(if you are viewing this via email, the website has a recording of this poem and commentary; click the title above)
Commentary
When you’re not an Anglican, but serving them in the soundbooth, and the priest comes up and says, “Just let the slides go black; come down and let me wash your feet.” Maybe next time I’ll be less duty-bound, and accept. It would have been a blessing, all around.
(if you are viewing this via email, the website has a recording of this poem and commentary; click the title above)
Commentary
Slowly, slowly it dawns on me what artists, musicians, and dancers have been doing all along. Some of them speak a language I never learned. But I start to catch their drift.
I’ll try to expand on that…. King David wrote that
The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
Psalm 19:1 (NIV)
When we witness something beautiful or magnificent, it points us to God. I’m not enough of a philosopher or theologian to defend that statement. It’s just something I sense or intuit, and increasingly so. Somehow, I am becoming more appreciative of beauty. It’s subtle: I watch someone dancing, or view a painting, and something deep inside me responds with joy. Even though I myself don’t speak the language of dance or of painting, I begin to recognize its words.
A few years ago, when I went full-time with my web business and suddenly had plenty of time on my hands, I began taking walks around White Rock Lake. Sometimes it was from a parking lot (a 9 miles hike) and sometimes from home (a 12 miles hike). That was the beginning of one of the best periods in my life. Here’s why….
Paying Attention On those long hikes, one of the things I did was pay close attention to how I was responding to people I encountered along the way: “The site of that elderly lady elicited warm feelings. Why? When I saw that young man, I felt disgust. Why? Why am I so ready to love some people, but not others?” Even after years of paying attention to my responses, it’s often still a mystery. But at least I’m a little more attuned to my emotional state now than I was before.
So I Asked Myself…. Yesterday, I walked by the bench in the background photo. Thanks to the habit of paying attention to my emotional state, I knew there was something I feel every time I pass by a person sitting on that bench. Could I put that feeling in words? Here’s what I initially wrote:
Often, when I’m walking at White Rock Lake and find someone sitting on this bench, I wish to sit with them, to share their experience. People taking in the beauty of a place like this are close to God, whether they realize it or not. But usually I just smile and walk on by.
Is it So? What I want to do (sit with them) is something I can report with more confidence than why I want to do so. In the prose explanation and subsequent poem, I connect my desire to a sense that God is somehow involved in the experience. That’s still just a theory of what’s going on in my head and heart. This theory may get support from a book I started into last night: “The Soul of Desire: Discovering the Neuroscience of Longing, Beauty, and Community,” by Curt Thompson.
Why Wistful? It makes me sad that I either cannot or do not always act on my good impulses. To sit and talk with a stranger? There’s nothing wrong with that impulse. But something usually stops me. What?
RELATED POST: “The Man From Valladolid” (based on meeting a fellow just yards from this bench).
I have no idea why this little song came to mind. I was on vacation, looking around at the mountain flowers. Below the song as I formatted it then, I have posted something I’m playing with, the score and rendering by Musescore. The voicing is ridiculous, I know…. I’m just learning that program.
In a thoughtful, thankful mood. At the time, I was reading the biography of George MacDonald, and my eyes were constantly open to wonders in God’s creation.
This is Indigofera miniata Ortega Common names: Scarlet Pea, Coastal Indigo, Texas Indigo, Western Indigo
