Practicing Hope week 6 - Music in the Pause

I was struggling to connect with today’s listen in the Hope Portal with Joy Harjo until I let go of my striving and allowed “the whole of time” begin to sink in.

My prayer time started with some frustration over circumstances that have prevented my regular routine. It’s not the circumstances so much as feeling that I’m not staying on top of my own things – everything from my home to managing my commitments felt disheveled, behind schedule. With constant interruption I lacked focus (motivation) to accomplish what was on my list. Hmm. Then Joy Harjo spoke of the “whole of time” and the questions to contemplate this week gave me pause. Stepping back for a wider view, I see these months of time are merely a drop in the bucket. And, while I may not be doing what I had in mind, what I am doing is still consistent with who I am. Even if it wasn’t my plan.

Yes, there is work to tend to. And there is often a ‘pause’ to tend to. These pauses come intermittently in life ~ and like the rest in a musical score, where there is music in the rest ~ there is life in the pause. I can follow the notes I’ve laid out before me. And when there is a rest, the quality of music continues and I get to hear a little deeper.

I continue to be fascinated by the question for contemplation in the portal notes:

Take your mind back to the youngest age you can remember and to the oldest person
you remember holding you. Calculate the year of their birth and the history that
shaped their lifetime.
Then, who is the youngest person you have held in your arms
most recently? Imagine a robust life for them – the age and year to which they could live.
Try to inhabit this expanse of history that you have literally touched and been touched by.
Can you feel in your body, in your imagination, a more spacious grasp of time itself and of possibility and agency? What difference might it make?”

My grandfather was born in 1893. I held my grand, Mae, born in March 2025. She could live past 90, which is 2115. That’s 222 years (!) that I will have directly touched and been touched by. What expanse of time is yours to consider?  I invite you to pause with that and listen to what you might hear.

In this together with great hope…