Loving what’s mortal.

Posted on by Shari Swanson

As we age, there is loss. That loss is like a presence that follows us relentlessly like a shadow. No avoiding it. No pretending. We are mortal. The people we love are mortal, perhaps imminently so. This is part of the rules of engagement. And while most of us avoid thinking too much about it, poets like Mary Oliver offer life instructions:

To live in this world, you must be able to do three things:

To love what is mortal

To hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it;

And, when the time comes, to let it go, to let it go.

I honestly don’t know which of these three rules is the hardest. Right now, they each seem nearly impossible. But having the courage to follow these instructions feels like the answer. 

Her full poem is below. 

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.“In Blackwater Woods” by Mary Oliver, from American Primitive. © Back Bay Books, 1983.

Everyday heroes choosing to do the right thing.

Posted on by Shari Swanson

Whom we claim as our heroes is telling. Today, in these troubled, divided times, who is acting heroically? We don’t know how our or this story will end, but we do know the values we hold to be worth fighting for: honesty, self-sacrifice, honor, integrity, the common good. As we enter the day, let us hold true to our values to meet life’s challenges in hope that those everyday interactions spread ripples of good.

Enjoy these words from Heather Cox Richardson in honor of MLK, Jr. Day:

You hear sometimes, now that we know the sordid details of the lives of some of our leading figures, that America has no heroes left.

When I was writing a book about the Wounded Knee Massacre, where heroism was pretty thin on the ground, I gave that a lot of thought. And I came to believe that heroism is neither being perfect, nor doing something spectacular. In fact, it’s just the opposite: it’s regular, flawed human beings choosing to put others before themselves, even at great cost, even if no one will ever know, even as they realize the walls might be closing in around them.

It means sitting down the night before D-Day and writing a letter praising the troops and taking all the blame for the next day’s failure upon yourself in case things went wrong, as General Dwight D. Eisenhower did.

It means writing in your diary that you “still believe that people are really good at heart,” even while you are hiding in an attic from the men who are soon going to kill you, as Anne Frank did.

It means signing your name to the bottom of the Declaration of Independence in bold script, even though you know you are signing your own death warrant should the British capture you, as John Hancock did.

It means defending your people’s right to practice a religion you don’t share, even though you know you are becoming a dangerously visible target, as Sitting Bull did.

Sometimes it just means sitting down, even when you are told to stand up, as Rosa Parks did.

None of those people woke up one morning and said to themselves that they were about to do something heroic. It’s just that when they had to, they did what was right.

On April 3, 1968, the night before the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by a white supremacist, he gave a speech in support of sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. Since 1966, King had tried to broaden the civil rights movement for racial equality into a larger movement for economic justice. He joined the sanitation workers in Memphis, who were on strike after years of bad pay and such dangerous conditions that two men had been crushed to death in garbage compactors.

After his friend Ralph Abernathy introduced him to the crowd, King had something to say about heroes: “As I listened to Ralph Abernathy and his eloquent and generous introduction and then thought about myself, I wondered who he was talking about.”

Dr. King told the audience that if God had let him choose any era in which to live, he would have chosen the one in which he had landed. “Now, that’s a strange statement to make,” King went on, “because the world is all messed up. The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land; confusion all around…. But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars.” Dr. King said that he felt blessed to live in an era when people had finally woken up and were working together for freedom and economic justice.

He knew he was in danger as he worked for a racially and economically just America. “I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter…because I’ve been to the mountaintop…. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life…. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!”

People are wrong to say that we have no heroes left.

Just as they have always been, they are all around us, choosing to do the right thing, no matter what.

Wishing us all a day of peace for Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2026.

Take your time.

Posted on by Shari Swanson

Have you ever been at your wits’ end, and then someone’s kind words literally change your whole day and outlook? We can forget how simple words can make profound differences.

