Over-worked or over-entertained? Our humanity gives us the joint gifts of both activity and passivity. We act and we are acted upon. But how do we balance and mediate these states? How do we cultivate long practices and habits that help us to inhabit the space between activity and passivity, bringing them together in a beautiful agency? Poet and linguist Alysia Harris joins Matt Croasmun for a discussion of that space between active and passive in human life—bringing the concepts of wonder, awareness/attention, patient receptivity to the natural world and to God, bearing witness to the autonomy and action of the other, and how she cultivates and meditates on these things in her own life.
Over-worked or over-entertained? Our humanity gives us the joint gifts of both activity and passivity. We act and we are acted upon. But how do we balance and mediate these states? How do we cultivate long practices and habits that help us to inhabit the space between activity and passivity, bringing them together in a beautiful agency?
Poet and linguist Alysia Harris joins Matt Croasmun for a discussion of that space between active and passive in human life—bringing the concepts of wonder, awareness/attention, patient receptivity to the natural world and to God, bearing witness to the autonomy and action of the other, and how she cultivates and meditates on these things in her own life.
Show Notes
About Alysia Harris
Follow Alysia Harris @Poppyinthewheat
Alysia Nicole Harris was born in Fremont, California but grew up in Alexandria, VA and considers herself on all accounts a member of the ranks of great Southern women. At age 10 she wrote her first poem, after hearing about sonnets in English class. That class began her life-long love of poetry and the literary arts.
Alysia went to The University of Pennsylvania where she experienced her first success as a writer and a performer. In 2008 she featured on the HBO documentary: Brave New Voices where she wowed audiences with her piece "That Girl". In 2010 Alysia graduated UPENN Summa Cum Laude with honors and was also inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa honor society.
Alysia received her MFA in poetry from NYU in 2014 and her PhD in linguistics from Yale University in 2019. Her dissertation “The Non-Aspectual Meaning of African-American English ‘Aspect’ Markers” breaks with traditional analyses and explores the discourse-oriented uses of the preverbal particles ‘be’ and ‘done’ in varieties of African-American English.
Although she has experienced scholastic success, poetry has always come first in her heart. Cave Canem fellow, winner of the 2014 and 2015 Stephen Dunn Poetry Prizes, Pushcart Nominee, her poetry has appeared in Best American Poets, Indiana Review, The Offing, Callaloo, Solstice Literary Magazine, Squaw Valley Review, Letters Journal, and Vinyl Magazine among others. Her first chapbook How Much We Must Have Looked Like Stars to Stars won the 2015 New Women's Voices Chapbook Contest and is available for purchase on site.
Alysia was also a founding member of the internationally known performance poetry collective, The Strivers Row and has garnered over 5 million views on YouTUBE. She has toured nationally for the last 10 years and also performed at the United Nations and the US Embassies in Jordan and Ukraine, as well as in Australia, Canada, Germany, Slovakia, South Africa, the UAE, and the UK.
Alysia now lives in Atlanta, GA where she works as a consultant for the Morehouse Center for Excellence in Education and as arts and soul editor at Scalawag Magazine, a nonprofit POC-led, women run media organization focused on Southern movement, community, and dissent. She is working on a book of poems and a collection of essays about the intersections of faith, violence, and the natural world.
Production Notes
Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center For Faith and
Culture. Visit us online at faith.yale.edu.
Alysia Harris: If you can never be acted upon, if you can never have that permeability, then you can never experience wonder, because you can never encounter that interface with the reality that there is something else beyond you that you don't yet quite understand. And yet it is amazing. And yet it is an experience that is changing you. That is shifting you. If you're not permeable, you either think of yourself as the only reservoir or source in a kind of environment, or, conversely, you only think about yourself as a dam to which everything else flows. And again, that allows you to be connected to a larger system, which is to say, I am deeply vital to the systems that are around me. I need to participate in these systems in order to help sustain them, but I, myself, am not the entire system.
Matt Croasmun: This is For the Life of the World, a podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity.
I'm Matt Croasmun with the Yale Center For Faith and Culture.
