the deepening ground

In this Lenten season, I have turned once again to The Word in the Wilderness: A Poem a Day for Lent and Easter by Malcolm Guite. Like the old adage goes, “A poem a day keeps the doctor away!” (Or something along those lines.) For me, Guite’s collection provides refreshing oases to rest throughout the busyness of life, and today’s poem especially fit the vision of The Deepening Ground.

How often do I push off the slow moments of life to an always receding “some time” in the future in order to plow through more work and seemingly pressing responsibilities? While my wife and children have been away at a speech and debate tournament, did I use the extra time to take slow walks, watch the Shakespeare plays I’ve been meaning to enjoy (The Tempest, for example), or sit with my guitar and just play?

No. I did our taxes.

So today’s poem chides me in a loving way. Though I am not in “County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,” and though we are in the last days of February, not “September or October,” there still remain an abundance of opportunities to BE “here or there,” rather than “a hurry through which known and strange things pass.” On this first day of the week, which for most of us the week’s end, let us not be already drawn into the week in our thoughts, nor rushing forward past what this day of rest offers. May we be still enough to feel the “big soft buffetings” that will “catch [our] heart[s] off guard and blow [them] open.”

Postscript by Seamus Heaney

And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you’ll park and capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

“Postscript” by Seamus Heaney, from The Spirit Level. © Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996.