Only that. But that.

This summer, I have repeatedly been asked my to describe my idea of a perfect life. "What do you want your life to look like a few years down the road?" friends and family wonder, arching eyebrows over the steaming rims of their coffee mugs.

It is a good question, and one that I have never answered to my own satisfaction, because my vision of the happiest personal future is a nebulous one, comprised primarily of abstract ideals. When I envision myself in a perfect world, I am living well within my means, and my means are nothing more than "enough." I have no desire for an all-absorbing career, and the very thought of a calendar crowded with social engagements exhausts me. In my dream, I have a job that gives me physical satisfaction, also a sense of accomplishment derived from doing a necessary thing well. I have a quiet space to return to at the end of the day, for coffee and reading and journalling and exercise, for fellowship as well as solitude. I fill my days with honest industry, exploring the world with a receptive hungry soul. I live simply, but abundantly. If I had to sum it up, I would use adjectives like clear, deep, quiet, rich, sufficient.

People almost inevitably note that such a life sounds rather lonely to them. "What about marriage? What about children?" they ask.

Of course, as usual, the specifics are where I grow cloudy. My response depends largely on my mood. I am not immune to the stir of curious wistfulness when the topic of love is broached. Sometimes I am very attracted to the idea of a life of prosaic domesticity. I desire the household dynamics of L'Engle's "Circle of Quiet," Barbara Crooker's "Ordinary Life," Marilynne Robinson's "Gilead." I have a hearty respect for the Mrs. Ramsays of this world, of whom I have known not a few. The majority of the emotional life on this planet seems so utterly wrapped up in eros and in family--living on the outside of it, never experiencing it firsthand, at times seems to me to be a cheated or at the least an incomplete existence.

Then again, I think of Lily Briscoe, of Emily Dickinson--of, on the other side of the coin, all the faded or disillusioned wives and mothers that I know or have heard of. I remember that my life is already a glorious love story. I think of how full and happy my life has been thus far, and the prospect of living a similarly solitary existence the rest of my earthly days does not frighten or appall me. In some ways, it allures me. I desire a life of witness and wonder...a bystander life, you might say, far enough from the mess to see its beauty and pattern.

As I considered all this, the words of Psalm 23 quietly filled my heart, and with a sense of wonder I realized that it held the promise of everything I put so much store in for my future.

The Lord is my Shepherd; I shall not want.

He makes me lie down in green pastures.

He leads me beside the still waters.

He restores my soul.

He leads me in paths of righteousness

for his name's sake.

Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,

I will fear no evil, for you are with me.

Your rod and your staff, they comfort me.

You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies.

You anoint my head with oil.

My cup overflows.

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life,

and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

All my confusion about what I specifically wanted evaporated in the sunlight of this passage. Instead of being tyrannized by the possible, by the idea of all the routes I could potentially take and the agonizing necessity of eliminating other (perhaps better) routes as I move forward, I need only follow my Shepherd.

That is my idea of a perfect future, and--imagine that!--I'm already there.

Whatever happens. Whatever

"what is" is is what

I want. Only that. But that.

[Galway Kinnell, "Prayer"]

Summer: June, 2010

All day the air molecules thicken and swell. They press the scent out of the pores of living things until the atmosphere is intoxicated with their heavy cologne. Distances bend and blur. My brain is a sluggish sea cow rolling in the murky waters of the Amazon.

Now as the earth turns its face from the sun it releases a deep sigh, redolent of honeysuckle. Still reeling from the day's swollen fever, I rejoice in the fall of light, in shadows and cool breezes.

I am comforted by the knowledge of Everest's unmelting snows, of heatless light glancing off of arctic glaciers.

I envision a child's model of the solar system and plot the trajectory of my own spot on the globe.

Away from the sun's smothering scrutiny.

Leaning wistfully against the cold shoulder of outer space.

Letter to My Landlady

Dear Jessica,

You know what they say about first impressions. When I was first told that my landlady was an elderly woman named "Jessica," I took an instant liking to you. I wanted to trust you merely and foolishly because of your beautiful youthful name, such a rarety in women of your generation.

Now, I realize that I have never met you. But I've been living for several months now in your little cluster of apartments, and I'm starting to learn some things about you. For example: you care a great deal about aesthetics. Thank you for bulldozing our backyards of their wilderness tangle of wild strawberries and scraggy weeds and chipmunk abodes. Thank you for building latticed wooden lean-tos for our trashcans. I've heard rumors that fresh paint will soon be gracing our dull brown siding, and that is lovely. I sincerely appreciate your efforts to beautify the exterior of my little home, and I think that reflects very well on your character.