Evan Rosa: In his new book published this week, This Sacred Life, theologian Norman Wirzba describes human agency this way, he says it's a, quote, "doing that is always also an undergoing." I've been puzzling for quite a while what it might mean to take that seriously, this thought that what we do is always also an experience of being acted upon. That's the sort of question I love to take to my friend, poet, and linguist, Alicia Harris. She is an extraordinary thinker, always excited to get a chance to talk with her. She's been a touring spoken word artist, a practicing poet, in 2008, she was featured in an HBO documentary, Brave New Voices. She traveled and toured for many years with an extraordinary performance poetry collective called the Strivers' Row. She has performed at the United Nations, at U.S. Embassies all around the world, an extraordinary performer and extraordinary poet. She holds an MFA in poetry from NYU. Alongside all of that, she also picked up along the way a PhD in linguistics from Yale University, which is where I got to know her. She currently serves as the Director of Public Programs at the Corsicana Artist and Writer Residency in Corsicana, Texas. As a poet and a linguist, as you might expect, Alysia is careful and incredibly thoughtful about words, their meanings, their uses, the ways that those change over time, the ways that they encapsulate whole cultures and approaches to life, and the ways that words capture whole approaches and series of thoughts about God. How we can think and live faith in the contemporary world. In her poetry, she shares vulnerably, and honestly, and with a sort of rawness about her own experience of life, and her own encounters with the numinous, with the divine. I always find that Alysia is asking the questions I need to ask, and giving me access to words and to worlds that helped me articulate my own response.
Matt Croasmun: Welcome Alysia Harris. I'm so glad that we get to have this conversation today.
Alysia Harris: Me too Matt, me too. It's a long time coming.
Matt Croasmun: It is. And, you know, last time you and I had a good long phone conversation, you really left me with something that I had been pondering ever since, which is something like this. I'll frame it in terms of my work in the Life Worth Living class. Two of the fundamental categories you sort of work with are agency and circumstance, right? So the active and the passive, like what is a good for us to do? What is, what sort of circumstances would it be good or preferable for humans to live in? But when we were last talking, you were sort of pushing on that. There's something maybe unhelpful, or even dangerous, about like giving in too much to that strict distinction between active and passive. Tell us a little bit, like, what do you mean there? What's untrue about that sort of distinction between I act, or I'm acted upon? Well I just think, you can swing too easily to one extreme or the other. If you're constantly focused on only acting, then you are always interested in the ways that you can assert yourself into a situation, and the situation will necessarily change because of your presence. And while that may have some benefits, it will likely leave you exhausted. And it will oftentimes, like in my experience, it has led me to kind of an abuse of my own power in a situation over others, instead of working with others or working alongside or....But then the other case is like, the passivity is that nothing that you do actually matters. And so you are not using the tools, and the actions, and the gifts that you have available to you in the service of something like larger than you. Which I also think is like a failure or a flaw. And so that can lead you to just like lethargic, dispassionate, uninterested, or even slothful to responsibilities that we have to ourselves and to one another and to the world. But then, there's this like intermediate category of potential, which is a kind of attention, like attentiveness, to what is happening around you, which then allows you to act in a way that is actually in deep service. It's different than striving, I guess, or maybe you're putting your striving to attending to a kind of awareness. And I'm interested in that kind of awareness because I think that through that I can actually have a response to the situation that is neither less than what it should be, nor more than what it should be, but in keeping with what's happening around me.
I'm hearing two things in what you're saying.
One is, um, it's pretty clear that striving towards activity only, as it sort of inevitably becomes a sort of over assertion of the self and a sort of, potentially like an erasure of the other. I mean, that's pretty clear. And then pacivity only also is an erasure of the self, or a sort of total withdrawal of the self, and a sort of self abnegation. The natural thing for us to say is, oh, well we just need both, but actually you're proposing, the second thing I hear you saying is, it's not just that, oh, we need both, but actually we need some sort of third category, which is some way of, I guess what you're talking about in terms of attentiveness, some way of, I think I've heard you talk about this in terms of bearing witness or something like that. There's a sort of active receptivity, a sort of intentional receptivity. Am I getting that right?
