*This essay originated from a reflection I shared at the Waypoint Contemplative Service at the Cathedral of the Rockies on June 17, 2026. You can watch it here.

One of the treasures I keep is an old pocket watch.

One of those old watches where you push the crown to open it. The face springs open. In olden days, men kept these in a vest pocket, attached by a chain. They would pull it out, perhaps with great gravity, click it open and declare, “Gentlemen, we best be going,” sez the sheriff, or the lawyer, or the head of the posse. (Your visual here courtesy of the last old Western you watched.)

I inherited this watch from my dad when he died. I believe it belonged to my grandfather, or perhaps an even earlier generation. Honestly, I’m not entirely sure of its history. What I am pretty sure of is that it was keeping time before I was alive.

Someone carried it before me, and someone carried it before them. Mebbe someone before that, and p’haps, just p’haps, my great-grandfather pulled that watch out of his pocket when...

Today I have it.

One day my son will own it.

Maybe it’s worth something, but most likely its value is in its lineage. As it has passed from generation to generation, its value as a way to keep accurate time has diminished as technology has improved. Yet its personal value has increased—deepened, enriched, seasoned.

A pocket watch, especially this watch, seemed fitting for a reflection about time.

A watch notes the passing of seconds, minutes, and hours. Its ancestors were water clocks and sundials, just as the atomic clock is its descendant.

The historian Daniel Boorstin tells the fascinating story of how human beings learned to measure time. For most of history, people told time by the sun, the moon, the seasons, and the rhythms of communal life. Then we invented clocks and calendars of astonishing precision.

Yet who reading this feels they have mastered time?

The busyness of contemporary life and how to control it has been the stuff of bestselling books and time-management systems. But perhaps the most important questions are not whether we know what time it is, or how much time until retirement, the next meeting, or the project deadline.

Perhaps the deeper question is whether we know what makes our time meaningful.

My pocket watch can tell me what time it is.

It cannot tell me what this time is for.

The ancient Greeks used two words for time. Chronos is measured time.

Kairos is meaningful time. That is,

Time as a procession of moments. A moment of song. A moment of generosity. A moment of insight. A breath of wind or the smell of sage.

Emily Dickinson captured this mystery when she wrote,

“Forever is composed of Nows.”

Perhaps eternity is not only something coming.

Perhaps eternity is experienced in each of these present moments.

These moments are portals to something beyond ourselves—to eternity and infinity, to the fullness of time and to timelessness. Yet we almost always miss them because we are thinking about what comes next or what came before instead of experiencing now.

My watch measures Chronos.

But it also represents Kairos.

Holding this watch is the memory of my dad after open-heart surgery, my grandpa singing The Old Rugged Cross in the little white church just down the road from his Kansas farm, and the dream of my family, just two or three generations before, coming to America from Germany.

This watch is a timekeeper.

It measures minutes, hours, and years.

But it cannot tell me what those moments meant.

The soul is a timeskeeper.

The watch records how long.

The soul discerns how deep.

Part of the pilgrim’s journey is to experience The Way, on the way.

The pilgrim’s deepest journey is not across a landscape. It is into the heart.

Ecclesiastes proclaims,

“He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.”

Unfathomable.

The word fathom comes from measuring the depth of water. Sailors lowered a weighted line into the sea, and if it could not touch bottom, the depth was unfathomable.

A pilgrimage is not simply a physical path. It is also a spiritual path—a path toward wisdom, toward healthiness, toward deeper connection with others.

A pilgrimage can be measured in Chronos time:

“How long does it take to get there?”

Or in Kairos time:

“How deeply can we experience time?”

Wayfarers and sojourners move moment by moment through the deep time of the present presence, through “a forever composed of nows.”

But the timeskeeping is up to us.

As Judith Valente writes:

God, the Eternal

Pre-dawn silence
Earth murmurs ancient secrets
We listen, or not.

— Judith Valente, The Art of Pausing

I’d love to hear your thoughts about this essay.

Here are a couple of questions for you.

• What in your life serves as a "pocket watch"—an ordinary object that carries extraordinary meaning? What gave it that significance for you?

• What helps you slow down enough to notice the sacredness of an ordinary moment?

• How might you live differently this week if you asked, "What is this time for?" instead of simply, "What time is it?"

My haiku this time

, Davin Carr-Chellman, and I have been doing this since 2019 and it has been a lot of fun and it’s so interesting how much water has passed under the dam over the years.

The process is that we each write a haiku and then send it to the others. Then, we write narratives about each of them - ours and theirs. So there are, then, nine narratives total - three for each haiku. Then we get together, like we did today, and read the narratives. We have found it so so interesting how many similar themes emerge each time from our narratives, across the haikus. We never have a theme. We never compare notes before we write the narratives and never share ideas before we read them for the first time together when we tape the video.

We always learn a lot. We always laugh a lot.

It’s a wonderful process, that’s for sure, and all our videos are available on my blog site, Profound Living with Michael Kroth.

If you watch, you might find haiku-ing is a lot of fun and very meaningful. You can check it out here:

Let us know what you think!

Leave a comment

Once a journey is designed, equipped, and put in process; a new factor enters and takes over. A trip, a safari, an exploration, is an entity, different from all other journeys. It has personality, temperament, individuality, uniqueness. A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.

~John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America, p. 1

This essay is adapted from an earlier reflection shared at the Waypoint Contemplative Service at the Cathedral of the Rockies here in Boise, on 6-10-26. You can see a video recording of the original here.

Thus begins The Way of a Pilgrim, written of uncertain origin, found in Mount Athos, first published in 1884. It is a story of a peasant, wandering through Russia, seeking the answer to the question, “How does one pray without ceasing.”

And so began the classic travel haibun, Narrow Road to the Interior, written nearly two centuries earlier by the master haiku writer, Matsuo Bashō, first published, posthumously, in 1702.

Different centuries. Different countries. Different religions. Different reasons. Different types of pilgrimage. Same spirit.

Bashō goes on to say “From the earliest times there have been some who perished along the road. Still I have always been drawn by windblown clouds into dreams of a lifetime of wandering.

We are all sojourners, all on our own journeys, all wayfarers in one way or another. Some of us have been pushed, some of us have been pulled, but we are all on a trail, we all take detours, and we all take step after step over our lifetimes.

We’re all just slouching or easin’ or truckin’ or rambling down the road.

Some of us know exactly where we’re headed. Some not so much.

And we all need waypoints, places of rest, along the way.

Sojourners All

Welcome, fellow sojourners. Thank you for joining me on this stretch of the path today.

Whether you come feeling rested or weary, hopeful or uncertain, I am glad you are here. We are all people on a journey. We are all travelers through life.

A sojourner is someone who has not fully arrived. Someone who is still learning, still searching, still becoming.

Recently I was on a hike on the Dry Creek trail here in Boise and picked up stones for folks coming to our Waypoint service. This is the one I chose for me.

It is simple. Ordinary. Weathered. It ain’t prettied up. It’s been walked on.

Like us.

A stone bears the marks of the journey it has traveled. It has been shaped not by avoiding the rough and tumble, but by staying the course. It’s a stepping stone for others and the makings of the path upon which they tread.

Like us.

Along the Camino de Santiago, pilgrims often carry a stone for many miles. The stone may represent a burden, a prayer, a grief, or a hope. At a place called Cruz de Ferro—the Iron Cross—many pilgrims leave their stones behind. Dropping off their prayers, their hopes, their regrets in the hands of something beyond them, for safekeeping, for support.

Credit: Random username 083794703875938, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Cruz de Ferro - Iron Cross

I’ll be taking this stone with me on to the next leg of the Camino. My son Shane and I have been walking The Way these last four years - this will be our fifth leg of the journey. And I will be leaving this stone at the Cruz de Ferro on our second day.

Wayfaring is Life Itself

The Camino is one form of wayfaring.

Life itself is another.

The road of life - cobblestones or mud, freeways or toll stations, detours or permanent train tracks - shapes our journey, doesn’t it?

I invite you to do something symbolic yourself. It doesn’t have to be a stone, it doesn’t have to be anything, but it could be. It could be a piece of pottery, or prayer beads, or a feather. It just needs to be something that will help you take inner swirling thoughts or assertions or plans or prayers and make them more visible, solid, and real. Yes, it’s symbolic, but in symbolism we can evoke deep understanding and mindful anchors to what’s important to us.

It will be something you can touch.

And therefore, something that can touch you.

Keep it with you or put it someplace special in your home. Or leave somewhere for safekeeping, or support.

Wanderers

Throughout history there have been people who embraced the life of the wanderer.

Some, like the Russian peasant, wander from place to place seeking answers or adventure or peace. Some, like the poet Bashō, walk attentively, observing, fully experiencing each step. Some, like pilgrims on the Camino de Santiago, chose one of a number of established paths. Wandering does not necessarily mean arriving somewhere, but it’s almost always about becoming.

There is a difference between a pilgrim and a wanderer, but they are also close cousins.

Pilgrims often have maps. They know where they are going. Wanderers often do not. The wanderer discovers the path by walking it.

Yet the two are not opposites. In fact, many pilgrims become wanderers, and many wanderers discover they have been pilgrims all along.

The pilgrim in The Way of a Pilgrim is both. He travels without a fixed route, yet he is moving toward something sacred.

Whether we call ourselves pilgrims, wanderers, or sojourners, we are all being shaped by the journey.

And all travelers need places to stop and rest.

Waypoints

Which brings me to the idea of a waypoint.

No one can wayfare continuously. Bashō stopped along the way. Pilgrims stop at monasteries and auberges. The Pony Express had relay stations and home stations. Hikers like me just haveta stop and sit on a rock here and there. Ultrarunners stop at aid stations. There are oases, wellsprings, safe harbors, waystations. Every wayfarer needs stopping points along the way.

On long races, say 100 miles, aid stations are set up for runners to eat or drink or change bandaids or clothes. Often runners have their own support crews who help pace them or make sure they eat or drink what’s needed during such a long endurance run over multiple terrains and weather conditions. Over 24 or 48 or more hours.

A waypoint is not a destination. You are not meant to live at a waypoint.
It is a stopping place along the way. The best waypoints offer hospitality, companionship, renewal, and perspective. They remind us who we are before sending us back onto the road. It gives us a chance to catch our breath and to prepare for the next leg of the journey.

Every pilgrim needs to take a load off at a soul aid station along the way. That’s what our contemplative services are for. That’s what a walk in the Boise foothills does. That’s what a summer concert or a family picnic or a trip to a museum can provide. These soul aid stations - forgive the endless metaphors - are also EV chargers. Battery plug ins.

On this lifelong journey of ours there will be side trips, and many of those will be where the fruit is hanging. Some will be unintended consequences. Others will lead to unfordable rivers, and we’ll have to find a way around. Those will be times when we’ll especially need waystations, where we can regroup. Rest. Message our spirit. Reconnect to our most profound, deepest, joy-producing self.

What waypoints have sustained you on your journey? Why were they?

A place, a person, a practice, a community, a prayer, a book, a trail, a song—what has helped you rest, reorient, and continue on your way?

What kind of wayfarer are you? Which one feels most joyous for you?

Do you travel with a map, like a pilgrim? Or do you discover the path by walking it? Or perhaps a little of both?

As we continue developing this book in public, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Does the metaphor of life as wayfaring resonate with you? Why or why not?

What does it illuminate about your own experience? And what, if anything, might it miss?

Your reflections will help shape future essays—and perhaps even the book itself.

Leave a comment

We are wayfarers. We are never done, we are always becoming. We are not and will never be perfect, but we can intentionally keep getting better along the trail. We don’t have to be finished, and certainly not a finished product for goodness’ sake.

We are still learning. We are still walking. We are wayfarers.

As Bashō wrote:

“Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.

An evening view at Mt. Angel Monastery, Oregon

Note: This essay was originally published on the Profound Living blog in January, 2025. As we build this messy elegance theme, I thought it the perfect time to reshare it here.

Haikus are elegant, as reading Patricia Leyko Connelly’s poem demonstrates. Just a few words in length, a haiku carries rich meaning. Each word must carry its own weight and contribute to the larger, but still slender, verse. Together, the few syllables comprising haikus² represent the Big Bang of the written word. A tiny haiku explodes with timeless, deep, and vast import. Some are humorous, some deadly serious, all are robust. Using another naturally occurring metaphor, each haiku is pregnant with meaning both for the one who conceived it and for the ones to whom it is delivered. The creation process for these evocative morsels continues as people read, reread, ponder, and consider them. Such is the generative destiny of all forms of art.