Consider this story from NPR:

STEPHANIE COLE: There I was in my black skirt and my white blouse and ready to go the first day. And I had been trained but very, very quickly. And as is true in a department store during Christmas, it was just bustling. You know how it is at Christmas, when everybody’s out shopping and everybody’s in a hurry and all these people around. This woman comes up to me with, I think, a Christmas tree ornament she wanted to buy, and I freeze. I just freeze. All of a sudden, I can’t remember anything. I can’t remember how to run the cash register. I can’t remember anything about the transactions. I am just absolutely frozen – and probably very close to tears. Just – I so wanted this to go right, and it was going so wrong.

She looked at me and paused and, with such a kind expression on her face, said, it’s all right. Take your time. I’m not in a hurry. And that was the release. All of a sudden, I could breathe, I could wait till somebody else could help me. It was going to be OK. It made such an impression that all these years later, not only do I still remember it, but I find myself – those words coming out of my mouth on numerous, many, many occasions over the years. You know, you encounter somebody whose first day on the job or they’re just having a bad day and things are really – you can tell they’re in a bad place. And you can say, it’s OK. I’m not in a hurry. Take your time. And it always makes the situation better. Always, always.

And so this woman, I can’t really remember her face – and certainly, she’s probably dead by now, given how old I was and how old she was – but she gave me that gift without knowing she gave me that gift, and it’s lasted all these years.

https://www.npr.org/2025/12/15/nx-s1-5640144/a-customers-patience-60-years-ago-was-a-gift-that-changed-a-womans-life

Maybe today you’ll have the chance to be the person remembered 60 years from now for the kind words you say and patience you show to a stranger today!

Dancing dust.

Posted on by Shari Swanson

Hello Mortal,

I regret to inform you that your time here in this place and time is limited.

So, now is your time, however much you might prefer a different one. You matter. The gifts you bring matter. The relationships you tend need you.

This is it.

Consider young Calvin:

Or, better yet, consider this poem:

We are in a joint and fragile keeping, ephemeral, and impermanent. But, now, now, it is ours for the tending, the keeping, the loving. Grasp it.

Mind the gap.

Posted on by Shari Swanson

How lovely things would be if the way we picture ourselves doing something in our heads is the way it plays out in real life. The beautiful prose, perfect plotting, and subtle characterization all laying themselves down on the page when pen is lifted rather than being cruelly translated into the awkward phrasing, cliched plots, and stilted characters plaguing a first draft. If perfect leaps, spins, and arabesques just happen rather than the more likely falls on the bum. If we were already perfect rather than striving. If there were no gap between where we are and where we would like to be.

With all the armchair quarterbacks and critics out there on virtually every issue, you’d almost think effort and expertise don’t count for anything. And yet, mastery is always the result of effort. Full stop. Every master painter, skater, dancer, author, was once a novice. In fact, that journey from novice to master is the important thing, and those hacks on the sidelines are missing the point. As Theodore Roosevelt said:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

So this gap, between where we want to be and where we are, is where we focus our efforts and attention. Not on the critic, because everyone stumbles. But we press on. For to be great at anything takes practice and effort, and our attempt is awkward and halting, ungainly and bumbling at first. But it gets better. And those sitting on the sidelines, afraid or busy criticizing others, aren’t moving forward unless they, too, mind the gap and try.

So many things.

Posted on by Shari Swanson

There are so many ways to find solace in troubling times. Lately, I’ve been paying attention to delight. What a lovely emotion is delight, and instances can be found everywhere.

For me, just this past few days, I’ve found delight in a friend’s video of their new grandson laughing, the unabashed belly laugh of the new to this world that can’t help but make me smile. In a friend’s periwinkle sweater, my favorite color, a favorite shared with my late grandmother who I adored and the color of jacaranda blossoms that takes me back to days sitting on the lawn of my children’s elementary school under the falling blooms as a best friend and I waited, chatting, for our kids to come running out at the end of their school day. In the fragrance of a new foaming bath soap, this one Winter Citrus Wreath, selected by my husband, who picks a half dozen or so out to surprise me, knowing how much I love scents. And so on.

Delight is everywhere when we look for it, and lingering for a moment in that feeling lifts us up and gives us hope.

