I want to peel them like Cara cara oranges, suck the juice out. Pick their pith from my cuticles, threading devotion, discipline, maturity into internal and external conversation. I want to gift these words to you today, and see how you like them, use them, turn them over and make them your own.
Shooting three-pointers and high-fiving, dribble maturity until it becomes a star in your palms. Fuck fouling. Claim it. It’s yours! The only referee is the inner critic and she needs a break. Devotion is gooey, oozing sacred and fire. Religion is dead and spirit is all I’ve got. Discipline needs a haircut, a consignment dress that fits like a season change, steady and strong.
Devotion comes in a puff of prayer, loyalty, and dedication. Don't worry, I'm not asking you to get down on your knees or whisper faithful nothings in my ear. I am devoted to the tulip bulbs that I planted last fall and the hope that they might bloom soon: Fosteriana, Darwin Hybrid, Lily-Flowered. I am devoted to coffee, friendship, music, childhood, walking, sleep, beeswax candles.
Devotion comes from Latin vovēre: to vow. While devout implies faithfulness of a religious nature, “devoted refers to one's commitment to another through love and loyalty.”1 I am devoted to writing this newsletter, to my daughter, and to taking myself both less and more seriously.
“Maturity is the ability to live fully and equally in multiple contexts, most especially the ability, despite our many griefs and losses, to courageously inhabit the past, the present and the future all at once. The wisdom that comes from maturity is recognized through a disciplined refusal to choose between or isolate three powerful dynamics that form human identity: what has happened, what only looks as if it is happening now, and what is about to occur.
Immaturity is shown by making false choices: living only in the past, or only in the present, or only in the future, or even living only two out of the three.
Maturity is not a static arrived platform, a golden epoch from where life is viewed from a calm, untouched oasis of wisdom, but the dissolution of living elemental frontiers between what has happened, what is happening now, and the consequences of our past; first imagined anew, and then lived into the waiting future.
Maturity is the discipline of giving up and giving away, to see what is left and what is real.
Maturity calls us to risk ourselves as much as we did in our immaturity, but for a bigger picture, a larger horizon; for a powerfully generous outward incarnation of our inward qualities and not for gains that make us smaller, even in the winning.”2
Discipline: I am a disciple of wonder. In the 13th century the word was punishment-related (religious chastisement),3 but we aren't in the Middle Ages anymore. I use this word to rinse it clean of the stinging ghosts. It comes from discipulus (Latin, pupil) which I like because pupil = school, and learning = cool. Discipline as in: rest, chips, and Alison Roman videos. Or, a vigorous workout and seventy-five minutes reading about tiny indigo penguins, then writing until I forget I have a meeting, a face, arriving breathless, heart racing.
I was speaking with my students about discipline and how for me it means showing up to something even when I don’t “feel like it”. To be disciplined is to be devoted, and to be devoted one must possess maturity. It’s having winged faith: one cannot hold this bird tightly. If squeezed, they will die. It’s giving oneself over to a process, and trusting that in the everyday mundane returning one might meet new devotions. I never would’ve imagined that I would spend seventy-five minutes immersed in small penguins on Tuesday morning, but hey! Discipline is the incandescent light, and I am the luna moth.
“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”4 I crush on words and phrases. I borrow, warp and explode them. The breadth of my language means the breadth of my world.
March’s five things
Loving: “Your ancestors are probably saying “I dare you””, the latest from Murphy Barney of Murphy’s Medicine, a newsletter I look forward to.
Listening: “We all know in our bones that things are harder than they have to be.” Isabel Wilkerson in conversation with Krista Tippett.
Reading: The Sum Of Its Parts, an essay by my friend Allison in Maisonneuve.
Making: these brown butter chocolate oatmeal cookies, and freezing some of the balled dough. Take them out of the oven when they look underbaked. They continue to settle and firm up on the pan as they cool.
Learning: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released The Synthesis Report this month, a ‘final warning’. It is alarming, overwhelming, and makes abundantly clear what many already knew: fossil fuels have got to go. I found comfort in the coverage provided by Gen Dread and Heated, as well as All We Can Save and their resources for working with climate emotions.
Thank you for being here. If you haven’t yet, and are moved to do so, consider sharing five things with a friend or colleague who you think might enjoy it. I hope Spring treats you kindly. 🌻
David Whyte, excerpts from “Maturity,” Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment, and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words (2020)
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922).
Maturity is the discipline of giving up and giving away, to see what is left and what is real. Felt this.