Haikus are an elegant form, perhaps the most elegant form, of poetry. Poetry as a genre lends itself to elegant expression through the written word. Haikus check all the boxes for the characteristics of elegance, and the practice of writing and reading haikus regularly elegancifies (see this for a definition) how we experience life and who we become as a person. Well-conceived and expressed haikus: 1) are timeless, 2) embody “simplicity plus capaciousness”³; and 3) are built on detailed description of observed phenomena wrapped subtly into a package of just a few, well-designed words which encapsulate underlying, generative, and profound questions and ideas. As in all practices, while anyone can write a haiku, mastering the craft requires consistent practice and growth over considerable time.

Judith Valente, along with Br. Paul Quenon and Michael Bever, wrote a book titled, The Art Of Pausing: Meditations For The Overworked And Overwhelmed.⁴ In it, the authors wrote haikus which speak to “one of the 99 names of God referred to in sacred texts.”⁴ Here are two which Judith wrote for the book:

God, the Friend

Day of solitude

Six wild turkeys come to stay

No one is alone

~Judith Valente

God, The Eternal

Pre-dawn silence

Earth murmurs ancient secrets

We listen, or not

~Judith Valente

In both poems, aspects of nature are included. Deeply felt words and expressions – solitude, Earth murmuring ancient secrets, listening, aloneness – are included. A turn of phrase – “no one is alone,” “we listen, or not” quickly brings a different perspective or an insight which gives the occasion a different interpretation.

This is what a timeless, subtle, well-and-parsimoniously-crafted, personally-interpreted-but-universally-relatable - yes elegant - haiku looks like.

As with all practices, we “become” what we do. One becomes a marathoner by running marathons. “I have run a marathon” means one has completed a marathon, but there is something closely related to one’s identity after making marathon-running a part of life rather than a one-off experience, impressive as it is. I have completed three marathons, years ago now, and I can accurately say I have run marathons, but it is the person who trains for and completes marathons as an ongoing part of life who has become a marathoner. Marathoner is who they are.

One can dash off a haiku a day, as I do too often, or one can make haiku writing a part of daily experience. One can approach life with, as Patricia Donegan calls it, a “haiku mind.”⁵ She said,

“A fine haiku presents a crystalline moment of heightened awareness in simple imagery, traditionally using a kigo or season word from nature. It is this crystalline moment that is most appealing. However, this moment is more than a reflection of our day-to-day life—it is a deep reminder for us to pause and to be present to the details of the everyday. It is this way of being in the world with awakened open-hearted awareness—of being mindful of the ordinary moments of our lives—that I’ve come to call ‘haiku mind.”

The haiku mind, as she described, is “the awareness to tune in to the vastness of the moment…when we can pause and relax in the moment, that is our haiku mind: the awakened, openhearted awareness that we can tap into. Every good haiku,” she wrote, “captures such a moment and is a reflection of our haiku mind.” She uses haiku, “not just as a literary form, but also as an awareness practice”.

In this sense, writing haikus can become a path for contemplative work and the present moment experience of simply emptying of minds so we can richly notice the world right in front of us. This too is elegant, and the process of creating the haiku from quieting, becoming aware, interpreting that awareness of direct experience through the spare form of a haiku, elegancifies our own being and becoming as well.

Haiku’s, with their minimalist structure, intimate revelation, and detailed-while-nuanced expression are parsimoniously sublime.

Haikus – reading or writing them – and other manifestations of elegance are available for everyone

As I previously reported, I asked Google alerts to send me links whenever a story about elegance popped up in the news. By far, the stories which come to me are about items or experiences that I couldn’t afford, nor could most folks I know afford, in a million years. High class fashion, expensive cars, celebrity celebrations – you get the idea – are what get reported and are what many of us think about when we think about the word elegance. If “expensive” were one of the principal attributes of what it means to be elegant then most of the world could never experience elegance.

But anyone can, it turns out. Writing or reading haikus can cost almost nothing. Think of the attributes of elegance and see if you can name some other ways that people of any income level can experience it. For me, tai chi comes to mind. tai chi originated in ancient China and is a practice involving slow, meditative, specific movements. As one becomes more proficient, more movements, known as ‘forms’, can be added to the routine. I have completed many times a wobbly version of the 24-movement routine from memory, which is a standard for beginners. My tai chi practice has waxed and waned over the last few years, but I count it as one of my anchors for a lengthy health span. Tai chi ties so much together – it’s meditative, simple-but-challenging, spiritual, something which can be practiced and improved over a lifetime. It is elegant and it is the opposite of the elite materialism of expensive consumption.

Inexpensive elegance is found in arts, crafts, and other physical items and I bet you could find some at an art fair or other places.

What are some examples of elegance that you could incorporate into your life?

What are some examples of elegance that you could incorporate into your life?

~ Art and poem by Michael Kroth

Afterword

I wrote my first haiku on January 21, 2019 when I began reading The Art of Pausing: Meditations for the Overworked and Overwhelmed, by Judith Valente, Brother Paul Quenon, and Michael Bever. Judith Valente, writing in the introduction, Pauses Written On Our Days, recommended writing a haiku poem every day. I immediately began writing a haiku every day. She recommended finding one or more people to share haikus amongst each other. “The haiku exchange,” she wrote, “is a way of building community and recognizing that none of us is alone, has a lock on truth or insight. After reading that, I very quickly reached out to Kelly Anderson and we began exchanging haikus, and soon added Davin Carr-Chellman. Kelly moved on to another art form, painting, and now makes beautiful, whimsical works of art. Amy Hoppock joined Davin and me and we have continued exchanging haikus monthly since September, 2019. We have made, as of this writing, 44 monthly recordings we call Haiku Narratives, where we share our reflections of each other’s poem. We even wrote a haiku book together, Framing the Moment: Haiku Conversations.⁶ The foreword to the book was beautifully written by . . . .

Wait for it . . . .

Judith Valente.

Since January 21, 2019, I have written a haiku most days. From the start, I made a pledge to myself that I would not worry about quality or how I might be judged by others or by myself. As a beginning haiku-ist I nearly always write using the traditional 5-7-5 syllable structure or a close iteration of it. I find the structure is freeing and the constraint forces me to be both creative and disciplined at once. Perhaps I will write haikus, as many do, in a less pre-set format as I continue to grow. To develop into deeper haiku writing I will need to, more and more, do as the master haiku writer Basho said, “To learn about the pine tree you must become one with the pine and drop your self-centered view”⁷ I stay close to nature in most of my haikus, but not always. I am not well versed in the history or the style of of haiku writing. I am clearly a journeyman here and slowly learning the craft, but I have become a haiku writer and it is part of who I am.

Question for you

What are some examples of elegance that you could incorporate into your life?

Leave a comment

I would love to hear your thoughts about this question and also about this post.

References

¹ Connelly, P. L. (2023). Sacredness Surrounds Us in Every Season: Contemplative Reflections in Haiku Prayers, Photos and Long Poems, p. 59.

² For a discussion about the number of English syllables or Japanese onji, sound symbols, found in haikus, see Chapter 8, The Form of Haiku, in Higginson, W. J., & Harter, P. (2013). The haiku handbook: how to write, teach, and appreciate haiku (25th anniversary ed.). Kodansha USA.

³ House, P. (2015). What is elegance in science? The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/what-is-elegance-in-science.

⁴ Valente, J., Quenon, P., & Bever, M. (2013). The art of pausing: meditations for the overworked and overwhelmed. ACTA Publications, pp. 11, 74, 158.

⁵ Donegan, P. (2008). Haiku mind: 108 poems to cultivate awareness and open your heart (1st ed.). Shambala, pp. xi, xiii, xv.

⁶ Hoppock, A. V., Kroth, M., & Carr-Chellman, D. (2021). Framing the Moment: Haiku Conversations.

⁷ As quoted in Donegan, P. (2008). Haiku mind: 108 poems to cultivate awareness and open your heart (1st ed.). Shambala, p. xii.

2019 Haiku Published in Profound Living

I was so taken with writing haiku, one-a-day, that I shared some of them in Profound Living. Looking back, I published a LOT of them. Here are some from 2019. Remember – I’m just a wet-behind-the-ears-eager-beginner here.

Three Haiku, https://www.profoundliving.live/three-haiku

Imperfect Am I https://www.profoundliving.live/imperfect-am-i

I Have A Floppy-Eared Dog https://www.profoundliving.live/i-have-a-floppy-eared-dog

Cracked Windows https://www.profoundliving.live/early-morning-prayer

Branches Break Fog-Day https://www.profoundliving.live/branches-break-fog-day

Black Pavement Ahead https://www.profoundliving.live/black-pavement-ahead

The Art of Pausing – My Experience https://www.profoundliving.live/the-art-of-pausing-my-experience

Heveled https://www.profoundliving.live/heveled

Neighborly Fence-Talk https://www.profoundliving.live/fivehaiku

Haiku Hodge Podge https://www.profoundliving.live/haiku-et-al

Fun with Haiku https://www.profoundliving.live/i-ll-take-a-cloud-float

I Wore My Raincoat https://www.profoundliving.live/i-wore-my-raincoat

So I feel alive https://www.profoundliving.live/so-i-feel-alive

Poetry from the Profound Bartender https://www.profoundliving.live/post-title68cf131c

Profound Silence https://www.profoundliving.live/profound-silence

Painted Blue’n Gray https://www.profoundliving.live/painted-blue-n-gray

A Lake of Diamonds https://www.profoundliving.live/a-lake-of-diamonds

Soon the whole field flows https://www.profoundliving.live/soon-the-whole-field-flows

Fall Haiku https://www.profoundliving.live/a-comforter-of-leaves

Moon Smiling https://www.profoundliving.live/moon-smiling

At 5:00 a.m. Books are Written https://www.profoundliving.live/at-5-00-a-m-books-are-written

The good life is a process, not a state of being.

It is a direction, not a destination.

~Carl Rogers, On Becoming A Person

OK, well, after much deliberation I thought I’d pretty much nailed the title of this book-of-mine-in-progress but then I remembered that pretty much anything in progress is actually going to progress. That’s the whole idea, right, that is if one wants to learn and grow along the way. And I do.

So I added “grace” to the title, and I think that adds a richness to the whole idea of becoming whole. (Think Audrey Hepburn in contrast with, say, Joan Crawford, or Andrea Sachs compared to Miranda Priestly, Annie Hall versus Claire Underwood, or Atticus Finch as the antithesis of Don Draper) After all, how whole can one be if part of their personality is mean-spirited or even vicious?

But that begged the question, can anyone — anyone — ever become whole? And if not, am I on a wild-goose chase here?

Last year I lost 30 pounds. This year, I’ve gained ten of those back. Causes? Well, I could blame a fall I took on March 1st that led to an ER visit on March 27th (where we all discovered I had blood clots — pulmonary embolisms — all across my lungs) which required me to stop exercising for a month, and only then slowly re-engaging with slow, regular walking and then hiking. But the real weight-gain culprit, I submit, was my capitulation to the “what the hell effect.”

Maybe you can remember a time when you committed to something - say running every day or dropping sugar from your diet. And you do great until, one day, you miss a day on the trail or eat that one Snickers bar. Then you say to yourself, well shoot, since I broke that commitment I can eat some Red Vines or those Milk Duds (some of my favs) and then I find myself hooked up to the metaphorical sugar IV. One missed jog becomes a skipped week and then a month and then “mind over mattress” (as I heard Stephen Covey call it) becomes the snooze button-over-alarm new habit. In fact, “counterregulation” is the term researchers use for the overindulgence that can come after breaking a commitment to oneself (to eating, exercising, and such).

In my own less-clinical terminology, it meant giving myself excuses to eat or drink anything I darn well wanted to, including candy bars, beer at bars, and bartering healthy versus unhealthy calories with myself. Bar none.

Well, some.

And this sad example is my way of laying out the case against the possibility that anyone can ever become completely whole. Just because I had the discipline and drive and joy of getting in shape, of really focusing on increasing my healthspan, it did not mean I was whole by any means. It only meant that part of me — my body — was a lot healthier than before, and could become not-as-healthy again. Other parts of my life, like re-engaging with the love of writing, had been on hold. When I took up this process of writing with purpose again, I moved it up on my priority list. The consequence was that healthiness lost my single-minded devotion.

And here I am.

The good news is that I can walk and chew gum at the same time (I went on a ten-mile hike just a week ago with an elevation gain of over 1600 feet), so I’m already moving into a more wholesome balance. But there’s still tons I’m not doing or not doing well. Welcome to the real world, Michael.

If I generalize this anecdotal information, I must conclude again that no one — at least no one I know of — has become whole. At best, they have become “wholer.” More whole.