Alysia Harris: Well I think it's this like, Carl Sagan would say something like, you know, the world has been gestating and evolving for 13.7 or 14 billion years. And human beings are part of the universe that allows the universe to sort of know itself or observe itself. And so if I take that. On its face value that there's something unique about my humanness, which allows me to observe and contemplate, and then not just enact my will on a surrounding, but actually respond in keeping with the observations that I'm making as I'm perceiving, experiencing, as I'm listening. Then, I think that that's something that can not only be restorative, but can also be a way in which that guides my actions moving forward. So it's actually like gathering the multiplicity of information that's available to me, in a way that necessarily allows it to act on me. I mean, that's the idea of a witness, right? You are not participating in the action. Something is happening around you, that you are privy to. And then you go and you tell, or you respond to what you have seen, to what you have heard. And I think within that, that requires, one, like you said, a kind of active receptivity, but then there is the agentic action actually follows after you have been receptive, right? It's not, I am acting first and then wanting everything else to respond to me, to respond to my actions. It is rather, I am responding to the situations around me, and then I am acting out of that response, which I think may help break down the kind of tension that we feel between our own desire, our own will, and the situations that are surrounding us.
Matt Croasmun: I think it's so interesting that you bring Carl Sagan into this picture because I'm struck that the more I think about myself as a part of a larger system, the more this sort of active or passive, both at once, sort of mode seems to be the only truthful way to think about myself, right? Because, and I think about this and I've been thinking about this a lot recently in terms of imagining myself as part of an ecosystem. So like, Robin Wall Kimmerer's work, Braiding Sweetgrass, or I was recently in a conversation with Tim Lilburn, the Canadian poet, who thinks so much about being located in a place, what it means to be in a place, and to be that human member, that human participant, in a sort of larger symbiosis that is any sort of ecosystem in which we might live. And what Lilburn said to me is he said that what he wants to cultivate and what he encourages his students to cultivate, here he gets in the reading practices. He's really like down into, you know, he's this guy he'll write about his experiences out in like the Saskatchewan wilderness and whatnot. But here he's just talking about like writing. He tells the students, as they read, to try to embody a refined, a sort of intentional permeability, right? You're using your intentionality in order to put yourself in this way where, this place where you're able to be, where the text, and not just the text the, he would say I think, the divine presence that might be present or active in a text can get to you, right? Can act upon you.
Alysia Harris: Yeah. And I think that's where the question about wonder comes into play. If you can never be acted upon, if you can never have that permeability, then you can never experience wonder, because then you could never encounter that interface with the reality that there is something else beyond you that you don't yet quite understand. And yet it is amazing. And yet it is an experience that is changing you, that is shifting you, without you then generating a kind of skepticism or a kind of doubt, that there ever could be such a thing that is beyond you. If you're not permeable, you either think of yourself as the only reservoir or source in a kind of environment, or conversely, you only think about yourself as the dam to which everything else flows. And I think this idea of permeability is to say that life, energy, observation, love, time, it passes through you. It doesn't just come to you, or it doesn't just originate with you. And again, that allows you to be connected to a larger system, which is to say, I am deeply vital to the systems that are around me. I need to participate in these systems in order to help sustain them. But I, myself am not the entire system.
Matt Croasmun: Right. Yeah. Yeah. So it reminds me of a story that Kimmerer shares in her book. She talks about the experience of an indigenous north American community that's making basket weavings, as a sort of core in their practices, that involves, um, for the basket weaving, you want to fell a certain age, sort of, adolescent ash trees, if I'm remembering the right species. Um, in any case, we often think about human use of wood, say, as only ever a threat to the health of a forest or to the trees and whatnot. And certainly there's like the taking of the life of a tree when you fell it, when you take a tree and you use it for this basket weaving purpose, but actually, as that native community had been driven by the American governmental policy, and any number of other forces but principally that, um, from these lands, they actually found, these forests became less healthy. Actually, essentially what the basket weaving practice and the taking of these certain age of trees was doing was essentially practicing like good forest management. That wasn't, it wasn't like a deliberately planned thing, but there's this, it strikes me that in granting this autonomy, right? An autonomy is, I take it, a condition of the possibility of wonder. I can't wonder at something that I haven't first granted autonomy to. If God is some, is like some little idea I have in my head, I can't really wonder at that God, right? Like God has to be sovereign-other in order to experience wonder. And the same thing with the natural world. Lilburn is constantly insisting, in his work, and I think Kimmerer is capturing a similar dynamic when you grant this autonomy to this natural system, these trees, and there's this way of sort of entering in exactly this active or passive sort of process. There is this different sort of interaction with the tree. There's this different understanding then of the artifact of the basket. But the whole thing has, it's not a matter of just leave no trace. I want to make no impact on the world. No, I need to make the right sort of impact, but it's not an impact that comes from my sovereignty. It comes from granting actually sovereignty or autonomy, right, to the natural world around me, learning to be at home in a place. And then I play this sort of role that is so much better than if I just withdrew.
