Walking is witnessing, a way to be present in movement and in time.
Yesterday’s stroll took me from the oldest part of Reston to the newest, from a community center to a commercial plaza, from a small cafe to a bustling bakery.
And all along I’m thinking spring. The dogwood, the azalea, the first green of the oaks and poplars. How lovely it is to see it unfold along familiar paths, how grateful I was to witness its unfolding.
I first read Robinson Crusoe as a child. I can still see the book’s binding, dark green spine with a mottled green-and-gold cover, and I still remember the joy of losing myself in the novel for hours at a time.
Here was a shipwrecked man on a desert island, abandoned and alone. Here was a man forced to build a life for himself from the ground up, to find or make food, shelter and clothing, outfitted only with his own strength and wits and what he could cobble from a sinking ship.
Back then, it all seemed like great fun, an extended version of fort-building in the woods. Now, I’m struck by the hopelessness of Crusoe’s situation and the emotional adjustments he made to cope with it. At one point, having satisfied his immediate needs, he sits down and makes a list (with pen, ink and paper salvaged from the ship) of pros and cons, which he called good and evil, things like: I’m banished from human society but there is food here. Or, I have no clothes but it’s so warm here I barely need any. Talk about looking on the bright side!
“Upon the whole, here was an undoubted testimony that there was scarcely any condition in the world so miserable but there was something negative or something positive to be thankful for in it; and let this stand as a direction from the experience of the most miserable of all conditions in the world, that we may always find in it something to comfort ourselves from,
and to set in the description of good and evil on the credit side of the account.”
— Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
The ultimate Pollyanna statement, but not a bad idea to keep in mind.
(I realized only after posting that “Credit Side” is an interesting title for April 15th, Tax Day.)
The rain has stopped, the sun has peeked through the clouds, and I have in mind a piece of music I always hum this time of year: “God So Loved the World,” by John Stainer.
Not knowing much about the composer I looked him up this morning. He’s not as contemporary as I thought. His dates, 1860-1901, mark him as a Victorian through and through.
Though his choral music output was prodigious, nothing much is performed these days except “The Crucifixion,” from which this piece emerged as an Easter and Passiontide favorite.
Give it a listen, if you have time. Maybe you’ll agree with me that to be remembered for one piece of music — if it were a piece like this — would make an entire life worthwhile.
It happened at 6:50 p.m. the night before last. A burst of light in the sky, a fireball or meteor, a visitor from space, vanished before those who glimpsed it even knew what they were seeing.
What was I doing at the time? Swapping out the old red plastic egg crate toy bins for new cloth ones? Or had I already come upstairs to fix dinner? One thing is certain: I was not outside looking up.
I’m thinking of Bruegel’s famous painting The Fall of Icarus, and Auden’s poem about it, how human suffering can be obscured by the ordinariness of life. The same can be said of wonder. How often we miss it. Our heads are down, focused on the page or the skillet, the task at hand.
Most of the videos sent to the American Meteor Society are from home security cameras. There’s no one around to see the meteorological marvel. But one of them shows a man taking out his garbage. You see the falling star with its long tail. You see him see it. He stops in his tracks, trash bag in hand. A witness to wonder.
(Photo: Wikipedia)
A Walker in the Suburbs turns 14 today! If it was growing up in England in the last century, it would be free to leave school forever and get a job.
I learned this fact while reading a Washington Post article “Centenarians Tell Us What Matters Most.” It strikes me this morning that the article’s subheads do a good job of explaining why I started A Walker in the Suburbs in 2010 and continue it still.
Don’t neglect your education. Think positive. Keep reading. Keep moving. Do what you love.
What started as an experiment during a snowstorm almost a decade and a half ago has become an essential part of my writing life. It keeps me learning and reading. It encourages positivity and perspective. And it certainly keeps me moving.
Most of all, though, it gives me the chance to do what I love. But that’s just half the equation. The other half is what happens in the minds and hearts of the people reading it. I hope A Walker in the Suburbs brings you a bit of pleasure, too.
(An old snapshot of the girls. I bet one of them was 14 in this photo.)
This morning I’ve found myself reading about the wedding of a woman I do not know, will never meet but who provided a link to a story about her nuptials on her travel blog, which I’ve been sampling.
