#practicing the present

Salsa conduits can be hard to come by in the grain-free life, but sweet potato chips are surprisingly tasty with my salsa today. They also happen to be a handy metaphor for accepting agency and responsibility, not only for my food needs but also my writing needs. I would prefer to use corn chips for salsa, but corn in any form makes me quite sick. So I choose an alternative, just as I would prefer to let some of my poems live in a lighthearted humorous space, but sometimes they want more than that. 

I’ve been procrastinating working on a difficult poem today. I just realized I’ve been procrastinating. It can be a sneaky practice. It can look like meditation and catching up on email and washing the kitchen floor. A friend gave me the feedback that I needed to work on it. The feedback, in summary, was an invitation to go deeper. While the poem as it is would make people laugh,  the material actually comes from a raw, vulnerable place. I am afraid to go down into it. I believe I must. Sigh. I am going to use one of my favorite revision tricks after I finish writing this post. I am going to tell myself that all I am going to do is read the poem. That’s it. I don’t need to commit to anything else. Something else usually follows, but if it doesn’t, that’s OK.

Also related to the needs of my writing life, I believe it is important to note that I am in the last week of this blog. Some of you have made a lovely case to me that I keep going beyond my one-year commitment to post a selfie a day with some writing. I have loved considering that option, as every writer loves having readers. But I am ready to complete this project and see how my writing life evolves without this practice. I plan to go about this last week as I have every other week of the life of this blog, which is to write about whatever I feel like with whatever time I have and post it straight away without fuss or revision. I suppose the blog has been a practice in mindfulness in its own way. Therefore, it seems appropriate that I will not be planning a big, intentional finale. Whatever comes on Monday, March 20th in the present moment of when I write it will be the last post.

I put a collection of William Stafford’s poetry in my bathroom yesterday, and I opened to this poem just now, which seems rather perfect for honoring the last week of a selfie blog: 

When You Go Anywhere by William Stafford

This passport your face (not you officially, your picture, but the face used to make the passport) offers everyone its witness: "This is me."

It feels like only a picture, a passport forced upon you. Somewhere this oval, sudden and lasting, appeared. It happened that you were behind it, like it or not.

Practicing the Present in the New Year

Of all the holidays in the year, I must confess that New Year’s Day has always had the least appeal for me. It is not a bad holiday. New Year’s Day just suffers from comparison with its more glamorous sibling Christmas, which comes robed in red velvet and laden with gifts. The best that New Year’s Day seems to offer is a football game, chips, and dip,  and for some people, a hangover. Between the…

Practicing the Present: Race Among the Ruins

When I was a pastor, I found that the hardest part of visiting church members at the hospital was leaving them in the same condition I found them in when I entered the room. It seemed to me that my visits should make a difference. If they did not, what good were they? On each occasion I read Scripture, spoke words of comfort, and prayed. Yet when I was done people seemed no better off.

It’s…

Practicing the Present: The Courage of the Ordinary

When my friend Ray was diagnosed with cancer, he started reading obituaries. He found comfort in the newspaper’s daily litany of the departed. Somehow it made him feel less alone. Like a pilgrim who is traveling in company, instead of someone who stumbles along a difficult path by himself. It was the ordinariness of the thing that helped him the most.

I feel something similar whenever I thumb…

I am a sucker for books and movies about time travel. The Time Machine by H. G. Wells, the DeLorean in Back to the Future,and any Star Trek episode in which the crew of the starship Enterprise travels back to the twentieth century—I love them all. But over the years, I’ve learned a few important things about time travel. For example, as far as I can tell from these books and movies, backward is…

I don’t love fall for the boots and tights alone. I love the way the leaves shift from green to bright and then fall to the ground. I appreciate the way fall reminds me that we need some things in our lives for a time, and then we need to let them go. I love the metaphorical significance of the seasons. While my life seasons may not follow a pattern that is as recognizable as the weather, I still see seasonish tendencies in all my rhythms: my work, my passions, my loves, my hates.

I love the routines that come with fall, the back-to-school-ness that seeps into our lives whether we are in school or have people in our lives in school. I need routines, although I hate it when routines are imposed on me. I like to create my own routines and change them at will. Fall is a good time for this.