There’s a portion of a Mary Oliver poem I read yesterday that I really love:
“If God exists he isn’t just butter and good luck.
He’s also the tick that killed my wonderful dog Luke.
Said the river: imagine everything you can imagine, then
keep on going.”
The part I particularly like is thinking you’ve imagined all that you can imagine, and then still imagining more. I really resonate with that. And it speaks to something deep within me.
I generally like to run to exercise. Before a run, I will establish a distance in my mind that I plan on running that day. I often like to run a 5k when I go for a run. And so I’ll have that distance, that time, that effort in my mind when I start out on the run. But sometimes as I get closer to the end of the run I challenge myself. I know throughout the entire run I imagined ending it at the 5k point, but then I ask myself, “What if I ran a little more?” And so I’ll push myself past that 5k mark and run another one or two miles and be amazed by the energy I still had left in the tank. It’s a strategy I have used to build up my own mental endurance.
Run until you think you can’t run any more, then run a little more.
There’s a song by Adrianne Lenker called “Free Treasure” and it is one of my favorite songs. In the song she describes someone cooking dinner late into the evening and that it smells so good.
“I haven’t smelled food so good since I don’t know where and I don’t know when…”
She talks about sitting on the floor of the kitchen together with this person, the stove light like a fire. And she sings my favorite line of the song:
“Just when I thought I couldn’t feel more, I feel a little more.”
That feeling. That sentiment. I love it. And it vibrates something within my soul. I often cry when I hear it.
My wife Sarah and I pour our lives and energy and attention into the ten children that live within our home. Some days are harder than others. Some days they require more from us than on other days. But on the hardest of days, and in the hours where I have to reach deep into my reserves of compassion or love or patience, I often think “I have given them all that I can give.”
And then I give them a little more.
This is not a unique feeling to the lifestyle that Sarah and I live. Parents know this feeling, too. Caretakers of any kind, really, and I think in that concept of imagining more, of running more, of feeling more, of giving more — we find ourselves tapping into something much bigger than ourselves. And I’m so thankful for that.
I return back to Mary Oliver’s poem and consider the words she says about God and the joys of the world and heartbreaks of it as well. And what it means to fully live in the world do, accepting the realities of both the good and bad while believing in a God over it all.
She says:
“Of course for each of us, there is the daily life.
Let us live it, gesture by gesture.
When we cut the ripe melon, should we not give it thanks?
And should we not thank the knife also?
We do not live in a simple world.”
Later she reflects:
“I pray for this desperate earth.
I pray for this desperate world.
I do the little each person can do, it isn’t much.
Sometimes the river murmurs, sometimes it raves.”
As I was just now writing this at my desk, the door opened beside me. My son Ezra, newly twelve years old, walks in and interrupts me in my reflection.
“Hi, Dad.” He said.
“Hi, Ezra. What’s up?”
“Oh nothing. I just wanted to give you a hug,”
He then gave me a tight little hug, smiled at me, and left the room, closing the door behind him.
And just when I thought I couldn’t feel more,
I feel a little more.
Stepping Back 