by Kathy Schmittgens / Facing a decision that pros and cons could not settle, Kathy Schmittgens was sent to poetry instead. The book she found in the library seemed placed there for her.
The Layers
by Stanley Kunitz
I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray …
Kathy‘s Reflection
Once, when I was discerning a big decision, my spiritual director suggested that looking at pros and cons was not getting me anywhere. She suggested that poetry might be a better avenue for my reflection. I discovered a book by Roger Housden called Ten Poems to Set You Free in our library. It seemed like it was put there just for me!
This poem by Stanley Kunitz was one that caught my interest. To me it was a new way to reflect on my life and all the various campfires I had sat around over the years. It spoke of all I had become as I lived at each one and, also, of the losses that I had faced. But it also showed that everything had given me strength to keep my will to move forward intact.
Kunitz was in his seventies when he wrote this. The voice told him to live in the layers, not on the litter. Litter can have two meanings. It can refer to the detritus of things not going well or no longer useful. It also can mean the stretcher that carries a wounded person off the battlefield. Live, rather, in those layers that life has revealed to you. The book of transformations is not finished. I am not done with my changes.
How the Word Works
Kathy’s spiritual director pointed her toward poetry when analysis had reached its limit. Spiritual teachers know that the rational mind, however disciplined, can only take us so far. It is metaphor and image that can open what is still closed, reframe our understanding, or carry us the rest of the way.
Kunitz does not tell us what to do with our losses. He gives us abandoned campsites to consider the impermanence of our journey, language for what loss feels like, and then an image that came to him out of darkness for how we might move forward: live in the layers, not on the litter.
A Simple Practice
Kunitz’s campsites are the places and seasons and communities that have shaped him. This week, name one campsite of your own: a chapter of your life that has ended, a community that has scattered, a season that formed you and then passed.
Sit with it quietly. Reflect on the layer it added to the life you have lived so far, and on how it may support the changes yet to come.
Kathy’s Bio
Kathy Schmittgens grew up in St. Louis as the oldest of five children — a child, she says, who was afraid of almost everything, including Santa Claus. She entered the School Sisters of Notre Dame after high school, and what followed was a life of improbable reach: teaching in Missouri, Illinois, and Sierra Leone; mission work in San Diego; provincial leadership; and five years in Rome as her congregation’s representative on international justice, peace, and the integrity of creation. Her travels took her to Haiti, Ecuador, Japan, Brazil, Argentina, Nepal, and across Africa. Grace, she says, really does work wonders when we are open to it.
Poems, Parables & Proverbs was a Sunday email series shared with the Still Point community through the summer of 2026. Each week offered a text, a reflection from a member of our community, and a simple practice for the week ahead.