Mary Camille Thomas

Gray-Haired Woman under the Harvest Moon

Sixty summers I’ve seen ease into autumn,

and I recognize this patient tug

of nighttime on the days,

gentle at first like my own hand

easing a ripe tomato from the vine,

then insistent,

darkness yearning

for the tomb of winter.

At sixty a sprain is slow to heal,

and vigor wanes

before day’s work is done.

Tonight, though, last light

like the scent of apples

round the cider press

lingers on summer’s wake

as the orange belly

of this pregnant season

peeps over the horizon.

What will I gather

in the gloaming?

Paint on the cavern wall

the hieroglyph for patience,

And plant me as a seed,

for sixty years have shown me —

winter is a womb.

Feast me now with hazelnuts

and pour a cup of mead

to seal the promise

of a distant spring.

Like crickets and tree roots,

I am beholden to darkness

and care not

what the world in me may see.

Touched by harvest moonlight,

I know my silver beauty,

and novice though I am,

surrender to the night.

Image courtesy of C.E. Price

Hold Us in the Great Hands of Light

Touching the outside,

you make the inside glow.

Drinking my coffee

by halogen light,

I may not see it,

but the fig tree knows.

It all began with you.

Fiat lux,

and so it was

that first day.

This morning

light on leaf

draws my eye

as a chipmunk

nibbles the fig I left

last night on the fence rail,

dainty as a lady at a tea,

all of us beholden

to you,

one of countless,

but in this blue sky

our one, our only.

Title from “Why I Wake Early” by Mary Oliver

The Traveling Reader

One of my favorite things to do when I’m traveling is to find the coffeeshop with the best mocha in town. (Luckily, this is a priority and pleasure that my sweetheart shares.) Even if the mocha disappoints, absorbing the atmosphere of the coffeeshop, observing and eavesdropping on the people who hang out there gives us an entrée to the locale that sightseeing doesn’t. Likewise, the local independent bookstore.

Yes, I am now going to out myself as a promiscuous book nerd. At home, browsing in Bookshop Santa Cruz or Bad Animal Books is a regular delight, but visiting a bookstore in another town offers a particular thrill. The differences are so alluring! Is the shop light and bright? Or dark, wood-paneled, and cozy? Busy or quiet? Are the shelves so high they need library ladders? Do books stacked up on the floor create a kind of biblio-maze? If I’m lucky, I discover a book I’ve never heard of but now can’t live without, or I come across a used copy in fine condition of a title I’ve been dreaming of. Even if this serendipity doesn’t occur, the quirky displays and books of local interest make browsing fun. Whether I’m roaming for hours in the multistory mecca of Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon or breezing through Bookworks just down the road in Pacific Grove, the atmosphere of the local independent bookstore introduces me in a unique way to the place that hosts it.

And if, like Powell’s and Bookworks, it features an espresso bar where I can sip a mocha while reading a new book? Heaven!

Come Back to Still Water

The time has come

To stop allowing the clutter

To clutter my mind

Like dirty snow,

Shove it off and find

Clear time, clear water.

May Sarton in “New Year’s Resolve”

Let me start with a confession: the only way I can sustain a tech sabbath is by cheating.

I should have admitted this up front because I felt terrible when one reader told me she liked the idea of abstaining from technology once a week, but she didn’t want to give up Facetime with her grandchildren. Another admitted she likes to watch television in the evening so she couldn’t do it either. Here’s the deal. When I decided to do a tech sabbath for Lent this year, I allowed myself certain exceptions: I can text, make phone calls, watch TV after dinner with my sweetheart, and attend Zoom meetings with my spiritual community. The practice was meant to disengage me from devices, not from my loved ones. “The solution to mankind’s most vexing problems will not be found in renouncing technical civilization,” Rabbi Heschel writes in The Sabbath, “but in attaining some degree of independence from it.”

If you decide to try a tech sabbath, I invite you make Jesus your role model. One sabbath day He was walking through cornfields with His disciples, who began to pick ears of corn as they went. Judgmental Pharisees jumped all over them for doing forbidden work on the holy day, but Jesus admonished, “The sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath” (Mark 2:27). In other words, don’t let rules get in the way of a meaningful practice.

