There is only one art of which people should be masters—the art of reflection.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

I have nothing to write about. My life is ordinary, without event. This is just a story (or poem, essay, article). What do you want me to say? I’ve got nothing. Really. So argued countless students over my 40 year teaching career. And they spoke with sincere conviction: they couldn’t write because there was nothing of any relevance or significance to say. Nada. I did have students who practiced–and may have even mastered–the art of reflection, who were unwilling to shut the door on a life event or literary work before they reflected upon it, giving it time to percolate and resonate. As you might guess, however, these students were rare birds, their colors and plumage too bright for much of the world.

Reflection is more than drive-by consideration. You don’t look out of your window and, finding nothing initially interesting, drive on without even checking your rearview mirror. You don’t stay in your car at all. Instead, you get out, pocket your phone, take your shoes off and walk through the grass. Reflection really loves those who are willing to feel the earth beneath their feet and walk without regard to time.

Many of my students were drive-by readers and thinkers. They raced through literary works, only to find that at the end, they could offer little more than a plot summary. This happened, then this happened, and then this happened. And when asked to do more, some sheepishly shrugged their shoulders as if to say: What you see is what you get. Others were more direct and defensive: This is boring, irrelevant, a total waste of my time. And still others–the ones who were reluctant to make eye contact–fearfully confessed that I guess that I don’t really know what you want.

In his collected essays, English philosopher Francis Bacon writes:

Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider.

Those prone to drive-bys, however, are unfamiliar with weighing and considering. If they read at all, they spend their time on the surface of the work, reluctant or unable to push into the deeper reaches. The same is true of viewing and experiencing, all of which makes for empty writing, speaking, and–saddest of all–living.

Students aren’t alone, however, for adults from all walks of life are also prone to drive-by reading, viewing, and living. We blame our reluctance to weigh and consider on our busy lives. No time for even a whole cup of coffee, we say, as we rush to the next person, place, or event. And regrettably, busyness trumps reflection almost every time. Because busyness is a surface activity where others can see what and how much we’re doing. Reflection is a subterranean endeavor, which may be mistaken for lollygagging or wasting time. Its yields are not immediate, and, as we’ve been told, time is money.

Classrooms with helpless, uninvested students, political debates during which questions are never answered and statements never directly addressed, entertainment designed primarily for shock and titillation–all are products of a world without reflection. Of course, there are many more examples, and this is the real tragedy. We’ve come to expect the shallows and, as such, have forgotten how to swim in deeper waters.

Without reflection, we go blindly on our way, creating more unintended consequences, and failing to achieve anything useful, writes author and management consultant Margaret Wheatley. Going blindly on our way seems to be the way of it now. Because we claim to have no time and demonstrate no inclination to reflect, we press on without seeing ourselves and our world. And the consequences? At best, they result in passable essays and trashy television that we can take or leave; at worst, they take us all hostage through ill thought policies and practices.

In The Dubliners, Irish writer James Joyce writes:

He lived at a little distance from his body, regarding his own acts with doubtful side-glances. He had an odd autobiographical habit which led him to compose in his mind from time to time a short sentence about himself containing a subject in the third person and a verb in the past tense.

Lest reflection become self-indulgence, we might consider stepping outside of ourselves, so that we can objectively think about ourselves and so that we might consider our lives as if they’ve already been lived. If we did this, if we lived at a little distance from ourselves, regarding our own thoughts, words, and actions with doubtful side-glances, we might have a shot at real reflection. For in doing so, we would have to look at ourselves and our lives as though they belonged to someone else. And then we might be more likely to ask the tough questions: Why did you do that? What did you think might happen? How did you think this might affect others? What do you truly want to do and say? How do you really want to live?

I recently worked with a group of middle and high school students. During my time with them, I admitted that I’d heard the same lament for years: I have nothing to write about, nothing to say. I confessed that I may have felt similarly when I was younger, believing my life to be altogether uneventful and ordinary. Still, I grew to see the small moments of my life as treasures. I grew to realize how significant their yields were. Through these moments and my subsequent reflection on them, I learned about what it means to be human and live in this world. These were small moments that mattered. But, I cautioned, it’s all in how you look at and reflect upon these things, people, and experiences. You recall them–months, years later–for some reason. What is it? Why do you continue to hold these moments as keepsakes? If you can reflect upon these questions, you may come to new realizations about yourself and your world. And, I told them, developing this kind of reflective practice may be the biggest treasure of all, for it will equip you to look upon your ordinary, uneventful lives, as well as upon literary works, news articles, social media posts, and more, with fresh eyes. What you see through these new lenses will astonish, trouble, comfort and perplex you. You won’t be the same. You’ll be a reflecter, someone no longer content to drive-by.

