Noticing

Sunrise over the Valley. Boone, NC 25 May 2024

Dear Friend,

Think back. Might you remember a time when things just didn’t seem to fit as you hoped they might. Not to say that your favorite shirt, the one you often wear because people tell you you look good in white, was so tight that you could not button the middle button across your chest. Rather, after you do manage to button the button, you looked in the mirror and noticed that there is a gap where the fabric is pulling.  Or in my case, the tuft of graying hair squeezing through the space that used to lie flat. (I blame the steroids.)

Last week was that sort of week. Monday labs were okay, but they suggested that my body is taking a little longer to recover from chemotherapy, and we had to delay the next round of treatment by a few days because my platelets were still wiping the sleep from their eyes after a restless, fitful couple of weeks.

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This weekend, I was with a friend in Boone, NC attending a poetry conference. I had anticipated being done with chemo on Friday night, the first of the conference. But because of the delay, this round went all the way through the conference and bled over into Memorial Day. And rather than walking with Carley or sitting on the deck with the wrens and cardinals and baking bread on Thursday morning, we were in the car on our way to the lab for re-tests. 

All week it felt harder to connect with friends. To make space for people I love. To respond to the lovely meditations  that you, and others, offered on “balance.” Hard even to articulate how deeply they touched me. Each of them. 

It was a minor thing, but the whole week has felt like nothing fits quite as it was supposed to fit. As it used to fit. I am suspecting that routine things are beginning to get a little more complicated. I wonder if this is true, or if I am simply growing hyper-vigilant. Looking for the turn - the volte of this sonnet.

Please keep reminding me: I don’t have to look for the volte, and that it will reveal itself in its time. I don’t have to be the keeper of what is to come. Please keep reminding me that we, like time,  do not have edges. That there is no space between our presence and the presence of our absence.

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On the first night of the conference, the host asked participants: 

What have you noticed this week? Name just one thing, and be specific.

Innocuous question. Innocent. Until it was not. Because I had no answer. No matter how I thought of or even tried to change the question…how I tried changing the emphasis to different words to see if anything might  break loose.

What have you noticed this week? Name just one thing, and be specific.”

What have you noticed this week? Name just one thing, and be specific.”

What have you noticed this week? Name just one thing, and be specific.”

This is usually enough,  but it was not that night.  Nothing broke. There was not a single thing I could point to and say, “This! I noticed this, maybe for the first time, or even maybe not. But it caught my eye and I couldn’t look away, and I still cannot.”

It’s easy imagine this is a not-trying-hard-enough problem. To say, “ Just open your eyes a little wider, Chris.” But no. I want to acknowledge there are any number of reasons to be stumped, and not all of them suggest that Just. Try. Harder is the proper fix, or that a fix is even called for.

Maybe I wasn’t looking.

Or maybe I was looking, but I’m losing my ability to distinguish one thing from another.

Maybe it’s my memory. 

Maybe I noticed all sorts of specific things, but simply couldn’t name them. Maybe they don’t yet have names, so without a way to name them,  I simply forgot them and moved on.

Maybe this is just the way things go. That sometimes we need a break from noticing.

Or maybe I just needed some sleep. 

Will striving to notice fix this ? I don’t think it will. I wonder if noticing is one of those things you have to approach more carefully. Approach aslant, rather than head on. Or even just wait for it. Do you remember when we talked about finding God on the trail, and somebody told us we would find God, but only if we paid attention to our peripheral vision? And when we did, we did.

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Do you ever wonder where the boundaries between praying and contemplating and paying attention lie. I wonder if noticing lay at the intersection of the three. I wonder if this is one of those spaces where the distinction between cause and effect collapses on itself - where giving feels like receiving, and loving feels like being loved.

And then I wonder if that is not the natural order of creation, rather than the exception. I wonder if by looking to circumstances as the reason for my malaise, by insisting on cause and effect, I miss the very thing that allows me to keep walking. If my determination to diagnose and solve the problem on my own is the very thing that obscures the one who walks with me - the one offering a hand that never depends on how I look in white or how well my shirt fits. 

Maybe the malaise has nothing to do with sleepy platelets, and everything to do with refusing the hand.

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This week promises to offer space for praying, contemplating, and paying attention. If you think of me, perhaps you might offer a prayer that I might simply abandon myself into the one extending his hand.  That I might stop assessing whether things fit or do not and let them be.

I will do the same for you, and I will let you know what I notice. 

Oremus,

C

Oh…and when you attend a poetry conference, you write poems. Here is a poem:

Our Town

In our town, 
an Old Man rises each morning
to bake one loaf of bread. 
He wraps it in linen cloth,
sets it on a different neighbor’s porch 
beside a hand-written note that 
always reads: How do You do?

O