Here are some ideas for designing your own tech sabbath:

Choose your time. I pick a 24-hour period over the weekend, usually 4 pm Saturday to 4 pm Sunday, but it’s okay to do a shorter amount of time, a different day of the week, or to change the day depending on your schedule.
Set parameters that work for you. Facetime with your loved ones if you want to. Photograph flowers with your phone. You are constructing your own unique palace in time, and it can be as simple or elaborate as you like. What soulful activities are calling you?
Create a ritual. At the beginning of my sabbath I light a candle and make a tiny ceremony of shutting down my laptop and iPad. Then I put them away in the closet. For the next 24 hours I mostly leave my phone out of sight in another room. When the sabbath is over, I again light a candle and smudge all my devices before I turn them back on, praying to use them mindfully in the week to come.
Reflect afterwards. As you dwell in your palace over the next weeks and months, think about what was hard, what surprised you, what you loved. You will notice the aspects of technology that are most deleterious for you — these are the ones to strictly avoid during your sabbath – but you will also become aware of surprising gifts. Keep and celebrate them!

Revelations of Reverie

Candle, book titled The Sabbath, and iphone

In the fifteen years since the first iPhone was released, reaching for our smartphones has become a cultural habit. Whenever we feel the least inkling of boredom — standing in line, sitting in a waiting room — out comes the phone. I do it too. I like instant relief from that restless ennui, but I also wondered what I might be losing by trying to avoid it. In fact, I originally planned to title this post “The Benefits of Boredom” and explore how it might encourage creativity. “The idea has an intuitive appeal and an illustrious history,” Margaret Talbot admits in an essay in the New Yorker, but then she quickly cites researchers who “say there isn’t much empirical evidence that boredom unleashes creativity.”

Yet during each tech sabbath, as I unplugged from my pandemic habit of listening to a podcast or audiobook when I went for a walk, I gradually recognized that my inkling was right. I was missing out on something: not boredom maybe, but the opportunity for reverie. It seemed like I was doing it all – exercising and absorbing Vitamin D while also indulging my love of literature – but I was giving up that dreamy and delicious mindset of looking up at the sky to find shapes in the clouds, sacrificing my own thoughts. At the very least reverie can lead to rest and relaxation, but at its best it becomes a kind of sober intoxication conducive to deep and imaginative thinking.

I used to judge people strolling along the ocean with a phone in their hands, but my AirPods made me one of them. I might be enjoying an entertaining novel, but I didn’t notice the sea otter frolicking with her pup. Forgotten was the Latin phrase I once claimed as a motto:

solvitur ambulando

It is solved by walking. For me, solitude combined with the easy stride of my sturdy legs in the outdoors is a brain tonic. The “problems” I solve might involve mentally rehearsing a presentation for work or pondering the next line of a poem I’m writing, considering a decision as major as when I should retire or as mundane as what to have for dinner. I might just daydream.

Not that listening to a podcast or audiobook is a bad thing, but I can save them for the gym or my commute. Which reminds me of another Latin phrase, modus omnibus in rebus, moderation in all things. Mentally removing yourself from your environment may be okay when your environment is a tedious line at Safeway, but loss occurs when it becomes a mindless habit. Take time out from your devices to think your own thoughts and indulge in reverie! Pausing the constant stimuli from tech makes it possible for you to listen more deeply – to birdsong, your loved ones, the voice of the Divine. It might even make room for a creative spark, and who knows where that will lead?

A Poverty of Attention

In common things that round us lie

Some random truths he can impart,

— the harvest of a quiet eye.

William Wordsworth at the end of “A Poet’s Epitaph”

Photo of iPhone, candle, and the book "The Sabbath"

I don’t need a research study to tell me that my attention span has decreased since reading more on screens and digital devices. I feel it halfway through a Zoom meeting when I start to slouch and squirm. Sitting up straight and scolding myself barely check my desire to pick up my phone and do the New York Times Mini Crossword right now. Although I stay in my seat trying to listen, even the strictest self-admonishment doesn’t prevent me from mindlessly reaching for my chocolate stash or getting distracted by the blue jay that just landed on the garden arch outside my window.

