I have come to appreciate January in the Pacific Northwest. I grew up in Wisconsin and signs of Spring are hard to come by this time of year. Brown and gray are the dominant colors in the earthly palate there. But it is different in our part of the world. Yesterday I took a walk through my neighborhood and I was amazed, as I always am this time of year, to see all the signs of life around me. The buds showing their faces. The green things showing up through the earth. A quiet and subtle awareness of something emerging.
Those signs are important for the spirit. Or at least I know they are for me. And they are a metaphor for the world I think. Last Sunday I reflected on the work of Martin Luther King, Jr. and what it means for us today. How certainly at the end of his life he was more explicitly naming the intersections of oppressions in his time. How racism very much intersected with the effects of war and poverty. How justice in one arena is so connected to justice everywhere. Much to hold then and much to hold now in our world. But bearing witness, I think, is part of the task before us.
Likewise the emerging spring is a reminder too of how everything is connected. I just came upon a poem I wasn’t familiar with that I share below. I think it particularly spoke to me because we have a 14-month-old puppy named Oskar in our house. And Oskar, too, has a way of helping me notice things I wasn’t noticing before. All kinds of sounds and smells, for sure. One of my spiritual practices these days include the trips to the dog park with Oskar and watching the dogs make their connections. I understand some of it but I know there is so much that I don’t understand. How the unfolding mystery is something I likely will never fully know.
May we bear witness to the creation unfolding around us.
Here is a poem by Lisel Mueller entitled “What the Dog Perhaps Hears”:
If an inaudible whistle
blown between our lips
can send him home to us,
then silence is perhaps
the sound of spiders breathing
and roots mining the earth;
it may be asparagus heaving,
headfirst, into the light
and the long brown sound
of cracked cups, when it happens.
We would like to ask the dog
if there is a continuous whir
because the child in the house
keeps growing, if the snake
really stretches full length
without a click and the sun
breaks through clouds without
a decibel of effort,
whether in autumn, when the trees
dry up their wells, there isn’t a shudder
too high for us to hear.
What is it like up there
above the shut-off level
of our simple ears?
For us there was no birth cry,
the newborn bird is suddenly here,
the egg broken, the nest alive,
and we heard nothing when the world changed.
Blessings,
Rev. Thomas Disrud he/him
Associate Minister
First Unitarian Church of Portland