Carl Rogers talked about this process as “becoming.” Rogers, back in the day, back in my Dad’s day, changed the way many therapists worked with clients by suggesting they should act more as compassionate facilitators than as authoritative experts. I remember Dad, the Director of Guidance and Counseling in the Wichita Public Schools and later a special education professor who became known in his field for working with the parents of special needs children, speak of Rogers and “Rogerian” therapy. In his classic book, On Becoming A Person: A Therapist’s view of Psychotherapy, Rogers wrote about therapy,

Can we apply that re-framing to ourselves? Instead of looking at who we are through the eyes of critique, asking how we can fix ourselves, can we instead consider how we can teach ourselves, and how we can be lifelong learners seeking to develop ourselves? Exit self-judgment. Enter exploration. Enter wholing.

You are invited to join me and others on this Messy Elegance journey.

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If we extended this idea of becoming wholer, we could look at “wholiness,” that is, becoming wiser, healthier, kinder, more graceful, more compassionate, more integrated, more deeply human.

At first glance, wholiness sounds like a typo for holiness. But I think the two are more like fraternal twins or cousins than born of different families.

Holiness and wholiness may be related but I don’t think they are the same thing. History is full of people widely regarded as holy who may not have been particularly whole. Saints, monks, reformers, ministers, and spiritual leaders have shown remarkable devotion, courage, discipline, and sacrifice while simultaneously struggling to become wholer. In fact, I’d suggest that one of the characteristics of these holy people is that they never consider themselves done, complete, arrived. They’re all workin’ on it.

Likewise, we all know people who seem remarkably whole — grounded, compassionate, emotionally healthy, relationally mature — who don’t consider themselves holy or even spiritual at all.

Holying (my term for becoming holier) in the Christian tradition, perhaps then, is the spiritual work to “Imitate Christ,” that is to become more Christlike. For many, if not all faith traditions, holying is perhaps that quest to become closer to the divine through intentional spiritual practice and experience.

Wholying is more oriented toward the lifelong learning process of becoming more and more healthy in all aspects of our lives - mind, body, spirit, socio-emotional (if you get a chance, you might want to check out an article my colleagues Davin Carr-Chellman and Carol Rogers-Shaw and I wrote about lifelong formation) - and the integration of all aspects of those into becoming a person of more and more depth, joy, and completeness. It’s an enflourishing process.

Holyness concerns sacred orientation; wholiness concerns caring for and developing the entire person. These are not exactly the same, but both are essential for each other.

Perhaps holiness and wholiness meet in grace.

Modern life pushes us toward goals, perfection (no errors, flawless), to more and more or to less and less. But we aren’t machines built to be one-trick ponies. We are organisms, ecosystems. We ebb. we flow. When I have to go to the doctor for this or that - especially for big ticket items - I’m amazed to find how integrated our bodies are, how they heal themselves almost always. Not-healing is the exception, not the rule.

We flourish when that integrated who-we-are includes it all - not just arteries and veins, but also deep thinking, wisdom, relationships, and meaningfulness.

Questions to think about.

What parts of your life are flourishing right now — and what parts quietly need attention?

What might becoming “wholer” look like in your own life these days?

What have you or others you have observed done to become “wholer” on your/their journey?

Leave a comment

Take-aways

1. No one is whole

The more I sat with this essay, the more I questioned the phrase “becoming whole.” It felt too final, too polished, too complete — as if somewhere out there existed as a perfect human being who had finally arrived. I’ve met some people I’ve admired mightily but never one who was perfect, or complete, or whole.

2. People can become “wholer.”

What I have met are people who are becoming wholer.

More joyful.

Richer in all the most important ways.

Living with more meaning.

Deeper relationships

Healthier, in various aspects of life.

3. Wholeness is not perfection.

Perfection is impossible, and the quest for perfection is a fool’s errand. But everyone can be wholer.

4. Holyness and Wholiness are different, but related

All of this led me into an unexpected rabbit hole. Somewhere along the way we split them apart. Health became medical. Holiness became something just for special people. Knowledge became the province of highly educated people or just older people. I increasingly think the deepest forms of flourishing are not extraordinary at all. They are profoundly ordinary, ordinarily profound.

5. Becoming wholer is all about enflourishing

Becoming wholer is not about becoming exceptional. It is about becoming more deeply and uniquely human. We can’t control what happens to us, but we have a lot of ability to influence the kind of people we wish to becoming.

The work of a lifetime is not about becoming perfect, it’s not to become something, but to move toward wholeness, to being.

Wholer.

Blue Sky

Heading down from the Aldape Summit 5-24-26

It would mean a lot to me if you would share this post with people you think might be interested in this kind of discussion/exploration.

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Notes

Rogers, C., On becoming a person. Houghton Mifflin, 1961. pp. 186-187

Polivy J and Herman CP (2020) Overeating in Restrained and Unrestrained Eaters. Front. Nutr. 7:30

Herman, C. Peter, et al. “The Illusion of Counter-Regulation.” Appetite [England], vol. 9, no. 3, December 1987, pp. 161–69

à Kempis, T. (2013). The Imitation of Christ (R. Challoner, Trans.). Tan Books & Pub.

*Kroth, M., Carr‐Chellman, D. J., & Rogers‐Shaw, C. (2022). Formation as an organizing framework for the processes of lifelong learning. New Horizons in Adult Education and Human Resource Development, 34(1), 26-36.

“Elegance is the harmonious integration of simplicity, refinement, and intentionality across diverse contexts, combining timeless beauty with functional sophistication.”

~ChatGPT Synthesized Definition

This essay was originally published on my Profound Living blog on January 22, 2025. I thought it would be useful to republish it here, with minor edits, as we continue to deepen the way we think about elegance, now in the context of Messy Elegance. For this version, I’m curious about your reactions to this process, the qualities it came up with, and the definition. What is missing? What would you add or change?

I wrote this essay in early 2025, and it was gratifying work as it helped me to see some themes and commonalities across the arenas where elegance is sought. And, as always, since then how I think about elegance has continued to deepen and change, which led to this project which, as you know, I’ve been calling “messy” elegance. I learned from this analysis but now see more aspects to elegance than I did “way back then,” all 17 months or so ago. But of course, that’s part of the joy of learning. It’s a lifelong, meaning-adding process and nothing is set in stone.

At the end of this essay I note some of qualities I think this analysis didn’t find but that I think are important and will need more exploration.

Now, to the essay, which hasn’t been changed except for comments and questions at the end.

My 2024 word was “Elegancing”, my motto and song were both “Take More Time, Cover Less Ground” (h/t Carrie Newcomer). My haiku was:

Camino backpack

Walking. Elegancing. One.

Taking what matters

~Michael Kroth

To tee that up, I wrote an essay about these declarations, and in particular spent some time there looking at what elegance means. I’d written about elegance twice in 2018 and had always planned to revisit this theme but it wasn’t until last year that the stars aligned, and I began to think about elegance more seriously. In my essay, I laid out some similarities and differences between minimalism, simplicity, and elegance; discussed what the qualities of elegance meant to me at that time; and proposed some areas for further research.

A definition that resonated with me at the time, and still, is Patrick House’s definition of elegance as, ““simplicity plus capaciousness.”¹

Google Alerts and Flipboard

What follows is a description and the results of a very unscientific (non) “study” of elegance. I decided that I had a very limited idea of what the word and concept of elegance meant and was used for, so in January, 2024, I created a daily Google Alert for the word, “elegance.” For these alerts, if you’ve never tried one, Google does its magic and looks for – actually monitors the web to find – when a word or phrase is used and then sends you a link to that source.

When I received alerts concerning elegance last year I sent some of them, the ones I thought added to my understanding of elegance, to a Flipboard magazine I called - wait for it - Elegance. Flipboard is an app that lets you store items from the internet that interest you or that you want to share with others. You create categories of items, which are called magazines, which you can make private (only you are able to see them) or public (so others can see them). So it’s a social app. I use it mainly as a holding pond for articles I find on the net that I want to keep for future reading or sharing, and I keep my magazines private.

I went back this month to see how many articles I’d collected about elegance in 2024, and there were over 40. I opened each one and copied its link. Then I eliminated, for this little analysis, videos and places I would have to sign up for. That left me 41 articles. So, as you can see, this was all a pretty subjective bit of data gathering.

Nonetheless, I thought there might be something to learn from all this so I brought in my (sometimes) trusty research partner, ChatGPT. I asked this AI program, using the 41 links to the articles as described above, to summarize the qualities of elegance, the places where elegance is used to describe something, and to synthesize all of that into a simple definition. Following is exactly what ChatGPT gave me. We’ll have a little discussion time after you’ve had a chance to review this.

A Summary of ChatGPT Analysis of Flipboard Elegance Links for 2024

Definition of Elegance

Elegance is the harmonious integration of simplicity, refinement, and intentionality across diverse contexts, combining timeless beauty with functional sophistication. It is characterized by a balance of form and purpose, exuding a sense of effortlessness, sophistication, and enduring appeal. Found in fashion, design, art, technology, architecture, and daily living, elegance transcends mere aesthetics to embody values of innovation, sustainability, and cultural resonance.

Qualities of Elegance Summary

Elegance is a multifaceted concept that transcends various domains, including interior design, fashion, technology, and lifestyle. A synthesis of the provided sources reveals several recurring qualities that define elegance:

1. Simplicity and Minimalism

Elegance often manifests through simplicity, where minimalistic designs and uncluttered spaces create a sense of sophistication. This approach emphasizes essential elements, avoiding unnecessary ornamentation.

2. Timelessness

An elegant design or style possesses a timeless quality, remaining relevant and appealing across different eras. This enduring nature is achieved by focusing on classic aesthetics rather than fleeting trends.

3. Attention to Detail

Meticulous attention to detail is a hallmark of elegance. Whether in fashion, interior design, or technology, refined details contribute to a cohesive and polished appearance.

4. Harmony and Balance

Elegance is characterized by a harmonious balance between various elements, ensuring that colors, shapes, and textures complement each other seamlessly. This equilibrium creates a pleasing and coherent visual experience.

5. Functionality and Practicality

Beyond aesthetics, elegance encompasses functionality. Incorporating practical features without compromising on style ensures that designs are both beautiful and useful.

6. Subtlety and Understatement

Elegant designs often employ subtlety, where understated elements convey sophistication without overt display. This restraint allows for a more profound appreciation of the design’s nuances.

7. Quality and Craftsmanship

High-quality materials and exceptional craftsmanship are integral to elegance. The use of superior materials and skilled workmanship ensures longevity and a premium feel.

By integrating these qualities, elegance achieves a refined and sophisticated essence that resonates across various fields and applications.

Themes from the Articles

1. Timeless Elegance

The enduring nature of elegance, especially in fashion, design, and art. Timeless elegance is often tied to simplicity, classic forms, and the enduring appeal of certain styles.

2. Elegance in Modern Innovation

Integrating elegance with cutting-edge technology or sustainable practices.

3. Interior Design and Spatial Elegance

Elegance as expressed in living spaces and architecture, focusing on simplicity, harmony, and transformative power.

4. Cultural and Artistic Representations of Elegance

Elegance in cultural events, artistic traditions, and public showcases.

5. Everyday Elegance

Finding elegance in routine and minimalism.

Arenas Where Elegance is Found

1. Fashion and Couture

Highlighting timeless pieces, seasonal collections, and the evolution of couture in different cultures.

2. Architecture and Design

Interior design, sustainable building concepts, and architectural tributes.

3. Technology and Innovation

The seamless integration of aesthetics with advanced functionality.

4. Art and Exhibitions

Elegance in historical and contemporary art forms, such as exhibitions and cultural showcases.

5. Daily Life and Minimalism

Mindfulness, slow living, and a minimalist approach to life.

6. Events and Celebrations

Gala events, music performances, and public gatherings as stages for sophistication.

Some Additional Thoughts

I had never used AI for this kind of summarizing before, but I was impressed. There is a lot to think about here. The caveats are, of course, that this is very limited information which was influenced by my subjective thinking each day. There are scholarly articles which use the idea of elegance which I haven’t tapped into yet. In the future, I’ll want to delve into those and other perspectives and examples of elegance to give a bigger, deeper, and more grounded look at elegance.

I do note that there is nothing in the categories or descriptions above that use the words “expensive.” As a person of modest means myself, and I believe I fall into the range of most people, I want to find out what “Regular People Elegance,” or “Relaxed Elegance” might look like and what it takes to achieve it. Elegance is thought of as “Je ne sais quoi” but I contend that with some thought and effort it’s more likely to be “Je suis élégant.”