More distressing than a case of the fidgets on Zoom is that I can no longer immerse myself in a book for as long as I used to. All those long summer vacation afternoons lazing in the sun with an Agatha Christie or a juicy romance, the pre-Netflix late nights when I dismissed all thoughts of an alarm clock just to read one more chapter lie far in the past. As much as I still love to read, I no longer spend hours lost in a book.

Part of the problem may be information overload. According to a 2009 study at UC San Diego, the average person reads the equivalent of 100,000 words a day. (As a point of reference this post has 506 words.) If you feel overwhelmed by all the information that lands in your email and pops up in your social media feed every day, you’re not alone. How often do you quit an article before you finish and move on to the next thing? Sorry, TLDR. (Too long, didn’t read.) As the Nobel-winning economist Herbert Simon predicted back in 1977, “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”

But surely another factor in our distractibility is that we consume those 34 gigabytes of word-stuff in short bursts across multiple digital devices. When your phone is at arm’s reach and you know that at any moment a seductive alert could notify you of a text, tweet, or coveted thumbs-up on Facebook, it’s hard to find the quiet eye that Wordsworth talks about in “A Poet’s Epitaph,” the sustained observation and musing that can harvest the gifts in the real world around you and within your own mind that lead to a new idea, a deep thought. When I have popcorn brain, it’s hard to hear the soft voice in the cave of my heart.

So, besides loosening the tether between my phone and me, another reason I decided to try a tech Sabbath was to see if stepping away from the wealth of information my devices offer could help restore my quiet eye. I want to build a palace in time that holds a wealth of attention.

How has your ability to pay attention changed in the last ten years?

A Palace in Time with a Kingdom for All

Have you seen the Lord of the Rings? Remember the scenes in The Fellowship of the Ring when Bilbo Baggins panics because he can’t find the ring only to discover with relief that it was in his pocket? Or how he transforms for a moment from a kindly old hobbit into an unrecognizable creature with a nasty grimace – just because Gandalf encourages him to give it up? I knew I was in trouble when I started to recognize myself in Bilbo. Just like him I was in thrall to an object — but it wasn’t a magical ring.

It was my iPhone.

I don’t think of myself as particularly attached to my phone – I put it away in social situations, and I don’t miss it when I’m on retreat at New Camaldoli where the absence of cell service renders it useless, but I’ve grown more and more attached. I feel Bilbo’s panic when I misplace it and that sweet relief when I realize it’s right there in my purse. I keep it close and grab it first thing when I get up in the morning — even if it is only to use the timer for my meditation.

The thought that I was addicted made me uneasy, so when I started to hear about a practice called a tech sabbath, I was intrigued enough to try it, and I’m pained to confess to you, dear reader, I couldn’t stick with it. Imagine my shock and dismay! I like to think of myself as a poet and a nature-loving spiritual being, yet I couldn’t live without my devices for 24 hours.

What exactly is a tech sabbath? It’s rooted in the Jewish tradition of observing God’s commandment to keep the seventh day holy by resting and refraining from work. In his beautiful book The Sabbath, Abraham Joshua Heschel likens the Sabbath to “a palace in time with a kingdom for all,” framing it as “an opportunity to mend our tattered lives, to collect rather than to dissipate time.” A tech sabbath is simply when you avoid digital technology for one day a week. Why do this? In his article Should I Take a Digital Sabbath? one of the founders of the Digital Sabbath Experiment gives several reasons: to improve creativity, deepen connections with others, remember how to listen, and rest. We often turn to our devices for a quick break, but he calls this façade rest. After all, does scrolling through social media or binge-watching Netflix really refresh you?

This year I decided to give tech sabbath another try as my practice for Lent. After a lifetime of Lenten observance starting with giving up ice cream as a kid, Lent has a power that fills the sails of my self-discipline, and with a few bumps and lessons learned along the way, I more or less succeeded. In my next few posts I plan to delve into the reasons for trying this practice and share ideas for making it your own.

