am i living a real, human life?
little sparrow thoughts
That question is posed by a character from a scene I wrote a year-ish ago, and I was tidying up the scene in preparation for the Orein Benefit this weekend, and the question remains pertinent, I think—at least resonant.
Last night, I dreamt I had a pet sparrow. Even in my sleep, I remember feeling the awe of having a creature born for the outdoors and the skies in the palm of your hand. The tenderness I felt toward something wild and helpless.
What do we owe each other? This is a question that guides our interactions with every creature from sang birds to our children to our neighbors. But how do we go above and beyond what we owe each other and do something truly lovely and beautiful? Love urges us to do not just the good, but the beautiful. Love explores the excessive gesture that's not about duty but about delight. Love is about the painterly, beyond the lines of code—the non-essential, that turns out to be everything. To live in wonder, and to create wonder by your living: is that living a truly human life?
I am dictating this post rather than typing this, using the voice-typing feature on my laptop, so that I can play with my cat, who I have ignored the past two days, not out of intention, but because there are other tasks to be done.
Early morning mass means that my peaceful routine of slowly waking up with prayer and coffee has gotten a bit shot to hell. I try, in the mornings, to notice what is beautiful and give thanks for it. Like, as I walk out the door, I notice the small pleasure of taking my feet out of my slippers and putting them into my Chacos. I notice the plants, the cats, the colors of the houses and the sky. To walk across the street into church is a great gift.
Yesterday morning, in the shower, I offered thanks for the bottle of conditioner that I finished.
I remembered, a year ago, arriving at my grandmother’s house with $200 in my pocket to last me the month of December. And I was so thankful to see these full, giant bottles of shampoo and conditioner. I wondered who had put them there. I realized later, looking through old photos, that I had bought them two years before, the last time I visited my grandmother before her final illness, while I was on a shopping trip for maqluba ingredients with my friend Faris. Who knows how gestures in the past unravel into the present and the future. This is real life, after all. The meaning of your own actions are hidden from you a lot of the time. We don’t live in a world of ones and zeros.
For the first Sunday of Advent, I wrote about the wasting disease of normalcy for the Catholic Artist Connection. You can read that reflection and sign up for the daily reflections here.
I’ve been thinking a lot about what love hopes to do for us in a world of darkness. In a world whose “normal” seems to be a wasting disease of the spirit. It’s not always clear what love brings us, but I think it’s most clear when it brings us to a place where we can see the beauty of others, and the wonder of our own lives, more clearly. And we have the ability to make something beautiful, make something that comes from the expressions of our own spirit. And give that to others, in recognition that they are a creature who belongs to the skies as well. Love comes to offer tenderness to we who are, in equal measure, wild and helpless.