The Caring Catalyst

Who Cares - What Matters

FROM THE SOUL TO THE THROAT TO THE PAGE

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Photo by Hannah Wright on Unsplash

My emptiness
has a fullness
that is hard to carry
It’s a thick sludge in my veins
that refuses to pump
through my soul’s heart
while it oxygenates the darkest
parts of me I wish dead

Consider these words from Richard Rohr, excerpted from his meditation on “The Sacred in the Concrete”:

Robert Frost said, “A poem begins with a lump in the throat; a home-sickness or a love-sickness.”¹ If a poem doesn’t give us a lump in the throat, is it really great poetry? My final theological conclusion is that there’s only one world and that it’s all sacred. However, we have to be prepared to know what we’re saying when we say that. If we say too glibly that the trees are sacred, along with our dog, a friend, and the roses, then we don’t really believe it. We first need to experience “a lump in the throat” to have encountered the sacred. The sacred is something that inspires awe and wonder, something that makes us cry, something that gives us the lump in the throat. We must first encounter the sacred in the concrete and kneel before it there, because we can’t start with the universal.

Poets . . . make the connection between the concrete and the universal. When we make that connection, there’s suddenly a great leap of meaning, an understanding that it’s one world. The very word “metaphor,” which comes from two Greek words, means to “carry across.” A good metaphor carries us across, and we don’t even know how it’s occurred.

. . . If we’re reading a poem too quickly, between two urgent meetings or other hurried spaces, we probably won’t get it, because we don’t have time to release ourselves. We need quiet, solitude, and open space to read poetry at greater depth. Then and only then do poems work their magic.

(My thanks to Fr. Richard Rohr, via the Center for Action and Contemplation 

Robert Frost, “Some Definitions,” in Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays (New York: Library of America, 1995), 701.

It’s not that the Sun doesn’t gloriously melt through the clouds so much as we just don’t take time to NOTICE; which kind of means that the worst poem of all isn’t the one not yet written, just the one not recognized or read.         .           .p o n d e r e d

MAKING MUSIC OUT OF MUCK

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Kids living in a slum built on a landfill in Paraguay create an orchestra made of trash, The Recycled Orchestra, and tour the world, finally realizing their wildest dream: to play with the heavy metal band, Megadeth.          .         .

There is not one of us that doesn’t have a trash heap landfill right in the middle of us. I mean right there at our Center.  It surrounds our soul, but it doesn’t imprison our Essence

So maybe the biggest question is not what kind of a landfill do you have in you but what kind of music are you making out of the junk, the throwaways/discardeds in your life?


P        O        N        D       E          R
while you wander through a rare double-feature
Monday Video Blog

Making MUSIC out of MUCK
is one of our greatest purposes in life
and our grandest contribution
especially when it begins with ourselves
So cue up
that magnificent Instrument of yourself
and PLAY ON
Share Your Music
and bring some much needed harmony
MUCK
TO
M U S I C

 

MOMENTS

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Mary always, gives me, like so many others, the most essential of Moments:

It doesn’t have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don’t try
to make them elaborate, this isn’t
a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.

~ Mary Oliver ~

So here’s the thing about
Moments
We wait for just the right ones
so we’ll never miss them
And in the waiting
We miss them the most

So make sure you look both ways
And especially straight ahead
before stepping out
in the multi-lane traffic
of your life
or you’ll have a moment
that won’t miss you
When it comes to 
M O M E N T S
.          .          .take one

HARDWIRING HAPPINESS

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It’s always one of the most important questions.          .        .

but not as important as

T H E    A N S W E R:

A   R   E        Y   O   U       H   A   P   P   Y

Seriously.          .         .

ARE  YOU MORE

 Eeyore or Pooh.       .       .

 Rocky or Mr T

 Beauty or The Beast

Cop or Robber

Sweet or Sour

Hot or Mild

Mountain or Valley

It seems, doesn’t it

that at times we have a fantastic pull

to ignore the good in life

and focus instead on the bad.          .          .

E  N  T  E  R       R  I  C  K       H A N S O N

He’s a psychologist who wrote a book a few years ago:

HARDWIRING  HAPPINESS

His   main   thesis   is   this:

Humans’ hardwired tendency is to go negative.  It’s whats allowed our ancestors to survive.  And for depression-prone folks, this proclivity to see the glass half empty is even worse.  To mitigate that negativity  bias, we need to “RE-WIRE” our brains for resilience and happiness.  You do this by taking a few seconds throughout the day to think about and really soak in the good stuff you have going in your life.  It’s basically a form of cognitive behavioral therapy, but it’s incredibly easy to do and the results are powerful.     .     .     .

It’s tough being a Caring Catalyst 

but it’s not always the achieving or the maintaining of being

a Caring Catalyst 

that’s  so  important

so much as the attempt

so much as the intention

so much as the overall consistency

that’s significant.          .           .

So even when you’re feeling more like Eeyore

P   O   O   H        U   P

and realize that even on Cloudy

OVER CAST DAYS

the Sun still shines

.          .          .especially if you let it shine through you;

THINK   ON   THAT

Professional Speaker, Author, Assurance Man