What I’ve Been Learning Since Writing this Essay

Elegance is not locked in stone, not petrified. Things become more elegant (never perfectly elegant) and then become less elegant, perhaps frayed or out of style or beat up or becoming entangled or the situation changes completely. It’s not just fancy cars, buildings, interior design, or clothes. At its best its deeply human. It’s not perfect. It can be more than hard rock jewels, and more about the gems of integrated relationships, spirituality, ecology, and science - the ways processes work simply after the messiness has been wandered through, but also meaningfully. Lately, I’ve been thinking that elegance and messiness, at their best together, include grace, gracefulness, graciousness. And although we may come upon elegant rock formations or seashores, for us elegance must be intentionally developed. We must seek it, sustain it, improve upon it, develop it. Although elegance is undergirded by timeless principles, everything else changes. Most importantly, and this I already knew – it was a key for me before I even jumped into this line of thinking – elegance is available to everyone, in ordinary living.

And finally, I believe that the development of messy elegance is a lifelong learning project for each of us. It is a part, perhaps the process, of continuous improvement leading toward living a rich – in every important way – life. It recognizes we are messy, mess up, messify our lives; that problems are messy – some say wicked problems – and that working through elegancifying principles is likely to move us toward bedrock, towards the peace of mind that comes from “getting it all together.”

Questions

As you can tell, this project is evolving, and I’d love you to be a part of it. I’d genuinely love to hear your thoughts:

• What connects with you and your experience in this exploration of elegance?

• What feels missing?

• Where have you run into what might be called “messy elegance” in ordinary life?

Leave a comment

I’ve come to think that, for me, the best kinds of messy elegance often come from sitting quietly my myself of with a person I care for, with a cup of coffee or a beer, a book or journal, or just wonderful conversation.

Sources and Resources

*As with some of the thinking and organizational work behind this project, the images in this essay were developed in conversation with AI tools (ChatGPT/DALL·E), with final selection, editing, and use determined by the author.

¹House, P. (2015). What is elegance in science?. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/what-is-elegance-in-science.

But wait, there’s more!

My friend Patricia Connelly invited me to talk about this Messy Elegance Project on a zoom session. I was thrilled she asked. It will be free and you are invited. All you have to do is sign up and join the meeting on June 13th. At the session, I’ll tee up the discussion by talking about this project, some ideas about messy elegance, and have opportunities for us to think about it and talk about this idea and practice as it relates to our own lives. We’ll learn together.

Here is the invitation Pat sent out. If you would like to attend, please send a note to her email address below.

I’m looking forward to an engaging conversation, and so appreciate Pat for setting this up - I hadn’t even thought about doing something like this before she suggested it!

From Pat:

I’m inviting you to a special Zoom conversation with Michael Kroth. Michael is a Professor of Education at the University of Idaho..he has co-authored 9 books including Framing the Moment: Haiku Conversations.

Join me for this special event;

Saturday June 13th 2pm Eastern Time

On Zoom

Hosted by Patricia Connelly

Sponsored by @The Weston Community Church on the Hill.

This is a Free Will offering event.

Donations may be mailed to: Church on the Hill, P.O. Box 105 Weston, Vermont,05161

If you have any questions please email me at patssong43@gmail.com

You can find Michael’s writings on these sites here below.

www.profoundliving.live.

I look forward to hearing from you!

Peace and blessings,

Patricia Connelly

Should I add “grace” to the book title? Perhaps in this way:

The Messy Elegance of Becoming Whole

Making Your Way Toward a Life of Grace and Depth

with the tagline:

A companion for people learning to live life more deeply

I’ll be exploring grace in future essays here with you. For now, here’s a poem I started while hiking Seaman’s Gulch trail yesterday and finished (at least for now) this morning.

Seaman’s Gulch Trail, 5-9-26, Photo by Michael Kroth

Graced

There will come a time, very sooner or very later

when I will no longer be able to hike,

and therefore no longer able to stroll amidst

the wildflowers and green grasses

along the trails across streams

and up into the mountains.

And when that day comes

through my grief and sadness

I will always know that I have known

The nature of what’s second nature

the revelational joy

found in sage and sunrise

in lupine and morning light

found on

paths of dirt

There will come a time, very sooner or very later

when you pass

and I will grieve

tears will fall

I will shake

but will have known

love

will have spent time

together

together

With you

auguring

time together

timelessly

There will be a time very soon or very later

when you and I pass from each other

And in passing, we two then will pass

in to

into

The best of both worlds

There has come a time, after sooner. before later

When

I count my gifts and wealth

not in coin

but in lives I join

moments purloined

little joys

When that day came

That day that graced me

Embraced me

Interlaced me

I found what I’d always

Left unexplored

Felt what I’d always

Left untouched

Sensed what I’d always

Left unwhiffed

Relished what I’d always

Left unsavored

Noticed what I’d left

unseen

Heard songs I’d

Lost in the wind

Life, life!

Lost on me

Until that day

Today

That today which comes and goes

Sooner-later-now

Hiking with my friend Dave, Boise foothills, 5-6-26, photo by Michael Kroth

Lupine

Hiking with my friend Dave, Boise foothills, 5-6-26, photo by Michael Kroth

I would love to know your thoughts about grace. Here’s a question for you. Does it add or detract to add grace, and its qualities of beauty, the divine, and more to the ways in which we consider messy elegance at it’s best? Why?

Leave a comment

I would value it - it would be an honor - if you would share this with others who might find it useful, and to add you to our list of subscribers if you would like to stay engaged with Profound Living and Messy Elegance.

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This video tees up the essay and the questions I have at the end of the essay.

As I develop this idea of messy elegance, I thought it might be helpful to share how I came to it. I started thinking about elegance a few years ago and wrote a couple essays about it, which I’ve posted here earlier. Then, when attending one of Judith Valente’s excellent annual “Prologue to Your New Year” retreats one of the assignments, after reflection, was to pick a word for the year. I chose “Elegancing.” This is the essay I wrote about it then. Next week, I’ll share some very amateur analysis I did and wrote about elegance.

My Word for 2024

Elegancing

My 2024 Motto and Song

“Take more time, cover less ground.”

~song by Carrie Newcomer

2024 Haiku

Camino backpack

Walking. Elegancing. One.

Taking what matters

~Michael Kroth

“Elegance.”

It just popped into my mind, like it had been fermenting, rolling around in the back of my mind.

I was at one of Judith Valente’s wonderful retreats, Writing The Prologue To Your New Year,^{1 *} and she had asked us to review 2023, to identify events which had been significant for us, and to look for patterns or places where we felt God touching our lives. She let us know that on the day of the retreat we would share “share a word that we would like to keep close to our heart as a kind of guiding light for us in the coming year.”²

See Judy’s essay about the retreat, Words to Live By in 2024³

And there it was for me. Elegance.

Since then, I’ve been playing with the word. Elegance. Elegant. Elegancer, Eleganting. To Elegant. Eleganted. Elegantly. One who elegances, making this or that eleganter. The elegant (as in, a type of person or group of people). To elegance. Elegancive.

Adjective. Adverb. Noun. Verb. var.

I imagine there will be more.

I had written a couple of essays about elegance in 2018, Elegance and Naturally Elegant⁴, and had always intended to come back to explore this idea but had never. Now, it seems, I must.

Here I will just tee up some thoughts about elegance which I plan to elaborate in later writing.

Minimalism, Simplicity, Elegance

What are the differences and similarities between the terms minimalism, simplicity, and elegance? They aren’t exactly the same, I don’t think, but they are related. We’ll start with Joshua Becker, who I have followed over the years and learned much from. He defines minimalism as “At its core, being a minimalist means intentionally promoting the things we most value and removing everything that distracts us from it.” He says simplicity is, “. . . about creating space in your life for what matters most. It’s about clearing the clutter from our homes and hearts so we can live with intention and purpose.”

As a starting point for elegance, I like Patrick House’s definition, “simplicity plus capaciousness.”⁵

It will be fun to play with these and related ideas.

The Qualities of Elegance

For now, I’ll just list some of the qualities of elegance (or perhaps these are just characteristics I aspire to…) I’m thinking about. They are ideas which resonate with me.

Elegance to me today means:

• Simplicity Plus (the capaciousness part). Just the right amount, not too much and not too little – Goldilocks, lagom (see footnote 6), the Golden Mean (Aristotle)

• Harmony out of messiness – everyone fits together, is aligned, unified, leverages the other parts, together they become something more than each element, hence there is synergy involved, appears effortless

• Four “C’s”: Calling (as in what am I called to do or be?), Culling, Curating, Contributing

• Style – has taste, has voice, embodies one’s identity

• Adaptive – rests on principles of simplicity, adapts to change in self or situation

• Paradox: Serious Fun, Dignity and irreverence, sophistication and “meat dresses” (well...I’m not absolutely sure about this one, but will leave it in for musing upon)

• Intentionality. Purposeful action.

• The Beauty of Depth, the Depth of Beauty

• The manifestation of suffering and love

Some Arenas to Explore Elegance

• Elegant Day-to-Day Living

• Relational Elegance – Elegant Relationships

• Design Elegance – elegant design for healthy, spiritual, loving, and wise living over the life course.

• Elegant Theory, Thought, Theology

My Motto for 2024 – “Take More Time, Cover Less Ground” by Carrie Newcomer⁷

During the retreat, Judy played Carrie Newcomer’s song “Take More Time, Cover Less Ground,” and immediately I knew it was what I needed to keep front and center for 2024. At the risk of being too autobiographical (heck, that’s never stopped me before), my whole life has been a struggle between being messy and organized, between having razor-like focus and undisciplined wandering, between scattered exploration and pulling disparate ideas and concepts and what I’ve learned together into an organized, more simple way. I am eager to learn and therefore am susceptible to the distraction of a new idea or article or author or this….or that…or...

That typically means I cover a lot of ground more superficially than I want, without doing the depth of work (see Cal Newport Deep Work) I must try to take all that and create something that can make a positive difference.

I’m not sophisticated and I don’t aspire to be in any fancy way, so that’s a problem I’ll have to think about. Simple, humble, elegance is what I’m interested in knowing more about and, through that, knowing more about myself.

You should listen to Carrie’s song; I love the music and the lyrics.

We live in a world careening toward superficiality and momentous change with little collective pondering and considerable reaction to the headline of the moment. These are momentous moments and terrifying times. We have complex problems the solutions of which are too often hijacked by political expediency, powerful people, and a culture that more and more seems to value immediate gratification and to forget about long term value and viability.

We need elegant solutions to the challenges we face both personally and as a society, and we need the discipline to carry them out. That means taking the time it takes. Working toward developing an elegant mindset, values, and principles for living seems at least one possible approach.

Questions for you

What does elegance mean to you - in real life, not just in theory? Is it reserved for certain people or can any one of us become more elegant?

Have any examples of messy elegance you have observed or experienced come to mind? I’d love for you to share stories, a reflection, even photos about them if you have them. I want to develop a deep list of examples to share with others. Rest assured, if you share an example here and I use it I’ll be sure to attribute it to you.

Leave a comment

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* Judith Valente, https://www.profoundliving.live/contemplative-living, The Art of Pausing, https://www.profoundliving.live/the-art-of-pausing-my-experience I have been following Judy, read her books and essays, learned from her (she was instrumental in inspiring me to develop a daily haiku-writing practice), and attended a number of her retreats over the last years and knew it would be a deeply reflective, rich experience.3 I knew there would be music, poetry, reflection, and discussion, all undergirded by what I think of as “the story of the retreat,” a beautiful presentation she’s puts together, written with care, personal examples, and imbued with the love she obviously has for her topic. Judy, a writer by profession, weaves the themes and history and stories together into something special. She is a gracious, generous, and wise person.

Footnotes

1 Writing the Prologue to Your New Year, https://www.cenaclesisters.org/event/new-revised-writing-the-prologue-to-your-new-year/

2 Communication to workshop participants prior to the retreat, 1-9-24

3 Valente, J (1-14-24), Words to Live By in 2024, https://judithvalente.medium.com/words-to-live-by-in-2024-b78ce2b88332

4 Kroth, M. (both of these were published in 2018). Elegance, https://www.profoundliving.live/elegance, and Naturally Elegant, https://www.profoundliving.live/naturally-elegant

5 Becker, J. (2019). What is minimalism? https://www.becomingminimalist.com/what-is-minimalism/; Becker, J. (n/d). Inspiring Simplicity. Weekend Reads.https://www.becomingminimalist.com/inspiring-simplicity-0124b/; House, P. (2015). What is elegance in science?. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/what-is-elegance-in-science.

6 Wikipedia, Lagom, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagom

7 Newcomer, C., Take More Time, Cover Less Ground,

Take a listen:

Take More Time Cover Less Ground”

by Carrie Newcomer

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Where in your life are you being invited not just to repair—but to heal and nurture?

What does it mean to repair a broken world?

What is our role? Emily Dickinson has a take on this.

If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain;
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.

~ Emily Dickinson

Earth Day, first held on April 22, 1970, marked the birth of the modern environmental movement. Twenty million Americans—10% of the U.S. population at the time—took to the streets to protest the damage of industrial development.