In the meantime, happy Easter, and blessings to my friends under the Tent of Abraham who are celebrating Ramadan and Passover. I’d love to hear from readers who observe any kind of sabbath. How do you achieve a day of rest and what does it mean to you?

The Secret Cup

The Essential Rumi (book on floral background with a tulip)

I first came to Rumi in the fall of 2000 at the suggestion of my teacher Carolyn Flynn. In response to a now forgotten comment or question, she recommended that I read his poem “Love Dogs.” A few months in her writing group had already dispelled my notion formed in college that poetry was an esoteric genre best left to more literary readers, and I trusted her judgement completely.

“Where can I find it?”

She pulled a worn copy of The Essential Rumi translated by Coleman Barks from the bookshelf behind her and held it up; the next day I held my own copy in my hands.

“Love Dogs” tells the story of a man who gave up praising Allah after a cynic pointed out that he’d never gotten a response. In a dream, Khidr, the guide of souls, explains to him:

This longing

You express is the return message.

The grief you cry out from

draws you toward union.

Your pure sadness

that wants help

is the secret cup.

Listen to the moan of a dog for its master.

That whining is the connection.

It was as if the guide of souls had appeared in my own dream, offering me solace and a way out of my confusion. As soon as I finished, my eyes pulled my heart into the next poem, “Cry Out in Your Weakness,” and before I came to the end, I was weeping.

Crying out loud and weeping are great resources.

A nursing mother, all she does

is wait to hear her child.

Just a little beginning-whimper,

and she’s there.

At the time, I was going through a divorce, which had been preceded by discovering I was infertile. The loss of my marriage was piled on the grief of my empty womb, so many dreams for my life gone, and here was God like a mother wanting nothing more than to let the milk of loving flow into me. Suddenly I began to encounter Rumi everywhere. My friend Eric was quoting him in Caffe Bene, Sufi translator Kabir Helminski read at the Vets Hall, Coleman Barks at the Rio theater. One might never guess this celebrated poet had been born eight hundred years before in Afghanistan!

Rumi was a Sufi scholar guiding a community in Turkey in 1244 when a wandering dervish named Shams showed up and changed his life. The friendship between the two men transformed Rumi into a mystic and a poet spouting inspired verse as he whirled in the Sufi tradition. Fortunately for us, Rumi was profligate with the wisdom he received in his ecstatic dance. Like the right key fitting into a well-oiled lock, his poems opened my heart to the sensuality of the Divine. Rumi didn’t simply rave about bliss, nor did he discuss it in intellectual terms; he actually gave me a taste. And always Rumi had the right words.

When, in the thrill of new love, I half-complained to my therapist about not getting enough sleep, he laughed and shared a few lines from Rumi:

When I am with you, we stay up all night.

When you’re not here, I can’t go to sleep.

Praise God for these two insomnias!

And the difference between them.

After the tsunami in Indonesia in 2004, the director of the International Students Program at Foothill College was planning a memorial service for our students who had lost loved ones. He called me in the library, asking for the poem “No Man Is an Island” or any poem I thought would be appropriate. Instead of John Donne I gave him Rumi: This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival. A joy, a depression … (p. 109) “That was perfect,” he told me later. And so a teacher from the 13^th century found grieving students in the 21^st, a mystic born in Afghanistan becomes a bestselling poet in the United States.

With eyes opened by Rumi I became alert to hints of sensual spirituality in the Bible. Taste and see how good the Lord is, David sang three thousand years ago, inviting us in Psalm 34 to use our senses to experience the Divine, while the Song of Songs offers a gorgeous allegory for our connection with God in its celebration of the erotic longing between a man and a woman: Arise, my love, my dove, my beautiful one, and come away … As a woman privately grappling with the patriarchy of my church, I felt the delight of noticing spring’s first roses whenever I discovered feminine imagery. More than once in the Psalms David compares God to a mother bird protecting her young, and Isaiah likewise promises that as a mother comforts her child, so will I [God] comfort you. Jesus takes up the metaphor when He laments over Jerusalem: how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings ….

