A Contemplative Life

September 1, 2015

The Secret to a Happy Marriage

Can it really have taken me
sixteen years to realize you can
live in the same house with someone
and still lose track of them?

It’s true.

We occasionally lose
each other, somewhere among
discarded Legos and Everest piles
of laundry, too many words to be written
or deciding the best way to teach
dangling participles
or the size of the solar system. Our words
cross and mismatch and fall,
seeds on parched August ground, hard
as pavement. Is
there a more complicated maze
than the everyday household routine?
Is there anywhere easier to lose someone
than in the daily humdrum of a life?

The two of us
we go from found to lost
in the time it takes to zombie-walk
to the baby’s bed at 2am and fall
asleep on the scratchy carpet, in the time
it takes to nurse a child’s hurt feelings on
the third floor, coming back to bed
only to find the
other has already fallen asleep.

Maybe the key to this thing called
marriage
isn’t remaining in love
(Lord knows I love you)
or sticking to those vows
(rules parch and crack and can’t
keep a meaningful thing together)
but maybe
the key is finding the energy
the courage
to keep finding each other again
and again.

They leave us after dinner, all
five children, and we’re staring
the vast distance from one end of the table
to the other, because a family this size
requires a large table, and the distance
from one end to the other
can feel like the span of the Sahara. Lost
and found.

But then one of us moves closer
and we talk quietly while the sound
of their steps rains down from above.
Or we walk this city in which I love you,
holding hands
breathing in the lights
remembering the sweet feeling
that casual ecstasy
of being found again
by someone you have loved for so long.

Maybe the key to finding each other
is discovering ways
every day
that we can get lost
together
all over again. Maybe the seeds
that fall on pavement can still
find the winding crack
burrow deep
and sprout green life
in this city.

I decided to walk away from my Facebook and Twitter accounts in June (you can read more about that HERE), at least for a time, so this little space of mine depends entirely on you to spread the word. If you read something you enjoy, please share it.

Also, if you’d like to receive my twice-monthly newsletter (basically a few bonus blog posts every month plus information on upcoming books) you can sign up for that HERE.

Finally, if you’d like to receive these blog posts directly in your inbox, just enter your email in the field at the bottom of the right hand column. Thanks!

August 31, 2015August 31, 2015

The Toughest Thing To Do

I sat across the small table from a good friend in Prince Street Cafe and I held the mug of coffee in both hands. I stared into its dark depths and I told him it still feels like a year of waiting, a year of not-quite-yet. I can’t say it’s an ache but it feels like things are holding their breathe. I’m not naturally patient. I’ve never found it easy to wait.

“That’s your word for the year,” my friend said. “You talk about that every time we meet. Wait.”

Then he smiled and said he gets upset when people are praying for him and ask God that he’ll have patience. He doesn’t want patience! He wants to move forward! He wants to take the bull by the horns! He laughed.

“I want to tell them they can hang on to their prayers, if they’re going to pray that I have patience.”

I know that feeling.

Waiting involves embracing the silence, something I’ve been trying to get better at. Sit in the present, and for just a moment let go of my hopes and dreams, my plans and strategies, the web I’m weaving in my mind. Let the wind of this present moment clear all those cobwebs. I want to turn down the volume on this noisy world, recapture my own senses, let them find life again.

Is that, I wonder, the essence of waiting? Finding life again?

August 28, 2015August 28, 2015

Regarding the Phrase, “Time Heals All Wounds”

“Time heals all wounds,” they say, which I suppose is mostly true, although my uncle lost part of his pinky finger in a wood-splitting accident and, while the wound healed, his pinky did not miraculously grow back. Then there’s my friend whose dad lost his hand in a tragic farming accident – yes, the wound healed after quite a lot of time, but now he lives life with a hook. I’m guessing we all know people like this, or perhaps are people like this, who have had a serious physical injuries, and more often than not those serious injuries heal, but that is not to say they have left us unchanged.

Which is perhaps why we feel there is something inherently missing in the phrase “Time heals all wounds.” There’s something about those words that feels inaccurate, or at best a bit callous. This is because, once we reach a certain age, we learn that the healing of the physical wound is not the same thing as being returned to one’s original state of being. “Time heals all wounds” does not equal “happily ever after.”

