A prayer for the season

There is a loaf (boule) of sourdough bread in the oven. The oven is both baking the bread and warming the house. I am enjoying a rare sense that, if not all, most is well, at least in my immediate purview. The dogs are fed and walked. When they get to their regular afternoon crazy time, I’ll be on my way, with the bread, to the Daughter Person’s for a birthday dinner.

I have spent little time on social media today, or yesterday, for that matter. I seem to be much happier than those days I end up doom-scrolling things about which I can do little. I’m reverting to some of the approaches I learned waaayy back in my college days. That’s when I was learning about and reading folks like Abraham Maslow and Fritz Perls. The latter is the source of a “Gestalt prayer” that I find I can honor better than the concept of trying to love everyone. Here’s the prayer:

I do my thing and you do your thing.

I am not in this world to live up to your expectations,
and you are not in this world to live up to mine.
You are you, and I am I,
and if by chance we find each other, it's beautiful.
If not, it can't be helped.

— Fritz Perls, Gestalt Therapy Verbatim, 1969

It seems to me that the world would be a better place if more of US prayed the Gestalt prayer rather than trying to convert, forcefully or otherwise, everyone into believing some one true belief. That brings me to another quotation, this one I believe new to me, that I found in a Jim Harrison book. The quote is from Simon Ortiz. “There are no truths, only stories.” When I read that my immediate reaction was “how true!” Here’s an example:

if...we find each other, it’s beautiful

Photo by J. Harrington

Maslow is noted for, among other things, describing a hierarchy of human needs. However, there are those who claim his work was derived from or influenced by Native American Blackfoot wisdom. If you’re not yet convinced about the relationship between truths and stories, I call to your attention the time-space continuum or almost any aspect of quantum physics. Schrödinger's cat, anyone?

This is the season in which we can and should do our best to find each other and make the world a little more beautiful. Once we learn to share and live the stories of Christmas, we can share them all year round, right?

The Oxen

By Thomas Hardy

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.

“Now they are all on their knees,”

An elder said as we sat in a flock

By the embers in hearthside ease.

We pictured the meek mild creatures where

They dwelt in their strawy pen,

Nor did it occur to one of us there

To doubt they were kneeling then.

So fair a fancy few would weave

In these years! Yet, I feel,

If someone said on Christmas Eve,

“Come; see the oxen kneel,

“In the lonely barton by yonder coomb

Our childhood used to know,”

I should go with him in the gloom,

Hoping it might be so.

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