Sunday Best – January 13, 2019
Recently I visited the most beautiful public playground I’d ever seen. It was not the most extravagant, or the biggest, but it had love and care in every corner. The big trees had been protected so that they could shade the playing areas from the intense sun. The tables were shaped as maps of the Hawaiian islands, so that you couldn’t help but learn as you sat. The fences featured handmade carvings of turtles and whales and fish. Every corner of the property was being enjoyed, with people playing basketball and reading books and captaining a giant wooden ship.
And near the entrance was a series of modest signs, each featuring a person who’d been instrumental in creation of the park. Unlike a lot of tributes, these signs did not cite dollars of donations or fancy titles. I don’t know if Rose Fujimori was a philanthropist, but I know she believed in the dream. I don’t know if Irma Chillingsworth was chair of the planning board, but I know she was a spunky go-getter.
This has me thinking of all the components we need for progress. We need dollars, often, but what good are those dollars without a spunky go-getter? And we need that energy, yes, but that energy will flag at times if there’s not someone else who holds a steady belief in the dream.
Dear friends, whatever we are working towards, what do we really need? Chances are that only a few of the most essential puzzle pieces are found in our budget spreadsheets and strategic plans.
And if we’re lucky enough to hold more formal titles like manager or chair or donor, what else do we add? Could we be spunky go-getters? Believers in a dream?
Every worthy endeavor needs an Irma and a Rose.
Sunday Best – January 6, 2019
WHERE IS THE love?
It’s the season of resolutions, when the supermarket is sold out of cauliflower and the treadmill section of the gym is overcrowded.
The challenge is, most of us don’t really love cauliflower all that much, and even with the greatest podcasts in the world it’s hard for treadmill time to feel anything but hamster-like. Without a greater vision, it’s no wonder that within a few weeks most resolutions are anything but resolved.
For many years, one item on my new year’s list has been to get over my fear of the water, and I’ve had some small and intermittent pockets of progress over time. But the truth is, I don’t love swimming pools, or bathing suits, or the idea of spending time on something that causes me anxiety.
What I DO love is catching a little glimpse of the amazing creatures that live in the sea, and being connected to a different part of our beautiful planet, and feeling strong and unafraid, and adventuring with my loved ones.
My sensible, rational resolution did not pull me back into the water this holiday. My loves did. And with those greater loves as inspiration, it’s possible to follow through over the longer term, too.
It is sensible to want to be able to swim. It is magical to visit with a sea urchin, or a manta ray, or a parrotfish.
Dear friends, where is our love?
Let’s follow it beyond the cauliflower and the treadmills, to the place where sensible meets magical.
Sunday Best – December 29, 2018
And now we welcome the new year, full of things that have never been. **
– R.M. Rilke (paraphrased)
Here we stand, on the edge of the new. Do you feel a little tippy, ready to plunge in? This year I am taking counsel from Pádraig Ó Tuama, whose wonderful In the Shelter begins with the idea of saying, “Hello to here.”
What is the name for the place where you now are? It requires close looking, it requires the dedication of observation and a commitment to truth. To name a place requires us to be in a place. It requires us to resist dreaming of where we should be, and look around where we are.
One reason to love the new year is its blank sheet of paper feeling, the idea that anything is possible. But to step into that wonderful possibility, our feet have to start right here where we are. Hello to here.
And if Here is nowhere close to where we want to be, all the more reason to pause and appreciate this place. It might be a long journey ahead, and we may never pass Here again.
Dear friends, Hello to Here.
May we have courage on our travels to There.
Happy New Year.
* In case you missed our year-end book list, here is the link:
Honeybee End of the Year Reading List 2018 – kc
** And here is Rilke’s full quote, which is a mix of wonder plus a caution to not spill too much of the new year’s potential:
And now let us believe in a long year that is given to us, new, untouched, full of things that have never been, full of work that has never been done, full of tasks, claims, and demands; and let us see that we learn to take it without letting fall too much of what it has to bestow upon those who demand of it necessary, serious, and great things.
Monday Best! Honeybee’s Year-End Book List
Dear friends, let’s celebrate like we’re in Iceland!
I’ve read that there is a tradition in Iceland called jolabokaflod, “Yule Book Flood.” On Christmas Eve, gifts of books are exchanged, and then everyone spends the evening reading. This is one idea that I hope will spread far and wide, across all regions and all faiths and all ages.
It brings me great joy to share these favorites with you, with best wishes for the new year.
Sunday Best – December 16, 2018
My! People come and go so quickly here!
– Dorothy, The Wizard of Oz
The solstice is approaching this week, when the Northern hemisphere earth tips back towards the light. It’s a time of betwixt and between – we’re ending one season, and one calendar year, and there’s often a big fuss to clearly mark the end of one thing and the beginning of the next.
But in the in-between, in the tipping spots, lots of good stuff lives. In ecotones, like salt marshes or mangroves, we see a great buzz of biodiversity and rapid evolution and near-miraculous transformation. Salt water that turns to fresh! Creatures that live on both land and sea!
At the intersections of other systems we see the same kind of potential for transformation, like the fascinating group Health Care Without Harm that I encountered last week. Working at the intersection of environmental health and human health (which, in the end, are not so separate at all), this organization has helped to eliminate mercury from hospitals, eradicate toxic building materials, and even improve hospital food.
It’s uncomfortable, being in that liminal in-between space, where we’ve left one familiar spot but have not yet arrived at the next. To avoid that queasy, floaty feeling, usually we do what we can to hurry through the transition, back to firmer ground. Is it 2018 or 2019? Are we on land or at sea?
But, dear friends, let’s pause here, on the edge the light, for just a moment. Take a deep breath. Feel the turning. Stretch out, and feel the edges on either side. Float in a patch of in-between.
See what might be transformed.