As a Muslim and a scholar, it seems likely that Rumi was familiar with Hebrew and Christian scripture. Maybe some of those verses lived in his subsconscious and ignited in a moment of ecstatic twirling. Or could it be that the resonance of Rumi with other worshipers under the Tent of Abraham speaks to the universality of our experience?

It turns out that the Christian tradition also has a rich legacy of mystics. St. Francis of Assisi, St. Hildegard of Bingen, and St. Teresa of Avila have joined The Essential Rumi on my bookshelves, but Rumi has a special place in my heart. He is there whenever I need to cry out in my weakness or simply long to taste and see the goodness of the Divine.

Women’s Real Power

“For women, the need and desire to nurture each other is not pathological but redemptive, and it is within that knowledge that our real power is discovered.” – Audre Lorde

In the year 2000 I was in the throes of a divorce, trying to finish a novel before I had to look for a job. Of course I got writer’s block. The process of sitting down at the computer every day to bring another world to life had lost its juicy zest. I was missing my passion. As a cure, a friend suggested I call a woman he knew who led a writing group, a talented writer who might offer me just the tonic I needed. Her name was Carolyn Flynn, and her group was called “Writing To Feed the Soul.” I signed up with no idea what was in store for me. This was more than a writing group. It turned out that feeding the soul required more than simply writing about soulful topics. It meant sharing — reading the personal words you had just penned out loud to the circle of women and in turn listening with equal intentness to their intimate thoughts. Hearing and being heard were as important as the words on the page. As I did this work week after week, my passion for writing was restored, and I gained a community.

Occasionally the circle rippled when a woman departed the group for one reason or another, and those of us remaining lamented her loss until we recognized a kindred spirit in the new member who took her place. To meet demand Carolyn eventually expanded her teaching schedule to offer more groups meeting less frequently. While I missed the friends who changed to another group, I didn’t lose them because a larger circle held us all. Even if we weren’t in a regular writing group together, I saw them over the years at a writing retreat or poetry reading, a wedding or birthday party. Whenever Carolyn took time off, some of us continued to meet on our own — the sense of community she nurtured turned out to be sustainable and enduring.

This essay began as a paean to my writing group, but in pondering Audre Lorde’s recognition of the redemptive power women find in nurturing each other, two more images popped into my mind, bookends for my marriage: the women who drank champagne, joked, and offered advice at my bridal shower and, eleven years later, the women who smudged and chanted (and yes, drank champagne) at the ritual house cleansing after my divorce. Those two snapshots hold my mother, who was the first woman I ever knew and my first spiritual teacher, my two sisters, aunts, cousins, grandmothers, and girlfriends. Add to that circle teachers, roommates, library mentors and colleagues, and you can see the company of women who have helped and encouraged me all my life.

The power Audre Lorde writes about manifests both collectively and one-on-one. Women may connect in groups — a book club, moon circle, or sports team like my sister’s aptly named cycling club Sorella Forte — but the power in a private conversation with a woman friend is just as potent. Everyday moments attach us to one another as much as rituals and milestones. Admittedly, it’s not always parties and walks on the beach. Connection and community require commitment, just as in a marriage vow — for better or worse, richer or poorer, in sickness and in health. Sometimes we’re called on when we’re busy and tired, so it also takes wisdom to discern priorities, the work of triage that women excel at.

Do women have a monopoly on nurturing? No, certainly not. My father’s love helped give me a strong start in life, and my partner … well, don’t get me started. He’s strong but sensitive, both a problem-solver and an incorrigible romantic who validates and loves me in ways I never imagined. One of the qualities that certainly benefits me but also makes him a good friend in general is the delight he takes in looking for the praiseworthy in others to buoy them with genuine compliments. In the larger world too, at work and church and out and about, I see kind and caring men, but for women, this “need and desire to nurture each other” is our power.

