Extol: to praise highly or lift up
This weekend I caught up with several podcast episodes of On Being. One was on Kevin Kling, a writer, poet and playwright from Minnesota. (His stories often appear on NPR programs like “This American Life.”)
His story is one of living a life with disabilities (one he was born with and one that he “acquired” later in life). His frankness and humor about the major and minor struggles had me laughing out loud one minute and nearly in tears the next.
There were a number of gems throughout the conversation, but here are some that resonated with me*:
- On community and family: “We spend the first 40 years of our life running away from family and the town we grew up in. We spend the next 40 years trying to re-create it.”
- On rediscovering the senses: “After weeks of not being able to taste anything due to medication and depression, that bite of apple, so tart and sweet, made me weep with joy.”
- On a play he’s written about the story of Lazarus: “Everyone focuses on the miracle, but I wondered what it was like for Lazarus to be dead for four days. Was he happy to come back?”
Give yourself 50 minutes to listen to this and see if you don’t look at the world with new eyes.
Click to listen to OnBeing’s program on Kevin Kling.
*I paraphrased his quotes above, so errors of transcription are all mine.