliss.
Ed Bradley (of 60 Minutes fame, died 2006)

Please don't retouch my wrinkles...it took me so long to earn them.
Anna Magnani

If ignorance is bliss, why aren't more people happy?

If green beans had been served at the Last Supper, Judas would never have gotten up to leave, I promise you that.
Philip Gulley

If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Wherever you are – if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time.
Joseph Campbell

What I can't do is lie here and watch you mourn for a life you think you should have had.
Mark Spragg, An Unfinished Life

Dear God, I didn't think orange went with purple, until I saw the sunset You made on Tuesday. That was cool.
Sara, Children's Letters to God

The great lesson from the true mystics...is that the sacred is in the ordinary, that it is to be found in one's daily life, in one's neigbors, friends and family, in one's backyard.
Abraham H. Maslow in Religions, Values and Peak Experiences

“We should do this more often.” A middle-aged man is speaking to a woman standing at his side. I am doing what I do best: Eavesdropping.

The couple is leaning on the upper deck railing of a Washington State Ferry. We are headed across the Puget Sound, from Seattle toward the Kitsap Penninsula. The Olympic Mountains, still snow tipped, fill our panorama. I have lived in this neck-of-the-woods almost twenty years, and this tranquil scene–a melding of pewter blue water with a hunter green tree line–has not yet failed to give me goose-bumps. Whenever I return from a trip, the mountains and water always re-orient me. Listening and watching this couple, it is apparent, that they too are plum-tickled, finding enchantment and solace in nature’s pageant.

“We should do what?” she asks.

“Take these mini vacations,” he tells her. And gestures, “Take time to enjoy all of this. We need to slow down, get out and about.”

“But we’re doing it right now,” the woman offers.

“Yes,” the husband persists, “but think of all the opportunities and years we’ve missed.”

And I think (but do not say), “Keep talking, and you’ll miss this one.”

We all practice a finely honed skill: Expecting life to reside in an event or experience or occasion other than the one we are in right now.

There are those lucky moments, when we recognize and embrace the here and now. But I’ll be, if we don’t want to bottle it up and sell it on e-bay. (This makes me think of the Transfiguration story in the gospel of Mark. . .Peter’s so worked up with goosebumps he wants to build three condos and call it permanent). Or worse yet, we feel compelled to evaluate or measure each experience, as if a superlative is a requirement for its enjoyment.

“Wherever you are, be all there,” Jim Elliot wrote.

This sounds great. It’s not as easy to pull off. I was going to spend some time wrestling with the wisdom of Jim’s statement, and distill it for the newsletter, but Brian called me this morning with “an exciting opportunity.” His name didn’t ring a bell, but Brian chatted like he knew me well. And, it’s not everyday you get offered an exciting opportunity. Brian wanted me to have a Free satellite dish. All for me. This kind of generosity makes you all tingly inside, doesn’t it? I could get 500 channels, Brian told me. And all these options provide me “so much more to enjoy in life,” Brian chirped (literally, he chirped). And (Brian’s spiel had no pause button), I would be never have to be “afraid of missing anything,” because I could Tivo all the good stuff. I didn’t want to burden Brian with the fact that being faced with a lot of options–like standing in the grocery store trying to choose cereal or toothpaste–makes me want to beat my head against a metal pole, so 500 channels might send me straight to the floor in a fetal position. Instead, I told Brian that while I was “in awe” of his offer, I asked if I could make my decision after I spent some time deadheading my roses, filling my birdfeeders and taking a brief nap in my lawn chair. Brian was quiet. I’m not sure Brian understood.

Here’s what I do know.

While waiting for perfect, we pass on ordinary.

While waiting for better, we don’t give our best effort to good.

While waiting for new and improved, we leach the joy right out of the old and reliable.

There’s nothing wrong with looking forward to something. Like my friend who likes to say, “I’m not going to have a mid-life crisis until I can afford to buy a mustang.” Fair enough.

But most of the time, Alfred E. Newman is right, “Most of us don’t know what we want in life, but we’re sure that we haven’t go it.”