But maybe remaining unchanged is not the measuring stick of life, because I see the way my children laugh and laugh and laugh when my uncle holds his shortened pinky up tight against his nostril and it looks like his finger is reaching up into his skull. And I heard story recently about how my friend’s father, the one with the hook, reached into his wallet with that very same hook, pinched out a hundred dollar bill with its grasping mechanism, and paid for the entire family behind him in the line at the buffet.

Maybe “Time heals all wounds” is true. I don’t know. Or maybe we should be less concerned about the wound and more concerned about the kinds of people that this mixture of “time” and “wound” is transforming us into.

What kind of a person are your wounds changing you into?

I decided to walk away from my Facebook and Twitter accounts in June (you can read more about that HERE), at least for a time, so this little space of mine depends entirely on you to spread the word. If you read something you enjoy, please share it.

Also, if you’d like to receive my twice-monthly newsletter (basically a few bonus blog posts every month plus information on upcoming books) you can sign up for that HERE.

Finally, if you’d like to receive these blog posts directly in your inbox, just enter your email in the field at the bottom of the right hand column. Thanks!

August 26, 2015

The Unlikely Gift I Found in a Lancaster City Alley

Sammy, two or three years old, taking a pitch from my dad at my parents’ old house.

On a cool August day, on that particular stretch of Market Street (which is more like an alley than a street), just north of James, you might see the young woman with the empty eyes sitting on the stoop, smoking a cigarette. Maybe you will, maybe you won’t – I’ve seen her there many times, staring at the cracks in the sidewalk. The top half of the storm door behind her is missing the glass.

If she’s sitting there and it’s in the afternoon or on a weekend you’ll probably also see her daughter playing with the dust and the pebbles that have been pushed into the gutter, her own private sandbox. She’s tiny and blonde and has dirt smudges on her face. Her clothes are covered in dust. She makes lines with a discarded straw.

If you walk past them and keep going north on Market, you’ll realize there aren’t any houses on that particular stretch, not between James and Frederick streets – there’s only chain link and tall, brick warehouses and a few long lines of storage units that some people use as a garage for their car and other people use as porches, sitting in front of the open doors, the grill on, their kids riding old trikes around in circles.

But some days, if the sun is out and you listen, you’ll hear a rhythmic !thwop! followed by a small shout, a particular time of silence, and then another !thwop!. If you follow that sound down the alley off of Market Street, you’ll see a narrow swathe of grass beside a brick warehouse that’s being renovated into “high-end apartments.” The grassy stretch is bumpy and littered with bricks from the building and old stones no one has touched for years. Overgrown bushes separate that grassy alley from the backyards of the houses on Prince Street. Cats weave in and out of the shadows.

!thwop!

There it is again. Look closer. It’s a long-haired boy wearing a baseball cap and cleats that are a touch too small. He’s six years old and he throws the ball to his dad (me). His dad throws the ball back. The red seams spin in the air like the rings of a planet and the ball smacks into the leather gloves. When I reach my own arm back and throw there is muscle memory there that goes back thirty years, goes all the way back to a small boy on a farm throwing ball with his dad in 1985, back to a large, lush, green yard shaded by two tall oak trees. Beyond that yard, fields stretching out. A small brick church across the thread-thin back road. A cemetery with its broken-teeth stones. A bending creek with fairy tales on the far bank.

* * * * *

I never would have imagined, in 1985, that thirty years later I’d be throwing baseball with my son on a too-narrow strip of grass just off an alley in the middle of a small city. I never would have imagined having neighbors like Eric or Paul or Jenny. I never would have imagined living across the street from a barber shop and a tattoo parlor.

!thwop!

But life has its own beautiful rhythm, it’s own poignant meanderings, and we resist our life’s natural course at our own peril. When we cling to our present situations, we do so at the risk of an unimaginably beautiful future.

Let go of comfort. Take a right on Market Street. Stop and talk to the empty-eyed woman. Give a smile and a kind word to the small child playing in the gutter. You might just find an unexpected rhythm, or, even more unlikely, a green strip of grass in the middle of a city perfect for playing catch.

August 25, 2015

The Value of Doing Things That Don’t Make Sense

I have to admit, I’m struggling to write on here these days. Not that the words aren’t coming – they are. But ever since I left social media two months ago, the traffic here at my blog has been a fraction of what it once was. It turns out that if you aren’t as noisy in this world, you just don’t get the same amount of attention. And it also turns out that my self-confidence is often akin to a soap bubble; low traffic is the happy child chasing the bubble, swinging wildly, popping it.

Go figure.