However, I think that our relationship would improve tremendously if you would remember that little adage "Beauty is as beauty does." Would you schedule cosmetic surgery for a patient with grave internal afflictions? Our house has gradually been falling to pieces from the inside: first the oven, then the dishwasher, then the air conditioning, and most recently, the water. All have failed.

In a demonstration of backwards reasoning, you have repaired the LEAST important components of this total system meltdown. Having a functioning dishwasher is fantastic--but useless, without a water supply. The benefits of a working stove are counteracted by the already oven-like temperature of the house itself...hardly conducive to a cooking or baking frame of mind. While I'm grateful (truly) to have these appliances restored, I would bargain them in a moment for cold air conditioning and running water. Surely that is not too much to ask.

At the very least, Jessica, could you talk to me? Let me know when to expect the water to be turned off (and turned on again); communicate about the status of our bid for a new air conditioning system. Please try not to get so defensive when I bring these requests before you. They are far from unreasonable, and, I would like to think, so are you.

Restore my faith in you, please. Make good on that positive (if unmerited) first impression.

Sincerely,
Your Humble (Financially Faithful) Tenant

snapshot of a Tuesday morning

It is yet another hot summer day, and I woke to find my covers kicked to the ground during my uncomfortable squirms last night. Perhaps today will be the day that our AC is repaired.

I made coffee anyway, in spite of the heat. Coffee will always be a good idea. To temper its muggy effects, a bowl of yogurt and fresh fruit perches on the edge of my desk as I write this. The chipmunk who resides outside my bedroom door (Queequeeg, as I've dubbed him, for his wildness and charm) is standing alert and shivering all over as chipmunks do, blinking, adorable, on my cement slab of a patio. My ceiling fan has a slight hitch, and makes a monotonous clicking sound with each revolution.

New day, jug of opportunities, I am so grateful for you.

Hello, sun in my face.
Hello, you who make the morning
and spread it over the fields
and into the faces of the tulips
and the nodding morning glories,
and into the windows of, even, the
miserable and the crotchety--

best preacher that ever was,
dear star, that just happens
to be where you are in the universe
to keep us from ever-darkness,
to ease us with warm touching,
to hold us in the great hands of light--
good morning, good morning, good morning.

Watch, now, how I start the day
in happiness, in kindness.

(Mary Oliver, Why I Wake Early)

Snapshot of a weekend:

1. U2's "Joshua Tree" in its thrilling entirety while driving I-24 beneath a golden cumulus sky.

2. Tennis shoes and iPOD on a mountain jog...keenly aware of my body's limitations and yet somehow invincible. "Inebriate of air am I / and debauchee of dew, / Reeling, through endless summer days / from inns of molten blue."

3. Marvelling at whales, the sea, the human heart--and the multitudinous ways they overlap. Whales are my latest obsession.

faces

I've just experienced one of those "tumbling down the rabbit hole" episodes that I should count on occuring any time I find myself on Facebook. I've spent an hour perusing photographs from the past five years: snapshots of faces and places from Covenant College, my semester in Slovakia, visits to Michigan, Canada, South Carolina. Click click click, each photo giving my memory a blurred and heady view of a span of past as it leaped over the gaps to the next documented moment.

As I watched my own face flicker across the screen, my mind echoed with remembered fragments from Graham Greene's "The Heart of the Matter." I remember that when I read this book I had been struck by something the main character thought as he looked at his wife's photograph: "It had been a very early photograph, and he no longer cared to be reminded of the unformed face, the expression calm and gentle with lack of knowledge, the lips parted obediently into the smile the photographer had demanded. Fifteen years form a face, gentleness ebbs with experience, and he was always aware of his own responsibility. He had led the way: the experience that had come to her was the experience selected by himself. He had formed her face."

This line of thought led me to recall that e. e. cummings poem: "...nevertheless i / feel that i cleverly am being altered that i slightly am becoming / something a little different in fact / myself / Hereupon helpless I utter lilac shrieks and scarlet bellowings."

What I thought, in connection to these passages, with photographs of myself still fresh in my mind, was that five years can form a face, too. They can "hit and chip" with "sharp fatal tools" and "cleverly alter" me. I don't know that anyone other than myself would have noticed the transformation that I clicked through tonight--it's certainly no meth addict before-and-after. But I noticed, and it was unsettling. I detected the ebbing of gentleness with experience, the creeping in of a certain...slyness, perhaps, or disenchantment.