Alysia Harris: And I think withdrawing really underestimates the reality that like many things, for millions of years, lived and died so that you actually, that ended up with like you actually being here. And like struggled. And there's a very romantic idea of nature and our natural systems, but it is a lot of struggle. It is a lot of struggle and I would say also suffering. And so there is a, at least to me, there is a responsibility that I actually carry by simply existing. That requires me to be faithful with the suffering that the natural world and my ancestors have done that have allowed me this great privilege of being able to like interact with this complex, to be acted upon by it and to then act in return in it. And that is something that I think the idea of leaving no trace gets wrong. And I also think from a biblical perspective, when I think of like the story of Adam and Eve working in a garden and they were gardeners. And that was like the labor of the prototypic human being was to be a gardener. It is actually like when you are a gardener, which is slightly different than being a farmer, but when you are a gardener, like you are stewarding the flourishing and the fecundity of a whole variety of species, not just for what they can produce, but also for their own beauty. And the reality of creating a garden so that things can, that, that things can actually like flex in their beauty is a thing that I think that as human beings who were created with a unique capacity for observation, I think is something that like, it is a part of our responsibility to see things at the height of their beauty, their natural beauty, which is different than just thinking about them only in terms of their productivity to me.
Matt Croasmun: Yeah, just to underline the point, I take it in Genesis 2:15, you have this, I've been thinking for a couple of years now about this pair of verbs that we get there, "the Lord God took the human and put them in the garden of Eden to," and then how do you translate these, to, he says, "to till it, and to keep it." Or we could say, to serve it and protect it. I mean, so Abad and Shamar, I mean, other things that you, you know, abad is pretty... I think they both have this active or passive sense. I mean, you could see them themselves as a sort of active and passive, right? You work it actively and you keep it sort of passive. You, you make sure that you granted its sovereignty and its autonomy. But I think even that misses... I think each one of those concepts has within it, actually both the active and the passive. So again, it's not a balancing of the active and the passive, it's both of those things at once, right. Because what else do you keep? Well, you keep, in the Hebrew Bible, you keep the commandments, you keep the Sabbath.
Alysia Harris: You observe.
Matt Croasmun: You observe, you observe, you attend to, and in that attending to you, let them do their work upon you, right? The Sabbath is supposed to form you in a certain sort of way, the commandments aren't just for you to, you don't observe like separately. So even the pacivity is certainly active, but it's actively making oneself available to let the other do its work upon you. And what if that were our picture of what it is to engage with God's creation to, uh, to what we can talk about to work and to serve, which again, both, I think they have their own sort of active or passive sort of tension within them, but this, this keeping, which is a sort of restraint of the self, but in order to have the self engaged by the other, and then let that other do that work back upon you. Anyway, I just, I think you're absolutely right. We get that right at the beginning as a sort of picture of what it is to be God's, parts of, it's part of the system, right? Parts of God's larger creation.
