First Parish Bedford UU

How We Greet the Day

Rev. Diane Teichert, Assistant Minister

First Parish in Bedford, MA

May 10, 2009

It's Mother's Day but I'm not talking about mothers today. That's one topic that is guaranteed to rub a few people the wrong way. There are people who did not know their mother and others who are not, or were not, fond of the mother they knew. There are women who longed to be mothers but who are not, and women who are disappointed by the children they had. There are women who wish to be pregnant and women who fear that they are pregnant. It's nearly impossible to say the right thing.

So, we're talking about how we greet the day. It's not unrelated to mothers, because many of us first greeted the day as infants in the arms of our mothers. While all our lives we are free to greet the day in whatever way we wish, our first experience was shaped for better or for worse by the people who greeted us first in the morning, perhaps our mother.

And that is all I will say about mothers, almost.

All day long, if the sun's out, you have a shadow trailing you. At night, where does it go? Did you know that when you get up in the morning, it is important for you to wait until your shadow comes home, before you get up?

As you heard in the reading this morning, that's what the children of the Hoopa Indians in NW California are taught from a young age. The Hoopa believe: when you go to sleep at night, part of you—your shadow—takes off. Your shadow is what you've held down all day, the part that you wouldn't let live, or be expressed, in your waking hours. So, at night, it goes off to see the world.

When you go to bed, your shadow says, "Now is my chance. I will go out and explore the world that you wouldn't let me touch all day." And off it goes. The shadow has the freedom to go as far away as it wants to, but it has a tie to you: you have a hum that only your shadow knows. And it will never disobey you.

So when you get up in the morning, if you remember to hum, your shadow will come back to you. Even though it doesn't want to. So when you get up, before you go out, give your own little hum, and your shadow will say, "Oh! It's time to go home," and home it comes, to make you whole again.

A nun who recorded this tradition wrote,

"You are never ready for the day until you have taken time to sing the song of your own shadow.

Sometimes people say, 'I must have gotten up on the wrong side of the bed—I think I'll go back and start over.' They've forgotten to hum!

Or some people get up at seven, and at ten o'clock they're still saying, 'Don't mind me, I'm not all here yet.' They've forgotten to hum! So there is a land of wisdom in remembering to get your self all here every day. Hum your song, so your heart and spirit come together." (Sister Maria Jose Hobday in Changing Light , J. Ruth Gendler, Ed., p. 84].

So, did you hum your shadow home this morning?

A recent US Poet Laureate, Billy Collins, seems to know about the Hoopa's belief about where our shadows go at night. Here is his poem “The Night House.”

Every day the body works in the fields of the world

Mending a stone wall

Or swinging a sickle through the tall grass—

The grass of civics, the grass of money—

And every night the body curls around itself

And listens for the soft bells of sleep.

But the heart is restless and rises

From the body in the middle of the night,

Leaves the trapezoidal bedroom

With its thick, pictureless walls

To sit by herself at the kitchen table

And heat some milk in a pan.

And the mind gets up too, puts on a robe

And goes downstairs, lights a cigarette,

And opens a book on engineering.

Even the conscience awakens

And roams from room to room in the dark,

Darting away from every mirror like a strange fish.

And the soul is up on the roof

In her nightdress, straddling the ridge,

Singing a song about the wildness of the sea

Until the first rip of pink appears in the sky.

Then, they all will return to the sleeping body

The way a flock of birds settles back into a tree,

Resuming their daily colloquy,

Talking to each other or themselves

Even through the heat of the long afternoons.

Which is why the body—the house of voices—

Sometimes puts down its metal tongs, its needle, or its pen

To stare into the distance,

To listen to all its names being called

Before bending again to its labor.

So, next time you awake in the middle of the night and your self is nowhere to be found, look around the house. Your heart is at the kitchen table drinking warm milk, your mind is in the living room reading a book, your conscience is roaming and darting around to avoid any glimpse of itself, and your soul is up on the rooftop… singing a song in her nightgown!

Then, at dawn, according to Collins, your self will return to your body like a flock of birds settles back into a tree.

According to the Hoopa Indians, that settling back in won’t just happen by itself; it won’t happen until you sing them all home, until you hum home your shadow.

It seems the Hoopa Indians understand the importance of rhythms and routines and rituals. They give us space and time in which to collect all the parts of ourselves back together, to become whole again, to be present in the moment, to pay attention, to begin to become who we are called to be.

Coming to together for worship is such a rhythm for us at First Parish. The service gives us space and time in which to collect all the parts of ourselves back together, hum our shadows home, if earlier we had forgotten. Rhythms and rituals within the service help this to happen.

Rituals in our services—lighting a chalice, silence, lighting candles of Joy and Sorrow—and also listening attentively to a good sermon, singing, clapping, roars of laughter—have a similar function of uniting those gathered in common experience, rendering fuzzy the boundaries between us, opening us up to depths of love greater than before we'd known.

