Coffee in the Bathtub

This morning I woke up with a clear calendar until 12noon. 

In the past six months, I have been working hard to remove appointments from my calendar and actually do less. I know that read like an oxymoron, working hard to do less … but for someone like me who has always understood that you have to do more to make more, well it is hard when rewiring your brain. And perhaps it sounds like a privilege to be able to do so or have we been taught that more = more? And so when I always have a full to the brim calendar, am I doing a disservice to myself and my beliefs about 40 hours work weeks. 

Things I ponder on a morning with an open calendar. 

My partner dropped the kids at school and as they kissed me good bye and I closed the door behind them, I asked myself ‘what do you want to do?’. 

And what I did was toss my leftover coffee in the microwave for 22 seconds and then proceed to run a hot bath. Hot bath with a coffee in hand, I actually do not know if I have ever done this before? Is this what retired people do? Is that what present people do?

So many of Mary Oliver’s poems I read and then furrow my brow followed by a sigh in deep understanding in her compilation book ‘Devotions’ speak to being present, recognizing what is actually right in front of you and allowing the reverence to wash over you, to change you.

There was a poem this morning where she give a shout out to Jame Wright who left a blank page in his poetry book to honor a horse that ate one of his poems and she says that there is poetry, and I believe that there is living. 

And I laugh because I feel I really would have enjoyed her in real life, in real time.

A Lesson From James Wright
Mary Oliver

If James Wright could put in his book of poems a blank page

dedicated to "the Horse David Who Ate One of My Poems,"

I am ready to follow him along

the sweet path he cut through the dryness and suggest that you sit now

very quietly in some lovely wild place, and listen to the silence.

And I say that this, too, is a poem