Alysia Harris: Again just, I think back to, the word witness. You can't be a witness unless you do both, unless you have seen or experienced, and then you tell or participate in that experience by sharing it outward. Like you cannot be a witness otherwise. If a witness does not come forward in a crime, even if somebody saw it, there are no witnesses, right? There are no witnesses you have to do both in order to be a witness. And I think again, it's the ability to restrain, observe, attend, and then to magnify what you have seen, observed, and attended. And it's a very natural thing. Like it's a very natural process when you are a pass through, you know, like when you are a pass through, of course, naturally the thing that is coming through you is going to work on you, but then it flows through you. That to me is exciting because it allows me to be connected both to divine source, and to all the other creatures, things, people, who are also receiving those same gifts of which I am one of them. Because sometimes, at least in my experience, in my service or my like witness to the Lord, I can become detached from those other people who are also meant to be recipients of the same thing that I am receiving from God. I can just make it about me and God, that's it. Me and God. And I think that I've failed at something in that. I failed to understand the totality of how I am meant to interact with both the divine and the natural. But it's hard, also, it's hard to remain in that position because there are so many ways of being and of moving and of working to which this way of thinking seems counterintuitive. So even something as simple as capitalism, which says that you should work and breathe a kind of scarcity mentality, such that nothing that you have, even when you have enough is actually enough. So that even when you are not working and you are resting, you are actually thinking about working. And then, you can get to a point where you have overworked so much, that you can not put out any energy to do anything. You can not attend to anything or anyone not even yourself, not even the people around you. And so then you become totally passive. And then the kinds of entertainment that I remember you gave a sermon on this years ago, but then we become, like, we bounce back and forth. We ping pong between being overworked and being under stimulated. And we live in this tension where we think rest is to actually just be sort of anesthetized and that's actually not what rest is all about. And you don't actually feel rested after that. So, yeah, like just breaking down that paradigm.
Matt Croasmun: Yeah, I mean, for any of the listeners, there's, there's just a quick free-be. In case it hasn't, in case you haven't stumbled upon this insight yet, resting and being entertained are not the same thing. Consider how you feel at the end of any number of things you might do when you entertain yourself. At least for me, rested is often the opposite of what I feel. You can be exhausted at the end of a night of Netflix bingeing in a particular sort of way. And yeah, I think that does speak to, yeah, we do, we tend to sort of oscillate, ping pong back and forth between deficient versions of activity and deficient visions of passivity. And instead, we're invited right, into this other way of life that looks like, I think some sort of marriage, blending, perichoresis, to use the fancy theological term of the two, right? And it makes me think even of the parables of the kingdom that we have in the gospels that I think, as I was thinking about our conversation for today, I was thinking about how many of these parables actually embody this sort of active or passive receptivity, right? It's uh, when you seek first, the kingdom of God, that sounds very active and you have parables of going out and selling everything you have, right? So you find something, a treasure in a field and you'll give everything for it. There's no doubt that there is an active engagement there. But of course, it's extrinsic, right? It's oriented outside the self, it's in the ultimate picture then is never, is not building the kingdom right? Like we don't build the kingdom. We receive the kingdom. Um, perhaps one receives a little child or as a child receives whatever is offered to the child. However you take that metaphor. There's a rest receptivity that's fundamental. And I think that, again, it comes back to then, of course, the most dominant, I think the most prevalent images of the Kingdom of God and the gospels and the parables of the Kingdom are organic metaphors, right? They are agriculture, but they're precisely agriculture that's picking up on the aspects that you just picked up on, right? Which are, um, not just agriculture in terms of like domination of the world in order to, you know, squeeze out of it, whatever utility we want. But instead, even just thinking after the parable of the sower, Mark Four, you get this, I love this little, these little reflections on, I guess it starts in verse 26. "This is what the kingdom of God is like, a man scatters seed on the ground night and day, whether he sleeps or gets up the seeds sprouts and grows though, he does not know how all by itself. The soil produces grain first, the stock, the head, then the full kernel. But then as soon as the grain is ripe, he puts the sickle to it because the harvest has come, which I think follows so closely the paradigm that you were just laying out of this granting autonomy to the other, taking yourself to that place of wonder, I don't know how this works and that's not a defeated I don't know, because we're reveling in a different sort of knowledge that isn't about ownership or comprehension or mastery, but it's a sort of knowledge that's relational. And it's giving autonomy to the object of knowledge, and it's this amazing thing that this is how it works. But then there is that moment as you bear witness of taking that sort of decisive actions and saying, ah, there's something here. There is something here for me, for me to seize upon. There's an opportunity here for nourishment. And it's just so striking to me that this invitation into these ways of being not just active, not just passive, but somehow in this sort of dynamic reciprocity, intentional permeability, this is captured actually in these para, in these parables of the Kingdom.
