What Looks Like Destruction
What Looks Like Diminishing Might Be Part of a Whole and Healthy Life
Yesterday was a slow day in the bookstore, so my friend Ned and I sat in the chairs in the front room and caught up. He’s an artist, a creative, so occasionally we like to sit around and bemoan our work and the way AI is destroying the creative world. We also bounce ideas off one another and try to give honest feedback. (Well, as an Enneagram 9, I try to give honest feedback—Ned is much better at saying precisely what he thinks.)1
As we sat there chatting, a young woman walked into the store and we started talking with her. She had a baby strapped to her front, and the child had just woken up and was looking around at this strange and fascinating world, eyes wide.
I asked her where she got her tattoos, and she said from a parlor in the Upper Westside of New York City. She had lived in the city for five years and was now back in PA with a husband and a baby and a new life. She was also an opera singer.
I didn’t see that one coming.
“An opera singer? Do you still perform?”
“No,” she said. “Well, not professionally. I still sing on my own, when I’m by myself. And I sing for this guy.”
She nodded her chin at the top of the baby’s head and smiled.
At first I thought, Oh, what a shame that her talent can’t be widely admired and enjoyed.
But then I imagined this young woman singing to her child at bedtime, his eyes wide, his consciousness awake to nothing else but the experience. No one else in the room. Nothing else on the baby’s mind. Nothing else to worry about. Just the beautiful sounds coming from this person who was the center of his universe.
I imagined her voice sounding out through the screen windows, escaping into the city, and neighbors catching a hint of some faraway singing, her voice mingling with the sound of traffic on the street and a couple arguing on the sidewalk and the wind in the trees.
Is performing for a full opera house more valuable than singing for this tiny, adoring audience?
In her book The Understory, Lory Wilbert writes about returning home from a trip to find that a group of trees had been destroyed by a windstorm. They were lying down or broken off at the top—these once-thriving trees would now begin the long process of decaying.
It would be easy to see such a thing and think all had been lost. But Lore saw it differently. She writes,
I reminded myself that a healthy forest will submit to its environment and do its own maintenance by adapting, creating mulch, and feeding its offspring with their ancestors’ decomposing matter. There is indeed a secret life to these trees, and what looks like destruction to my human eyes is still a part of a healthy and whole life.
A healthy forest will submit to its environment.
. . . do its own maintenance by adapting . . .
. . . what looks like destruction . . . is still a part of a healthy and whole life.
What in my life do I think is destruction or loss or diminishing, when it’s actually nothing more than a new part of my whole and healthy life?
Was an out-of-print book worth writing?
Is a song sung in the shower worth singing?
Was that talent I spent years developing worth it, now that it’s only a hobby or gathering dust in my life?
Richard Rohr writes in Just This,
The real gift is to be happy and content, even while we are just sitting on the front porch, looking at a rock; or when we are doing the “nothingness” of prayer or benevolently gazing at anything in its ordinariness; or when we can see and accept and say that every single act of creation is “just this” and thus allow it to work its wonder on us.
I feel this wonder beginning to take root in me, when I pause long enough to sit on the rocking chair on the front porch, or take Winnie for a walk, or ask a tattooed young woman a simple question about her life. When I write for the simple joy of it. When I get out of the car and pause and stare up at the cloudy sky.
There’s something about being in the present moment that helps me to submit to my environment, to adapt, to see how what initially feels like loss is simply another phase in my whole and healthy life.
What losses have you learned to view in a new way?
Don’t miss this week’s book spotlight over at our Nooks Substack, including how one author’s works have followed me through my life.
Ned is also a co-creator of the book Every Moment Holy, and we’re hosting him and Douglas McKelvey for an event at the bookstore in a few weeks, so join us, won’t you?
This is insightful, Shawn. It's something I'll have to sit with for awhile.
Sometimes being made small, being limited, even the destruction of something, is actually a redirection or a refining. There is something essentially good about both creativity and expertise, a fundamental goodness in it that does not include a requirement for fame or acknowledgment. There is beauty created and then widely-seen, and then there is beauty created and invested in just one small place, person, or moment. Both are beautiful. The meaningfulness of it and even the effects of it can be tremendous in either case. And even if the effect is small -- even if it is felt only by yourself -- is it not still part of the awe-inspiring, electric goodness of creation?
I think there may be losses, like loss of a job, where it is possible, in time, to say, "I'm so grateful now, because I wouldn't have this life." There are losses, like the loss of a child, where it's possible to say, "Though given the option between offering you support and having her back, I'd take her back. And yet, I'm grateful that I can offer you support."
I'm a hospital chaplain. Our conversations don't scale. But each matters to the numb one in front of us.
And in half-an-hour, our grandson who never knew his aunt (nor did his mother), will get the full benefit of a grandfather who now delights in being ridiculous for no audience but him.