I can’t help but think that most of us may need a shot to our reflective souls. Some of us may even need a transplant. Whatever it takes, though, reviving a reflective spirit is essential if we are to flourish. We have to do better than be a drive-by people. Our world depends upon it in more ways than we can imagine.

photo by Collyn Ware

 
 Cardinal in Late Winter
  
 The day breaks over a monochrome world
 where there is only the memory
 of color.
  
 I’ve had enough of gray:
 of pasty trees too weak to shoulder the sky;
 of hills, like lumps of coal, that clot the earth;
 of skies that slather the sun for weeks.
  
 Even my dreams plod through the nights
 dragging their shrouds across the land.
 They sober in the company of stones
 as their eyes are sealed and their tongues 
 removed.
  
 Outside, the world writes Its obituary-- 
 line by leaden line--
 and the snow is a hearse through the streets
 of my days.
  
 But in the linden,
 a solitary cardinal.
  
 And suddenly, 
 it’s as if the world remembers its better self,
 as if it can sing in scarlet again.
 Here is red resurrected:
 we sink our teeth into it,
 and sweet juice runs from our lips;
 we breathe it in, and languid moments blossom;
 we look into the eyes of vermillion and rose
 and smile.
  
 The monochrome world presses in,
 but a single cardinal takes the day. 

The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside by a generous hand. But- and this is the point- who gets excited by a mere penny? But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days.
― Annie Dillard,  Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

A penny is a throw-away coin, one that can roll under the sofa, and no one stoops to retrieve it. A penny is an afterthought–the clerk pressing it in your hand as change. A penny is a nuisance, which, when multiplied, sits like dead weight in your change purse. A penny is a trifle, a scant teaspoon of hot fudge on your sundae, a descant without a melody. And yet. . .

What if a penny could literally make your day? What if you genuinely valued your pennies and thereby cultivated a healthy poverty that bought you a lifetime of days? Well, then, you might look at your bulging coin purse with new eyes, and you might mine the floor under the sofa for riches.

Like Dillard, I like the notion of healthy poverty. Too often, we think ourselves poor and lament the fact that we don’t have enough time, enough money, enough love, enough recognition, enough possessions. Poor, poor, poor! In our contest to keep up with the Joneses, we find our lives lacking. We believe that we are natives of scarcity, condemned to wander the land in want.

Claiming to be poor is one thing, but actually being poor is another, much more serious matter. According to the 2018 U.S. Census Bureau, 38.1 million Americans were classified as living in poverty, which for a household of four meant living on $25,465 annually. Worldwide, Action Against Hunger reports that 780 million people live in extreme poverty on less than $1.90 per person daily. Most of us Americans aren’t poor–not by a long shot. Even if we claim to use the term “poor” relatively, comparing ourselves to others in our income bracket who seem to have more, we must concede that we aren’t poor. And by doing so, we must understand that, ironically, it’s our unimpoverished living that often makes us unhealthy.

Generally speaking, we don’t experience genuine poverty, the likes of which we only read about or view on television. Our lives are often so full–of food, money, opportunities, possessions–that we suffer from all sorts of ailments, not the least of which is the inability and unwillingness to see the pennies in our lives. So if someone were to offer us guidance in cultivating a healthy poverty, we would probably turn them down, politely of course, and then roll our eyes as they left.

Dillard is on to something here, though. She’s not suggesting that we all pledge to live on less than $1.90 per day, but she is advocating that we live differently. That we live better lives as penny-lovers who find the small, ordinary things and moments of our lives as extraordianary day-makers.

