I am delighted to share another beautiful submission to our Monk in the World guest post series from the community. Read on for Callie J. Smith’s reflection Yarns and Yams: On Enjoying What My Loved Ones Enjoy.
Vivid strawberry, variegated mango with cream and aquamarine, a very soft and buttery yellow–my mother handknits dishcloths in a wonderful variety of colors and patterns. I love seeing her smile each time she shows me her latest yarn purchase and, knowing another dishcloth is coming, I find myself soaking up her enthusiasm for the process. Even when my mother pauses from her knitting, all I have to do is open the drawer of her dishcloths, and I smile.
It’s coming to my attention more and more how living as a monk in the world has often, for me, involved relishing the things that my loved ones enjoy. Attention makes the enthusiasm feel infectious. Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised by that. Joy spreads, and I truly can’t imagine appreciating life half as much if I weren’t encountering it with others.
I still, for instance, enjoy that time of year when leaves fall from trees, and I get to watch from a back window as deer browse for food in the woods. When I was growing up, my father would notice deer outside, and he’d interrupt everyone else at home to call us over to the window to watch with him. And if someone else saw the deer first? My father expected us to notify him. He’d drop whatever he was doing to go to the window. So even now, years after his death, I’ll still pause at the sight of deer in the brush with something a little like wonder.
I pay extra attention to the visual arts, as well. My mother and I both do, but not because either of us paint. We don’t. My grandmother did.
When my mother and I went to an art fair recently, we passed an artist painting on found wooden objects–barn siding, cutting boards, old wooden spoons. We paused at the artist’s tent, struck because my grandmother did similar work. She was always on the lookout for creative ideas of surfaces she could paint on. My mother and I stood there on the lawn for some time discussing which other artists’ tents my grandmother would have been drawn to. It struck me as we talked how brightly my mother smiled. I suspected my own smile had grown enthusiastic, too.
Sometimes I find this practice of enjoyment coming easy. Paintings, deer, colorful yarn – noticing things my loved ones have enjoyed is a contemplative kind of pause that opens my awareness to more than I’d noticed on my own. It’s certainly an aspect of my deepening presence to relationships with these loved ones, and with our communities and world, and with the divine who – I believe – made each of us and all of these enjoyable things.
Sometimes, though, that practice of presence feels harder to me. Beyond the happy moments and smiles, appreciating what a loved one enjoys can push at my boundaries in uncomfortable ways. I have a relative, for instance, whom I’ve been finding increasingly disagreeable in recent years. It seems we can talk about very little without bristling and going into defensive anger around our respective belief systems. We’ve found a few things, though, that allow us to interact to some extent. Like yams.
My relative takes great pride in his yams. He has grown some impressively large ones. I’ve taken them home sometimes and cooked them, paying attention to taste and texture so I could report back to him at the next family gathering. Items like these yams have given us a chance to focus on things other than the topics that divide us.
I won’t pretend that this relative and I have the best relationship. I certainly can’t claim that avoiding divisive topics is an answer to the tensions in a family or in a society. And yet, by focusing on things like yams as best I can, I find I’m able to keep meeting this relative at family dinner tables during our holiday gatherings. I’m trusting that these shared meals are accomplishing, or may yet accomplish, something with some kind of good in it. Perhaps, at the very least, they’re a start.
In that hope, I practice. I keep enjoying what I can about what my loved ones have enjoyed. I doubt I’ll ever grow yams, myself, and I may never knit more than the wavy edged, terribly uneven scarf that I knitted twenty years ago, but that doesn’t matter. Appreciation provides its own form of participation. I’m enjoying explosions of color in the dishcloth drawer, tasting myriad ways of preparing tubers, and pausing to watch deer as I imagine my father watching alongside me. I’m finding the contemplative presence somehow connects us even now.
Callie J. Smith is a clergy person in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in Indiana. She’s author The Sacred Grounds Novels and blogs about everyday things like grief, hope, and creativity. She received the 2025 Award of Merit from The Polk Street Review and is online at CallieJSmith.net.
