4 Things We Learned this Summer (2026)
something about Wendell Berry, the lost art of ironing, and a smooch on the top of my head
What we need is here. And we pray, not for a new earth or heaven, but to be quiet in heart, and in eye, clear. What we need is here.
Wendell Berry
Life moves fast and faster, news comes at us crazy and crazier, loud voices shout loud and louder. Maybe we need a pause to catch our breath and realign our hearts. That is where What We Learned comes in.
It’s that time again to pause and reflect on the passing season to see all we have learned before forging ahead into the next one. I know it is time because my Mama has had her crayon boxes lined up in her kitchen windowsill for almost a month now, and the last of my 9 Wonders of the World, the ones in the PNW, start school this week.
1. Choose your stars for more than their celebrity.
I have a secret list of OG’s that includes writers, songwriters, poets, preachers, mystics, artists, architects, and astronauts. Two of my living OG’s died this summer within days of each other, and I am feeling the emptiness where their lives and lessons crossed my heart - Dolly Parton and Wendell Berry.
Dolly Parton taught me literacy is love. She made sure her Dad learned to read and later founded the Imagination Library in his honor to get books to children so they could, too. Dolly modelled a rare mix of kindness, savvy, creativity, and wisdom into stardom. She seemed to know who she was on the inside and embraced where she was from. She was a brilliant businesswoman who knew better than to sign away any part of her copyright or royalties, even to a star as big as Elvis.
Wendell Berry taught me to make sure and do some things that do not compute. He suggested things like meandering, Sabbathing, acting like snow, practicing resurrection, and even late, begin again. He taught me to maintain a Sabbath economy in God’s green earth so it can remain so where “field and woods at last agree in an economy of widest worth”. Wendell taught me “she who makes clearing makes a work of art”. And I have taken that to heart in my work as a spiritual director and grandmother. Anytime I can read to a child in my lap is a solid investment.
For years, I read one poem from Wendell’s collection of Sabbath poems every Sunday morning before church. Somewhere I let that slip to every now and again. Upon his death, I returned and found this, which has me chewing on hope and where it comes from, especially during cruel times,
Let hopelessness
shrink us to our proper size.
Without it we are half as large
as yesterday, and the world is
twice as large. My small
place grows immense as I walk
upon it without hope.
Dolly Parton and Wendell Berry were both original, authentic, and a first of their kind. In the words of another songwriter, let’s hope they’re not the last of their kind.
2. You’re never too old for newly dear friends, pickleball, turkeys, ironing secrets, and a kiss on the head.
I recently rediscovered, after almost 50 years, a small group of high school friends I went to high school with in Iran. After storied days of crazy families and more moves, college, careers, marriages, children, divorces, kids’ wedding and grandchildren, I learned several beautiful things: old friends can be new again (and dear), pickleball is fun, a group of turkeys gobbling along is called a rafter, and apparently I’m never too old for a kiss on the top of my head.
With that sweet smooch on my crown, Linda, made me feel young again and glorious in her presence. The cozy chair I had nestled into became sacred like sanctuary walls where birds nest. I told my spiritual director that the fleeting moment has stuck with me and reminded me of a line from a Naomi Shihab Nye poem. Naomi writes of an older neighbor who always had time for her when she was young “She lit up like a lantern when I rang”.
I was still carrying some of Linda’s light later that day as we were snapping fresh sheets and smoothing them onto a guest bed when we happened on our kindred hearts around ironing. We both love vintage linens, ironing, and that feeling of smoothing out life’s wrinkles with every steamy sweep of the iron. One of Linda’s secrets for ironing napkins is to ball them up straight out of the washer and put them in the freezer until ironing time.
When you pull them out (even weeks later!), because of the even moisture tucked in tight, the ironing is sweet and quick. And I thought of Linda while the steam iron hissed.
3. Make brave plans, even if you never reach them.
After nine months of brutal cancer treatment, my dear friend Phyllis is away in Paris on what she and her husband call the “Cancer Sucks Tour.” For all the months of pain, fear, and setbacks, we didn’t know if she’d get this short break in her treatment to visit her 3-year-old grandson. But every time we spoke, I admired her bravery and perseverance. I realized that while I tend to make plans I am already capable of, ahem, reasonable plans, doable plans, she was making impossible plans in the face of impossible odds. In the middle of praying and worrying that her plans might not work for so many reasonable reasons, I suddenly heard this question, Do you make plans because they will work out, you know you’ll reach them, or because you are reaching for life to the very edges?
This lesson has me wanting to keep making plans up to the very edge of the very end, and not stopping short.
4. Beauty emerges when I challenge my existing plausibility structure.
First, I had to learn the term. When I seemed incapable of processing an event, relationship, information, or possibility, I called it a missing shelf in my library. I simply had no place to put that particular book in what the French call my bibliotheque de couer (library of the heart). I recognized it when I had a persistent feeling I had missed something important, misplaced something, or could not lay down a feeling or thought because I had no place to put it.
Then I learned the term. In psychology, a plausibility structure is like a berry colander for our beliefs, letting some things filter through and blocking others. We have plausibility structures for relationships, politics, parenting, aging, and faith. Even claiming we have no faith exposes an established plausibility structure.
The problem I had is common to plausibility structures. They do not tell us if what we are filtering is true, only that it doesn’t match our previous experienced possibilities. But I wanted creative possibilities, fresh imagination, and Jesus’ third way of living. Here are a few questions that are helping me when I meet something new that God is doing in me, in the world, or between me and another.
Whose voice is shouting at me?
What does the quieter voice of God’s Holy Spirit say?
Which one is more life-giving, long-lasting, and good for both me and my community?
Let Wendell walk us into autumn with these lines from Sabbath poem VII 2007,
Poem, do not raise your voice.
Be a whisper that says “There!”
Where the stream speaks to itself
of the deep rock of the hill
it has carved its way down to
in flowing over them, “There!”
where the sun enters and the tanager
flares suddenly on the lighted branch,
“There!” where the ariel columbine
Brightens on its slender stalk.
Walk, poem. Watch, and make no noise.