In the grocery store the other day I overheard another couple, discussing their list for a dinner party. “We need wine,” he says.

“We have that nice bottle of Cabernet at home,” she tells him.

“I’m not wasting a good bottle of wine on your mother,” he huffs.

This will be a dinner of good will and revelment, I think, and I’m sorry I’m going to miss it.

In a culture of lottery winners and bigger and louder and faster and newer and shinier, ordinary gets lost in the din. Ordinary, like watching dusk settle while reading on the patio, counting nuthatches when they return to the feeder, enjoying a handful of fresh strawberries from the garden (they sit on the tongue with a sweetness that makes you believe in heaven) and wrestling with my son on the back lawn. Ordinary, yes. But a day without the heaviness of expectation, worry or fear.

How’s your summer been?

I confess to whining about time flying by, or some other variation on jammed schedules, stretched resources and altered expectations. But I’ve found the wisdom of May Sarton fitting, and her sentiment is mine, “There is a slight lifting of the air so I can smell the earth for the first time, and yesterday I again took possession of my life here.”

Zach, Judith and I spent Saturday night on our Village Green (the place for our island’s Saturday market, where kids in dreadlocks play hacky sack most of the day). It is Shakespear on the lawn. Maybe 130 people, lawn chairs, blankets. All ages, all types. The evening air is tepid and soothing. The light stays in the evening sky until past bedtime. After the play, we walk to our local café for blues with the Jelly Rollers. When we leave the café, it is dusk. It gives the horizon more substance, the sky the color of ink. And I think again about shadows, and smile. Last month I wrote about shadows–those veins of disappointment, doubt, sorrow, disillusion, insecurity, disenchantment, un-fulfillment, heartache, or shame which can course through our psyche. (See newsletter)

I did not write about shadows to generate interest. I did it for some catharsis in my own soul, because the shadows plague me some days. It turns out that it did generate interest. Lots of emails (I was going to say “letters,” but I received only one of those. It’s a lost art, don’t you think?). I’m glad I wrote about shadows, because in the writing (the speaking, the voicing, the embracing) I gave myself the permission to live there, find acceptance there, at least for the time being.

I know that there will always be someone, usually in the name of God, to tell me that I need to pray more, or believe more, or try harder, but I find that having someone say to me, “I don’t know how you lost your way today, but if it’s okay by you, I’ll sit a spell with you on the back deck, just to see if we can’t enjoy the colors the shadows make at dusk.”

In one of the emails, someone sent these quotes on to me. . .worth passing on. . .

Look round and round upon this bare bleak plain, and see even here, upon a winter's day, how beautiful the shadows are! Alas! it is the nature of their kind to be so. The loveliest things in life, Tom, are but shadows; and they come and go, and change and fade away, as rapidly as these!
Charles Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit

He is one of those people to whom you must allow moods,--when their sun shines, dance, --and when their vapors rise, sit in the shadow.
Harriet Prescott Spofford, The Amber Gods

Even in the shadows, wherever you are, be all there.

An island friend’s son (in his 30s, from the big city) spent the weekend here on Vashon. He asked his mother, “What are we going to do today?”

“What do you mean?” she asked

“Are we going to sit around the house today and do nothing?”

Ah. . .wonderful ordinary nothing.

Reminds me of another comment I overheard, “I want a different kind of life.” I understand the sentiment, I just didn’t know that life came in kinds. With the incessant pressure to live a life other than the one we have, we are susceptible to the same malady that plagued the guy at the ferry boat railing: missing out on the very life we long to live.

Do me a favor, would you? Eliminate the question, “What did you accomplish today?” Whenever any asks me, it makes my head spin, and I find myself scrambling for the right sentence just to impress the questioner.

http://johreiki.net/INSPIRATIONS/merton.php

I have a friend who jogs on the path next to Lake Washington, “for cardio vascular work,” she insists. But she spends a good part of her walk stopped, standing there, just to look at the sky and the clouds. “It’s okay,” she says, “This is so much better for my heart.” How right she is.

Even in the unaccomplished ordinary, wherever you are, be all there.