I have good friends, people I’ve known for years, whose wedding pictures I’ve never glimpsed and probably never will. But I could describe in detail the gold lace gown that Caroline wore on her special day in 2016. Such is life in the digital age.
In fact, there’s a chance that you are, even as we speak, reading a post by someone you don’t know, writing about someone she doesn’t know.
For some of us, the world at our fingertips is much more real than the one outside our door.
They drugged their babies, wore four layers of underwear and often went hungry. They are the Victorians, and they may as well have been ancient Greeks so different are the lives they lived from our own.
I learned these facts from the book How to Be a Victorian and the experiences of author Ruth Goodman, who lived for a year on a Victorian farm where she dug turnips, squeezed into corsets, and brushed her teeth with soot (which she recommends as an alternative to modern toothpaste).
More than halfway through the book now, I can say with some certainty that life was difficult for most Victorians, who worked hard and ate little. It makes me wonder about the lives of ease that so many of us live. How has comfort shaped us? How did adversity shape them?
(Halfpenny meals for poor children, 1870, from Wikipedia)
During these wide-open days of winter, I’ve been keeping a pair of binoculars on my desk. They’re fast becoming an essential element of this writer’s toolkit.
I’m watching a fox sun himself in a sunny corner of our backyard. He paws at the snow, ambles around the hollies. Every so often he glances up with his perky ears and catlike face (a winning combination since the rest of him is doglike). Does he see me watching him?
I marvel at the alertness of his posture, the thickness of his reddish-brown fur, his winter coat. I imagine the feel of the sun on his back, the generations of wildness in his bones.
He is a gift, as are the woodpeckers and cardinals at the feeder. A reminder of the creatures who live among us, the natural world we inhabit. The binoculars help me see the fox and, by extension, all of creation.
I’d heard about it for years but usually have a conflict on the night it happens. Last night I didn’t, so I drove to the church in the dark and walked into a shimmering, candlelit chapel that scarcely resembled its everyday self.
There were icons on the altar and candles flickering around the sanctuary, illuminating the rough-hewn brick walls. There were two tables of thin tapers for lighting to elevate your prayer intention. There were many in attendance, but a hush filled the room.
Taizé is an ecumenical monastic community in France with worship services of repetitive chanted prayer. Its model has become popular around the world.
We sang in Latin, we sang in English. We were accompanied by piano, organ, violin, oboe and clarinet. The melodies were like plainsong, and in their repetition was the music of the ages.
Silence punctuated the service: a silent entrance, a silent exit, and a stretch of silence in the middle, time for quiet contemplation — “essential to discovering the heart of prayer,” the handout told me.
I left feeling renewed, inspired, quieted.
(Photo: courtesy Arlington Catholic Herald.)
Today is Epiphany, celebrated as Christmas by some and as a day of wonder and awe by others. I’m one of the latter. For me, this is a day to celebrate the aha moments of life.
Which brings me to an op-ed I read in yesterday’s Washington Post. In it, James Naples, a surgeon and medical residency program director, shares how he conquered the yips, an unexplained loss of skill that affects high-performing athletes, performers and, apparently, surgical residents.
Early in his training, Naples explained, he began to struggle through even basic procedures. “My head had gotten in the way of my hands.” Then he met a new senior surgeon, Dr. E., who in the three minutes it took the two of them to scrub for an operation, totally changed the younger surgeon’s trajectory. The older doctor was warm and open and approachable. There was only one thing to avoid doing in the upcoming procedure, he said. “Everything else is fixable.”
The effect on Naples was profound. The younger surgeon realized it was okay to make mistakes, that it was part of the learning process. Now he’s mentoring new doctors, encouraging them to share their fears and doubts. ‘
I’m not a surgical resident, but the lesson that “all mistakes are fixable” resonates with me, too. “What thing worth doing — in our jobs, families or communities — is not susceptible to the folly of perfectionism?” Naples asks. “With honesty and empathy, we all can help others find peace with fallibility.” I’m grateful that Naples had his epiphany and shared it with the rest of us.
(A photo not of surgery but of an Epiphany surprise.)