More than fifty years later, our home—our environment—is still at risk.

The work is still unfinished.

A couple of weeks ago, at our weekly Candlelight contemplative service, Lindsay Cox shared a beautiful reflection with us about tikkun olam. Tikkun olam in Jewish thought is the idea that the world is unfinished—that it needs healing—and that we humans have a spiritual responsibility to be a part of that.

But tikkun olam is far more than a call to heal the earth proper. Healing also includes restoring justice, extending mercy, and more.

This is also the deep commitment of other religious traditions,

• to justice, to mercy, to care for the earth,

• to dignity for the poor,

• to the preciousness of every human life,

• to internal healing as a means of mending the external world.

Tikkun olam does not require agreement on doctrine.

It requires agreement—and partnership—in responsibility.

In Jesus, she went on to say, we see tikkun olam embodied, as He:

• restores people to community.

• heals bodies and relationships.

• challenges unjust systems.

• refuses to separate love of God from love of neighbor.
  

No one of us can complete this repair, but each of us has a responsibility to work toward it.

Such beautiful words from Lindsay—for a world that badly needs tikkun olam. That badly needs us to be fully engaged.

Tikkun olam is the moral and spiritual practice of bringing wholeness out of what is fractured—through healing and through the steady work of nurturing life.

In my last essay, Repairing the Earth, Part I, I wrote about the need to stop breaking the world. To stop destroying it.

That sounds obvious.

It isn’t.

Because much of what harms the earth does not feel like harm—or like destroying at all.

It feels like convenience. Progress. Normal life.

The damage takes many forms.

• Sometimes it is small—tossing trash out of a car, a careless word, wasteful buying

• Sometimes it is large—violence, injustice, displacement, war
  

But all of it affects not just things—but people, relationships, and the living world itself.

We often use the language of repair. We want to fix it.

And we should.

Something has been broken.

But the word “repair,” has deeper meaning than in the ways we often think about it.

Repair suggests a mechanical fix—tighten this, replace that, restore what once was.

Life does not work that way.

Repair here means much more than that.

It goes further.

We need healing. Animals need healing. Ecosystems need healing.

And beyond healing, all that lives need nurturing—the patient, attentive work of protecting, helping life take hold again, growing, becoming healthy, reproducing.

Healing and nurturing have a deeper feel than how we often think about repairing.

In medicine, healing is described as a complex and dynamic process.
It unfolds—often with support, time, and care.

There is something we’ve long sensed—and science continues to confirm:

Life carries within it a capacity to renew itself.

Living systems make and remake themselves. Which means healing is not something we impose.

It is something life already knows how to do.

But we must stop getting in the way. Stop harming the natural processes of Mother Nature. Stop destroying.

And we must support it.

And nurture it.

I was struck by a recent reflection from Father Richard Rohr. He wrote:

Lately, I’ve been reflecting on something so simple that it almost feels obvious: Nearly everything that Jesus does in his ministry is to heal broken people . . .
. . . He did not heal people so they could go to heaven; he healed people so they could live fully in this world now…We are living in a time that is crying out for healing. We see grief, anger, and despair—but also courage and compassion, as people step forward as instruments of healing and love.

This is often quiet work. The work that rarely makes headlines.

Not bombast. Not threat. Not deal-making. These are strategies that may, or may not, lead to repair.

To healing.
To nurturing.
To loving.

Allowing systems to recover.
Protecting what is fragile.
Tending so people—and life—can grow.

This kind of work is often slow.

Often invisible.

But this is how the world is mended.

Not all at once.
Not by leaving it to someone else.

But by each of us—choosing, again and again—

to bring more care,
more attention,
more life

into what is broken…
and into what must be nurtured to remain alive.

*This is a later version of a presentation for the Candlelight Service at the Cathedral of the Rockies, Boise, Idaho on 4-21-26

So I’ll ask again:

Where in your life are you being invited not just to repair—but to heal and nurture?

I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Leave a comment

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Download Messy Elegance Field Notes for Repairing the Earth, Part II

This week, as Earth Day approaches, I’ve been ruminating about what it means to repair the Earth. We have two contemplative services in our church each week, and our theme for both just now is is the idea of Tikkun Olam - a Hebrew phrase “connected with human responsibility for fixing what is wrong with the world.” That’s a huge topic, and though it’s all interconnected - including care and spirit and morality and justice, but here I’m just pondering about fixing the material Earth.

Here is a video - featuring (part of) St. Francis’ Canticle of the Creatures - to tee this up.

I remember in the early 70’s my college buddy Matt and I were driving down to his hometown in Eunice, New Mexico. We were heading down a rural two-lane road, chatting it up as friends will, and I casually tossed an empty bottle out of the car window—just as normal as normal could be in those days.

Tossing trash out of cars, with nary a thought about it.

But something made me think twice about it.

So we turned the car around. Went back to the scene of the crime, though I’m not sure littering was even a crime yet back then. I got out of the car and picked the bottle up.

It was a small thing.

But it was the first time the whole, new-to-many-of-us idea that we were littering the Earth hit me in a way that changed my behavior. Not sure why. The first Earth Day, on April 22, 1970 had been celebrated just three or four years before, and the ball started rolling toward protecting our environment (check out the history of Earth Day here.)

And of course, the values of people like my grandparents, who owned a small farm, were all about conserving the land, not wasting anything, and protecting the water and so much more.

But two generations away from the farm and living in town, many people like me were blithely unaware that bottle by bottle by wrapper by wrapper nature was becoming strewn with trash. And growing up in Kansas, people like me really hadn’t experienced air or water pollution yet.

But something had clicked, and I realized I needed to do better.

I think that’s where repairing the Earth begins. None of us, at least anyone I know personally, intentionally wants to hurt our planet or contribute to global warming, just about everyone wants to see this beautiful gift we have been born into remain beautiful into the future. Some people, of course, just would use the resources for personal gain at the expense Mother Earth. But just take a walk in Boise’s foothills some morning and you’ll quickly connect to the beauty of a pollution-free sunrise, the the crisp air of a spring day, and perhaps even feel a part of something remarkable.

So today, I’m focusing on just one aspect—the material world—of repairing our home, Mother Earth. Lots of people have addressed this. Here’s my take.

For me, the first step is simple:

Stop destroying it.

Stop blowing things up. We don’t need more war-produced rubble.

Stop making and buying and tossing things we don’t need into landfills or oceans that don’t need them either.

Stop stripping away environmental protections that we already know work.

Stop kicking the costs of reducing the impact of human-caused global warming down the field in the name of making or keeping some coin now, just to hand the repair bill to the next generation.

And we humans are part of this Earth too—so stop killing people, directly or indirectly, as if they don’t matter.

I said it was simple, but I didn’t say it would be easy. Or, realistically, accomplishable. But there’s a lot of room for conservativism, or progressivism, or however you want to label this idea of protecting and nurturing that which we have been gifted and have responsibility for.

From the beginning, we’ve been given a responsibility.

Not as owners of this magnificent creation—
but as stewards.

We are told in Genesis that humanity was placed in the garden “to till it and keep it.”

To care for it.
To protect it.

And guess what?

we’ve known about environmental damage for a long time.

In the late 1970s, after another energy crisis, with the price of gas at the pump, if you could get any gas at all, skyrocketing—President Jimmy Carter stood in front of the country and said what we were facing wasn’t just an economic problem, but a moral one.

He called that energy crisis the “moral equivalent of war.”

He called for energy conservation, energy efficiency, and a long-term move away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy.

And it’s worth asking—what if we had stayed with that guidance? Would we be worried about gas prices going up today? Could we just ignore blockades now that stop the flow of oil in order to leverage power? If we had dove into that call for action, would we even see any human-caused climate change at all?

We’ll never know, will we?

Would we be in this situation today - still being throttled by the need for oil - had we made renewable energy and conservation a national priority and over time part of our national identity through living the practices and values of purchasing what we really need, items that will last, and conserving rather than easy-to-buy-and-toss consuming?

Woulda’s, coulda’s, and shoulda’s are history, sunk cost, but we can learn from them. What’s the best time to plant a tree? 20 years ago. The next best time - right now.

I realize this is not a small ask, to stop destroying the Earth. After all:

More than 8 million tons of plastic enter the oceans every year
Air pollution contributes to 7–8 million premature deaths every year
Forests the size of Iceland are being lost—15 billion trees, net, are lost every year

But you already know all that.

And so much more.

This isn’t abstract.

This is measurable.
This is happening.
And this is because of us.

And yet, when we act—things change.

In Los Angeles, smog once made it hard to breathe and hard to see. Today, many major pollutants have fallen dramatically. Ohio’s Cuyahoga River was so polluted it once caught fire. Today, it supports life again. The Bald Eagle once fell to just a few hundred nesting pairs. Today, it has returned in great numbers.

Even the ozone layer—once a global crisis—is healing.

These improvements came through human action - they didn’t just happen.

So we absolutely know this—what we do or don’t do matters. Repair is possible.

Repair is possible . . . until it isn’t.

Once species disappear—they are gone.
Once glaciers melt—they won’t return anytime we’ll be around for.

And in fact, nothing is ever restored to what it was, is it? Sometimes we can cobble something together. Sometimes it can even be better than it was. Often it’s not. But it’s never the same.

Damage accumulates. And we don’t always know when we’ve crossed the line of permanent brokenness until we’re past it.

There’s a line from an old advertisement:

“You can pay me now… or pay me later.”

Turns out—that principle isn’t just about car repair.

The cost of prevention or repair, after all, is coming either way.

But sometimes . . . paying later is no longer possible.

We won’t be able to pay our debts. We won’t be able to fix Social Security. And, the calamitous one hanging over all of us, we won’t be able to stop global warming and Mother Nature will just have to run her course.

Beneath all of this mess is something more profound.

This isn’t just a physical, environmental issue.

It’s moral. It’s spiritual. This relationship we have with the Earth—this stewardship—is a sacred covenant.

I look at caring for the Earth, preventing damage to it, and repairing what is broken not just as “the moral equivalent of war,” but as a spiritual practice. Practices, we know, never lead to perfection but, with persistence and diligence and starting once more—and then once more, and then again, and then . . . —after missing the mark, lead to improvement.

It’s not the easy path, but it’s the way.

Like most things—physical health, the health of the economy, the health of important relationships, spiritual growth—caring for the Earth takes effort over time. It can’t be bought by making and breaking and re-making “deals” capriciously or for short-term gain, by cutting down forests and expecting trees to magically regrow right away, by spending more than you take in until the debt service is more than you can keep up with.

Again and again, we face the same choice:

short-term comfort,
or long-term well-being.

Sacrifice,
or indulgence.

What we want now,
or what we want most.

The traditions call these virtues.

Prudence.
Temperance.
Fortitude.

Yes, we are talking about character here, and together, these virtues form something simple but demanding . . .

. . . the willingness to sacrifice now for the sake of what comes later. We can pay now…or we can pay a much larger, perhaps existential, cost later.

The cost will come due one way or another.

These words from Spiritual Ecology: The Cry of the Earth, written over a decade ago, still ring true:

“The Earth is in distress, and is calling to us, sending us signs of the extremity of its imbalance—through earthquakes and tsunamis, floods and storms, unprecedented heat and drought.
There are now indications that its ecosystem as a whole may be approaching a tipping point—an irreversible change with unforeseeable consequences.
Until we go to the root of our sense of separateness, there can be no healing.
And the deepest part of that separateness lies in our forgetfulness of the sacred nature of creation—which is also our own sacred nature.”

So that’s Step One for repairing the Earth—Stop Destroying It.

Next week, Step Two. Nurturing the Earth.

Question

What are the most important things we can do individually to repair the Earth?

Leave a comment

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*This essay was adapted from an earlier presentation for the Candlelight Service at the Cathedral of the Rockies, Boise, Idaho on 4-14-26

References

Earth Day History
Genesis 2:15 (Stewardship)
Jimmy Carter – Energy Crisis Address (1977)
Jimmy Carter – Crisis of Confidence Speech (1979)
Global Waste Data – World Bank

Smog in Early Los Angeles: From Crisis to Control
Air Pollution and Health – World Health Organization
Forest Loss Data – Global Forest Watch
Cuyahoga River Recovery – U.S. EPA
The Cuyahoga River Caught Fire at Least a Dozen Times, but No One Cared Until 1969

Bald Eagle Recovery – U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service
Ozone Layer Recovery – UNEP
Tikkun Olam Explanation – My Jewish Learning
Spiritual Ecology: The Cry of the Earth (2014)

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Under The Harvest Moon

Under the harvest moon,

When the soft silver

Drips shimmering

Over the garden nights,

Death, the gray mocker,

Comes and whispers to you

As a beautiful friend

Who remembers.