It helps me to write about this because at first my reaction was, “Well, I guess I need to get back on Facebook and Twitter.” But I don’t feel that my time away from those noisy forums has run its course. I don’t feel that I’ve learned everything there is to learn in this silence, and I know that if I jumped back into social media right now, it would simply be me acting on the same old things I’ve been trying to overcome. Insecurity. A desire to be accepted and praised. A need for some kind of validation.

Those aren’t all bad things. Of course not. But I don’t want them to be the foundation of who I am. I’d like the primary sustenance of my soul to be something more than the acceptance and praise of others. That’s a fickle food source, and one that will, more often than not, leave you high and dry when you least expect it.

I’ve been thinking a lot during the last two months about the value of doing things that don’t make sense, the value of listening to the small voice leading you into new places. It’s a hard voice to follow. But I read this by Richard Rohr and it encouraged me in that regard:

I will continue to encourage you to try something new: change sides, move outside your comfort zone, make some new contacts, let go of your usual role and attractive self-image, walk instead of drive, make a friend from another race or class, visit new neighborhoods, go to the jail or to the border, attend another church service, etc. Then you can live yourself into new ways of thinking, which then seem so right and necessary that you wonder how you could have ever thought in any other way. Without new experiences, new thinking is difficult and rare. After a new experience, new thinking and behavior comes naturally and even becomes necessary.

There is so much to be learned in this life simply by trying something new, even if only for a short time. New thinking requires new experiences, and making a decision about whether or not to try something new isn’t as easy as compiling a list of pros and cons because what we’re talking about is a new experience – one you can’t yet see all the pros and cons for!

So for now I’ll forge ahead in the silence. Thanks for hanging around and journeying through it with me. I hope you’re learning as much as I am.

What new thing are you thinking of trying? Where would you consider making room for silence in your life?

I decided to walk away from my Facebook and Twitter accounts in June (you can read more about that HERE), so this little space of mine depends entirely on you to spread the word. If you read something you enjoy, please share it.

Also, if you’d like to receive my twice-monthly newsletter (basically a few bonus blog posts every month plus information on upcoming books) you can sign up for that HERE.

Finally, I am back on Instagram. Connect with me at shawnsmucker.

Thanks!

August 24, 2015August 25, 2015

Do Not Despise Small Beginnings

This world isn’t really one for small beginnings. Publishers want new books to skyrocket up bestseller lists in the first few weeks, banks want to see businesses turning a profit immediately, and the music industry wants a ready-made idol, one with adoring fans from coast to coast.

And they want it all today.

So do we. We want to throw everything together without mixing, without letting the flavors converge. We want to toss our effort in the microwave. One minute. Start. Ding! Finished.

That’s not reality. Do not despise small beginnings, slow starts, unheralded openings. Do not let your strong desire to be known quench the tiny flame before it can gather heat.

* * * * *

We showed up for the first day of soccer practice, and our college coach told us not to worry about bringing soccer balls. Just wear your running shoes. Meet him at the track.

We arrived, and the goal on that first day before we even had our first practice was to run a five-minute mile. Four laps around the track, each lap in 1:15.

“Start steady,” our coach said. “Don’t wear yourself out in the beginning. Finish strong.”

But during my freshman and sophomore year, I disregarded his advice. I sprinted out of the blocks, trying to get ahead while I had strength, trying to grab a few extra seconds in the beginning. I was looking for that quick start, and it always hurt me in the end. By the third and fourth lap, I was spent.

My junior year I decided to listen. I started off at an easier pace. My first lap was 1:20. My second lap was 1:20. I was ten seconds behind the pace, way behind everyone who had sprinted away from the starting line, but I had a strength in my legs I didn’t have the previous years. I charged forward in the third lap, and I finished strong in the fourth, passing almost everyone. I ran that mile in 4:52.

* * * * *

There is something to be said for an even start. There is something to be said for not wearing yourself out on the first day.

Rest in the small beginning. Find your pace in a steady start. There will come a time to push ahead.

“Do not despise these small beginnings, for the Lord rejoices to see the work begin…” Zechariah 4:10

I decided to close down my Facebook and Twitter accounts in June (you can read more about that HERE), so this little space of mine depends entirely on you to spread the word. If you read something you enjoy, please share it.

Also, if you’d like to receive my twice-monthly newsletter (basically a few bonus blog posts every month plus information on upcoming books) you can sign up for that HERE.