I adore Parker Palmer. His book Let Your Life Speak was a game-changer for me. (i recommend it to so many clients searching for meaning in their too-busy-to-breathe lives). If you don’t know who he is, you might want to find out more (well, after you read today’s offering of course…).
I follow him on social media; he’s a HUGE poetry fan, and I will probably share more than one poem that I discovered because of him.
Today’s poem by the late Leonard Nathan is one of those.
Nathan was a professor of rhetoric at the University of California-Berkeley. My old friend — the poet Ann Veronica Simon (i’ll be sharing one of her poems soon) — died in 2003; she was in the PhD program at Berkeley…in rhetoric. I like to imagine that Nathan may have been one of her professors.
This wonderful poem centers on a question so many of us wrestle with: what can I do? what should I do? if I’m not a big fish in a big pond, how can I make a difference? what will make this fleeting, fragile time on the planet meaningful? for me, and for others?
And so…So?
So?
Leonard Nathan
So you aren’t Tolstoy or St. Francis
or even a well-known singer
of popular songs and will never read Greek
or speak French fluently,
will never see something no one else
has seen before through a lens
or with the naked eye.
You’ve been given just the one life
in this world that matters
and upon which every other life
somehow depends as long as you live,
and also given the costly gifts of hunger,
choice, and pain with which to raise
a modest shrine to meaning.
As Palmer added when he first “gifted” the poem to his social media followers: “I re-read this poem occasionally and ask myself, “Using everything I have—including my own ‘costly gifts of hunger, choice, and pain’—what can I do today to keep raising the ‘modest shrine to meaning’ I’d like to create with my life?” Maybe it’s planting a tree, maybe it’s a random act of kindness to a stranger, maybe it’s offering comfort to someone who’s hurting, maybe it’s writing a thank-you letter to a mentor who saw your potential and drew it out…There’s always something meaningful I can do to honor the gift of life in myself, others, and the world around us. Just do it!”
What he said. :)
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