The most visible creators I know of are those artists
whose medium is life itself,
the ones who express the inexpressible
–without brush, hammer, clay, or guitar.
They neither paint nor sculpt–
their medium is being.
Whatever their presence touches, has increased life.
They see and don’t have to draw.
They are the artists of being alive.
J. Stone

What are you doing this summer? I’ve been asked. Truth be told, I’m trying my best to practice the Sacred Present. It begins with two assumptions (or beliefs). One, that the incarnation–God, literally, in the flesh–tells us that there are no unsacred moments. Or the way Geoffrey Charlesworth put it, “It is only when you start to garden–probably after fifty–that you realize something important happens every day.”

And two, that God’s love gives us permission to keep life from being a contest or a race or a beauty pageant. We’re already in good standing with the Creator, so we need to cut ourselves some slack here, and give ourselves the permission to embrace the day without a tally sheet needed to justify our existence. Do you need to make a list to go about your day? Okay, start with this one: Be gentle with yourself.

It helps if I think about this the way I think about my garden. I can’t force a flower. But I can make space, make room, for it. It is the occupational hazard of gardeners, we have an idea (or a dream, a plan, an obsession) and we begin buying a passel of tools, books, trinkets and gadgets all guaranteed to help us succeed. This afternoon, I put down the gadgets. And I spent the afternoon. Literally, spent it, living inside the time. . .Listening and lounging and reading and laughing and resting and savoring and yanking a occasional weed. Join me if you can. And if we get it wrong, here’s the good news: nobody’s keeping score.

The plain fact is that the planet does not need more successful people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And these qualities have little to do with success as we have defined it.
– David Orr

Bring on the poets

to remind us of the weighty glory resident in the rose,

the caterpillar, the dog, and the grass.

Bring on musicians of the spirit

whose melodies touch both light and dark.

Bring on painters and writers and designers and architects

who ignite sparks of the soul.

But mostly, bring on the sun and the rain and the dawn and the dusk,

the night and the moon, shadowed by a hazy film of cloud.

And bring on love in a wife and a son and rich friends

who suffer from the same fatal disease but refuse to give in,

who redeem moments of time simply for rest

and joy and goose-bumpy love.

– Eugene Peterson

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Be there when you are there
SELF-HELP FOR DUMMIES

Experts disagree on what makes people happy. Now that is funny! Because we live in a world that wants five-easy-steps to enlightenment. As if life, and our faith journey, is a checklist, something to orchestrate, some correct answer on a text. We are so self-conscious: Am I living fully? What am I doing right or wrong? All the while, missing the point. Join Terry, who believes that getting your act together is highly overrated! The more important issue: How do we re-train our own eye (or mind) to appreciate simple pleasures? Is there a spiritual practice that we can incorporate into our lives, that opens our eyes to the abundant simple pleasures that surround us? Answer this: Can you tell me a simple pleasure that happened / that you enjoyed, in the past hour? And while we're on the subject, it wouldn't hurt to change the way we talk. We ask, of each other, daily, "What do you do?" Or, "What did you do?" Why not ask, "What surprised you today? What made you smile?" "Where did you see God incognito?" Laugh and learn with Terry about making the choice to receive life's gifts. That life is to be lived, not managed. We will learn what it means to be open. Available. Curious. Willing to be surprised by joy.

Lost in Wonder
finding heaven on earth

Often we live the truth of a postcard: Having a good time, wish I was here. That's what happens with speed, this crush of information with our "can't miss" technology guaranteed to give us more time. In the end we live out of breath and out of time. In the words of TS Elliot, we are distracted from distractions by distractions. And we see less, taste less, listen less, smell less, touch less, and savor our own fullness less. Terry agrees with Thoreau, "nothing can be more useful to a man or woman than a determination not to be hurried." To be lost in wonder is to be present in our lives. So let us rediscover Radical Amazement. Let us be those who spend their days lost in wonder, who live grateful, humble and self-possessed. Let us no longer give in to projection, resentment or despair. Let us be free to see our worth and significance, not in power or possessions or reputation or religion, but in the extraordinary Grace of our Creator.