Battle Creek, Michigan, USA
I’m reading a marvellous little book called “Dispatches from the Global Village” by my friend Derek Evans. Derek is a remarkable individual, having most notable served two terms as the Deputy Secretary General of Amnesty International. He now lives in the Okanagan Valley in British Columbia and is the spouse of my long time homeopath, Pat Deacon.
What I really like about Derek is that he embodies a certain tempered optimism that the human species is capable of great things despite it also being capable of unimaginable acts. Derek has assembled a book out of a series of columns he wrote for his neighbours in Naramata, BC. THe column are the musings and reflections of an internationally important peacemaker. There are many gems in the book, which I’ll share over the next couple of days, but I offer this one tonight to those who are despairing at the moment that we might just have it all wrong.
This is a poem that Derek spotted on the London Underground several years ago by Sheenagh Pugh:
Sometimes things don’t go after all,
from bad to worse. Some years muscadel
faces down frost; green thrives;the crops don’t fail,
sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.A people sometimes will step back from war;
elect an honest man; decide they care
enough, that they can’t leave some stranger poor.
Some men become what they were born for.Sometimes our best efforts do not go
amiss; sometimes we do as we meant to.
The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow
that seemed hard frozen: may it happen for you.
This poem reminds me of a line that escaped my lips earlier this year when I was juggling with friends Tenneson Woolf and Roq Garreau. I said that I though juggling is so compelling because “there is always the possibility that a ball might not drop.”
[tags]derek evans, sheehangh pugh, hope[/tags]
Thanks for sharing the lovely poem, Chris. I’ve often pondered why others find my juggling so compelling. Why, in the right performance setting, is there such an explosive release of energy following one of my routines? What I’ve settled on for now is that it’s based in a deep, visceral experience of HOPE. My audience is truly hoping that I’ll succeed, and they feel the ever-present risk that things might fall apart at any moment. The closer I move to the edges of my capacity to keep the pattern flowing, the more powerful the response. I’m curious about the correlation between risk and hope. I believe that to live fully awake with an energetic undercurrent of hope we need to find that sweet spot of risk living at the edges of our capacity for grounded action.
I think that captures well people’s fascination with juggling, jazz, circus arts and figure skating.
I think it is different with NASCAR, reality TV or American Idol, where people watch to see failure.
[…] Chris Corrigan says juggling is compelling because “there is always the possibility that a ball might not drop.” Well said. A vivid picture. […]