Alysia Harris: Yes. And it's so, like, it's easier, you know what I'm saying? It's actually easier if you've ever watched a plant and waited for it to grow. Sitting, you'll never actually see it do it, but my orchid, I love my orchid. Bless it. I love it. And every year it does this thing where it, I cut down the stem, and then it grows a new stem. And then I see the little buds, like I see the buds and I'm like, oh, you're gonna bloom soon. But if I sit there and watch it, I will never actually see it open up. I've never, actually, I've tried, I've looked at it for hours and hours to be like, am I going to see you opening? And I don't and then I go to sleep. And the next day, the next morning, the orchid has bloomed. And I'm very confused about how this happens. But, in that process, I think again, it's just be amazed, be amazed at beauty. Don't try to see, I'm going to literally watch. And then it just, it's like a, what do they say? Like a watched pot never boils or something like that. I feel like that, that, that is when we are so focused on the product that we're getting, what is being produced, then we begin to watch things, and to ensure as if by are watching, we are going to ensure that it is going to happen. No! Whether you watch it or not, the orchid will, in fact, bloom, the water will in fact boil, and you can be better used, your time, your energy, your thought process can be better used in other places while this thing is going to do what it is going to do, because as you said, it has the agency to do so. Like, it has the capacity and the gift to do so. And that also requires a kind of trust, and a kind of faith, and a kind of stepping back again and allowing things, allowing time to do its work, allowing others to do their work, and you to go on and do your work, which is not sitting there watching it, trying to ensure the outcome.
Matt Croasmun: Well, and I can say, you know, if you do over-engage an orchid, um, as has happened recently in our house, easiest way to get that orchid to drop all those blooms is to provide it too much water. Yeah. So there's a lesson there too. So I'm an ideas person. You're an ideas person. These are exciting ideas. But we want to make sure that ideas are of no use unless they have something to do with our lives. So I just, I'm just wondering, what practices, habits, postures do you personally practice in your life following Jesus in order to try to inhabit this sort of in between, whatever this is, sort of active or passive posture.
Alysia Harris: Yeah, well, there are a couple things, I am getting really into ritual, because I feel like in, like we're talking about in observing a kind of ritual practice, I'm not only doing a thing, but I'm allowing the thing, the activity, to actually, like, work on me and prepare me for the day. So my rituals in the morning include tea. It includes waking up before the sun rises. It includes yoga and it includes like time with God. And if I'm very, like, on it, then it also includes like 20 minutes of me just like practicing the habit of just like writing my thoughts, because like my creative energy as a writer has been like way under-stimulated for a while. And I used to think, you just need to produce, you just need to go and you just need to write poems and put them out there. And again, it's this idea of like, extractive, like, looking at even parts of your personality as things that you can extract for their own ends. When in reality, I haven't actually been tending to that part of my life. And so like, how do I like, just tend to it without expecting any kind of output yet knowing that in a faith practice, like knowing that like the faithful stewardship over a little necessarily amounts to faithful stewardship over more. So if I want to write, I have to spend some time writing. It doesn't mean I need to spend some time making a poem. It means I need to spend some time like putting into that sort of jar of talent. And then the other thing that I've found that I've been doing also is dance. Because, you know, as a person, when I was younger, I had these dual passions, words, and dance, and then over the sort of years, and as I got to became more serious about writing, I kind of like left movement aside and it became all about head, very cerebral, and again, like being a part of a, being not just a part of an ecosystem, but ourselves being like a micro ecosystem, like there has to be balance even within that. And I was like, well, I'm not actually engaging my body. I'm not actually exploring the metaphor, the limitations, the movement of my own self and how like in dancing, which is, which has nothing to do with really the mind, that I actually discover things by the doing, not by the thinking, and when you are in, when you're dancing, which I think is why people find it so hard, you are actually receptive to the music that is happening around you, you are actually not leading, you are totally responding. Or when you're really in the flow of dancing, you're not saying I'm going to do this move next. You are simply in a responsive posture. And I feel like I'm trying to cultivate that in my life. And I, and I'm trying to figure out ways of marrying this spiritual practice with also a physical practice so that they both can inform one another. So that's how I'm trying to, to practice it. And then in prayer, I think like the most effective prayer that I pray, because I'm an intercessor, that's one of my spiritual gifts. So I can go in and like pray long, hard prayers for the people for the world. And I can pray it out of my will. And then I can also then find that I'm actually anxious or frustrated or fearful when those things are not coming to pass. But instead of trying to pray out of my will, instead, I'm like, oh, and I can get very excited about it and be like, God, what's going on. I gotta move. I gotta do this. I gotta do this. Instead, I've been asking the Holy Spirit to like lead, and to like produce opportunities for me then to just move into. And like, I don't want to lead cause I get exhausted or I get frustrated or I get bitter or I get resentful or I overwork it and I kill the opportunity. I'm like, so you just do the leading, and just open my eyes to the things that you are saying, ah step in here. Ah, step in here, and that has been a really fruitful prayer. And, I feel like every day that I've prayed that, there has been something that has arisen. And I feel like the Lord's like, now now, now, now labor. And that has been something where I don't have to work out of striving, but out of hope, I guess. What about you?