Consider Mary Shelley’s complete list of the simple things she found to love:

Love! What had I to love? Oh many things: there was the moonshine, and the bright stars; the breezes and the refreshing rains; there was the whole earth and the sky that covers it: all lovely forms that visited my imagination, all memories of heroism and virtue. Yet this was very unlike my early life although as then I was confined to Nature and books. Then I bounded across the fields; my spirit often seemed to ride upon the winds, and to mingle in joyful sympathy with the ambient air. Then if I wandered slowly I cheered myself with a sweet song or sweeter day dreams. I felt a holy rapture spring from all I saw. I drank in joy with life; my steps were light; my eyes clear from the love that animated them, sought the heavens, and with my long hair loosened to the winds I gave my body and my mind to sympathy and delight.”

Oh, to give our body and mind to sympathy and delight. Definitely good for whatever might ail you.

Putting the wind underneath your wings.

Posted on by Shari Swanson

Do you have a dream? Maybe to meet someone special, learn a language, write a book, learn an instrument, play a sport, travel? What is that dream?

Now, more importantly, what work are you doing to realize that dream? There are a plenty of people who dream of being musicians who never practice their instrument, or people who dream of being published who never write, or people who dream of traveling but never save up. Why is that?

One reason is it is fun to dream that you have God-given natural talent that will be discovered by the world someday like Lana Turner sitting at the counter sipping a Coke at the Top Hat Cafe. And, while those kinds of stories may happen occasionally, the much more common story is that someone who achieved their dream worked for it, and worked hard. Michael Jordan didn’t make his high school basketball team. Frank Sinatra spent hours holding his breath to improve his phrasing. Vincent van Gogh’s early work was, well, not that great.

And plenty of people who have become successful want to perpetuate the notion that they were just born that way. It was natural talent not hard work. It was their own efforts, not a result of having many people in their corner, helping them move forward. And sometimes it seems this way, doesn’t it? We see the Olympic performance, but not the struggle that led there. We read the best-selling novel from the overnight success, but don’t see all the drafts in the desk drawer. And something in us wants to believe that those people, those success stories, are different from us. They were just born different. But that’s not the truth.

Success isn’t like winning a lottery; it’s like running a marathon. Hard, grueling, and long-term. Some people achieve their dreams because they pursue them. They don’t just dream, although the dream–something that ignites your passions–is the first step. The dream isn’t all they needed though.

But the dream gave them curiosity to explore it from every angle. And that curiosity gave them energy to practice. And that practice brought improvement. That improvement was encouraging. And that encouragement helped them stay the course. Now sometimes following the dream will result in financial or other success, but that shouldn’t be the yardstick. The yardstick should be if you are doing what you dreamed of doing.

So, yes, dream of all you can be. But then figure out some concrete steps you can take to help you get there.

Love in this place.

Posted on by Shari Swanson

It’s okay to be heartbroken for more than one group of people at the same time. When it comes to showing compassion, we don’t have to pick sides. Sometimes, often really, maybe even always, there is hurt and anguish everywhere, and we can mourn the lot of it. 

Beware people who tell you not to be concerned for this group or that group and the hurt they feel. 

Beware those who try to dehumanize others. 

Beware those who lump you in as the ‘enemy’ for working to assure people are treated humanely.

Beware people who draw lines between us and them. 

Beware those who try to limit you to a label or single identity. 

Our hearts are big enough to embrace it all. What we must save is love.

A work-out routine for character.

Posted on by Shari Swanson

In her book Almost Everything, Anne Lamott describes her struggle with hate:

Hate weighed me down and muddled my thinking.  It isolated me and caused my shoulders to hunch, the opposite of sticking together and lifting our hands and eyes to the sky.  The hunch changes our posture, because our shoulders slump, and it changes our vision, as we scowl and paw the ground.  So as a radical act we give up the hate and the hunch the best we can.  We square our shoulders and lift our gaze….

Hating the way I was feeling helped me give up Camel cigarettes thirty-two years ago, and then alcohol.  It is good to surrender things that poison us and our world.  Am I free of such toxicity now?  Well about forty percent, and that is a pretty good deal.  I’ll take it.”

She now considers the circumstances and people pushing her to hate as helpful weight-training equipment to build muscles in her soul, ‘Nautilus equipment for your character.’

That’s a helpful perspective shift, isn’t it?