Under the summer roses

When the flagrant crimson

Lurks in the dusk

Of the wild red leaves,

Love, with little hands,

Comes and touches you

With a thousand memories,

And asks you

Beautiful, unanswerable questions.

~Carl Sandburg, Harvest Poems

Photo by Gary Fultz on Unsplash

To me—no expert in the science of nature—there is nothing quite so elegant as the living world.

Even the bright colors, the loud squawks, the restless pacing of animals—each seems shaped by necessity.

Nothing extra. Nothing wasted.

Life, in its unfolding, appears refined by the quiet discipline of survival.

But it’s messier than that.

In a New Yorker essay, Patrick House suggests that nature is not always elegant. Evolution does not necessarily produce the best solution—only one that works. As neuroscientist William Newsome observes, evolution “just seizes on convenient solutions… and uses them again and again . . . They get frozen in place, reproduced, and used again and again.”

Not perfection—just persistence. Even Francis Crick, winner of the Nobel Prize for discovering the structure of DNA, once made an elegant—but incorrect—conclusion.

Thirty years later, he reflected that it is

“. . . very rash to use simplicity and elegance as a guide in biological research.”

If nature does not always arrive at the most elegant solution—and if even our best minds can mistake elegance for truth—what hope do we have of making sense of the complexity of our own lives?

No philosophical treatise or mathematical formula can rival the complexity of a human brain—or even an ant making its way through the day. We understand parts of the world. But what we do not know still dwarfs what we do.

Still, we continue to learn. It makes life exciting and rich and infinitely interesting.

We can, however, learn how to apply lessons from nature to our own human challenges, as organizations like the Biomimicry Institute have shown. Nature is our teacher, and we are the students, the beneficiaries. Once a species is gone, so are all the untaught lessons we might have learned from it.

Despite muffing conclusions from time to time, science continues as a process of testing, failing, revising, and trying again.

And from that messy process, something remarkable occasionally emerges: an elegant idea. Einstein’s E = MC² is an elegant way of expressing analysis that is far beyond nearly all of us.

The elegant is not the superficial, but rather “simplicity plus capaciousness” as House characterizes it. That gets at it, I think, in all its richness.

How elegant is a harvest moon, resting languorously in an autumn sky? How simple, love? How essential, “a beautiful friend who remembers”?

How profound, in its breadth and depth and presence, is the elegant?

Perhaps that is one of Sandburg’s “beautiful, unanswerable questions”.

My copy.

Questions for you:

Can you think of some simple conclusions you have come to that may be far messier, deeper, and more complex than they first appear?

I mourn the losses we see in nature, the beauty of it and what we can learn from it. How about you?

Leave a comment

Notes

An earlier version of this essay was published October 5, 2018 on my Profound Living blog.

God Without A Face, Finding A Way. Peter Bolland

What Is Elegance In Science?, The New Yorker, Patrick House, August 17, 2015

Sandburg, C. (1960). Harvest poems, 1910-1960. Harcourt.

Click this link to watch a video about Biomimicry.

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I have been thinking about elegance, which has evolved into this messy elegance project. This essay was first posted on my blog on September 21, 2018.

Photo by H&CO on Unsplash

el·e·gance

1. the quality of being graceful and stylish in appearance or manner; style.

synonyms: style, stylishness, grace, gracefulness, taste, tastefulness, sophistication.

2.the quality of being pleasingly ingenious and simple; neatness.

Source: Merriam-Webster

The first known use of the term “elegance” was in 1510 according to Merriam-Webster, but in 1504 according to the Oxford English Dictionary, though it was spelled “elygance”. It was borrowed from the French, “elegance”, which in general meant, “desirable or agreeable refinement”.

I like the term “simplicity” better than the term “minimalism” and the term “elegance” has some qualities of simplicity that I want to explore. All three of these ideas – at their essence, involve removing all that gets in the way of living life fully and deeply, and instead keeping and acquiring just what will facilitate what is meaningful – move us toward a more profound, rich-in-all-the-ways-that-are-important, life. St. Teresa of Avila, said, “The closer one approaches to God, the simpler one becomes”. Occam’s Razor , also called the “law of parsimony” says that if there are two competing theories, the simpler explanation is the one to be preferred. Audrey Hepburn’s iconic “LBD” worn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, has been a prototype for elegance ever since.

Seeking the simple and elevating the elegant are ways to get to the core, to the center, of what really matters.

Simplicity and elegance have much in common. They are, perhaps, the same, but with different emphases. They both suggest a lack of embellishment. They both use just what is needed, and nothing more. Both remove that which is not needed. Both the simple and the elegant can be costly or inexpensive, of high quality or utilitarian quality. An elegant shirt is a simple one. Elegance has more of a sense of “grace” and “sophistication” and simple may or may not be graceful or sophisticated or stylish. An elegant solution is, perhaps, a simple explanation after fully considering a complex issue. A simple solution may be that too, but may also be a simple explanation, simply considered. Thoreau wished for simple life, to live life most fully. As he famously said:

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms...”

Photo by Yilei (Jerry) Bao on Unsplash

Though most people will not choose to live a “Spartan-like” life, as Thoreau explored, perhaps some may think about a more “elegant life”. Such a life would be built not on the idea that “the one with the most toys wins”, but on the idea, perhaps, that the one with the most elegant life, lives most richly.

We will continue to explore these powerful and beautiful ideas of minimalism, simplicity, and elegance.

I would love to hear your thoughts about this essay, elegance, and messy elegance.

Here are some prompts.

Where have you felt elegant?

Where have you observed it?

What qualities of elegance did you notice?

Leave a comment

This gorgeous photo by Marc Christensen exemplifies simple, elegant beauty.

Notes

*The video will refer to my words of the year in 2004 and 2005, but they were actually in 2024 and 2025.

This essay was originally posted on my blog, Profound Living with Michael Kroth, on September 21, 2018.

More about the LBD here.

Here is a link to Judith Valente’s Substack newsletter and to her essays on Medium. She’s a gem.

Dictionary, O. E. “elegance, n.” , Oxford University Press.

Elegance. (n.d.). Retrieved September 21, 2018, from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/elegance

Seeking the simple and elevating the elegant are ways to get to the core, to the center, of what really matters.

From Lamentations—words spoken by a people in exile:

“Restore us to yourself, O Lord,

that we may be restored.”

Last year we had a problem in our house.

Our water heater began to leak—not all at once, but slowly, quietly, inside the wall behind it. It was the kind of leak you don’t notice right away.

Until you do.

And what struck me most in the days that followed was not the damage itself—but how long restoration takes.

It’s not immediate.

It’s not clean.

It’s MESSY and EXPENSIVE!

It’s not simple.

Even for this relatively small project.

This wasn’t something I could do myself, so I watched the experts open the wall, remove the damage, then set up the drying out (and drying, drying, drying while I twiddled my fingers), until they could finally begin to rebuild.

We’ve seen how easy it is to break things.

We’ve seen wars of choice and wars we didn’t choose. Fate, accident, intention.
We’ve seen systems and norms and ways of doing things tossed aside without a second thought, and we’ve seen them broken after considerable thought, because they were already broken. We’ve seen long term relationships with trusted allies or supporters intentionally degraded. Fate, accident, intention.

It’s easy to cut, it’s much harder to heal.

To me, that is a lesson that we should always take care, think of all the consequences - good or bad, and break the status quo only after deep deliberation.

And these days, unlike the days when my grandmother would darn and redarn our socks until there just wasn’t any sock left, these are days where people are more likely to just patch things over, to simply put a coat of paint on top of the rust, and then to move on. Instant results, no worrying about the long term deficit or the pay me now or pay me later kicking the ball down the field costs to our environment of climate change. But there will be a payment later. For sure.

Things break.

And sometimes we feel it closer to home—in our personal relationships,
in our health, in our work, in our families and friends.

It only takes a moment for something to break. It doesn’t take much—sometimes just a word spoken too quickly, a silence held too long, or a fracture that forms between people.

And rebuilding trust and health and all those matters that are important to us takes a long time, sometimes forever.

I remember many years ago when my grandmother passed.

She lived in the little town of Winfield, Kansas where my parents met and fell in love. We had gathered to help my mom clean out her home. Some of you may know that Kansas is well known for tornados and, sure enough, one evening around dusk we were in the motel where we were staying and, you guessed it, heard a crazy wind outside.

I can’t remember now if we’d been warned it was coming (this was in the days before cell phones and AccuWeather), but this wind lasted just a short time—minutes—and then it was gone.

We didn’t think much of it until we walked outside.

There, the streets were strewn with broken trees and branches.

I don’t know the extent of the damage, but it was at that point, through no fault of their own, that the good citizens of Winfield had to begin restoring their town. And in a place like that, I’m sure they’d been through it before.

Photo by Mick Haupt on Unsplash

Sometimes, though, we have to restore what we have caused to break.

Sometimes, like the sign in a store packed with fragile goods says, “If you break it, you own it.” And it really doesn’t matter if it was an accident or not.

And sometimes we have to restore what we have intentionally broken—things we chose to break, for whatever reason.

Regardless of fate, accident, or intention, something has come apart.

We can try to fix it or decide to let it go.

But if we choose restoration—whether it’s a relationship, an organization, a system, or something within ourselves—we can bet on one thing:

It will never be exactly what it was.

It will be different.

And this is where the season of Lent meets us.

Lent is not about quick fixes. It is a slow uncovering—being aware of what is messy-ing our lives, and letting some of that mess go so we are ready for what’s coming and our purpose moving forward..

It is a drying-out time. It’s the lacuna between what is and what will be.

Resurrection is not a return to what was.

It is something transformed.

In Japanese aesthetics, there is an art form called kintsugi.

When a ceramic bowl breaks, it is repaired with lacquer mixed with gold.

The cracks are not hidden.

They are featured.

And in many cases, the piece is considered more beautiful—not despite the break, but because of it.

Underlying this practice is a broader philosophy known as wabi-sabi—the acceptance that life is incomplete, imperfect, and always in process.

Healing, too, is not instant. It requires time. It requires the right conditions—honesty, humility, sometimes silence. It unfolds in layers. And when it is real, it does not erase the past. It integrates it.

The cracks remain visible.

But they are no longer simply signs of damage. They become part of the story.

Photo by Matt Perkins on Unsplash

Restoration, then, is not about returning to what was. Nor is it about becoming something entirely new.

The pot, the vase, the person retains its character—the blemishes it has earned, the scratches that come from being used. But it is now bound together differently, and often more strongly.

But sometimes putting something back together just seems like too much.

You’ve been there.

We’ve seen the damage. We’ve felt the loss. The distance between broken and healed seems too great.

Insurmountable.

And in those moments, something Albert Camus wrote gives me hope:

“In the middle of winter, I at last discovered that there was in me an invincible summer.”

We carry our own weather with us.

Not just around us—but within us.

To restore or not to restore—that is the question.

Either way, life will be different.

But if we choose restoration—slowly, imperfectly, through trial and error—we will always discover that something has changed.

It may be deeper. Stronger. More whole. It might be weaker, though, than it was before. Or it may simply be different.

But it will not be the same.

Some things, like our water heater damage, we simply cannot restore on our own.

I finish with these words written to early Christians—from 1 Peter 5:10:

“After you have suffered for a little while,

he will himself restore, support, strengthen, and establish you.”

Like anything of lasting value, restoration may take time, perseverance, and faith.

Things will never be the same—

but a life of abundance

doesn’t depend on them being the same.

I have a question for you to ponder. If you have thoughts you’d like to share I’d love to read about them

Where in your life are you being called
to move more carefully—
not to break what doesn’t need breaking…
and to trust the slow work of restoring what does?

Leave a comment

Also, if you haven’t subscribe yet, I’d love to have you as part of this Messy Elegance journey.

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And if you know folks who would enjoy this, please share it with others.

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Thank you for your time.

Have you ever tried this silence experiment?

It’s really an inner one.

The goal is simple: to walk a short distance without thinking—without any words in your head—and just experience.

When I say short, I mean just a block. Or even a few steps.

The idea is to practice what I’ve learned is called kenosis—emptying.

Often, probably usually, we have a ton of thoughts rolling through our minds. We ruminate—what worries us, what we plan, what we regret.

You know how it goes.

With all this chatter in our heads, it becomes difficult to sense, hear, or be ready for what the world is trying to tell us.

Now, clearly there is a time and place for thinking. It’s just that too often we miss this emptying way of putting words aside in order to just be.

So typically, I don’t get twenty steps before some words intrude into my mind.

If I’m not careful, those words will just keep rolling and rolling.

If I’m aware of that, I can resume walking without thinking again.

For about twenty more steps.

But I relish those twenty steps of peace—being attentive to the world: flowers, birds, mountains, streams, the light wind all around me.

