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.