A beautiful question

Note 32: Asking good ones can be a gift, a skill, an act of love

A few weeks ago, in a small class where we ask and are asked lots of interesting, perceptive, and sometimes probing (or some kinder, less cliched adjective) questions, a colleague asked me, “When’s the last time you wrote about beauty?”

Wow.

We’re in a CPE class (Clinical Pastoral Education), which includes a number of clinical hours volunteering as a chaplain intern at Presbyterian and Montefiore hospitals in Pittsburgh. We visit patients, talk with them, listen to them, often pray for them. These conversations are protected by our vows of confidentiality, so I can’t tell you what I was writing about in my case study of a patient visit, or even much about our class … Oh, wait, that wasn’t a case study week. We also write one-page personal reflections on a series of assignments, and this was one of those.

What a surprising and delightful, even beautiful, question! As we delved into my response to that week’s prompt, he was connecting two points, one of which I both hoped and feared someone would press on.

“I love that question,” I told him, while considering an answer. This classmate is a veteran of CPE classes, so offers gentle, hospitable, insightful questions — sometimes for us to ponder and not answer that moment. I mentioned my long, if uneven, habit of keeping a gratitude journal, and several things from a gratitude list I’d written that week that are beautiful in “beauty” is a broad umbrella. I can tell you that the question felt like the flip side of a different question and a lovely way, surprising to ask it.

Every Monday, the journal River Teeth publishes a weekly flash nonfiction piece called “Beautiful Things.” These little pieces (250 words max) certainly stretch what we automatically think of as beautiful. (People who have taken a Tweetspeak Poetry nonfiction workshop with me know that I am a big fan of this flash nonfiction series, as both class readings and inspiring prompts.)

Here’s one, the first in a 28-item series of daily wee pieces written by Michelle Webster-Hein that got the whole thing started.

Beet

February 1, 2014

I sliced a beet in half and discovered that it has rings. Rings like you would find on a tree stump to mark its age--one ring, one year.

But beets are young, have only known one spring, one summer, one early fall, perhaps also one winter passed inside in a dark, dry box. So what could each ring represent? Each season? Each snap of cold? Each grub that has burrowed blindly around its girth in the cool black soil?

It makes me much less serious to think about how much happens, silently, under my feet.

A stretch of 2021 and 2022 was a weird, challenging time. I thought about writing a beautiful thing every day as a way through it. I did on many days, but that project (which would, coincidentally, have taken roughly 250 days depending on my start and ending points) never really got off the ground (which is to say I did not make the move from idea to commitment to daily effort and habit.) And I regret it.

You may have come across these words of Mary Oliver: “The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.” Here’s a longer stretch of that essay, “Of Power and Time”:

“The working, concentrating artist is an adult who refuses interruption from himself, who remains absorbed and energized in and by the work — who is thus responsible to the work… Serious interruptions to work, therefore, are never the inopportune, cheerful, even loving interruptions which come to us from another.
[…]

It is six A.M., and I am working. I am absentminded, reckless, heedless of social obligations, etc. It is as it must be. The tire goes flat, the tooth falls out, there will be a hundred meals without mustard. The poem gets written. I have wrestled with the angel and I am stained with light and I have no shame. Neither do I have guilt. My responsibility is not to the ordinary, or the timely. It does not include mustard, or teeth. It does not extend to the lost button, or the beans in the pot. My loyalty is to the inner vision, whenever and howsoever it may arrive. If I have a meeting with you at three o’clock, rejoice if I am late. Rejoice even more if I do not arrive at all.

There is no other way work of artistic worth can be done. And the occasional success, to the striver, is worth everything. The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”

This bring me to another beautiful question. Through my own neglect (or distraction, which Maria Popova writes about through the lens of Oliver’s essay), I lost two bodies of work that are mostly not recoverable. A sympathetic friend acquainted with loss and good at questions asked, “What might be your next step, since you've now got a clean slate?”

One step is to write here more often. I have often thought, write here weekly. Maybe every weekend. The drafts folder has many beginnings. I’m using several events as goad prompt invitation to take this step — not even to commit, but to finish a quickly written post, send it out, and invite responses, especially from my steady readers. What do you value here? What would you like to see? Would you be willing to support it if I’m writing more consistently?

It’s time to return to the good work of grading papers (praising the good, and trying to ask inviting questions to help college writers re-see their work and the possibilities for revision), and once we’re done with our companionable silent co-working, the goodness of being with those I belong to (which — that B word, I mean — is probably a subject for another time). Thanks for reading. Before next time, I’m going to reread Tweetspeak’s book club posts on Warren Berger’s book A More Beautiful Question.

Finally, some beauty from recent days:

• Driving to see family on a day that turned sunny, and not encountering road work once (a first in several years).

• Even if delayed, opening Christmas gifts with them in person for the first time since 2019.

• One gift that was both joke and act of love in response to small accidents with one of last year’s gifts. (And recalling the conversation I had with the physician assistant student who fixed me up at an Urgi-Care visit last Easter.)

• Fish tacos, and the steel zigzag thingy that holds them upright and separate.

• A dachshund curled in my lap.

• Random stranger conversations with an 85-year-old South American guy who walk-exercises (forwards and backwards!) on the flagstone sidewalks outside the building I teach in, who has resting smile face and radiates joy.

• The way students embraced a springlike day by tossing footballs, flinging Frisbees, picnicking, playing coed volleyball, stringing up hammocks, and studying al fresco on the campus lawn.

  (thanks, friend, for making me snort and laugh hard at the word "subaltern").

• Shared laughter, and shared jokes that bond you with only a few people, or even one other soul (like memories with your only sibling, and the funny and beautiful question a friend asked last week, making me snort and laugh hard over the word subaltern).

Bless you, all of you, each of you, for meandering through this rambly post with me. I’m grateful for you. May you find beauty in this day, right where you are.