Your Spiritual Practice as Poetry
Long ago, when naturalist John Muir, the father of our national parks, was a hungry, active boy in Scotland, his aunt was given a parcel in the family garden. Rather than planting potatoes or turnips, she filled her allotted segment with lilies. One can imagine her fellow family elders regarding her work with astonishment, and her with the indulgence one reserves for the challenged and abnormal.
But young Muir adored his aunt’s lily garden. Destined to become the first chronicler of the gorgeous wild lilies of the Sierras in California, he had never seen anything as beautiful as those dazzling lilies in the family garden. He spent hours gazing at them, studying each plant until he knew them as well as one might know a dear friend.
Sustenance comes in at the mouth, but also through the other spiritual portals of the senses. All we need to do is slow down, listen, and observe. This poem by George Hitchcock that says it better:
Records
Another
Russian
has returned
after
2,000,000
miles
in orbit.
Today I sat
motionless
for
28
minutes
while a
butterfly
folded its
trembling
wings
and rested
on my knee.
A life is made up of countless moments just like this one, yet how many we miss! We miss them by scurrying to and fro, whipped by deadlines, pursuing money, prestige, and phantoms created by our compulsive conjuring. We miss them by straying far from the fountainhead as we’re swept away on a tide of frenzied, unfocused energy. We miss them by becoming deaf to the Word. We fall away so pointedly that we no longer hear the voices of elders—the mentors—whose responsibility is to keep alive and pass along the words we need to hear in order to be whole.