interconnectedness of life

Melting pot or mosaic?

Posted on by Shari Swanson


When I was a girl, text books used the term ‘melting pot’ to describe America as if everyone were thrown into one big pot and all the differences were boiled out, with America becoming just one big homogenous pot of glop. But better metaphors have popped up in the years since. Such as a salad bowl:

We don’t need a melting pot in this country, folks. We need a salad bowl. In a salad bowl, you put in the different things. You want the vegetables – the lettuce, the cucumbers, the onions, the green peppers – to maintain their identity. You appreciate differences.Jane Elliot

But perhaps my favorite is Jimmy Carter’s:

We become not a melting pot but a beautiful mosaic. Different people, different beliefs, different yearnings, different hopes, different dreams.Jimmy Carter

I love the idea of a mosaic to define America—beauty in all the bits and pieces, each a small distinct individual unit but also a necessary part of a larger picture. 

No matter how you describe it, America at its best, living up to its ideals, is stronger because of its diversity, the unique perspectives, the mix of voices, backgrounds, cultures, and traditions.

Full of wonder.

Posted on by Shari Swanson

How lovely it is to stand still in the enormity of your questions. To realize that what you know is minuscule in relation to all there is to know. To let your curious mind take you on a journey of discovery. How liberating it is to lay down the facade of expertise and acknowledge that, in this world, we are all students.

I’m ready.

Posted on by Shari Swanson

I’m listening, world. What do you have to teach me? Where should my attention be, to understand and, finally, get it, the great purpose and plan of it all?

Annie Dillard, in Teaching a Stone to Talk writes:

At a certain point, you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening. After a time you hear it: there is nothing there. There is nothing but those things only, those created objects, discrete, growing or holding, or swaying, being rained on or raining, held, flooding or ebbing, standing, or spread. You feel the world’s word as a tension, a hum, a single chorused note everywhere the same. This is it: this hum is the silence. Nature does utter a peep – just this one. The birds and insects, the meadows and swamps and rivers and stones and mountains and clouds: they all do it; they all don’t do it. There is a vibrancy to the silence, a suppression, as if someone were gagging the world. But you wait, you give your life’s length to listening, and nothing happens. The ice rolls up, the ice rolls back, and still that single note obtains. The tension, or lack of it, is intolerable. The silence is not actually suppression: instead, it is all there is.

And later:

The silence is all there is. It is the alpha and the omega. It is God’s brooding over the face of the waters; it is the blended note of ten thousand things, the whine of wings. You take a step in the right direction to pray into this silence, and even to address the prayer to ‘World.’ Distinctions blur. Quit your tents. Pray without ceasing.

Perhaps the aha moment isn’t in understanding as much as in being, a part within a vast whole, caught up in the mystery and the magnitude.

The singing leaf and your busy heart.

Posted on by Shari Swanson

Let heaven and nature sing.

There is a thrum, a life force, a joy at the core of it all, and sometimes we need to tune in to it and listen.

As Mary Oliver wrote:

What can I say that I have not said before?

So I’ll say it again.

The leaf has a song in it.

Stone is the face of patience.

Inside the river there is an unfinishable story and you are somewhere in it

And it will never end until all ends.

Take your busy heart to the art museum and the chamber of commerce

But take it also to the forest.

The song you heard singing in the leaf when you were a child

Is singing still.

I am of years lived, so far, seventy-four,

And the leaf is singing still.

Where will you take your busy heart today? Can you hear the leaf singing?

How to be a good creature.

Posted on by Shari Swanson

Sy Montgomery’s delightful book, How To Be a Good Creature, is a ‘Memoir in Thirteen Animals‘. What an interesting way to organize a memoir, focusing on the impact various animals have made on her life and what they have taught her about co-existing as fellow creatures on this planet! It is a profound, yet simple, book.

If you were to write a memoir of your life through that lens, who would the animals be that impacted your life in meaningful and enriching ways? What life lessons did you learn? How were your limits expanded from sharing space with that fellow creature?

For inspiration, consider Montgomery’s words:

All the animals I’ve known–from the first bug I must have spied as an infant, to the moon bears I met in Southeast Asia, to the spotted hens I got to know in Kenya–have been good creatures. Each individual is a marvel and perfect in his or her own way. Just being with any animal is edifying, for each has a knowing that surpasses human understanding. A spider can taste the world with her feet. Birds can see colors we can’t begin to describe. A cricket can sing with his legs and listen with his knees. A dog can hear sounds above the level of human hearing, and can tell if you’re upset even before you’re aware of it yourself. Knowing someone who belongs to another species can enlarge your soul in surprising ways.

I often wish I could go back in time and tell my young, anxious self that my dreams weren’t in vain and my sorrows weren’t permanent. I can’t do that, but I can do something better. I can tell you that teachers are all around to help you: with four legs or two or eight or even none, some with internal skeletons, some without. All you have to do is recognize them as teachers and be ready to hear their truths.

Today, consider the wonder of creation around you and thank your teachers of the non-human persuasion.

Are you lost?