This is much, much better for me than having my Airpods in and listening to words: podcasts, music, even phone calls, unless they just can’t wait.

So what is this silence that seems so important, yet underappreciated and underpracticed?

I have run three marathons in my life. The first when I was thirty-nine, the last a couple of years later. I began running half marathons instead, but these days I generally walk the Race to Robie, a half marathon, every year. My knees and body thank me for that.

Training for a half is much more civilized than for a full, but it still involves running or walking for hours on end, often by yourself.

I remember when I first started getting ready for these, people would ask me:

“Don’t you get bored just talking to yourself going all those miles for hours and hours?”

And it’s a good question.

But I remember answering—cleverly, I thought:

“Why should I be bored? I find myself a very interesting person!”

Over the years, however, I’ve realized that I’m not all that interesting.

What’s really going on is that I’m interested.

I pay more attention these days to all around me that is fascinating.

When we are quiet enough, we begin to experience something deeper.

And whether or not we believe in the divine, we may find ourselves immersed in it.

Beneath the busy lives we lead, there is a peaceful calm—a slowing, a depth-that-calls-to-depth (Psalm 42:7).

I’ve come to think of silence as what remains when noise falls away—especially the noise we create through words, activity, and the steady hum of our lives.

Divine silence, on the other hand, is not simply the absence of sound. It is the experience of being immersed in something larger than ourselves—when, in the quiet of our minds, we sense not only our own presence, but the presence of something more.

When, in the quiet of our minds, we feel present and a presence.

We can find this divine silence on the meditation cushion, walking on the trail, snuggling with our puppy, watching the clouds on a summer day.

A person who has developed inner peace might be surrounded by cacophony and yet carry inner silence at the same time.

I like the way Br. David Steindl-Rast talks about God singing:

“In everything we experience we can hear God singing, if we listen attentively.”

He also writes:

“Silence too, in this sense, is not the absence of word or sound. It is not characterized by absence but by presence—a presence too great for words.”

Perhaps that is why music—so full of sound, of joy and tragedy and majesty, discord and harmony—can call out this presence, drench us in it, lead us into this divine silence.

Martin Laird writes in Into the Silent Land:

“We are built for contemplation,”
and
“This joy that is silent is already within us. Its discovery is precious beyond compare.”

We are built to experience divine silence.

And it doesn’t have to occur in a church or religious setting—or even within religion itself. We don’t even have to call it “divine” silence, just that silence that makes us feel we are connected beyond ourselves.

Edward Abbey describes his first morning at Arches National Park:

“The sun is not yet in sight, but signs of the advent are plain to see. Lavender clouds sail like a fleet of ships across the pale green dawn; each cloud, planed flat on the wind, has a base of fiery gold. Southeast, twenty miles by line of sight, stand the peaks of the Sierra La Sal, twelve to thirteen thousand feet above sea level, all covered with snow and rosy in the morning sunlight. The air is dry and clear as well as cold; the last fogbanks left over from last night’s storm are scudding away like ghosts, fading into nothing before the wind and the sunrise.”

Call it presence, call it awe, call it flat-out amazing, or just brimming full of be-ing. Experiencing that which is infinity bigger than anything we could drum up in our imagination fits what I’ve been calling divine silence. Call it what you will, wouldn’t you have liked to be sitting there with Edward that morning?

So the truth is this:

While we think and communicate in words, silence is the default.

Max Picard said:

“Speech cannot exist without silence.”

The silence after the music stops.
The silence before the curtain goes up.

There is something almost visceral in this quiet.

This silence is available to everyone.

Regardless of age, education, religious denomination, or belief system.

I’ll finish with one of my favorite quotations about silence.

It’s often attributed to Rumi, though it can’t be found directly in his writings:

“Silence is the language of God, all else is poor translation.”

So if silence is God’s language—and if, as David Steindl-Rast suggests, God is singing through all of nature—

then we have a lot to listen for.

Silence doesn’t have to be something we understand.

Better, it can be something we do.

Maybe it’s time for you to conduct your own experiment.

Just walk ten steps.

Without words.

Then see if you can walk twenty.

Then more.

And see what happens.

A Question for You

What might you notice if you walked just ten steps today without words, either spoken or in your mind? Or try it. What did you experience? What did you learn?

I’d love to hear what you discover.

Leave a comment

Notes

Abbey, E. (2011). Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness (Electronic ed.). RosettaBooks.
Sarton, M. (1977). The House by the Sea: A Journal (Kindle ed.). Open Road Media.
Steindl-Rast, D. (2016). The Way of Silence: Engaging the Sacred in Daily Life. Franciscan Media.
Laird, M. (2006). Into the Silent Land: A Guide to the Christian Practice of Contemplation. Oxford University Press.

This essay was adapted from a reflection I shared at the Cathedral of the Rockies’ Candlelight Service on March 17, 2026.

Image created with AI assistance (ChatGPT / DALL·E), 2026.

Note: I often think through these essays in conversation with ChatGPT. It helps me explore ideas, test structure, and refine language—much like writers have long done with editors, colleagues, and friends. The reflections and final words remain my own. If you respond, you become part of that ongoing conversation.

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Most weeks at our Candlelight service I light a candle for people (sometimes animals) I want to keep in my heart. When I shared my original reflection on March 3rd about certainty collapsing, I lit my candle for those whose lives have been thrown into uncertainty by war. Not only in places we see in the news, but any places where lives that once felt stable suddenly do not.

During times of war there are so many totally innocent people who find themselves in unpredictable insecurity and loss due to nothing they have done.

Moments like these, these wartimes, bring us back to a deeper question:

What remains when certainty collapses?

When disaster strikes, we suddenly see what really matters and what doesn’t.

Sometimes what feels like the collapse of certainty is actually the beginning of deeper clarity. But we rarely recognize that in the moment.

Some of you may not remember the collapse of certainty when John F. Kennedy was killed.

I do.

I remember walking home from elementary school along the railroad tracks, crying. Bawling. When my mom opened the door her face was stricken. I’d never seen her in such shock before.

Something had shifted.

More of you will remember the day after September 10, 2001. On September 10 there was the unspoken but doubt-free assumption in this country that we were safe—that we could not be attacked. The next day that certainty vanished.

Airports changed.
Security changed.
Our assumptions about the world changed.

Certainty became uncertainty overnight.

Moments like these reveal something deeper: how fragile our certainties really are.
And they raise a question that eventually touches all of us:

What remains when certainty collapses?

We see then that the rocks beneath our feet are not as stable as we thought.

Young people these days speak openly about collapse. Climate instability, political volatility, economic fragility, institutional distrust, structures that were once assumed stable now feel provisional. And so I wonder, and I actually think, that one of the main reasons people are turning to spirituality, young people in particular, is because of this deep uncertainty in what all the world trusted without much thought. Our institutions, our media, our role models, suddenly seem more like shifting sand than solid rock.

On what rocks can we stand? Are there any?

Collapse for example can test the certainty of religion. But is religion certain to start with?

Paul Tillich once wrote something striking about faith:

“Faith is certain in so far as it is an experience of the holy. But faith is uncertain in so far as the infinite to which it is related is received by a finite human being… To accept this is courage.”

In other words, uncertainty is not the opposite of faith. It is built into faith.

The scientist Carl Sagan made an observation which complements Tillich’s. He wrote,
“A general problem with much of Western theology… is that the God portrayed is too small.” God, he was suggesting, if one believes in God (he didn’t), should be considered much more vastly than simply a God of our planet. If our vision of God doesn’t go beyond our own Earth-centric denominations or traditions to include all of infinity, how certain can it be?

Reality is larger than we can imagine. Over decades, centuries, millions of years - heck, even within a week - what we think is true, isn’t. Will my church still be standing a thousand years from now? A million years from now, will there even be people living on our planet? We can pretty much bet that countries, religions, cultures - just about everything that we count as certain these day, will be much different.

Outcomes are not certain, though some are much more highly predictable than others.

If scientists accept the mystery of the universe, then religion, as this clip from the movie Conclave suggests, must be careful to make sure that certainty doesn’t take the mystery out of the church. In this video, Ralph Fiennes plays the dean of the College of Cardinals responsible for guiding the election of a new pope. Here he speaks to the the cardinals assembled, about doubt, certainty, and mystery.

Cardinal Lawrence on Doubt and Certainty

So is there room for mystery in religion? Scientists revel in exploring the mystery of the universe, and mystery, by definition, is uncertain.

Uncertainty, certainty, doubt, mystery, exploration, learning - they’re all part of the process of - if we will - going more deeply in thought, spirit, and action.

And uncertainty is a space where listening, humility, and discernment can occur.

This all goes well beyond the institution of religion, of course, there are many kinds of uncertainty in the world. For example, there is:

food insecurity

housing insecurity

medical insecurity

and the uncertainty created by war and conflict

That brings us back again to that deeper question:

What remains when certainty collapses?

Sometimes what looks like collapse is actually transition.
A job ends. New jobs open up.
A relationship changes. We meet new people.
A plan we counted on falls apart. A new plan emerges.

Only later do we realize that the very thing we thought was the end was really the beginning of the next chapter.

The universe seems to move through cycles of release and renewal. Cycles of seasons and death and rebirth and restarting occur in our natural world. What looks messy on the surface may actually be part of a deeper elegance.

Hasidic Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson said that in times of upheaval, “we need, more than ever, our absolute spiritual foundation…even in our most difficult moments,” he wrote, “our purpose never waivers, this helps us to find our way when all the familiar signposts have vanished.” Of course, if our deepest selves have never been explored, then what do we have?

The Rabbi says that faith is the answer to all the difficult questions of uncertainty. Faith “in a higher purpose, a more perfect form of justice than human institutions are capable of,” and then he talks about what he thinks faith does. It “infuses us with the certainty, will, and resolve that good can overcome indifference and evil.”

“Life is a process,” he says, “ that leads to redemption, a process in which loss leads to renewal, suffering to growth, and death to rebirth.”

That sounds a lot like the process of resurrection we see in Holy Week. And seems quite similar to the environmental and universal cycles of collapse, reformation, into new and - if it’s working well - deeper transformation.

What do we have when certainty collapses? At the very least, we have us. We have access to the deep purposes of our life. Too, we have the natural cycles of formation, deformation, and reformation. We have agency - the ability to make decisions, even when the situation is constraining. And we have the present moment. We have right now. For everyone, spiritual or not, wealthy or not, in the middle of a war or lining up for lemonade at the country fair, we have this moment. This elegant, once-in-a-lifetime moment. And the opportunity to choose how we will use it. And how we can step through the mess, and step into our purpose.

That is the strange and beautiful pattern of Messy Elegance.

Have there been times in your life or observations, when the loss of certainty led to something deeper, or more joyful, or more meaningful in your life? Can you share what made that possible?

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Simple, not simplistic. Elegant, not superficial.

The quote in the image above is the original one from Holmes, but recognized these days is the more familiar paraphrase, also attributed to him:

“I would not give a fig for the simplicity on this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity,” and that shows up in books, essays, and the like and is used, rightly so, to show how important it is to not just take the easy simple answer.

This going from simple through the complexity back again to the simple, well that’s what I’m calling messy elegance these days.

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Early concept cover for The Messy Elegance of Becoming Whole

This essay introduces a book I’m writing in public about living more deeply in a messy world.

Hi everyone.

This year I’m beginning work on a book, and I’d love your help along the way. Right now the working title is:

The Messy Elegance of Becoming Whole – Making Your Way Toward a Life of Depth.

The tag line is: A companion for people learning to live life more deeply.

I’ve posted a possible book cover so you can see what the finished product might eventually look like, and I’ll share another idea later as well. The title feels pretty dialed in at the moment, though I wouldn’t be surprised if it evolves as the project unfolds. And I also have created an introductory video, which you can click on here.

For the last couple of years I’ve been circling around a set of ideas about how people move toward depth in their lives in the middle of what seems like a world with fewer and fewer anchors to hold onto. For most of 2025 I stopped writing almost completely. My creative self, I suppose, was in a period of gestation.

During that time I spent a good deal of time thinking about what truly resonated with me. If I was going to devote the time, curiosity, and emotional energy required to write a book, I wanted to focus on something that genuinely mattered to me—something I wanted to understand more deeply myself.

At the center of it all is a simple observation: life is messy.

Sometimes we make the mess ourselves.
Sometimes the world does it for us.

Either way, things change. Certainties dissolve. The river we thought we could rely on dries up. Relationships that seemed rock solid sometimes turn out to be built on sand.

And yet something interesting happens.

Some people move through this mess much more gracefully than we seem able to manage. Their lives are far from perfect. They’ve faced the same disruptions and uncertainties the rest of us experience, and sometimes they’ve created their own difficulties along the way. But they seem to draw on something deeper that allows them to keep moving forward with curiosity, meaning, and even joy.

