To follow up on yesterday's gratitude blogpost, I share the following, posted to today's MCC discussion list: "When singer-songwriter Mary Chapin Carpenter canceled her summer tour, she no doubt disappointed the dozens of dancing glow-in-the dark plastic flamingos who traditionally turn up (to her delight) for her annual outing at Chastain Park Amphitheater. But her reasons were sound. In her This I Believe essay, "Everyday Is All There Is", recorded for Sunday’s edition of National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition Sunday, the singer details her recent health scare. After a concert tour this spring, Carpenter was hospitalized after suffering a pulmonary embolism. “Everyone told me how lucky I was,” she says in the radio essay. “A pulmonary embolism can take your life in an instant.”
As she recovered, Carpenter says she experienced disappointment and depression, until a chance encounter at the grocery store: “One morning, the young man who rang up my groceries … told me to enjoy the rest of my day. I looked at him, and I knew he meant it. … What I want, more than ever, is to appreciate that I have this day and tomorrow and hopefully days beyond that. I am experiencing the learning curve of gratitude." The singer should be back on the road in 2008."
Weekend Edition Sunday airs locally (in South Florida) from 8 - 10 a.m.
Plus... Mary Chapin will be a guest on the Air America show Ring of Fire Saturday, June 23. Ring of Fire is hosted by Robert Kennedy Jr., Mike Papantonio and David Bender, streams live from 3 - 6 p.m. and is rebroadcast Sunday, June 24 from 8 - 10 p.m. If you can't tune in for either time, the show is available from iTunes.
SONG: On and On It Goes by Mary Chapin Carpenter
BOOK:
Simple Abundance Journal of Gratitude by Sarah Ban BreathnachPOEM: Sweetness by Stephen Dunn
Just when it has seemed I couldn't bear
one more friend
waking with a tumor, one more maniac
with a perfect reason, often a sweetness
has come
and changed nothing in the world
except the way I stumbled through it,
for a while lost
in the ignorance of loving
someone or something, the world shrunk
to mouth-size,
hand-size, and never seeming small.
I acknowledge there is no sweetness
that doesn't leave a stain,
no sweetness that's ever sufficiently sweet.
Tonight a friend called to say his lover
was killed in a car
he was driving. His voice was low
and guttural, he repeated what he needed
to repeat, and I repeated
the one or two words we have for such grief
until we were speaking only in tones.
Often a sweetness comes
as if on loan, stays just long enough
to make sense of what it means to be alive,
then returns to its dark
source. As for me, I don't care
where it's been, or what bitter road
it's traveled to come so far,
to taste so good.
QUOTE: "Gratitude is twofold -- love coming to visit us and love running out to greet a welcome guest." ~ Henry Van Dyke
