Preserve, within a wild sanctuary, an inaccessible valley of reverie. - Ellen Glasgow

Remember last month’s newsletter that celebrated silliness? (If you missed it, check the archives here on the website to read it now.)

Well, this week I had an opportunity to expand my own personal celebration of silliness. My husband and I had spent ten days at our lake house in Tennessee and it was about time to return home to Austin. I casually mentioned how much I would enjoy staying on another week, and my husband picked up on this idea whole-heartedly and began urging me to extend my time here. Even though I was so drawn to stay, thinking about how wonderful it would be to be still and quiet all week, by myself in such a peaceful environment, I also knew, about the commitment I had back at home, the tasks that awaited me which hadn’t been done during the 10 days we were away. Jerele countered those objections by saying, “Staying on here for a week will be good for your character! By doing this you can have a breakthrough in your seriousness!” Ah, the opportunity again to celebrate silliness.The week has been wonderful. I have worked no more than two hours each day—keeping a promise I made to Jerele. The rest of the time I have relaxed and rested. On Tuesday morning, my willingness to intervene in my default seriousness was repaid in a beautiful way. It was early morning and I was sitting out on the screened-in porch of the lake house. All the trees in the area are virgin timber and go so far up into the sky that you have to crane your neck way back even to begin to see the top. Our house is surrounded by these trees.

Suddenly while I was sitting there drinking my coffee, heavy rain began to fall. This was the kind of rain that you can hear as it falls down from one layer of limbs high, high up in the sky, to the next layer of limbs of the trees to the next and finally to the brown and green earth at the bottom of the trees. Strong rain. Continuous rain. Loud rain. I felt transported to some mythic time when connection with the elements seemed direct and somehow personal. For some minutes there were only the rain, the trees, and I in a kind of holy triad that blessed my soul. I found myself thinking of a quote from Thomas Merton, the monk who lived at Gethsemane Monastery in Kentucky and often went to the woods to spend a little time living like a hermit. I quoted these words in the hardback edition of my book A Sacred Primer and also in my book Seven Choices, so clearly they have meant a lot to me for a long time. But on Tuesday morning the words were alive and real for me in a way they never had been before:

The rain…fills the woods with an immense and confused sound. It covers the flat roof of the cabin and its porch with insistent and controlled rhythms. And I listen, because it reminds me again and again that the whole world runs by rhythms I have not yet learned to recognize…. What a thing it is to sit absolutely alone, in the forest, at night, cherished by this wonderful, unintelligible, perfectly innocent speech, the most comforting speech in the world, the talk that rain makes by itself all over the ridges, and the talk of the watercourses everywhere in the hollows! Nobody started it, nobody is going to stop it. It will talk as long as it wants, this rain. As long as it talks, I am going to listen.

I realized as I sat there listening to the rain that I was experiencing a profound moment of sacredness in the midst of the everyday. And that this gift of the sacred had come while I was doing nothing except sitting still!

A few weeks ago I received a copy of a poem written by a wonderful woman Pam Bailey, whom I met when she attended a class I taught at the Austin Presbyterian Seminary this spring. Pam’s poem illustrates for me another moment of experiencing the sacred in the midst of the everyday. Here is the poem Pam wrote:

Anointing

At daybreak
the heartbeat of the day
all around me
the rhythm of bodies
beginning their day.

Mindful, on another path
a white truck passes.
The beat steps up
and I sit
in the breaking of the day.

Two boys
laughter muted by the trees
run wildly for their ride;

Their dog
complete with Cocker-bouffant
sends them off,
salutes their departure
with lolling tongue.

Already he begins
to mark the pattern of his day
to be about
their coming home.

My dogs step up the beat:
yowling a wild greeting
for the huge yellow bus.

A tiny kitty-slip
“Tortie-Ma”
arrives, expectant
for breakfast.

The boys board,
The bus groans,
Tortie crunches.
The dogs stop.-
A bird notes the exact moment
with a sharp pip.

I sit in the morning’s
second stillness.
I hear the earth
murmur its revolution
looking over its shoulder
with a steady, slowed beat.

In the last of the morning
I sit immersed
amidst the hearts
that consecrate the day.

The sacred in the everyday. “In the morning’s second stillness.” A dog with a Cocker-bouffant hairdo. A kitty, a bird. Little boys running for the yellow schoolbus.

A moment of anointing.

May all of us during this beautiful month of September pay attention and experience those many sacred moments that occur during our every day.

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Dr. Elizabeth Harper Neeld offers wisdom and practical insights to anyone whose life is in a time of transition, change, grief and loss of any kind. As an internationally recognized and accomplished consultant, and author of more than twenty books - including Tough Transitions and Seven Choices: Finding Daylight After Loss Shatters Your World - she is committed to work that helps lift the human spirit.