Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.
~from “Sometimes” by Mary Oliver (the full poem is included at the end and is certainly worth not missing)
This week I learned something from a woman who raises cows about the word ruminating. The word has its roots in Latin—ruminare, meaning “to chew the cud,” which in turn comes from the word rumen, the Latin name for the first chamber of a four-chambered, ruminant animal, such as a cow. This first chamber of the cow breaks down plant matter using rumen bacteria and stores the undigested material, called the cud. Now this isn’t part of a cows stomach at birth. So they’re not born with the function of ruminating. When they’re born, only one of their four chambers, one that functions much like a human stomach, is active and functions to process its mother’s milk. Once a cow begins consuming feed or grass, the rumen bacteria begins to develop which develops the other 3 chambers.
So, a cow eats, the feed or grass moves to the rumen where the process of ruminating begins. Undigested food is, in effect, regurgitated for the process of “chewing the cud,” which is a slower, more deliberate chewing process than when the food is first chewed, then it returns to the next chamber for further breakdown, moving all the way through the four chambers. This continues until all of the cud is broken down and digested.
Ruminating is a slow, deliberate process. Cows will typically do this work in their preferred position—lying down—or standing still with their eyes lowered, nearly closed. They spend at least as much time chewing on what they’ve ingested in the first place as they do actually feeding. If you see a cow lying very still, this is likely what’s happening.
Why the biology discussion? I can’t help but see how perfect our word for the act of deep and considered human thought really is. Like a cow, a human isn’t born with the ability to ruminate; however, once the mind develops more, this slow, deliberate processing and considering of words spoken or not, actions initiated or not, life lived, situations we can’t quite understand or process quickly, also begins. Our own deep time in rumination is often at least as much, as we chew and break down life, over and again sometimes, as the time spent taking in an experience in the first place. Also like the cow, the ruminations often happen in the quiet, still hours of the night or when we’re alone.
The last few years have been a kind of wack-a-mole frenzy of dealing with one unexpected death, sickness, horrifying act after another. This has brought me to a long ruminating season, a season in which I’ve deliberately (and not so deliberately) chewed on death. Death as a capitol D word, that Tom Long, a wonderful writer and theologian says, is one of the two preachers always present at a funeral, telling us, “I have the last word, and there’s no way to avoid me.” It’s the presence that makes us ask, “How will I number my days?” The presence that makes loving, as Kate Bowler says, somewhat unbearable.
To discover our mortality is both painful and necessary. It is why every yoga practice ends in Savasana, the Corpse Pose. This posture comes back every time—the only pose that is consistently present in every practice. It makes us lie down, do the hard work of being still, and consider our body still alive, yet close somehow to death.
So, the body. It’s essential in considering death so we might consider how we number these days we have. Essential that the ruminations don’t stay only in the mind, but enter into the body. Tom Long says that if you want to know who he is, look at what his body does—"look at where I go, what I touch, my relationship with my wife, what I choose to spend time in.”
My body is in this life, this world, right now—and only right now. I don’t want to miss it. This is a rumination I’ve had, and have kept the thought in my mind for a long time. If I move it into my body, as Long says, then what becomes of my days—where will I go, what will I touch, what and who will I choose to spend time on?
Too much wack-a-mole, too much hustle, too much busyness—that’s often the answer. Yet, what if I ask this question each day as I make my to-do list: “According to my most deeply held values, if I didn’t do these couple things, the day would not be valuable.”
If I answer this carefully, with my heart, the answer isn’t tasks. It’s actions that keep me walking toward gratitude, delight, and connection. So, it’s spending at least 5 minutes time with a soft, gentle, loving presence with each of the three people I live with and checking in with at least one beloved friend each day; it’s making sure I get outside and really pay attention to creation; and it’s the time I allow myself to think and write about, sometimes for no one else but myself, delight.
This is how I rejuvenate my life. It feels like an act of honoring creation to say that gratitude, delight, and connection are worth ruminating on daily. And though I must still be reminded of this often, I can feel more of me embodying it.
Perhaps you ruminate this week friends on that question yourself, see what it brings to the surface for your day, for your one life.
Or, consider ruminating on the Mary Oliver poem below. She’s far more brilliant than me and says all that needs to be on this very thing in 7 perfectly created stanzas.
Be well friends. The spring equinox is in just two days—lightness and darkness, action and stillness, winter’s death and spring’s new life, all held in equal balance for a time.
sometimes :: mary oliver
1.
Something came up
out of the dark.
It wasn’t anything I had ever seen before.
It wasn’t an animal
or a flower,
unless it was both.
Something came up out of the water,
a head the size of a cat
but muddy and without ears.
I don’t know what God is.
I don’t know what death is.
But I believe they have between them
some fervent and necessary arrangement.
2.
Sometime
melancholy leaves me breathless…
3.
Water from the heavens! Electricity from the source!
Both of them mad to create something!
The lighting brighter than any flower.
The thunder without a drowsy bone in its body.
4.
Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.
5.
Two or three times in my life I discovered love.
Each time it seemed to solve everything.
Each time it solved a great many things
but not everything.
Yet left me as grateful as if it had indeed, and
thoroughly, solved everything.
6.
God, rest in my heart
and fortify me,
take away my hunger for answers,
let the hours play upon my body
like the hands of my beloved.
Let the cathead appear again-
the smallest of your mysteries,
some wild cousin of my own blood probably-
some cousin of my own wild blood probably,
in the black dinner-bowl of the pond.
7.
Death waits for me, I know it, around
one corner or another.
This doesn’t amuse me.
Neither does it frighten me.
After the rain, I went back into the field of sunflowers.
It was cool, and I was anything but drowsy.
I walked slowly, and listened
to the crazy roots, in the drenched earth, laughing and growing.