Posted on by Shari Swanson

Have you ever been lost? Perhaps in a crowd when you look up and realize all the people you know are gone, and, despite the crowd, you are alone. Or maybe driving when nothing is familiar, and you are getting farther and farther from your destination. Or maybe you’ve been lost emotionally, confronted with too many choices and unsure of which way to move forward.

In most of these scenarios, when we are deeply and profoundly lost, we need help. There is someone who knows where you are and where you are trying to be and can help point out the way for you. Or someone who can make an announcement over the PA that they are holding on to a lost child. Or someone who can help you walk through your choices and make the best decision.

There are times when asking for help is our best option. And despite all our tendencies to want to solve the problem ourselves or keep the problem hidden from the world or to tough it out, seeking help is a brave and rewarding choice.

If you are feeling lost, do not be afraid to ask for help. And for a heart-warming video that demonstrates how rewarding it is both to be found and to help someone who is lost, go here to see a baby bird stuck in a PVC pipe and separated from its parents get reunited through the help of a young man who finds the experience one of the most meaningful he has ever lived.

Let it begin with me.

Posted on by Shari Swanson

We wish for peace but quarrel with our neighbor. We tremble from talk of war but allow ourselves to respond to others with hate, sarcasm, anger, and animosity. We expect leaders to be the adults in the room, but mock and deride them mercilessly. Peace, it seems, is something for other people out there to do and strive for because we are angry and fed up and impatient, and peace isn’t in our everyday lexicon at the moment.

But we can fight for peace, by controlling ourselves, treating each other respectfully, and speaking out against injustice. Take a minute to watch this beautiful video.

Let there be peace on earth
And let it begin with me
Let there be peace on earth
The peace that was meant to be
With God as our father
Brothers all are we
Let me walk with my brother
In perfect harmony

Let peace begin with me
Let this be the moment now
With every step I take
Let this be my solemn vow
To take each moment
And live each moment
To take each moment
And live each moment
To take each moment
And live each moment
In peace eternally
Let there be peace on earth
Let there be peace on earth
Let there be peace on earth
And let it begin
With me (me)
With me

Songwriters: Jill Jackson / Sy Miller

Wiping the dust off our souls.

Posted on by Shari Swanson

It is so easy to get discouraged when living a creative life. Your words are criticized; your paintings don’t sell. “They” don’t believe you have any promise. Sometimes the struggle to be commercially successful in a creative field can be so daunting that you abandon the art. But then you remember that art isn’t about “them” or “success” or “critical acclaim” at all. It’s about bringing your truths into the light, being creative, pushing yourself, being you.

Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the case of Henri Rousseau, a forty year old toll collector who wanted to paint. His work was derided, and yet he continued. He found joy in the painting. Not until the end of his life did anyone take his work seriously. As summarized by Maria Popova:

Long before history came to celebrate him as one of the greatest artists of his era, long before he was honored by major retrospectives by such iconic institutions as the MoMA and the Tate Museum, long before Sylvia Plath began weaving homages to him into her poetry, he spent a lifetime being not merely dismissed but ridiculed. And yet Rousseau — who was born into poverty, began working alongside his plumber father as a young boy, still worked as a toll collector by the age of forty, and was entirely self-taught in painting — withstood the unending barrage of harsh criticism with which his art was met during his entire life, and continued to paint from a deep place of creative conviction, with an irrepressible impulse to make art anyway…. [Rousseau’s life is] an emboldening real-life story, and a stunningly illustrated one, of remarkable resilience and optimism in the face of public criticism, of cultivating a center so solid and a creative vision so unflinching that no outside attack can demolish it and obstruct its transmutation into greatness.

The message from Rousseau’s life speaks to all of us: he was a success all along. He persevered with a remarkable resilience to produce work that spoke to him and pursued a passion that made him happy. That, the pursuit of great art, rather than the financial success was what gave his journey depth and meaning and lifted up his soul.

Adulting.

Posted on by Shari Swanson

Toni Morrison had a gift for complexity and nuance in her writing. Multi-dimensional characters and lots of gray area rule the day in her work.

I found it interesting to hear this perspective from her:

I just think goodness is more interesting. Evil is constant. You can think of different ways to murder people, but you can do that at age five. But you have to be an adult to consciously, deliberately be good — and that’s complicated.

It’s an age-old question whether people are inherently good, whether altruism is learned or instinctive, whether selflessness develops naturally.

But there definitely is an intentionality to doing good, choosing kindness, forgiving, welcoming, holding your tongue. And as we grow older and cast off our childish ways, we learn the wisdom of restraint and forbearance.

And we learn the power of good because often we are on the receiving end of it and know how much it matters.

And then when it’s our turn, we want to pass it on.

Unique you.

Posted on by Shari Swanson

What are the things you love, the things you hate, the things that keep you up at night? What are your favorite smells, sounds, tastes, sights, things to touch? How are you inhabiting that body you’ve been given and finding joy?

Whatever your combination of answers to these questions is, it is uniquely your own. It is what makes you, you.

For each of us, that answer will be different, but all part of the same global struggle for individualism. Here is George Bernard Shaw’s answer to some of these questions:

So long as I remain alive and well, I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information.

I love his list. What’s yours?