Matt Croasmun: Oh, I think you're the guest you're supposed to have all the answers. I, well, honestly, Tim Lilburn's work has been really helpful to me leading me to very simple practices of, of just walking in the woods. Maybe others will resonate with this. Um, for some I know quarantine, lock down, have meant. One of the few things you were able to do, right, was go out for exercise, for a walk. At my healthiest, I am regularly, you know, taking runs, taking long walks, no podcast on, no media, earbuds out. Trying to be receptive, granting that autonomy to the natural world. One time I was running with earbuds in, such that I did not even notice until I was eight feet, maybe less away from a huge buck, a deer, it was on the path that I was running on. And, I think actually that was a sort of revelatory moment, that was God's grace to me, I didn't have to do anything to grant this deer autonomy. It was, he was, he was his own thing in that moment. And I mean, it can sound cheesy maybe, but really powerful. You know, indigenous folks in North America will talk about human beings as the younger brother. And, if you get eye to eye with a deer that's at least as tall as you are, and you are in his space, and he sort of looks through your soul, you can have a visceral experience of the full hearted youthfulness of the modern human. And so there have been these moments on those paths in West Rock State Park, and I've found that I need to make myself available to those. For God to speak, for God to speak more or less directly, for God to speak very much just through God's creation. Um, and to feel smallness, to feel my, like, species-level youth, to feel my connectedness. Most of, anyway, most of the sort of paths and actually, by extension, most of the roads, many of the roads that we have, require roads where they are, because there was a path there. Why were humans walking that path? Well, cause they found that path because an animal walked there. And you get, you know, when we're walking, when you're walking a path in a forest, there's a good chance that, at least some part of it is there because somebody...
Alysia Harris: Because somebody else, yeah, walked before you, something else,walked like...
Matt Croasmun: And literally like, thousands of years, right, of ways of life that we know nothing of. Anyway, so feeling that smallness, and yet, at the same time, profound connectedness. Being available to what God might teach in those moments, that practices have become irreduceable to life for me, and I think in some surprising ways. So Alicia, thank you for this conversation. Thank you. Just for this idea. I will continue to be thinking about this third way, neither active or passive, making ourselves available to what God might have for us to work and to keep. Thanks for the conversation friend.
Alysia Harris: Thank you Matt, I'm so glad to have been a part of it. It was a great reorientation to my day.
Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center For Faith and Culture at Yale Divinity School. This episode featured poet, Alicia Harris and biblical scholar, Matt Croasmun. Production assistance by Martin Chan and Nathan Jowers. I'm Evan Rosa and I edite and produce the show. For more information, visit us online at faith.yale.edu. New episodes drop every Saturday, and occasionally midweek. If you're new to the show, we're so glad you found us. Remember to hit subscribe, so you don't miss any episodes. And if you've been listening for awhile, thank you friends. If you're liking what you're hearing, I've got a request. Would you support us? It's pretty simple, really? And won't take much time. Here are some ideas. First, you could hit the share button for this episode in your app and send a text or email to a friend, share it to your social feed. Second, you could give us an honest rating on Apple Podcasts. How are we really doing? Finally, you could write a short review of the show in Apple Podcasts. Reviews are cool because they'll help like-minded people get an idea for what we're all about and what's most meaningful to you, our listeners. Thanks for listening today friends. We'll be back with more of this coming week.