It is early on a Friday morning in August, 2016. While at the gym I was listening to the November 1,2012 Krista Tippett interview on the NPR program On Being with Joanna Macy entitled “A Wild Love for the World.” Mrs. Macy is a philosopher of ecology, a scholar of Buddhism, a translator, and author. She is fluent in at least three languages (speaking, reading and writing), served with the CIA during WWII, a wife, mother, an activist and remains, in her eighties, an active and articulate mentor/teacher for many. She is the author of eight books.
I am not sure how I have, until today, missed her wise voice. I thought I was very familiar with Rainer Maria Rilke, but I had missed her scholarship and sage comments about his poems. It seems every day I am made acutely aware of the fact that I will have to live to be at least as old as Methuselah (969) if I am to come even close to accomplishing as much as folks such as Ms. Macy.
While listening to interviews or reading about such prolifically accomplished folks as Ms. Macy, I often find myself comparing my meager accomplishments. At the same time, I am enormously grateful to sit at the feet of such intellectually and spiritually wise individuals.
A poem of Billy Collins comes to mind.
To My Favorite 17-Year-Old High School Girl
“Do you realize that if you had started building the Parthenon
on the day you were born,
you would be all done in only one more year?
Of course, you couldn’t have done that all alone.
So never mind; you’re fine just being yourself.
You’re loved for just being you.
But did you know that at your age
Judy Garland was pulling down 150,000 dollars a picture,
Joan of Arc was leading the French army to victory
and Blaise Pascal had cleaned up his room
— no wait, I mean he had invented the calculator?
Of course, there will be time for all that later in your life,
after you come out of your room and begin to blossom,
or at least pick up all your socks.
For some reason I keep remembering that
Lady Jane Grey was queen of England when she was only 15.
But then she was beheaded,
so never mind her as a role model.
A few centuries later, when he was your age,
Franz Schubert was doing the dishes for his family,
but that did not keep him from composing two symphonies, four operas and two complete masses as a youngster.
But of course, that was in Austria at the height of Romantic lyricism,
not here in the suburbs of Cleveland.
Frankly, who cares if Annie Oakley was a crack shot at 15
or if Maria Callas debuted as Tosca at 17?
We think you’re special just being you --
playing with your food and staring into space.
By the way, I lied about Schubert doing the dishes,
but that doesn’t mean he never helped out around the house.”
—Billy Collins
Billy Collins has this wonderful way of reminding us of how silly we humans are. The talents of a Bill Gates, Johann Sebastian Bach, Frank Lloyd Right, Rainer Wilke, Michael Phelps, Eleanor Roosevelt, Mother Theresa or a host of others enrich our lives in a marvelously magical and profound way. Yet, they may or may not bring the smile that provides just the amount of warmth or connection which gives a stranger the courage to live another day, the compassion and courage of the 17-year-old who saves the life of a man whose car has just gone into a body of water, the gift of the person who cleans and make home smell like home, or strength of a neighbor who offers to help child care on a day when a single mother has used up 180 percent of her energy.
I do not need to compare myself to Mrs. Macy or the host of others I admire. As the new school year starts, I want each and every student to know that they have a talent and a purpose which the world desperately needs; that it takes all of us sharing our talents and love. The words of the poet Dylan Thomas come to mind:
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on that sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Dylan Thomas (poemhunter.com)
We must all honor and claim our own light and our own dance. Surely the world would not be better if thousands of voices were screaming, “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” We need the solitary voice of each of us which together create the chorus which can soothe, excite, challenge and entertain just as surely as the wonderful sounds of the annual Estonian song festival.
Written August 13, 2016