Sometimes I admittedly go over the top with my attempt to “squeeze the marrow out of every moment” much like Thoreau wanted to “suck the marrow” out of life. “Make every moment count!” my motto – and sometimes synchronicity and a voracious hunger for words knocks me off the royal throne of my opinion and allows me to take on something even better.
In a moment of multi-tasking, I paged through Mary Oliver’s collection White Pine one morning. I sat and read and actually had the most inconceivable, yes more than slightly arrogant and flat out outrageous thought, “Mary must have had an off year with this book. None of these poems are stirring me at all.”
And then I turned the page.
It was in that page’s turning Mary’s words knocked me off my chair.
There I was, feeling smug and proud for “managing my time” with intention and insight and oh so fabulously spiritual yet tangible and applicable not at all esoteric terms and here Mary wrote, in her poem “At the Lake”
(Listen to me, reading, in audio.)
”This is, I think,
what holiness is:
the natural world,
where every moment is full
of the passion to keep moving.
Inside every mind there’s a hermit’s cave
full of light,
full of snow,
full of concentration.
I’ve knelt there,
and so have you,
hanging on
to what you love
to what is lovely.
===
I read it once, silently, to myself.
I read it twice, aloud, to no one and the entire world.
Mary’s words knocked me off my chair and invited me to live some questions, to walk around with them for a while.
What if I looked at my concept of time management as expansive holiness?
What if I held time like the touch of the river water along the banks, letting it flow and gurgle and smell so good I just want to throw off all my clothes and leap into it?
What if I integrated the thought of time as holiness and passion and movement and me as holy-time’s playmate, co-conspirator, fairy godgranny?
This is where I want to kneel with time.
“Full of light, full of concentration,” and “every moment full of passion to keep moving” even in the stillness of tears in my eyes, kneeling with my grandbaby and wondering "how the hell did I get so blessed?"
Time as holiness.
I am diving into it, headlong, and see the feather comforter supporting me and surrounding me and yes, perhaps you are there laughing beside me.
Time as holiness.
With my life work, with the people I love, with the people I serve that I absolutely can't help but love. With my creative projects. With the next-whatever-it-is-that-pops-up-next.
Time as holiness.
Questions/Prompts:
If I considered time as holy, my attitude might.....
Remember a moment when I was full of light, full of concentration -- what happened? Relive the moment in words --
How would your relationship with time shift if you greeted it as holy --
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