listen to your life

 

“Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it, because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.”

― Frederick Buechner,  

Now and Then: A Memoir of Vocation

I've always been someone who loves (needs?) beauty. "Beauty is truth, truth beauty," as my beloved Keats said. Beauty brings me closer to what is real, to what is true and good. Another Romantic poet, good old Shelley, wrote, "Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar." For me that poetry comes in the form of words, a photograph, a song, the mountains, soup bubbling on the stove, spring tulips, my child's warm hand.

When I started this blog, I intended it to be a long-distance photo album for our families. I set it up with trepidation, thinking about the double-edged need for privacy and connection, and the strangeness of posting a life. I've spent far too many masochistic moments comparing my dented-up life to what looks like perfection onscreen. Perhaps you have, too? So, I just want to say now: This blog is in no way my attempt to portray or manufacture a perfect life.

But I do believe that beauty inspires. And pausing to write words down, to take a picture of blue sky, to sew a pillowcase or write a card or make marmalade or practice the piano, to somehow, someway, slow down the jangling frenzy of everyday life: this is how I find my way to beauty. 

I guess this blog is still a photo album, but it's also my gratitude journal of sorts, a way of commemorating everyday grace--not from some pristine place outside of furry couches, peed-on toilet seats, the Mt. Vesuvius of laundry, wrinkles and extra pounds, career pressures, marriage and family and finances, and all of the trivial and profound tragedies of life--but from within that mess and muck. I want to find a way to be inside the mess and still stop and see the hidden beauty.

All that to say, if you're stopping by here today, I hope that in some small way these images and words will inspire you to listen to your own life. Maybe the listening will help us both to answer Mary Oliver's question:  

"Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?"