Toolkit 17 A Hard Day

It’s a hard day for me. So I will offer you a poem to ponder and some new ways to experience the examen.

The Sunflowers, by Mary Oliver (Blue Iris)

Come with me
into the field of sunflowers
Their faced are burnished disks,
Their dry spines

Creak like ship masts,
their green leaves,
so heavy and moan,
fill all day with the sticky

Sugars of the sun.
Come with me
to visit the sunflowers,
they are shy

but want to be friends;
they have wonderful stories
of when they were young –
the important weather,

the wandering crows,
don’t be afraid
to ask them questions!
Their bright faces,

which follow the sun,
will listen, and all
those rows of seeds-
each one anew life!-

hope for a deeper acquaintance;
each of them, though it stands
in a crowd of many,
like a separate universe,

Is lonely, the long work
of turning their lives
into a celebration
is not easy. Come

and let us talk with those modest faces,
the simple garments of leaves,
the coarse roots in the earth
so uprightly burning.



Here are some thoughts for days end taken from John O’Donohue’s book, To Bless the Space Between Us; Doubleday, 2008. Choose one or two for your examen.

Where did my eyes linger today?
Where was I blind?
Where was I hurt without anyone noticing?
What did I learn today?
What did I read?
What new thoughts visited me?
Whom did I neglect?
Where did I neglect myself?
What did I begin today that might endure?