Reflections on One Wild and Precious Life
Unitarian Society of New Haven
February 25, 2018
Cedro Greist Salazar:
Good morning everyone! I am Cedro Greist Salazar and my life is both wild and precious because of my friends, my family, and YOU.
I was born in Costa Rica, where everything was wilder than here – the trees, the animals, insects and even my dad’s hair. In Costa Rica there is a legend about an animal called a kinkajou. They say that kinkajous are attracted to the cries of newborn babies and sometimes even try to take them away from their homes to take care of them themselves. This almost happened to me. My dad tells me that he saw a kinkajou hanging around our house just days after I was born. Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like if I’d been raised by Kinkajous instead of humans. I am glad that I was NOT raised by them though, but by humans instead.
Let me tell you about my family. My family speaks Spanish and English (except for my dad – he speaks some other languages too). My mom is an incredible cook and she has taught me how to make pasta and cookies. I recently used that knowledge to make cookies for the Hamden Police and Firefighters. My brother Bismark and his fiancé Nicole are very sweet and take good care of me. They share just about everything they have with me and that’s not very common among big brothers. I won’t tell you more about my dad because you know him pretty well already.
My dream for the future is to be an inventor, an astronomer, and a potion maker (you might call this a “scientist”). I hope my inventions, my studies of space and my potions will make people happier and more peaceful with each other. I really want to invent some devices and potions that will help stop gun violence. Maybe I’ll make an anti-gun shield out of plasma energy that will destroy all guns in the world all at once. I hope that will make everyone happy. Would you be happy if I did that?
Thank you for listening and I hope you have a peaceful day.
Lauren Clorite:
When I think about the future, and where I will go, my thoughts always go back to how I got to be where I am now. Sixteen years ago, my parents, Mike and Janis, embarked on a trip that would mark the next chapter of their lives. They put their work lives on hold, said temporary goodbyes to friends and family, and set out to fly to Changsha, China. Two weeks later, they had become the parents of an 11-month old baby girl named Tan Jiang Dong. Thereafter, they flew back to the U.S., a family of three, and were welcomed with open arms by their parents awaiting their arrival. As the new family settled in, Mike and Janis filed for an American birth certificate with their daughter’s American name on it. After a long and hopeful process, they were able to acquire the certificate. It read: Lauren Jiangdong Bozzo Clorite.
From a young age, it was clear to me that the people raising me were not the same as the people who had given birth to me. Although I was aware of my adoption, I still felt as though I was a typical American kid. I regularly ate mac ‘n cheese for dinner, I routinely went to BJs with my dad, and every Thanksgiving I sat down with my family and got way too into football games. But as time went on, and the other kids in school began to grasp the concept of race, I began to feel different. “Why are your eyes so small?” “Why is your hair black?” “Are you and your mom even related?” I was constantly reminded of the characteristics that set me apart from everyone else. It was something that I could not escape.
Soon I started to see myself through the eyes of others. At some points I still viewed myself as American like everyone else. But the Chinese part of me still lingered in the back of my head, slowly creeping its way to the surface. Invariably I had two feelings, two voices, two identities.
The notion of my double-consciousness is still unsettling to me. When people carelessly say to me, “Say something in Chinese,” I shy away, knowing that I am only Chinese by title, not by culture. I somehow feel guilty for not being able to speak my native-tongue; I feel the disappointment others have when I’m not what they’re expecting. In history class when we discuss past international events involving China, I feel uncomfortable. I am paranoid that people are looking at me because the people we’re learning about are my “ancestors.” I am worried that every faint laugh coming from every direction of the room has to do with my racial appearance. At times like this, I feel as though I am too aware, too conscious, of my Chinese identity, and its contrast to my American one.
Sixteen years into my wild and precious life, I have not yet discovered my true identity. I am American and not American. I am Chinese and not Chinese. Consequently, I seek not to have an unsettling impression of who I am, but rather seek to reconcile with the multiple identities I possess. As college nears, I will embark on a journey, like my parents did, that will mark the next chapter of my life. My parents took a chance in adopting a child who was not biologically related to them, and they say that it turned out better than they ever could have hoped. As the future unfolds, I will invest in new experiences and take chances with the hope of an outcome similar to my parents’. I look forward to stepping into the rich environment of the unknown, allowing me to integrate all of these complex parts of myself.
Jeannette Faber:
The Summer Day by Mary Oliver
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean –
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down –
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention,
how to fall down into the grass,
how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed,
how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
Most would agree that what makes this poem most beloved is the question posed at the end, its last line: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
Making another hypothesis, the words that are often most noted in that question are “wild” and “precious.” “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
Pardon me while I geek out on etymology.
“‘Wild’ is derived from an Old English word meaning ‘in the natural state, uncultivated, untamed, undomesticated, uncontrolled’”
“Precious comes to us from the mid-13c., from Old French, meaning “costly, honorable, of great worth.”
I am a high school English teacher and have often shared this poem with students. They love it too. It seems everyone loves this poem. But I took this “assignment” as a way to see something new to love, some fresh way of looking at it. So, I decided to focus not as much on “wild” and “precious” but on the word “one.”
“One” was “originally pronounced as it still is in only, atone, alone; the now-standard pronunciation “wun” began c. 14c. in southwest and west England.
The histories of these words give us new ways to think about them through other words, other concepts: Untamed, natural state, honorable, atone, and alone.
Now, I’ll pull those words – untamed, natural state, honorable, atone, and alone -forward and back to the question, now paraphrased in the first person: ‘What do I plan to do with my one wild and precious life?’
I will answer the question with a quote: My present, life-defining and guiding quote is from ― Thich Nhat Hanh: “We are here to awaken from our illusion of separateness.” I believe our natural state is one of oneness. And that state is wild and precious. And honorable.
