fretting

Ever since 11 a.m., my heart has been rolling its ankles every so often on the pothole that the morning's news chipped into my memory. A cherished coworker recieved some frightening medical news, as yet inconclusive, but loaded with potential sufficient to lay a weight upon all of our spirits.

Isn't it strange how a handful of words can sorcerize the honey and light from summer's first expressions? And also strange how the honey and light can extinguish the dreaded fascination of those words for thoughtless hours at a time? I want to hold it all at once, the bitter and the sweet, and feel perhaps some measure of proportion, but I lack focus, and I lack distance, and I'm feeling both the blessing and the curse of that as I grapple with my own attention span.

Mostly I feel human right now, and out of practice. But perhaps that's one of the most signature elements of the human condition: this perpetual state of unpreparedness, Woolf's "leaping from the pinnacle of the tower into the air ; ...startling, unexpected, unknown."

I am going to savor these gentle opening bars of summer, because refusing to do so brings unnecessary darkness into this world, and such a penance solves nothing. I am going to be hopeful, because uncertainty, like most things in life, has both positive and negative angles, and I have been set free to "hope all things, believe all things." I will be joyful, too, because my joy is a birthright that cannot be stolen. I will be prayerful, because prayer reassures me of my need and its perfect fulfillment. And I can be sad, even as I feel all this, without fretting and without doubting.

A soul is an extraordinary possession.

"A Large Number"

Four billion people on this earth,
but my imagination is the way it's always been:
bad with large numbers.
It is still moved by particularity.
It flits about the darkness like a flashlight beam,
disclosing only random faces,
while the rest go blindly by,
unthought of, unpitied.
Not even a Dante could have stopped that.
So what do you do when you're not,
even with all the muses on your side?

Non omnis moriar—a premature worry.
Yet am I fully alive, and is that enough?
It never has been, and even less so now.
I select by rejecting, for there's no other way,
but what I reject, is more numerous,
more dense, more intrusive than ever.
At the cost of untold losses—a poem, a sigh.
I reply with a whisper to a thunderous calling.
How much I am silent about I can't say.
A mouse at the foot of mother mountain.
Life lasts as long as a few lines of claws in the sand.

My dreams—even they are not as populous as they should be.
There is more solitude in them than crowds or clamor.
Sometimes someone long dead will drop by for a bit.
A single hand turns a knob.
Annexes of echo overgrow the empty house.
I run from the threshold down into the quiet
valley seemingly no one's—an anachronism by now.

Where does all this space still in me come from—
that I don't know.

Wyslawa Szymborska
Translated by Joanna Trzeciak

A headache can be a very clarifying thing.

For instance, last weekend. I don't believe I've ever really experienced a true headache before last Thursday, when I suffered my first migraine. The pain clouded everything around me, making only the knot of tortured nerve endings just behind my left eyeball feel real. That and, every fifteen minutes or so, the rush of nausea that sent me staggering over to my little trashbin in the E.R.

I'm remembering a quote, from Maryanne Wiggins' "Evidence of Things Unseen," when she describes pain as a purifying element, burning away all but the essential nature of its host. My "essential nature" was cowardly. I did not take courage, cling to faith, or find some other positive outlet for my suffering. I just curled up and waited for it to end, so my life could resume. So much for "in every disability lies a vocation," or any other noble sentiment that I had convinced myself I believed.

If my roots are so fragile as to be this easily unearthed, if "just getting through the pain" is all that is sustaining me through any trial, I need to take serious stock of my life's purpose. I need to remind myself that I am not here to have the smoothest, happiest, most pleasant life possible. Indeed, if I am fitting too snugly in those grooves, I probably could do with a bit of shaking up.

It was just a migraine, of course. It hurt, and then it receded, and now I'm living my life again. But if I'm blowing the headache out of proportion, I know at least that the lesson it taught me cannot be blown too big.

I need to live a purpose so vast and all-encompassing that no amount of suffering or sadness can rob it of its joy and satisfaction. A purpose that calls me to sacrifice, and sustains me with the assurance that any losses I count now will be rewarded a thousandfold and forever in heaven.

superstitious

This morning, I'm glad that I don't believe in omens.

It is the 7th of April, season of blossoms and birdsong, and yet when I opened my front door to let Janie outside this morning, the porch was coated in downy white...as was my longsuffering LeBaron, which took a good ten minutes to heat up when I at last mustered the courage to sprint outside and start the engine. Now snow in April could be considered a happy omen, but only when classes are cancelled, and today they were not.

Speaking of birdsong, I almost squished a robin as I walked up to work at 7 o'clock. The air was still inky and distractingly cold, and I didn't see the poor creature on the walk until it stirred and flailed out of my way before stiffening again into immobility at the base of a snowy tree.

An hour later, I drove home to pick up my housemates. On the side of the road, a raven stood perched over the limp carcass of a hare. I've been searching for a happy way to interpret that chilling sight ever since.

I remind myself again that I do not live in a Flannery O'Conner novel, that omens do not carry any inherent meaning but rather acquire the meanings we assign. And yet I know that, should anything ill-fortuned occur today, the superstitious crone that haunts the swampiest areas of my brain will start her vindictive cackling.

how good it is

Tonight the air smells of cut grass.
Apples rust on the branches. Already summer is
a place mislaid between expectation and memory.

This has been a summer of moths.
Their moment of truth comes well after dark.
Then they reveal themselves at our window-
ledges and sills as a pinpoint. A glimmer.

The books I look up about them are full of legends:
Ghost-swift moths with their dancing assemblies at dusk.
Their courtship swarms. How some kinds may steer by
the moon.

The moon is up. The black windows are wide open.
Mid-July light fills the neighbourhood. I stand by the
hedge.

Once again they are near the windowsill--
fluttering past the fuchsia and the lavender,
which is knee-high, and too blue to warn them

they will fall down without knowing how
or why what they steered by became, suddenly,
what they crackled and burned around. They will perish--

I am perishing--on the edge and at the threshold of
the moment all nature fears and tends towards:
The stealing of the light. Ingenious facsimile.

And the kitchen bulb which beckons them makes
My child's shadow longer than my own.

["Moths", Eavan Boland]

I've just discovered Eavan Boland, and am on that delicious first reading of a book of poetry: feeling the language and rhythms and images without too much intellectual probing, intuiting the meanings.

I can't wait to go back and read through it again, this time word by word, line by line, section by section, pen viscerally in hand.

I can't wait to apply what I've read, to reach the point where the words have been absorbed into my psyche and into my heart, have become channels through which new thoughts and emotions can pour.

I delight in the knowledge that when I've exhausted all these steps, I can start all over again on the same book and emerge with new channels carved into my soul, old channels deepened and broadened.

Joy, joy, joy. I'm off to read some more.

Were there but one deep, holy spell, whereby
Always I should remember thee--some mode
Of feeling the pure heart-throb momently
Of the spirit-fire still uttering this I!
Lord, see thou to it, take thou remembrance' load:
Only when I bethink me can I cry;
Remember thou, and prick me with love's goad.

[Diary of an Old Soul, George McDonald]