Save or Savor

“I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”

E.B. White

It’s that time again when many of us pause and look back at the past year and forward to the next. We review and plan. Some of us make resolutions or set intentions for the future. But after a year like the one we just came through and the uncertainty of the one that faces us, peering into the past or future may seem futile.

Sometimes the best we can hope for is to take things day-by-day. 

E.B. White said the words above in 1969 in an interview with the New York Times. The Vietnam War was raging; students were protesting; Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy had recently been assassinated; rivers ran polluted; and our indiscriminate use of DDT had nearly annihilated species.

There was a lot to consider saving then, as there is now. 

But like White, I’m torn. I find it hard to plan my day. By nature, I’m an observer, an enjoyer. Every day, there’s something—a spark of light, the crook of an oak limb, two sparrows gabbing, barely visible among the dark shiny leaves of the winterberry outside my window. Each has its own delights. Each shines forth in its divine uniqueness.

And that’s one of the reasons this blog was created—as a celebration and savoring of the goodness of this Earth we so cherish.

What I’m learning is this: what you cherish, you will savor and work to save.

No resolutions. No big plans. Just day by day, I will move slowly and drink deeply of the moments. And pay attention to what may be asked of me, whether it’s a donation, an act of protest, or some sort of refraining. Be simple in the world. Walk humbly.

“If I spent enough time with the tiniest creature—even a caterpillar—I would never have to prepare a sermon. So full of God is every creature.”

Meister Eckhart