“We are here to awaken from our illusion of separateness.”
So, my ONE life: Everyday, I want to see myself less as a self and more as a part of a greater oneness. And just what is that oneness? I guess that is the mystery so many of us ponder. A oneness that, perhaps, we come from; a oneness of which we are, perhaps, a part; a oneness to which we may, perhaps, one day return… But this life, this life – I truly want to live like I am part of something greater than myself. To not see myself as separate for that is a terrible illusion which causes so much suffering.
Oliver offers this line as well: “I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.” Neither do I, but the closest I can get to it is to try each day to awaken, more and more, to the great mystery alive in all of us and to let pure love awaken. Not to be tamed by an illusion of separateness. But to live in a way that atones for having lived with that illusion for so long. I have vowed to be differently.
I am not alone. You are not alone. We are not alone.
Because we are part of everything. Everything is in us, and we are in everything.
And isn’t that wild and precious?
My hope: May we ever be being more aware, more awake human beings. Ones who one day simply and peacefully fold back into the eternal great mystery – pure, loving oneness.
Dan Wade:
Mary Oliver asks what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? At age 74, perhaps not so wild, but definitely precious! I have been fortunate to have had quite an enjoyable life. One might say hedonistic in a Platonic sort of way. Frankly, I just want to keep doing what I have been doing. At an early age I discovered I liked being in the library. In first grade I waited in the library for my mother to pick me up after school. Having spent fifteen years in graduate school, I have worked in the Yale Law Library over the past thirty, having come from the Vanderbilt and the University of Houston Law Libraries. The truth is that I have spent my entire life in the library and so I will continue to spend it there, Inshallah. I am a true library nerd. Today, semi-retired, I work 23 hours a week in the Law Library selecting books for the foreign and international law collection. This has kept me engaged in the intellectual world, and my wife, Carol, and I enjoy partaking of all that Yale has to offer, lectures, film, art, music, and friendships. Working part-time allows me to enjoy my other passion the out of doors. I love to feed the birds outside our dining room window and to take short walks and long drives around Connecticut. We also enjoy nature vacations whether it be Acadia or the Tetons and Yellowstone. In the proper season we also like to garden.
I have also recently commenced teaching ESL to Latin American immigrants. Sophie and Carol have done this for several years at Junta, and I have joined Peter Schwartz in the Beginners class. There is a sign in the Literacy Volunteers Office that says 30% of New Haven can’t read this sign. Here is a mission for all of us.
My part-time work has also allowed me to become active in USNH. I look forward to the CONECT process, and getting to know you through one on ones. I feel like the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on the mountain top. I may not make it to the promised land, but I have faith with your living out the UU seven principles you will get there some day.
Finally, I will spend my days seeking the Divine. I am a Unitarian by day and a Christian by night as I worship on Sunday evenings with Shalom United Church of Christ that meets in downtown New Haven. Eight of those 15 years of graduate school were studying religion, and its mystery fascinates me. I will spend the rest of my life pursuing that mystery. Like Mary Oliver I don’t know what prayer is, but a lot of us are doing it, as this poem from this year’s Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr’s. service at Mishkhan Israel suggests:
Prayer is not purely an act; all things pray, and all things pour forth their souls. The heavens pray, the earth prays, every creature and every living thing prays. In all life there is longing. Creation itself is but a longing, a kind of prayer to the Almighty. What are the clouds, the rising and the setting of the sun, the soft radiance of the moon, and the gentleness of the night? What are the flashes of the human mind and the storms of the human heart? They are all prayers—the wordless outpouring of boundless longing for God.
Carol Stockton:
Good Morning!
My name is Carol Stockton. I’ve been a member of USNH for 25 years…some of you may have seen me around doing social justice work and the quilt project.
- My early life was spent in a house with no bathroom and no heat in my bedroom and my family has struggled with the heartbreak of relatives who suffer from addiction and mental health issues.
I’ve had four broken bones and 12 surgeries, have parted with five entire and two partial organs, and survived three different types of cancer. I’ve had three children, one of whom was born with a serious heart defect and died two days after his first birthday, and have lost my mother, father, and brother.
Each of these experiences forced me to examine some complicated questions. Who am I now? What will my life be like in the future? And most recently — what will be my legacy?
In Prof Shelly Kagan’s online Yale lecture, using the stages of a car’s aging as a metaphor for life, he asks How many changes of the constituent parts can you have and still be the same hunk of stuff? As you might imagine, I found that question particularly intriguing.
The truth is that, as we grapple with the exigencies life imposes, we are never again the same hunk of stuff… We change based not only on the stages at which we find ourselves but also, for good or ill, on whatever challenges we must face. We rarely have choices about what we must endure, but our thoughts and attitudes about what comes our way shapes (and conversely, reflects) our characters.
Our abilities may be affected at any stage in our lives, and even our inner world may be forever altered, but how we respond is always our choice. We can become angry or bitter and withdraw or reach out into the world with a deeper understanding and ever increasing empathy.
I have been blessed with a wonderfully supportive, loving family, dear friends and this congregation. These connections inspire me to try to be a positive influence for my children and grandchildren and to endeavor always to seek justice and act lovingly.
As to answering the question “What will I do with my one wild and precious life,” … I have absolutely no idea! Seven months ago, I would likely have answered survive. But here I am, opening the door to the rest of my life with the same interests and passions but with new insights.
It’s ok to not be the same hunk of stuff, and it just might turn out to be even better.
I’m no longer afraid to adapt and reinvent myself because whether or not we realize it, that’s what we all do every day of our lives anyway.
2/25/2018