Noticing
Staff from First Unitarian Church of Portland were asked to write a weekly reflection during this time. Here’s one from me, published on April 12, 2021.
Alice Walker wrote as the title line in her 1982 novel, The Color Purple, “I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it. People think pleasing God is all God cares about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.”
Since moving to Portland nearly 5 years ago, I have always noticed the rivers. Every time I cross or am near the Willamette or the Columbia, I am taken away from whatever was on my mind and sucked into trance-like awareness of the shimmering surface and the sheer quantity of water and life below. I am from Los Angeles, as most of you know. There, “river” means a very different thing. In Los Angeles, rivers are concrete structures that help drain the streets of storm runoff, but most of the year, they serve as filming sites.
Only a few months into pandemic isolation last year, I found it necessary to leave my Downtown home and seek something a little more peaceful — somewhere I could both work during the day and sleep at night, neither of which were possible in my last place at that fraught time. So, I moved into one of the many small neighborhoods that line Terwilliger Boulevard in the southwest hills. Once here, I had no choice but to notice the trees. Sure, I had noticed them before and had spent a significant amount of time among them, yet that all seemed a superficial cognizance once I really began to notice them and live with them. In the summer, I noticed how many of them there are, and how diverse. I noticed the sounds they make when the wind passes through them. I noticed them in the fall, when their leaves changed the colors of every backdrop and piled themselves up in my yards. I noticed their bareness in the winter, and how I could suddenly see for miles through them, a veiled perspective of the cityscape. And, these things, while beautiful and full of magic, surprised me only in that I somehow hadn’t noticed them before. And, even while living Downtown, I noticed the blooming of all the flowering trees in the spring. I announced appreciation with every sneeze.
But now, just as spring is springing, I’ve noticed something else for the first time. It may seem silly to those of you who have lived here a long time, or who know better about how to pay attention than I do. But, this year, I noticed that, just as the trees are beginning to bud, but well before they begin to leaf and flower, the branches appear to begin to change colors. From far away, the brown-gray wooden structures develop a glow — and auric hint of what is soon to come. Every day, they become bolder in their spring statement, but in the beginning is just the shyest hint of redefinition.
As with many of nature’s lessons, I was drawn into introspection by witnessing this shift. I know of myself that I tend to be impatient about progress and necessary change. I know of myself that I often expect that the move from realization to adjustment should be swift if not immediate. I don’t, except for at an intellectual level, understand the need for many of us to process feelings about change even after there is consensus that change is needed. And so, I am glad for this reminder from the trees to try to be grateful for the flickers of change in peoples’ hearts and minds — not to be tolerant of inaction, but to leave enough grace for the movement of possibility. What is it in your life or in your noticing that helps you to temper your own impatience this spring?
Instead of music today, I’ll share with you a new-ish piece by my favorite living poet, Rudy Francisco from the collection, Speakeasy: Volume I.
Is Made
There is a common phrase in the english language;
it goes, “you don’t want to know how the sausage is made.”
Meaning,
there are things in life that we enjoy,
but if we saw the process that it takes to create them,
we might be shocked, frightened
and they would be considered less desirable.
Meaning,
it’s harder to put food in your mouth
when you know the journey
it went through to get there.
Meaning,
sometimes, mystery makes things a little easier to handle,
and maybe this is why I don’t open up to people.
I’d rather be a page with no browser history,
a conveyor belt with no baggage.
So when you tell me I’m funny,
I don’t say that somehow trauma
makes you find humor in strange places.
When you compliment my achievements,
I don’t say, “I’m still trying to prove to myself
that I’m worth all the oxygen I’m taking from the atmosphere.”
