More Like Sunshine Than Arithmetic
4 Things We Learned this Fall (2025) A little look back, a little later than usual.
“You live life looking forward, you understand life looking backward.”
I am always telling people, “You’re not behind.” But then a season arrives, and I need a moment, a day, or a few days. Now, I am telling myself that I need the time I need.
Advent is here, and while it is a season of readiness and darkness and that feeling of coming from a long way off, I am not quite ready.
First, before entering fully in, I need to glance back and see where I have been. It helps me move forward to remember sights and sounds and words that held my attention.
Let’s look at a few lingering lessons from fall that I hope you can use.
Here are four lessons that felt more like sunshine than arithmetic.
1. Notice what you doodle.
This isn’t the first time I have found my doodles speaking as much as my sentences. Often, you’ll find a thread or a gust of wind doodled into my journal. It turns out, I am trying to discern the gentle, almost imperceptible movement of the Holy Spirit in my life and markings that flow from my hand and heart, helping me notice those movements in other circumstances. This fall, it has been patchwork birds.
I don’t know what they mean yet, I am just doodling birds as they rise from my heart to my hand. I like to follow Mary Oliver’s Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.”
a bird doodle from my journal
Pay attention to what you’re paying attention to. There’s wisdom there even before you have words for it.
2. Tiny habits make add up to big changes and even bigger wonders.
Mike and I recently started walking most nights after dinner. Really, its more of a stroll, and a slow one at that. We breathe in the night air, look at the moon, listen for the owl pair in Douglas firs by the barn, the ones we listen for but have yet to see. We simply walk the driveway around the tulip tree and down to the mailbox and back. Sometimes we hold hands. It takes 5 minutes, maybe 7.
Like so many prayers, it is pure joy and attentiveness.
Still one day, I wondered what these walks might add up to over the course of a year. If we walk 25 days out of 30 each month, that’s close to half a workday each month or, by the end of a year, it adds up to a 40-hour work week spent outdoors with someone I love.
Recently, when one of our kids was visiting for Thanksgiving, we took their whole family on our stroll – mom, dad, 4-year-old, 2-year-old, and 5-week-old in a wrap against mom’s chest. We more than doubled our time staring with faces to the moon in awe until we discovered a lunar halo. (see the wide circle in the photo below?)
We will all recall that moment experiencing our first lunar halo, and we experienced it together. Why do I even make the calculations when I know the value surpasses the numbers?
It is as Marilynne Robinson once said of something else of inestimable value,
“I’m inclined toward the idea that we do not create faith in ourselves. It has another source. It is created in us . . . its mysterious. It’s more like sunshine than arithmetic, ya’ know.”
3. Read and Experience the Psalms Christologically.
Christology is just a fancy word for Jesus Christ as a whole person, including his human life, teachings, work, relationships, relationship with God His Father and role as Savior of the world.
I know just where I was when I learned how to practically do this. At a Benedictine monastery on a foggy fall hilltop in Mt Angel, Oregon waiting for my ninth grandchild to be born. My teacher was the Abbot of Mt Angel Abbey. Benedictine monks sing the Psalms in their entirety every single week. And Abbot Jeremy Driscoll has been praying the hours eight times a day since 1974. In 50 years, he has sung the Psalter 2600 times.
Abbot Jeremy taught us to listen and savor the Psalms remembering both Jesus the son of David in his in skin and bones (life and death) and Jesus the Son of God in His resurrection. How is Jesus Christ pleading for us? Additionally, Abbot Jeremy taught us to remember, like Jesus, our enemies are not our human enemies but Sin and Death. That is transforming how I read the Psalms, view enemies, or hear verses about conquering and kingdoms. I am on a pilgrimage with my Savior.
St Augustine of Hippo wrote,
“If the psalm prays, you pray; if it laments, you lament; if it exults, you rejoice; if it hopes, you hope; if it fears, you fear. Everything written here is a mirror for us.”
It is my habit to read the Psalms every year during Ordinary Time. Slow and steady, one each day for 150 days. I look forward to it every year after Pentecost. It’s poetry and prayer seem to be getting deeper into my bones. But boy howdy, what if I read it with all of Jesus the Christ in view? And if I sang the entire Psalter every 7 days, what would I learn about Christ and myself? Who would I become?
4. Akimbo is a word that takes up space.
I saw a photo of my granddaughter with her hands on her hips and felt a solid peace. She was standing her ground. It was her, plain and simple. I never use the word (and why in the world not?), but that is what popped into my head bright as day.
If I had to tell you why, it was the blush in her cheeks, her Arriety Clock pigtails with so many wisps of new hair, her arms akimbo. I am drawn to the strength and authenticity of the word’s sound. It’s like popcorn or snapping your fingers. (Just say it three times and see if you’re not throwing your elbows out and taking up your space.)
Like most onomatopoeias, it rings true, just like her in this season. This is just a few months before becoming a big sister herself.
Even when the world tries to make her smaller, may she keep the presence she has in this moment. May she hold her nerve and keep her moxie. Its all in there, shining out.
Remember the best things in life are more like sunshine than arithmetic, ya’ know?