That’s what I mean by “messy elegance.”

It’s not perfection.
It doesn’t rely on wealth.
And it isn’t reserved for a lucky few.

Messy elegance recognizes that the messiness of life isn’t simply a problem to eliminate. Often it becomes the raw material for creativity, discovery, and growth. When we explore, experiment, and wander down unexpected paths, something interesting can emerge.

From that exploration elegant things appear: paint arrives on canvas; new organizations are formed; people discover what they love to do and what they are called to do.

It’s a lifelong skill—learning how to move again and again toward wholeness, toward deeper relationships, toward wisdom, spirituality, health, and meaning.

Both messy and elegant.

Not one or the other.
Both.

I suspect there are principles and practices that help us move in this direction. We can learn from the lives of others, from science, from the arts, from spirituality—from the entire messy world around us—how to “go deep.”

That’s why I’m writing this book.

Like many writers have said before me, I often discover what I think through the act of writing itself. Even more importantly, I learn through the process. And I learn from other people.

That’s where you come in.

For this project I’m trying something I’ve never done before. Instead of writing the entire book privately and only sharing it once it’s finished, I’m going to write in public.

Along the way I’ll share essays, reflections, and questions as the book develops. I’d love to hear what you think. What resonates? What feels incomplete? What perspectives might I be missing?

Show Your Work! by Austin Kleon sparked this approach for me. Writing in public feels like an experiment worth trying.

So I’m giving it a go.

A question to start the conversation

What do you think of the idea of messy elegance?

Can you think of people or situations where messy elegance seemed to be at work?

Leave a comment

Over the coming months I’ll be sharing reflections, essays, and questions as this book develops.

Finally, this will very much be a work in progress. It won’t be perfect, and I’ll be learning along the way.

Which seems like an appropriate way to begin a book about messy elegance.

Note: In working on these essays I often think things through in conversation with ChatGPT. It helps me explore ideas, test structure, and tighten language, while the decisions, reflections, and final writing remain my own. Historically, authors have used editors, colleagues, relatives, and friends in much the same way—as thinking partners in the writing process. I think of ChatGPT as a kind of digital conversation partner. If you contribute to these discussions, you’ll be one of those conversation partners as well.

Source: Austin Kleon, Show Your Work! 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered. Workman Publishing, 2014.

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“An invariable element in the experience of Now is that of unspeakable and exquisite joy, peace, serene release.”

~Thomas Kelly, A Testament of Devotion

Note: This essay, with a few edits, was first delivered as a reflection at the Cathedral of the Rockies Candlelight Service on February 3, 2026. You can watch a video of the reflection here.

In December of 1934 Thomas Kelly had a nervous breakdown. “During that winter,” one of his former students [1] wrote, “he had strength only to get out of bed and wobble unprepared to his classes.” Early the next year he finished his doctoral thesis for Harvard but was not allowed to defend it. He already had a Ph.D. from a theological seminary and was teaching in a prestigious school but, as Howard Macy commented, “He longed for the kind of recognition a Harvard Ph.D. would grant him.” [2) The folks at Harvard couldn’t understand why he would want another doctorate on top of the one he already had.

He tried again in 1937. He published the dissertation himself in 1937 but during his oral examination he had a memory lapse and failed. He went into, Jones writes, “…one of his ‘woozy spells’…and his mind blanked.” The Harvard committee testing him said he did so poorly that he would never be able to try for their doctorate again.

He was “totally crushed by this irreversible failure” and sank into a deep depression, which scared his wife, and he had to be assured by the President of the university where he was working and another colleague that his talents and accomplishments were plenty worthy, even without a Harvard degree, and that his job was secure.

He had counted on the Ph.D. to support his goals as a scholar, but that dream had just gone down the drain.

He was grieving. His life was a mess.

But soon after he had a spiritual awakening. “No one knows exactly what happened,” Douglas Steere wrote [3], but the dark days of his life were over. “A fissure in him seemed to close, cliffs caved in and filled up a chasm, and what was divided grew together in him.”

“Within months,” Howard Macy wrote [2] “…out of the ruins of this dream rose a new, capturing vision.” He had experienced suffering himself but also was formed by the suffering of others. He made his “breakthrough,” Macy says, at the age of 44.

When I first read Thomas Kelly’s book, A Testament of Devotion, I was stunned. It was like his words pierced through a myriad of questions and thoughts I had about religion and spirituality and life and struck right to my core. I don’t remember how I found him. When I did, I knew almost nothing about his Quaker religion, and absolutely nothing about his story. But time and again I have come back to this book, referred to it – as I’m doing here – and thought seriously about what it would mean to me to “center down.”

He wrote,

Deep within us all there is an amazing inner sanctuary of the soul, a holy place, a Divine Center, a speaking Voice, to which we may continuously return…it is a Light Within which illumines the face of God and casts new shadows and new glories upon the face of men…It is the Shekinah of the soul, the Presence in the midst. Here is the Slumbering Christ, stirring to be awakened, to become the soul we clothe in earthly form and action. And He is within us all.

Kelly urged us to practice “the prayer of inward listening.” Canby Jones described it, as:

“Only in the deep, centered down, silences of the soul can we hear that still small voice, can we feel the gentle nudgings of the Lord, speaking, guiding, showing us the path… There is no experience of divine guidance apart from the practice of inward listening.”

I have thought long and hard about centering, centering down, moving away from the superficial and toward the deeply meaningful - and realized that for way too much of my life I was pursuing things that just didn’t matter. I do better now but it is, I’ve found, a lifelong journey. The world pushes the immediate, the loud, the glittering, the variable reinforcement schedule of slot-machine-living. But it’s the extraordinarily meaningful joy of ordinary day-to-day appreciation for things that have lasting value - like my marriage, my wife, my children, my friends, and trying to do something that makes a difference for others that is the real gold of a centered life. Fool’s gold just seems to vanish, doesn’t it?

Poof.

On January 17, 1941 Kelly learned that a publisher was willing to meet with him to discuss the publication of a book. He died of a heart attack later that same day. He was 47.

Three months later, Douglas Steere, the same colleague who had helped talk him out of despair after he had failed his Harvard examination, submitted five of Kelly’s devotional essays to the publisher. The book was published under the title A Testament of Devotion. Some of his other essays were also collected in a book entitled The Eternal Promise. [5]

“An adequate life,” Douglas Steere wrote, “…might be described as a life which has grasped intuitively the whole nature of things, and has seen and felt and refocused itself to this whole. An inadequate life is one that lacks this adjustment to the whole nature of things—hence its twisted perspective, its partiality, its confusion. The story of Thomas Kelly’s life is the story of a passionate and determined quest for adequacy.“

“Adequacy” seems like such a mundane aspiration in this world today, where we extol the latest fashion, the ultra wealthy, having the most followers, and celebrity of all types. But to aspire to adequacy as Steere describes it seems like something all of us mere mortals can shoot for.

Adequacy in this sense would be a perfect description of my grandfather’s life, perhaps the wisest, most virtuous, person I have ever known - who gave up a promising career in education to return to run the family farm when his father-in-law died. No glitter for him, just preparing, planting, and harvesting. And then doing it again.

I would like to become more adequate, more centered down as I travel forward into my later life.

From the messiness of punctured dreams, Thomas Kelly had moved toward wholeness. He became adequate.

Notes

[1] T. Canby Jones, one of Kelly’s students, wrote, Thomas R. Kelly: As I remember him (Kindle ed.). Pendlehill Publications.

[2] Macy, H. (2016). Foreword. In T. Kelly, The Eternal Promise (3 ed., pp. vii-xv). Friends United Press.

[3] Steere, D. V. (1996). A Biographical Memoir. In T. Kelly, A Testament of Devotion (pp. 101-127). HarperSanFrancisco.

[4] Kelly, T. R. (1996). A testament of devotion. HarperSanFrancisco.

[5] Kelly, T. (2016). The Eternal Promise (3rd ed.). Friends United Press.

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From time to time, I share essays on wholeness, quiet growth, and the messy elegance of becoming fully human.

You’re welcome to walk along.

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From my old, used, tattered book, A Testament of Devotion. WOW was all I could write when I first read this, years ago.

“Life from the Center is a life of unhurried peace and power. It is simple. It is serene. It is amazing. It is triumphant. It is radiant. It takes no time, but occupies all our time. And it makes our life programs new and overcoming. We need not get frantic. He is at the helm. And when our little day is done we lie down quietly in peace, for all is well.”

I would love to see your thoughts about how you or others have “centered down,” and what are some examples of people you’ve observed personally or at a distance who are “adequate,” as discussed in the essay. How does one become these ways?

“The poor in spirit are by no means poor-spirited. They are persons who see so much to be, so much to do, such limitless reaches to life and goodness that they are profoundly conscious of their insufficiency and incompleteness.”

~Rufus Jones, The Inner Life, p. 19

The Beatitudes are a call to arms. But this call to arms is not saber rattling, it isn’t uppercuts or clenched fists. It isn’t making a show of force with innocent people, with people who disagree with you or protest against you. It isn’t the arms of guns or pepper spray or bullets or masks.

No, this call to arms, these Beatitudes, these Christian dispositions and actions, are a call for arms that embrace. That support. That love. That sacrifice. That protect. That are warm and soft and strong.

I am making the case today that the contemplative life, contemplative practices, prepare us for open arms – for receiving them and for sharing them.

Embracing arms.

Let’s remember the Beatitudes, spoken by Jesus.

The Beatitudes (Matthew 5:1–12, KJV)

1 And seeing the multitudes, he went up into a mountain: and when he was set, his disciples came unto him:

2 And he opened his mouth, and taught them, saying,

3 Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

4 Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.

5 Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.

6 Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.

7 Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.

8 Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.

9 Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.

10 Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

11 Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake.

12 Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you.

What are we called to embrace?

What are we to make of this sermon, this call? The profound Quaker author, Rufus Jones, writing about the “blessed-ness” described in the Beatitudes, said

“It is not a prize held out or promised as a final reward for a certain kind of conduct; it attaches by the inherent nature of things to a type of life, as light attaches to a luminous body, as motion attaches to a spinning top, as gravitation attaches to every particle of matter. To be this kind of person is to be living the happy, blessed life, whatever the outward conditions may be.”

“The beatitude attaches…to hunger and thirst for goodness.’

The beatitude attaches…to hunger and thirst for goodness.

These are words of humility and sacrifice, not of domination or control.

The beatitudes are not just telling us what kind of people we should be, but also who we need to lift up, to cherish, and what we need to do. The Beatitudes give us the road map.

Jesus says those who are poor in spirit, who mourn, who are meek, who are peacemakers, who are pure in heart, who thirst for righteousness, who are merciful, and who are persecuted and insulted and lied about because they follow Him – will be comforted, inherit the Earth, will be shown mercy, be satisfied, called the Sons of God – theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.

Those qualities are the arms of embrace. They are the acts of loving God with all one’s heart, mind, soul, and body and one’s neighbor as oneself.

Contemplation and the Beatitudes

And let’s not forget that contemplation and the Beatitudes complement each other. What we do in contemplation – through intentional practices of silence, stillness, prayer, singing, and worship – to is experience the presence of the divine. To hear the divine call. To experience the mystery. If we practice, and we listen, then we are formed, often so slowly, into people following the ways of mercy, humility, peacemaking, courage, and sacrifice.

Foundational to this formation is experiencing the “sacrament of the present moment,” as de Caussade wrote, or T.S. Eliot expressed in Burnt Norton:

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor

fleshless;

Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance

is

What is the still point, what is the dance?

Moving Stillness

I think of contemplation, engaged in opening the arms of the world, as Moving Stillness. Moving with peace and courage and resilience and hope through a troubled world. Stepping into the chaos of politics, warring parties, inequity, and a myriad of other troubles with a profound depth of spirit. That’s the dance of contemplative stillness.

“A talent forms itself in solitude,” Goethe wrote, “A character amid the stream of life.”

This contemplative work begs the question, “How might I intentionally become closer to God; how might I become a more humble, merciful, peacemaker? How can I practice the disciplines in order to embody moving stillness?

Contemplation opens our arms to others, to embrace a world that needs to be surrounded in love.

Sources

Caussade, J. P. d. (1982). The sacrament of the present moment. Harper & Row.

Eliot, T. S. (1963). Burnt Norton, in Collected poems, 1909-1962 (1st American ed.). Harcourt. p. 177.

Goethe, J. W. von. (1993). Torquato Tasso (C. E. Passage, Trans.). In F. G. Ryder (Ed.), Plays (p. 155). The Continuum Publishing Company. (Original work published 1790).

Jones, R. M. (1917). The inner life. The Macmillan company. From pages 16, 17, 18.