Green

 

Four weeks ago, I landed in this tropical green sanctuary. During the day, working from home, I look out through a full wall of windows into a small and lush garden. Green is the dominant colour I see. As the day progresses and the clouds come and go, the shades of green shift subtly. What doesn't change is the quiet serenity I experience.

My windows are open all day long, so I hear the endless rustling of leaves and birds singing. Hummingbirds and butterflies float through lazily, oblivious to my endless string of Zoom calls. 

When so much is going wrong in the world, pausing to focus on soaking up the green of life makes me believe that all can be well. Somewhere on the edge of my consciousness Gerard Manley Hopkins keeps drifting through with his poem, "God's Grandeur":

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

    It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

    It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

    And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

    And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

    There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

    Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

    World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Rain

When I arrived here in San Salvador almost a month ago, I discovered to my dismay that my house didn't have hot water. The weather was warm and I figured that maybe this was just how things are here, that I needed to adjust myself. As long as the weather was warm, I did okay with cold showers. But in the last week, temperatures cooled and I found myself gasping. 

I had mentioned the issue once as a problem and a few people came and fiddled with a few nuts and bolts, to no real effect. I thought I was stuck with cold water and have been trying to muscle through it (I do fully realize that I am privileged in naming this as a struggle when any access to water is such a huge problem for so much of the world's population). Then a couple days ago, our General Director checked in with staff and asked if there was anything we needed help with, as far as our living situations were concerned. I took a deep breath and sent a tentative request for some help. The results were instantaneous. Yesterday, a maintenance person arrived at my door and, in half an hour, told me to come check my shower and see if it was sufficient.

After twelve years of intermittent water pressure and 3-minute showers in India, I now have a massive rain shower head and took a half-hour shower this morning. I won't make a habit of it, but I couldn't resist after the mornings of shivering. I've been smiling all day because it felt so extra good. Today's word is Rain. The shower felt so rich and undeservedly luxurious, like the arrival of the monsoon when the clouds just break open.

It rained almost all day here. I sat looking out of the windows and thinking about the old idea that rain does not fall only on the deserving, and that we all long for it, as I longed for my hot shower. I remembered Portia's famous monologue from the Merchant of Venice that I used to have up in my first classroom in Atlanta:

The quality of mercy is not strained.
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest:
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.
'Tis mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes
The thronèd monarch better than his crown.
His scepter shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
But mercy is above this sceptered sway.
It is enthronèd in the hearts of kings;
It is an attribute to God Himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God's
When mercy seasons justice. 

This then made me think about the nature of real leadership and how very much, in this strange and difficult season, we need for mercy to season justice...even in the smallest daily interactions or applications of policies. This is a season for mercy and we need it like we need the rain: in other words, we can't survive or grow without bountiful mercy. 

Embrace

 

Charles White, "The Embrace" 1942

The best hugs I ever got were from my niece when she was a little older than a toddler. When she saw me from a distance, she would race toward me and launch herself up into my arms, squeezing fiercely, so that even her eyes and nose screwed up tight. I loved it, her unabashed embrace.

Today's word is Embrace. The last few months have brought so much social and physical distance from loved ones. In part, I choose this word for the longing it represents right now--longing for a time when I can hug my friends and family hard and unabashedly, mask-free.

I choose the word embrace, too, to signify my determination to enter into all of this strange, isolating and isolated experience. I will assume there is value to be found in each of these long days, however long they last. This time of quiet is teaching me much about my own will power (or lack!) and limits. Our shadow side emerges in full force with so much time alone. I embrace this knowledge; it's part of me.

I embrace even the grim realities we currently inhabit. It takes work to understand the vectors of impact around us, the burdens that others carry, from bus drivers to ER doctors to journalists. This work is painful and exhausting, but necessary. I believe we owe it to the human experience to consciously seek to make sense of how and why events evolve as they do--on a micro and macro level, and where we might act meaningfully to make a positive difference. We make choices all the time about how we live and I want to make those choices with the best awareness of impact I can achieve. It's not just about choices, though. It's also about embracing a simple assertion that it is better to know what is happening, even if it's dark, than to remain ignorant.

But mostly, I choose the word Embrace because I feel so powerfully the human-to-human connection in this moment and I want to celebrate that. Amid the fog of daily work and life come moments of a transcendent sense of humanity joined in the same struggle. We always have been struggling to live and live well, but I have never felt so much a part of people I have never met and will never know. John Donne expressed this much better than I ever could in his Meditation XVII, "...any man's death diminishes me, for I am involved in mankind..." All the heavy darkness around makes me want to launch myself at the human race with a hug so fierce like my niece's, fierce enough to burn away at least a fraction of the darkness, the way hers did for me.

Live. Live. Live.

I don't know how many Zoom webinars and seminars and meetings I have zoned in and out of in the last five months. Far, far too many. Yesterday, I found myself watching the disembodied face of a man I have never met, on yet another Zoom webinar, when I suddenly had to clutch at falling tears before they hit my keyboard.

He's a parent here at the school. We had invited him to share with our students how he's moving forward through this time. A student asked him, "What three words would you want students to hold onto, going into this school year?" 

He had been gently authentic for an hour already, which made me eager to hear his answer, but this is the moment that landed like a pebble in a still pond: He paused, then raised his (somewhat battered) water bottle and pointed to one of the many stickers. "You can't read this from there," he said, "but Oscar Wilde, an English playwright, said that 'To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people simply exist.'" He paused again and then softly, softly said, "My three words are Live. Live. Live. We must make sure we keep really living." 

We must. I've moved to a new country and started a new job. Even so, the last few months feel like I've been wandering through shadows lit mostly by the blue glow of my many screens, haunted by an endless and endlessly grim news feed. Time to rise, shake off the electronic anodyne effect, and live, live, live.

I'm starting this blog with a challenge to myself: To find a meaningful word for living each day. Just one. It doesn't need to be happy or positive or angry or haunted, just living. Today's word is Live.

Le Chaim. To Life.

By the way, turns out the Oscar Wilde quote is part of a longer, 1891 essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism. It's a fascinating read that makes the compelling point that it's fundamentally immoral for those who have private property to "be generous" and alleviate the suffering of those who are kept poor by the nature of capitalism and the very existence of private property. Some parallels to the current conversation around race and privilege. Here's the immediate context:

"An enormously wealthy merchant may be – often is – at every moment of his life at the mercy of things that are not under his control. If the wind blows an extra point or so, or the weather suddenly changes, or some trivial thing happens, his ship may go down, his speculations may go wrong, and he finds himself a poor man, with his social position quite gone. Now, nothing should be able to harm a man except himself. Nothing should be able to rob a man at all. What a man really has, is what is in him. What is outside of him should be a matter of no importance. With the abolition of private property, then, we shall have true, beautiful, healthy Individualism. Nobody will waste his life in accumulating things, and the symbols for things. One will live. To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all."