Savoring

so much beauty at Hocking Hills State Park!!!-Michele

Savoring
........ What I discovered is that there’s a powerful impulse within me to possess everything that I desire. To own it. To clutch it. To consume it.

The media constantly teaches us that we can buy the things that are most valuable to us. You know, we’re set up to believe that if only we could purchase that hot little sports car, we’d be young and attractive again. If only we could afford a weekend at that fancy spa in Sedona, then we’d be fully realized, spiritual people. If only we could get that SUV, then we’d have the freedom to roam the great outdoors. Have you noticed that all of the ads for SUVs are shot on some Alpine mountaintop? All the SUVs I’ve seen are stuck in rush-hour traffic on the highway with everyone else. We’re sold an illusion.

But it’s a powerful illusion that we’re being sold. It convinces us that somehow we have control over our happiness. Krister Stendahl was a Dutch theologian who taught for many years at Harvard Divinity School. He once wrote: “The colonialism and imperialism of the American mind thinks that the only way you can honor something else is to have it yourself. But to really rejoice in that which you do not have, that is what we need to learn.” To be able to savor something from a distance. To love, but not to possess.

It’s as though we’re the little child who has to be taught that when she holds the ladybug in her hands, she must hold it gently, or she’ll crush it. We sometimes unwittingly crush the things that we love. We want to possess them, when instead we should be savoring them. What’s called for here an ethic of presence and mindfulness in the face of beauty, and at the same time, a kind of non-attachment. An ability to let it go. To let the beauty return at its own will, in its own time.

This kind of savoring reminds me of the lines from Wendell Berry:

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

To rest in the grace of the world. To relish the beauty of things I cannot own. To savor, and not to consume. To desire, but not to covet. Slowly, I’m learning to love with a lighter touch.

-Robert G. Hardies