‘I Am’ is a Complete Sentence, Episode 221
To be a living, conscious, experiencing being is one of the great miraculous wonders of the universe. And being ‘this one’, the unique one each of us is, will never happen again. And yet… we learn to discount the unique first-person experience of being ourselves, pushing our ordinary everyday sacredness to the side, often in favour of treating ourselves and others more like objects or production machines than the sacred conscious beings that we are.
What would it be to let ourselves honour the beauty and mystery of our everyday consciousness, our joys and losses, our lost-and-found-ness, and to honour the sacredness of that in each other?
This week's Turning Towards Life is a conversation about saying hello, with love and reverence, to the miracle of the everyday experience of being a person, hosted as always by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.
Here’s our source for this week:
What You Missed That Day You Were Absent from Fourth Grade
Mrs. Nelson explained how to stand still and listen
to the wind, how to find meaning in pumping gas,
how peeling potatoes can be a form of prayer. She took
questions on how not to feel lost in the dark.
After lunch she distributed worksheets
that covered ways to remember your grandfather’s
voice. Then the class discussed falling asleep
without feeling you had forgotten to do something else—
something important—and how to believe
the house you wake in is your home. This prompted
Mrs. Nelson to draw a chalkboard diagram detailing
how to chant the Psalms during cigarette breaks,
and how not to squirm for sound when your own thoughts
are all you hear; also, that you have enough.
The English lesson was that I am
is a complete sentence.
And just before the afternoon bell, she made the math equation
look easy. The one that proves that hundreds of questions,
and feeling cold, and all those nights spent looking
for whatever it was you lost, and one person
add up to something.
Brad Aaron Modlin
Photo by Leonardo Toshiro Okubo on Unsplash