I like this a lot. Sadly, I confess to many days during which I couldn’t be bothered to retrieve a missing penny–or to even notice that a penny was missing. But there were other glorious days during which the smallest, most ordinary things and moments literally made my day. My family and I lived a good portion of our early lives in the lower-middle class income bracket. I didn’t know this, though, because my parents lived in healthy poverty. They taught us the value of Sunday afternoon drives in the country (with no particular destination and no treat at the A & W), the value of thrift stores and used books, the value of evenings in lawn chairs as the fireflies came out, the value of conversations around the dinner table and Marcia’s Mess (my mom’s wonderful casserole which is as close to hamburger heaven as you can get). In short, they taught us to value pennies in all their forms, and because of this, I thought we were rich.

As I get older, I find that I have more time for and take more interest in the pennies that have been cast broadside by a generous hand. When I stop by the side of the road to examine a patch of bittersweet, my life is the richer for it. When I hear a word or phrase that is just right and make a mental note of it, my day brightens. When my grandson and I scout the yard for the best autumn leaves, I count my blessings. And when my granddaughter takes her brother’s hand as they walk home, my heart skips a beat. In the whole scheme of things, these things and moments are pennies. But they are pennies which buy a lifetime of days, days lived with purpose and joy, regardless of income bracket. These are days of heathy poverty.

Who gets excited by a mere penny? Dillard hopes that we will answer with a resounding, We do! For a moment, imagine an entire nation, an entire world of penny-lovers. Imagine people everywhere whose days are literally made by ordinary things and moments which make them smile and take pause or which stop them in their tracks and take their breath away. Imagine if healthy poverty was not just a generational fad–here today and gone tomorrow.

I can imagine it. Heaven knows that I lack the power to transform the entire world, but I can transform my own life. Which I intend to do, one penny at a time.

In the long months of winter, we can all use a shot of unadulterated joy, one brought to you through the stunning photography of my daughter, Collyn, and the beautiful spirit of my niece, Zarah.

 So this is joy:
  
 your silk skirt alive,
 a deep red river running at your feet;
 the gilded grass;
 the cottonwood bough which lowers
 an unexpected crown;
  
 and a distant tree line squeezing the sun
 to the center of the clearing 
 where it settles into a buttery pat 
 of light.
  
 So this is joy:
 the switchgrass lit with birthday candles
 a fiery party for one;
  
 while above, the late afternoon sky pales,
 an afterthought. 
  
 So this is joy:
 arms which open
 with minds of their own;
 such bounty, such unculled charity,
 as if to pull the whole world in—
 all its toadstools and troubles—
  
 and you, twirling in the twilight, 
 your silk cyclone such a magnificent sight,
 daring the world to sulk. 

There is a time for action, a time for “commitment,” but never for total involvement in the intricacies of a movement. There is a moment of innocence and kairos, when action makes a great deal of sense. There is [also] a time to listen, in the active life as everywhere else, and the better part of action is waiting, not knowing what is next, and not having a glib answer. Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander

Minutes after my freshman composition class had dismissed, I pushed open the door to my father’s university office where he was scribbling notes in the margin of a text. I barged in without knocking because I had a real crisis. I was going to have to change my college major, and my father was my advisor (academically and familially). I don’t know what I was thinking, I gasped. I can’t possibly be an English major any more. I dropped into the straight-back chair he kept for visitors and put my head in my hands.

I remember that my father closed his book and used his teacher voice: So, do you want to explain why you believe that you can’t major in English? Tears filled my eyes as I started in: Well, a guy in my class read his essay aloud today, and there were words–so many words–that I didn’t even understand. It was like his mom read the dictionary to him when he was in the womb! So you see, I have to change my major because I don’t use words like that, and his essay sounded so incredibly articulate.

After what seemed like an interminable amount of time, my father asked, Did you understand his essay? Incredulous, I said, Well, no, of course not. I mean, he’s obviously so intelligent that someone like me couldn’t possibly understand. My father just shook his head and said, Did you ever consider that this young man may be saying nothing, that he may be just putting makeup on a pig?

Of course I hadn’t considered this at all. At 18, I believed that there simply must be valuable ideas to support all his fancy language. Surely, he had something worthwhile to say, and because of my own limitations, I’d failed to discover it. Although I didn’t know it at the time, I’d just looked squarely into the face of glibness, a pig with lacquered lips and painted eyes. At the time, glib was a word I didn’t really understand or use, but all too soon, I’d come to know it well.

