It is a kind of love, is it not?
How the cup holds the tea,
How the chair stands sturdy and foursquare,
How the floor receives the bottoms of shoes
Or toes. How soles of feet know
Where they’re supposed to be.
I’ve been thinking about the patience
Of ordinary things, how clothes
Wait respectfully in closets
And soap dries quietly in the dish,
And towels drink the wet
From the skin of the back.
And the lovely repetition of stairs.
And what is more generous than a window?
This poem is from The Patience of Ordinary Things (Amherst Writers & Artists Press, 2003) and is compiled in Another River: New and Selected Poems (Amherst Writers & Artists Press, 2005).
Pat Schneider (1934–2020) was a poet, playwright, librettist, and leader of writing workshops who in 1981 founded the nonprofit organization Amherst Writers & Artists to help people discover their deepest stories through writing. The AWA grew out of a writing method Schneider developed, described in her book Writing Alone and with Others (Oxford University Press, 2003), which is used by an international network of workshop leaders. This is one of over a dozen books she’s published, which include six collections of poetry, a spiritual autobiography, and How the Light Gets In: Writing as a Spiritual Practice (Oxford University Press, 2013). She and her husband, Peter, a Methodist minister, devoted many years to community-based social justice ministry, fueled in part by Schneider’s having grown up in an impoverished single-parent home (and later orphanage). She had four children.
Art & Theology 
Hello Victoria,
First of all, I want to say how much I enjoy receiving your emails. In almost every one there’s something that catches my eye and that I want to explore further. Your art interests are wide-ranging, surprising, and inspiring, and the quality of your writing and your commentaries is first rate. Thank you so much! In a broad field, you stand out as one of a kind.
What’s more, I understand you attended Regent College. My wife and I were there in 1982-3, the first year we were married — and what a splendid way to start our life together! Loren Wilkinson was very important in helping me to sort out my feelings about art and faith, and just a few weeks ago we attended one of several book launches he had here in Ontario. I’m assuming you know him? Regent people seem to be everywhere!
Anyway, I could go on and on. But I’m writing to you now because of the Pat Schneider poem “The Patience of Ordinary Things.” As it happens, I featured that poem on page 34 of a book I just published, Same Old, Same New: The Consolation of the Ordinary. So I just wanted to mention that great minds think alike! Pat was a wonderful poet who definitely deserves to be known more widely.
Keep those great emails coming!
Warmly in Christ,
Mike Mason
Author of The Mystery of Marriage, Champagne for the Soul, The Blue Umbrella, and many others. Visit MikeMasonBooks.com.
Why is so much of our existence so ordinary? Why this immense tract of stuff in our lives that seems to have no lofty purpose? In ninety short devotional chapters, Mike Mason meditates on this question, concluding that in fact everydayness, to the extent we embrace it, is a source of deep consolation. Far from being meaningless, the humdrum and the commonplace may actually hold the secret of life. Same Old, Same New—beautifully and provocatively written and full of arresting insights—will take your old tired world, stand it on end, and spin it like a top.
“Mike Mason straddles two worlds, the quotidian and the eternal. Of course those two worlds aren’t separate worlds at all—and the reality of that intermingling, that co-existence of the mundane and the mystical, is perhaps the recurrent theme of Mason’s writing.” ~Ron Reed, Founding Artistic Director of Pacific Theatre
LikeLike
Hi Mike,
I’m so glad you’ve been enjoying the blog! I’m not a graduate of Regent College, but I did take a summer course there several years ago, taught by David Taylor, who has been very influential to me. Thanks for letting me know about your new book–I’ll check it out!
-Victoria
LikeLike