The very first circles I ever joined were for girls: Brownies in second grade, followed by Junior Scouts two years later. One of our practices, as described on the Girl Scout website, was the friendship circle: girls “standing in a circle, crossing their right arms over their left, and clasping hands with their friends on both sides. Everyone then makes a silent wish as a friendship squeeze is passed from hand to hand around the circle.” Although the book clubs and bible studies, the committees and writing groups that were to come may not have practiced an intentional friendship circle, that spirit in the silent wish and squeeze of the hands bonded the women in each group.

In her introduction to Sisters Singing, an anthology of prayers, poetry, and sacred stories by women, Carolyn Flynn writes about a term from carpentry: “A piece of wood attached alongside an existing beam for extra support is called a sister joint. And the verb describing the particular and specific action of providing essential, side-by-side support is known as sistering.” In my connections to women, whether we are bound by blood, books, or spirit, I find sisters.

The Girl Scout motto is “be prepared.” Little did I realize when I was ten years old that my Girl Scout troop was preparing us to sister. Holding the hands of two girls in a friendship circle was the template for my future, for the communities of women who invite me into my real power.

Why Write?

Do articles and blogs bombard your email inbox the way they do mine? On top of the important news, intriguing essays, and inspirational nuggets delivered digitally every day, books fill the shelves in my house and are stacked in every place I might sit down to read. Even though I work in a library, I still get a thrill out of browsing in bookstores.

Why then would I add to the volume of words our information age is already exploding with? I just turned 60, so this is not an idle question. Why spend the time I hold dear writing? When I was 35, laboring on a novel, I wanted to be a bestselling author. Even now that I’m happily earning a living as a librarian, I wouldn’t complain if my blog suddenly went viral or if I were named poet laureate of Santa Cruz. But when the garden languishes for want of my tending and my sweetheart wants to go on a bike ride with me, those pipe dreams are not good enough reasons to spend time scribbling in my notebook.

So why bother?

My writing friends have different answers to this fundamental and deeply personal question. “We’re all just piles of sand,” one said when we talked about this recently. “If sand could write, it would.” The human person is meant to work, to be of service. Of course, people who are overworked can rightfully complain that too much work is exhausting and soul-draining, but the opposite of the old aphorism is also true: all play and no work makes us dull too. Artists create, writers write. It’s what we do. But what if your innate drive gets stifled somehow? Another friend called on the artist’s sense of responsibility. “Who are you not to write?” she mused. “To share what only you can give voice to?”

For some of us, writing is personal. One friend writes to process. Through the alchemy of writing, a painful experience can be transformed into something beautiful. “Writing is medicine,” another said. In fact, Carolyn Brigit Flynn, the beloved teacher who originally brought us all together, calls what she teaches “writing to feed the soul.” This is certainly true for me. Writing nourishes me, and I often turn to my journal in lieu of a therapist.

Like Joan Didion, I also write to find out what I think, whether it’s sorting out an environmental issue or exploring my own anxieties and aspirations. I delight in discovery, the surprises that sometimes burble up from secret places when I’m working on a poem. Was that insight waiting in my subconscious all along, or was it just this minute delivered from the Divine? “The writing of poems must be counted as much a contemplative practice,” Jane Hirshfield writes in Ten Windows, “as a communicative one.”

Indeed, while writing is personal for me, it is also, obviously, about communicating. I’m currently looking for an agent for my novel; I submit poems to journals and publish this blog. Something impels me to share. Is it just that old desire for acclaim I had when I longed to write a bestseller? Maybe, but I don’t think so. The friend for whom writing is medicine explained that the real magic happens when she reads her work aloud in a circle of women and is witnessed. As reader and listener as well as writer, I agree.

An old adage claims that there are three ingredients for happiness: something to do, someone to love, and something to look forward to. In a busy life already full of words, why do I bother putting more on a page? When I was younger, I wanted a product. Now, it’s all about process: reflection, discovery, sharing, healing. The challenge of trying to write well both torments and stimulates me, and when I feel I’ve succeeded, it delivers an intellectual pleasure without compare. Quite simply, I write because it gives me joy.

What is your art, and why do you bother? I look forward to hearing from you!