Today, political debates are glorious arenas for the glib. The political gladiators line up, shielded by their individual podiums, prepared for battle. We suit them up and send them to slaughter, shouting: May the glibbest man or woman win! It matters little–or at all–if they don’t respond to a moderator’s question or a competitor’s statement. Armed with polished words and manufactured statements, the glib march into battle, fearless and proud. For they know that, in the end, glib wins the day where the victors rest on their silver-tongued laurels.

Trappist monk and writer Thomas Merton cautions that the better part of action is waiting. He even argues that not knowing what is next is better than offering a glib answer. For there are, indeed, times for action and times for waiting, times for speaking and times for listening. In my dreams, I have conjured up politicians (or teachers, physicians, attorneys, etc.) who pause for more than a few seconds and then stun their audiences by stating: Honestly, I don’t know the best answer to that question right now. I want you to know that I’ve been thinking about this, though, and I’ll continue to think about it until I can give you my best response. Be still my heart! What courage, what authenticity, what firm refusal to capitulate to glibness! But mind you, this is all in my dreams.

In the cold, hard light of reality, however, I understand that such a candid and thoughtful response is not a glib one. Falling short of any true measure of glibness, it would generally condemn its speaker or writer to oblivion. Because today, refusing to answer, refusing to offer up the expected politically, economically, and socially-charged buzzwords of the day is simply suicide, and those poor glibless souls are surely destined for burial in unmarked graves.

I admit to having fallen prey to the glib-trap. Standing in front of a classroom, faced with a challenging student question, I’ve glibly pushed on with words intended to, at the very least, fill the dead space. When I should’ve waited, when I should’ve refrained from offering such a glib answer, I blathered on–and on. For many of us, the allure of glibness can be all too real. Even when we know better, we may give into temptation and push our loquacious selves forward.

Some of this is not entirely our fault, though. We live in a world where appearance matters greatly, and quick-response times are expected. Sadly, many of my public speaking students delivered canned speeches whose content was glibly puffed up and then memorized. They believed that if they were to speak more naturally and to even pause occasionally, this would be certain and instant death. Faced with audiences who often smirked–or yawned–when speakers bobbled and wavered, they glibly pressed on. For ultimately, they’d come to accept that their delivery was far more important than their content.

Although I don’t dispute much of the research on reading fluency, I do object to the over-emphasis on fluency as a reading assessment. I’ve known too many children who could read fluently but failed to understand anything they were reading. Early in their school experience, they’d learned to compete for words-per-minute scores that topped the classroom leaderboards. Even in the world of reading, glibness often trumps understanding.

Styles, preferences, and expectations do change, though. What’s in today may be out tomorrow. I’m really hoping that this will be true of glibness without substance. I’m hoping that earnest, thoughtful speech will come in vogue. It goes without saying, though, that this isn’t entirely up to speakers and writers. Listeners and readers must also be willing to change their habits and preferences; they must be much more patient and much more invested in what is being said than how it is being said. In this brave new world, the glib will take a back seat to the truly articulate, and the best speech will grow consciously and carefully from the best thinking.

Photo by Collyn Ware

                                 

 Night Sky 
  
 Honeyed ribbons of the day hug the horizon
 where embers smolder along the ridge.
  
 It’s dark, you say,
 as you open the barrel of your flashlight
 to check for batteries before you walk the path
 from the campsite to the lake.
  
 But already I stand at the lake’s edge
 where constellations of pebbles flicker in the airglow
 and waves lap the shore in lunar time.
  
 And above—oh, the too wondrous above—
 the sky is a feast of light.
 Cassiopeia, Ursa Major and Minor, and stars
 which stud the heavens with opal and moonstone.
  
 The universe really puts on a great spread, I say
 and take your hand as we walk towards the boat landing.
  
 This is the hand that held the flashlight, long since pocketed,
 the hand that now holds mine as if to say:
  
 Let meteors shower the hills 
 and comets blaze in the treetops.
 Let dark become light
 and the moon on the lake our lodestar.
  
 For there is galaxy enough, 
 here and now, 
 when even the sand is celestial.
  
