A Quiet Life

A Quiet Life                                                                                                                                            by Baron Wormser from Scattered Chapters (Sarabande Books)

What a person desires in life
   is a properly boiled egg.
This isn't as easy as it seems.
There must be gas and a stove,
   the gas requires pipelines, mastodon drills,
   banks that dispense the lozenge of capital.
There must be a pot, the product of mines
   and furnaces and factories,
   of dim early mornings and night-owl shifts,
   of women in kerchiefs and men with
   sweat-soaked hair.
Then water, the stuff of clouds and skies
   and God knows what causes it to happen.
There seems always too much or too little
   of it and more pipelines, meters, pumping
   stations, towers, tanks.
And salt-a miracle of the first order,
   the ace in any argument for God.
    Only God could have imagined from
   nothingness the pang of salt.
Political peace too. It should be quiet
   when one eats an egg. No political hoodlums
   knocking down doors, no lieutenants who are
   ticked off at their scheming girlfriends and
   take it out on you, no dictators
   posing as tribunes.
It should be quiet, so quiet you can hear
   the chicken, a creature usually mocked as a type
   of fool, a cluck chained to the chore of her body.
Listen, she is there, pecking at a bit of grain
   that came from nowhere.


A few weeks ago I began a practice that just happened to coincide with the beginning of Lent, but is a habit I hope to continue.  Each night before I go to bed, I take the small flowered notebook that rests on my night stand and write the headings, "The Small Step" and "The Small Gratitude."  Under each heading, I then record a few words:  worked on website, sorted out story idea, snow flurries on a Monday afternoon, a conversation with a kindred spirit.

The Small Step is to remind me that no matter how unproductive I may feel as a day comes to its close, chances are there was something I managed to do that inched me closer towards my goals. 

The Small Gratitude is also a prompt for keeping things in perspective, but it also makes me more mindful of these moments of gratitude as they occur.  When I initially started the practice, I had to review my entire day to try to recall one small think for which I was thankful.  Now, it seems as if there are several clamoring to be written down each evening. 

One of the things I love about Baron Wormser's poem is that it reminds me that even a small gratitude isn't necessarily as small as it appears at first glance.  Behind something as simple as a boiled egg, there is a story waiting to be told.  Gratitude for a simple snowflake can turn into an avalanche of thanksgiving if we look deeper.

How do you practice gratitude?

A Day in Bed with Aunt Maud

A DAY IN BED WITH AUNT MAUD
by Elizabeth Smither from The Year of Adverbs (Auckland University Press)

My dear high-foreheaded aunt, good
at sums and attentive to all that love
demands, loved a day in bed.

No illness drove her there, or fever
no drenched nightgown, twisted
but the bliss of a day in bed.

She lay, she slept, she reached out
a hand towards an improving book
she closed its covers on her day in bed.

She contemplated the plaster ceiling rose
and all the world that swam around it
a spider web from her day in bed.

She lay like someone in a shroud, proud
of her stretched toes, her spine
bearing not this day on her day in bed.

She took some rations, delicate things
and a jug of fresh-made squash
she dined daintily on her day in bed.

What did you get? the others asked.
A firmer view of the world, she said
through lying down on my day in bed

and love and anything you care to ask.
They never did. Away they sped
She contemplated them from her day in bed.

Here is the promised "day in bed" poem.  This idea might seem like an indulgence in what many churches deem a "penitential" season but as I mentioned in an earlier post, Lent to me has always been more about perspective than penance.  Sometimes being fed on a diet of bread and water in the silence of the desert provides the right conditions to survey the landscape of our lives.  But other times, we need to feed our souls with a good book, comfort food and, perhaps, a day in bed to give us a firmer view of not only the world, but also our place in it.

What do you need to feed your soul now?  Is it a time to feast a little or fast a little?