Angela Center

Integrating: spirituality, psychology, social responsibility and the arts

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A New Song for a New Year

After you've done
what you wanted to do ,
were expected to do,
were talked into doing,
did without thinking,
achieved consciously,
unconsciously,
by accident;
after no one expects you
to do much more,
wants you only to
be content, age well,
die gently, but not yet:
What is it
you still want to do
with this one precious life?

--Donna Hardy

I knew her well, liked her a lot, envied her a little. She was old enough to have done her major life work: marriage, children, grand children, a career, the care of aging parents. She was young enough and healthy enough for us all to agree, had we even thought about it, that she had miles to go before she slept.

It was in July when I saw her last. She was off for a long summer holiday; she would call when she got back. When the call came it was from her husband to tell me she had died in an accident overseas the day before. She had just turned 60.

This woman had family and friends all over the country, all around the world, and she traveled often to them and they to her. I told her she needed more time to herself, but that was more about me than about her. She needed to be involved with people; she needed to love what she loved.

"What is it you want to do with your one wild and precious life?" Mary Oliver asks in her poem, "The Summer Day." I suppose a lot of what we can know about what someone wants to do with this one precious life is to look at what that person is doing with this one life.

If I were giving advice here it would be to suggest that this New Year's Day, or prior to it, rather than make resolutions, keep for a week or a month a detailed diary of what you do. Not what you plan to do, but what you do. Scrutinize it as closely as the poet Rilke observed the Bust of Apollo in the Louvre. Your diary may tell you, "You must change your life."
On the other hand, it may ask you to think more about what you say you want.

An early death reminds us: if we want to have some sense of control of our life, we must measure our days in content, not duration. Most of us do not decide how long we will live; we only choose how true to our ideals, our desires, our comforts we will live.

If the Fates give us a long life, we will each have to decide again and again how we want to live in our changing circumstances. Always we must choose a life that has meaning for us, not what someone else tells us we need.

At those times in every life where we have, or feel we have, no choice, then we still can choose-to live what is with as much grace as possible.
"Teach us to number our days," the Psalmist tells us. Naomi Shihad Nye reminds us of this phrase as she suggests in one of her poems that when someone invites you to a party, "remember what parties are like before answering."

"Feel like a leaf," she continues. "Know you could tumble at any second. Then decide what to do with your time."

Poet Denise Levertov tells us to pick our song--line by line--from the uproar around us, and then to throw back our head and sing it.
Think you can't sing? So write a poem about it. Live it. You never know.

by Donna Hardy

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The Therapist's Journey by Donna Hardy

Schedule 2004

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2004.pdf
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Fall / Winter 2003

SPIRITUAL DIRECTION

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2003 Schedule
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