In these varied ways, we learn to pay attention to more than the surface of life. Whether here in this meetinghouse on the Common or in our homes or when we are out and about, so much more is available for our awareness than we may notice.

A young mother in my former congregation told me that she wants her children to grow up knowing to be grateful; so, she created a daily routine of saying prayers, “not the Our Father kind that I grew up with” she explained, “but prayers I made up myself, and each person in the family says what they are thankful for that day.”

When my own children were young, our family gathered for a special Sabbath supper on Friday nights, by candlelight, with food everyone liked and always dessert. We began with singing a Unitarian Universalist version of the doxology, and then each of us shared something for which we were thankful that week.

Yet, it is a constant challenge (I speak here for myself) to maintain meaningful rhythms, routines and rituals in daily life. I am forever re-committing myself to such patterns or exploring a new one.

For those of you who have been sustained by the same rhythm or ritual for years and years, that’s so wonderful.

For those who wish that were true, who feel it to be a struggle, as I sometimes do, to maintain a daily routine that grounds us… perhaps what suits us better, or is at least for us a better place to begin than trying to set aside blocks of time out of the ordinary, is to practice paying attention in the ordinary moments.

There's a story about that.

Once two friends were walking down the sidewalk of a busy city street during rush hour. There was all sorts of noise in the city; car horns honking, feet shuffling, busses passing, people talking! And amid all this noise, one of the friends turned to the other and said, “I hear a cricket.”

“No way,” her friend responded. “How could you possibly hear a cricket with all of this noise? You must be imagining it. Besides, I’ve never seen a cricket in the city.”

“No, really, I do hear a cricket. I’ll show you.” She stopped for a moment, then led her friend across the street to a big cement planter with a tree in it. Pushing back some leaves she found a little brown cricket.

“That’s amazing!” said her friend. “You must have super-human hearing. What’s your secret?”

“No, my hearing is just the same as yours. There’s no secret,” the first woman replied. “Watch, I’ll show you.” She reached into her pocket, pulled out some loose change, and threw it on the sidewalk. Amid all the noise of the city, everyone within thirty feet turned his or her head to see where the sound of the money was coming from.

“See,” she said. “It’s all a matter of what you are listening for.” (Anonymous, in Doorways to the Soul , Elisa Davy Pearmain, Ed., p. 14).

It’s all a matter of what we are listening for, what we are paying attention to. It’s a matter of finding meaning, or making meaning, in the ordinary times in our lives. Like when we are walking down the street. Or waking up. Or beginning a meal. Or going to sleep.

Any of these things we do anyway in our everyday lives, can be done with a mindfulness that gives them meaning.

Some time ago, for example, I took up the practice of bringing in the daily newspaper in a more mindful way. It only takes a minute. I step out on the porch, where the paper usually has landed, bend down to pick it up, stand erect again and, then, instead of turning around to go back inside, I look around, maybe breathe deeply. I notice the colors of the sky, the temperature and any movement of the air, any sounds especially birds or smells, especially of the earth. In that moment, a quiet gratitude might come over me. Or not. But, still, what a wonderful way to start the day. How simple. Just a moment of paying attention.

In her poem “Morning,” Mary Oliver pays attention to the ordinary things around her.

Salt shining behind its glass cylinder.

Milk in a blue bowl. The yellow linoleum.

The cat stretching her black body from the pillow.

The way she makes her curvaceous response to the small, kind gesture.

Then laps the bowl clean.

Then wants to go out into the world

where she leaps lightly and for no apparent reason across the lawn,

then sits, perfectly still, in the grass.

I watch her a little while, thinking:

what more could I do with wild words?

I stand in the cold kitchen, bowing down to her.

I stand in the cold kitchen, everything wonderful around me.

What do you remember about your waking moments earlier today? Were you able to savor them or did something-- the alarm clock, the day’s duties, or others’ needs -- crowd right in and steal those first hazy moments from you?

How much more attentive to public affairs and the health of the planet might we be if we greet the day by paying attention to it? Our nation needs for its citizens to be paying attention.

And, for our emotional and spiritual health, how will we find moments, every day, to be present to ourselves, our loved ones, and the natural world around us? long enough to come upon a feeling of gratitude?

Will we, upon waking, call our shadows home by humming, each our own tune?

In the morning, note the cat’s curvaceous response to our small, kind gesture that put milk in her bowl?

While walking, hear the crickets?

While driving, notice the clouds in the sky?

At supper time, give thanks for the food and those who made it?

At bedtime, to let go of the day’s hurts, remember its pleasures, and be thankful that we are alive?

At the end of his book Walden, Thoreau wrote—it's the second to last sentence, to be exact—one of the most beautiful of his many beautiful lines, "Only that day dawns to which we are awake."

Only that day dawns to which we are awake.

Don't forget to greet the day. So may it be. Amen.

Benediction:

Are we awake yet?

Remember, only that day dawns to which we are awake.

Don't forget to greet the day.

Hum home your shadow. Pay attention!