A Bowl Large Enough to Contain the Entire Milky Way

Recipe For (Organic) Spiritual Growth:
by Toben Cooney-Callnan

Start by clearing the counters of everything 
you think you know 
about how this is “supposed to go”.
Then wash the dishes free of any unappetizing notions
You have about what it means to be hungry.
While you are at it, pack away any ancestral china or silver-
This is your nourishment-
not your mother’s or grandfather’s.

Next, go through the kitchen cabinets.
Notice how full your shelves are.
Toss out anything with artificial preservatives-

Now is the time to get real!
Select only the ingredients that you can pronounce
With a smile on your face. 
Now find the biggest bowl you can-
Something large enough to mix the entire Milky Way in.
Add your ingredients by color
Not in rainbow order but like you are painting
the ceiling of your own chapel.
Don’t be stingy about it- no need for precise measures

Start mixing- don’t bother with the wooden spoon
Or rolling up your sleeves
Just fold in handfuls of every fragrant thing 
That ever made your mouth water.
That ever made you feel full,
That ever made you want to make more.

Sit with it after sunset when 
all the buds in your heart feel too dim
For your tongue to recognize hope
If it doesn't soar on its own, 
Leaven it with your breath
Salt it with your tears- joy and sorrow
are sourced from the same local region

Flavor to your liking-Delicate or Piquant
It may take some time to age perfectly
Use that time to go outside and listen to the birds
Garnish the plate with their songs
Don’t bother setting the table- use your fingers
This food must be played with.

Don’t save this meal for special occasions
And don’t wait until you are starving
But do share it- the more the merrier
Try serving it in silence
Running each grain over your tongue
Savoring every sacred molecule.

I have been wanting to share the above words for a few weeks now. Toben is an amazing local educator. I so admire his work with children and teens. He welcomes them with friendliness, curiosity, creativity, respect, and, above all, love. As you can see for yourself, he also writes beautifully.

There are so many images in Toben’s poem that feel to me like clear air pouring into my lungs. The one that captures my imagination the most today (tomorrow it may change, because this poem offers so much) is the idea of mixing ingredients by hand in a bowl large enough to contain the Milky Way. If I am doing the mixing, I will be sure to lift my hands to the sky to harvest some stars to put into my bowl.

I come from sky people. When I was little, my father addressed the local town meeting (the governing body of that small town) to object to the streetlights that were scheduled to be erected in our neighborhood. “We won’t be able to see the stars!” he protested.

Protested to no avail, I hasten to add. Soon a streetlight was placed directly at the end of our driveway.

But family vacations usually were at a rented remote fishing camp in Maine, where there was no electricity and no ambient light. We could see the stars just fine there. One of our favorite activities was to lie on the dock at night and look up. Often we were there during the Perseid meteor showers, so our evening viewings were punctuated with exclamations of “There goes one!” whenever a star burned its way across the sky.

What is it about the night sky? For me, it’s two things. First, celestial events fill me with awe. And awe is a very good thing for my soul. Stars, those tiny pinpricks of light so far away in our vast universe, are beautiful. Shooting stars thrill me particularly. Comets, too. The couple of times I have been blessed to see the aurora borealis sent a near-electrical charge through my body. Each of those wonders has caused my heart to swell and my sense of gratitude to expand.

Second, the night sky humbles me: Gazing at it gives me a sense of how truly small I am in the vast, unfathomable universe. Human beings generally inflate their sense of importance in the grand scheme of things, it seems to me. People tend to view themselves as somehow outside of and elevated from the natural world instead of just one thread woven through it. The night sky reminds me that I am part of a much bigger system than I can possibly imagine.

You may know where I am headed here: Yes, I was part of the throng of people gathered in northern Maine and elsewhere to see the total solar eclipse on April 8. Here was an opportunity to gaze at the night sky during daytime!

Monday’s total solar eclipse was not my first. My family was at that aforementioned fishing camp on July 20, 1963, when Maine was treated to another total solar eclipse. There, too, a small crowd gathered to watch. A veterinarian who was renting a nearby cabin brought X-ray films to share so that we could take turns looking at the sun as the moon gradually swallowed it up.

