Ready or Not, Here You Are...

Art by Sandra Guiloff

Musing…
Have you written a triolet (4/30 post)? Taken a mindful walk (4/22 post)? Listed your ideas along with your vision of the joy you’d receive from them (3/26 post)? Has something stirred in you by reading our musings (1/24- 4/25 posts)? Or, has something else contrived to happen? 

Charise’s turn:

I’m sitting in the ER with my fifteen-year-old daughter who has a swollen wrist, impact of a fall.  We wait for the x-ray results. In two minutes, the poetry reading by former Poet Laureate W.S. Merwin will begin at the Folger Shakespeare Library. My ticket for that event will be unclaimed.  Wasn’t it John Lennon who said,” Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans”?

Interruptions have their own plans. Unexpected events or demands get you off track, derail you. Throw you into action, into immediacy. Insist that you let go of what you thought was happening. Ruffle your feathers, disappoint you, scare you, wake you. What else could cause you to see things differently? What is W.S. Merwin writing about anyway?  It’s whatever he sees – the presence with which he looks and how he feels becomes a poem.

How I view this moment defines the world for me.  Right now my daughter is the whole of what I see, lying on a hospital bed with ice on one wrist while trying to text her friend with the other hand.  The doctor walks in with a one-word pronouncement,” negative”. No fracture, only a sprain. 

“ I believe in the ordinary day that is here at this moment and is me”, first line of "A Momentary Creed" by W.S. Merwin.

Get Fired Up:

When your plans get scrapped and your intentions diverted, take a fresh look at what is happening.  Make room for wonder.  Make -- room -- for – wonder --