 
   

Photo by Collyn Ware

She is nine, beloved, as open-faced as the sky and as self-contained. I have watched her grow. As recently as three or four years ago, she had a young child’s perfectly shallow receptiveness; she fitted into the world of time, it fitted into her, as thoughtlessly as sky fits its edges, or a river its banks. But as she has grown, her smile has widened with a touch of fear and her glance has taken on depth. Now she is aware of some of the losses you incur by being here–the extortionary rent you have to pay as long as you stay.
― Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

Oh, the extortionary rent you have to pay to live in the twixt time, the nether world of adolescence! As one who has already passed through and emerged on the other side, Dillard is painfully aware of the dues you must pay to live in a world that appears first as a glorious beacon on the horizon of adulthood but then inevitably loses some–if not much–of its luster. The smiles tinged with fear, the furtive glances at others who seem so perfectly made, the nail-bitten obsession to fit in. To survive, you must pay rent to the world’s landlord for whom you are just another boy or girl mucking a way through adolescence.

Poet Sylvia Plath describes this coming-of-age process as doing all the little tricky things it takes to grow up, step by step, into an anxious and unsettling world.  Isn’t it enough that adolescents must pay extortionary rent? How doubly brutal, then, that these dues “entitle” them to leave the land of childhood for an anxious and unsettling world.

My granddaughter, Gracyn, will turn eleven soon. This summer, I witnessed the fragile walls of childhood’s cocoon begin to crack. As the cracks began to widen exposing a new and different creature, it was almost more than I could bear. There were so many moments during which I wanted to tell her to burrow in, to just wait for another month (or year) before taking flight. I found myself desperate to sell the attributes of cocoon-life. I lay awake at night and imagined the anxious and unsettling world into which she would soon emerge. And too many times, I realized that I was crying.

In her photo, she is backlit by a soft ochre sun and framed by the foilage and berries of summer. Her face is guileless, the face of a child. Her eyes– fixed on her mother behind the camera–sing from a light source within. Here is the garden before the fall, the female unblemished and open.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh writes:

Woman must come of age by herself. This is the essence of “coming of age”—to learn how to stand alone. She must learn not to depend on another, nor to feel she must prove her strength by competing with another. In the past, she has swung between these two opposite poles of dependence and competition, of Victorianism and Feminism. Both extremes throw her off balance; neither is the center, the true center of being a whole woman. She must find her true center alone. She must become whole.

To stand alone, to achieve balance and find one’s true center, to become whole–these are serious dues, indeed. As much as I yearn to keep Gracyn in childhood’s cocoon or an Edenic garden, I, too, know that she must pay these dues in her own way and in her own time. She will suffer through periods of imbalance and dependence. She will compare herself to others and find herself lacking. She will wake to find that her world is not fair and that the happiness that came so easily in childhood eludes her. She will love and lose. And she will be reminded that there is always, always more rent to pay.

Bildungsroman is a literary genre that focuses on a character’s psychological and moral growth from childhood to adulthood. How we love a good coming-of-age story or film. We laugh and cry with Huckleberry Finn, Holden Caulfield, and Scout Finch. We settle in with a bucket of theater popcorn and spend a couple hours living vicariously through the characters in Dead Poet’s Society, The Breakfast Club, and The Outsiders.

For adults, this is familiar–albeit frequently painful–territory. We paid our dues and pioneered through adolescence’s seemingly endless frontier. Having reached the promised land of maturity, we are often too quick to dole out smug advice and platitudes, guaranteeing teens that they, too, will survive heartbreak and acne and the worst that social media can dish out. Perhaps we do this because we really don’t know what else to say or do, for if we were being honest, we would simply sit and suffer with them. Coming-of-age themes may make such great movies and books because generally speaking, we are confident that their protagonists’ struggles will end and that we will leave the theater or close the book with some genuine sense of catharsis. But as many of us know too well, real life may not be as generous. The cathartic release we long for may be tortuous months–or years–away.

I’m certain that every generation has claimed an even darker, more challenging world than the generation before them. Still, I can’t help but wonder if the world into which my granddaughter will step is genuinely darker and more challenging than many earlier ones. There is much more shouting over people and drawing lines in the sand. The images of males and females that many youth regard as ideal–and therefore to be painstakingly emulated–are photo-brushed, digitally-edited gods and goddesses. The old adage that you can be who you want to be if you work hard and keep your nose clean persists, even though it sounds sadly more like fiction now than ever. And the talk of climate change, extinction, and environmental disaster confidently heralds the end-of-times.