I was just a little girl back then. I remember the excitement, the darkening sky, and the light’s return. Oddly, I do not remember the eclipse itself. Perhaps I had been so thoroughly cautioned not to stare directly at the sun that I was afraid to look up during totality. I don’t know.

In the ensuing years I befriended a work colleague who saved up her vacation time to travel all over the world chasing total solar eclipses. Her apartment walls were lined with photographs she had taken of various total solar eclipses. They were intriguing, but, studying them, I wondered what so thoroughly stirred her passion. Instinctively I knew there was something the photographs failed to capture, even as expertly produced as they were. I yearned to know what it was.

So it was that my family headed an hour and a half north on Sunday so that we would be in good position for the eclipse on Monday. We made a small vacation out of it. Our son took a couple of vacation days and came with my spouse and me to a cabin we rented in Caratunk, Maine, from Sunday until Tuesday. On Monday afternoon, we gathered with a couple of dozen people on the banks of the Kennebec River to watch the show.

April weather in Maine can be a little iffy. If you have been reading my recent posts, you have some idea. It was more than a little ironic that Monday’s weather was gorgeous. Warm, sunny, not a cloud in sight. We sat in summer chairs set up on a lawn covered with last week’s wintery snow while we enjoyed spring sunshine.

Others have described eclipses much better than I could do. Try Annie Dillard, for one: Annie Dillard's Classic Essay 'Total Eclipse' - The Atlantic

I will say this much about my experience: It reminded me of a safe. You know how, with a safe, you have to turn the dial to the right so many times, then to the left so many times, then to the right, then to the left, each time landing on precise numbers? You have to line up the turns and the numbers just right until, finally, you hear a click and you can swing the door open and peer inside. The eclipse felt like that for me, only backwards. It seemed as though I had been living inside the safe, and some mysterious force was moving the dials outside. Then, when the combination of sun, moon, and earth lined up just exactly so, the door finally swung open, and the entire universe opened up before my eyes, charging my entire body with some kind of energy I couldn’t recognize or comprehend. Up until that point, I thought I had understood the vastness of the universe. Now I knew I understood nothing — nor will I ever have any true reckoning of interstellar space.

Awe and humility. Just from looking up.

I didn’t bother trying to photograph the eclipse. For one thing, all I had was a cell phone. For another, even my long-ago friend with all her fancy cameras, lenses, and filters couldn’t frame a picture that did solar eclipses justice. But I want to share one photo that feels meaningful to me. Below you see my son on the right gazing at the darkened sky. Only minutes before we had bright (though diminishing) sunlight and a robin’s egg blue sky.

Maybe you don’t like star gazing. Maybe the idea of hanging out on a riverbank with a bunch of strangers who are all donning silly looking glasses and turning their gaze heavenward is just plain weird. Maybe you find your inspiration in other places. Or maybe you would have loved to have seen the total eclipse but couldn’t for any number of reasons. But, friends, I do hope this for you: that you find and harvest your sources of wonder and awe, that you discover ways to understand just how small we humans are in the vast scheme of things, that you find your own mixing bowl large enough to contain the entire Milky Way, that you fill it with the ingredients of your own inspiration, that you plunge your hands in and stir everything to just the right degree for you. In the end, I hope you share what you have created with others.

I leave you with some of my favorite star words. These come from Hannah Senesh, who was a Jewish freedom fighter during World War II. Born in Budapest in 1921, Senesh left Hungary for Israel in 1939. In 1943, she joined the British army and volunteered to be parachuted into Europe to make contact with the resistance fighters. For three months she worked with Tito's partisans in Yugoslavia. Then, when crossing the border into Hungary, she was captured and ultimately executed. She was 23. Here is what stars inspired her to say:

“There are stars whose radiance is visible on Earth 
though they have long been extinct. 
There are people whose brilliance continues to light the world 
even though they are no longer among the living. 
These lights are particularly bright when the night is dark. 
They light the way for humankind.”

Love,

Sylvia