A Welcome Day
How a restful Saturday coaxed me out of burnout and into a lush world
Friends,
After a long week of hard work and some unexpected sleepless nights I needed to rest. So on Saturday morning, I took my coffee down to the front porch and just…sat there for a while. I don’t think you understand how novel this is in my life! I just sat down? No clocks, no emails, no thinking about the next meeting or planning the month or responding to texts or “relaxing” with doomscrolling or rushing from errand to errand? Just a guy, sitting on a porch, drinking coffee without a plan for the day. Here’s what I saw and heard around me:
a bird hopping around chipping into the dirt with its lil' beak
keys jangling on a woman's purse as she walked by
the dull roar of cars on the freeway
birdsong (chickadee? cardinal? sparrow?)
neighbors laughing on a nearby step, planning out what to plant
shadows (leaves swaying on the sidewalk, birds flying overhead)
quaking aspen leaves, the size of silver dollars, twirling
a 100-year old Lutheran church across the street, built in castle-grey stone
a cellphone tower behind the church covered by massive crucifix panels
yellow-green hostas pushing through last year's dull brown leaves
and then: a bunny! Just bouncing past a few feet away from me. I could see its bright black unblinking eye looking at me while it cleaned its paws
tree roots buckling and breaking the concrete sidewalk
In less than an hour, I saw more than I saw all last week, a string of days where I treated the world around me as backdrop, a blur of color and texture. But by slowing down for just a few minutes, I learned just how much much I was missing, and I could feel just how much stress I was carrying in my own body and fizzy mind.
Later that day, Lindsey wanted to smell the lilacs at Lake Harriet, so we biked on over, took a deep whiff (intoxicating) and threw down a blanket in the bright blooming tulip garden. Over the course of a few hours, we witnessed whole worlds of social life: photoshoots for a quinceañera, a Somali wedding party dressed in teal, a young Hmong couple wearing traditional clothes embroidered in bells, fathers chasing toddlers waddling up to strangers, and—this was the most adorable thing ever—a rickshaw-style bicycle pulling retirees. The men were in red suspenders, the women were dressed to the nines in sparkles, waving to everyone like queens. It would take a lifetime to trace all the relationships and histories weaving together in that garden. It was fragrant with rest and kindness.
To top it off, we ended the day in our backyard garden with our neighbors, marveling at the strawberries and garlic that keeps coming back every year, planting tomatoes and mint and basil and sunflowers—laughing over drinks along the way.
So, what does that mean for Still Life? Ah: yes. I’m tempted to do an hours-long deep dive on Hmong traditional dress or explore the history of tulips or write an essay about that crucifixion-cell-tower (anyone want to write a dissertation on the impact of telecommunications on religion?) or any number of researchy off-shoots. All good things! But sometimes my curiosity gets the better of me and what starts as interest turns into obsession, which then turns into abstraction, and all of sudden the pursuit of a good thing becomes yet one more way to live crammed up in my head and on a screen.
As a recovering intellectual, let me tell you: it was a gift of a Saturday. I didn’t have to chop up each moment as fuel for a mental fire (“Our meddling intellect / Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:— / We murder to dissect” —William Wordsworth). Instead, I could just…be. The fact that I feel I need to give myself permission to have this kind of slow day reveals how much I’ve internalized a corrosive need to be productive at all costs. Who asked me to live that way?
So it was a welcome day, a day to be off-screen and in the world, to put my hands in the dirt, shoulder-to-shoulder with friends and family, settling into deeper timescales. I hope you have one of these days soon, too.
Take care,
Michael
“Instructions on Not Giving Up” by Ada Limón
More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.
An institute for contemplative science
The Buddha & Jesus: An Anthology of Articles by Jesuits engaged in Buddhist Studies
Rainbow Quest: Pete Seeger’s rambling, unedited, and earnest music show
Wonderful!!! Do it again soon.
This is a welcome invitation as I approach a busy week :) Thanks.