I’m certain that Gracyn will pay her dues and dish out her allotted rent as she moves from childhood into adolescence and beyond. As her grandmother, though, I’m respectfully asking the Grand Landlord of the Universe for a much, much reduced rate.

When I look out on such a night as this, I feel as if there could be neither wickedness nor sorrow in the world; and there certainly would be less of both if the sublimity of Nature were more attended to, and people were carried more out of themselves by contemplating such a scene.
― Jane Austen

This afternoon, I sit in my room near Saratoga, Wyoming watching the snow fall on the mountains outside my window. For the next three weeks, I will have the privilege of working in the company of two other writers, three artists, and one composer at the Brush Creek Ranch and Foundation for the Arts. Each resident is provided with a private room and studio, along with hours and hours of unstructured time. When I contemplate the splendor of the scene outside my window and the hours of solitude before me, I confess to feeling as though I may be carried out of myself.

Jane Austen understood one of the greatest desires of my heart: to be genuinely carried out of myself, to be pried from the choke hold that self-consciousness and reason have on my soul, to become untethered, loosed into creative spaces that I have imagined but not yet visited. How often I have conjured an image of simply stepping out of my self, shedding its brittle shell like a locust, and emerging as something quite different, quite unaffected. Too often, however, I’ve retreated back into my shell where I can navigate life comfortably and safely. And because I’ve lived here for so long and cluttered up the place with all sorts of things, I haven’t exactly created the best conditions for contemplation.

American Trappist monk and writer Thomas Merton writes:

To enter into the realm of contemplation one must in a certain sense die: but this death is in fact the entrance to a higher life. It is a death for the sake of life, which leaves behind all that we can know or treasure as life, as thought, as experience, as joy, as being.      

Herein lies the rub: the death part. This knowledge that one must in a certain sense die is precisely why I’ve danced around the edges of contemplation. Oh, there have been times when I’ve tooled around the contemplative dance floor. Holding a sleeping baby in the middle of the night, listening to the sound of running water in a creek, watching the waxy leaves of cottonwood trees as they move in the wind. In these moments, I was truly carried out of my self. But these were brief jaunts. In the world of Trappist monks like Merton, these jaunts wouldn’t qualify as any real type of contemplation. Still, for precious moments, I died to something wondrous and profound.

Photographer Dorothea Lange argues that the contemplation of things as they are, without error or confusion, without substitution or imposture, is in itself a nobler thing than a whole harvest of invention. I think that too often I’ve regarded contemplation as a means of invention, as a mental and spiritual field to be gleaned. Contemplate a little, harvest a lot–or something like this. But Lange’s argument that we must contemplate things as they are is surely a strong one. It is a first–and essential–step towards any prospect of invention. When I think of those I admire most–writers, philosophers, artists, theologians, and good human beings–I am moved by how they stand in wonder before the world as they contemplate all sorts of things, just as they are. Their willingness and ability to do so has given the world the most magnificent harvest of invention.

In “From the Garden”, poet Anne Sexton writes:

 Put your mouthful of words away
 and come with me to watch
 the lilies open in such a field,
 growing there like yachts,
 slowly steering their petals
 without nurses or clocks.

Maybe this is my biggest impediment to contemplation: putting my mouthful of words away. Words–spoken and unspoken–budge in with bluster and bravado. They steal the show before there really is a show. Lest there be too much silence and too little creative harvest, they swoop in with good intentions and take the stage. My own words sometimes sicken me. I’d much rather they stop swooping in and, like lilies in a field, content themselves with steering their petals/ without nurses or clocks.

I have no contemplation excuse for the next three weeks. I’ll have no Netflix, no errands to run or meetings to attend–just uninterrupted hours of solitude in a stunningly beautiful place. I hope to write, of course, but I hope to spend time in contemplation first. I hope to sideline any words or conscious thoughts that might want to get into the game too quickly. For there is a lot of sitting the bench when it comes to contemplation, and I intend to spend some good time there.