Monday November 10 — “working together in common cause to produce the miraculous”
I’ve been fussing with today’s post, “A Work Day in a Hard Time,” all morning. Too much to take in, too many implications calling for rumination. I thought of David Whyte’s The House of Belonging (1998) and found a poem he wrote “for the presentation of The Collier Trophy to The Boeing Company marking the introduction of the new 777 passenger jet.” Passenger jets require immense, collective engineering capacity for complexity. And every complex sub-system must work in harmony with all the others or that big device is likely to fall out of the sky without help from its landing gear.
The 777 is hardly perfection; no complicated and interactive technological system ever is. But it is designed to work, to get itself off the ground and back down again without crashing, to manage storms and turbulence and passenger safety.
Not a bad metaphor for the Detroit settlement formally approved last Friday by Judge Stephen Rhodes. Lots of moving parts have to work together; it is manifestly imperfect; lots of sweat and frustration ahead. Still I cannot deny that this Detroiter sees in The Grand Bargain, a realistic shot at urban rebirth. Lots of courage and lots of negotiating and lots of creativity has been happening here. Lots more needed.
Blessings on your day.
john sj
Today’s Post
“Working Together”
We shape our self
to fit this world
and by the world
are shaped again.
The visible
and the invisible
working together
in common cause,
to produce
the miraculous.
I am thinking of the way
the intangible air
passed at speed
round a shaped wing
easily
holds our weight.
So may we, in this life
trust
to those elements
we have yet to see
or imagine,
and look for the true
shape of our own self,
by forming it well
to the great
intanbibles about us.
David Whyte