As my dismay heightened, I gave myself a much-needed reality check. Both of these passages are weighted down by a sense of doom: as though this life is all there is, and you will submit to the experiences inflicted upon you (perhaps helplessly uttering shrieks and bellows, but to no avail) because they are all you've got. The more I thought about the ideas behind these passages, the more I realized how wrong they are.

Scobie seems to believe that his wife's face has been fully formed: that it is now, fifteen years later, a reflection of her immutable Self. But life is not like that, thank goodness! My face will never ever be completely past-tense formed until it has been purified in the fires of mortality and becomes its fully realized Self. Until then, my path abounds with choices that offer me limitless opportunities to change the way my face is formed.

It is also important to note how Scobie shoulders all the responsibility for having formed his wife's face...an unfair burden for him to bear, and one that results in his own moral paralysis and eventual downfall. Tempting though it may be to blame others for the way my face has been formed (and, to an extent, justifiable though those accusations may seem), nevertheless I must remember that I am no passive victim in this process. My choices--down to the ways that I choose to respond to others--are, in the end, the ultimate face-formers.

Similarly barren of any mention of active will is cummings' portrayal of his mind as a "big hunk of irrevocable nothing", "helpless" to the chiseling work inflicted upon it by the "sharp fatal tools" of experience. I am no hunk of irrevocable nothing. And sanctification is really a different sort of process entirely. Although it retains cummings' idea of being altered by diminishment from an original state, this process is not merely the result of the sense's sharp and fatal (and, one gets the feeling, disinterested and indiscriminate) tools. It is the work of the loving and personal Spirit, the divine Comforter. He is making sure that my raw mortal hunk of heavenly metal is cleverly being altered, that I am becoming, in fact, MYSELF. As I was meant to be. And there is a world of difference between the passivity of a hunk of irrevocable nothing and the submission of a trusting hope. Whereas cummings' response is reactionary and futile, I am given the ability to choose to partner in my own transformation by celebrating it and submitting to it.

Active submission is utterly different from cummings' helpless bellowing. It is beautiful and productive, and suffused in a transcendant peace: the sort of peace that forms a face. What comfort.

encouraging

To Be Of Use
Marge Piercy

The people I love best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half-submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who are not parlor generals or field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.

a green mile

My new house may not be in all ways, or even most ways, an improvement upon the last, but for the sake of one irreplaceable feature, I've decided that I love it. Take ten steps straight from my front door, and you will see what I mean. Here your feet will encounter a broad gravel bike trail, with a median of green striping down its back. Take it to the left, and it will lead you beneath the tar-scented creaking beams of the Incline Railway and down a pleasant mile to where it dead ends into Scenic Highway. Take it to the right, and all the winding footpaths of the mountain (Point Park, Mountain Beautiful, Sunset Rock, Craven's House, Covenant College, etc.) are at your command.

This morning I decided to go left towards Scenic Highway, opting for a brisk run rather than a brisk ramble. A mile is not a long distance, measured by the amount of time it takes to traverse it. Even by foot: a mile there, a mile back--it's over in a quarter of an hour, and then I am bursting into the cold kitchen, panting and glugging a glass of water. But God has crammed my newest pet mile with such a glorious density of matter. Such atmosphere, summer damp and summer bright! Such effusions of foilage--such madness of buzzing and chirping and chugging and rustling! Greenery fawns around my ankles as my gravel-chomping tennis shoes carry me past flashes of grandeur, where the trees thin enough to disclose the trail's elevation, and then enfold me again in sunlight and verdure. Chattanooga, splattered off the edge of the treeline and bisected by the glittering Tennessee River, keeps flickering in and out of my peripheral vision. Cars cruise along Scenic Highway. I feel isolated and yet involved: queenly. And that is what I should feel.

Daughter of Eve: this is your dominion. Of course you can't know everything about it, or even everything about some of it. But you can love it and delight in it and be grateful for it, for the way it makes your heart climb over itself. For the way it paralyzes you and also mobilizes you: praise's overwhelming paristalsis.

You can live, in your starstruck finitude, forever a handmaiden to the Mystery.

Mother's Day

This year's Mother's Day was unconventional. I spent the bulk of its daylight hours on the road, headed toward Knoxville on a rather sad errand; returning from Knoxville in a contemplative frame of mind. The length of Highway 27 beat the interstate for scenery, if not for speed: slanting green-blue ridges piling up behind one another in the bright sunlight, flawless blue skies, and sweet little towns with biblical names (Mount Pisgah, New Salem). I passed several cemeteries where visitors were paying their respects, and speculated on the connection of the holiday to their ministrations. The idea of life being so breathtaking and yet quotidian, so full and at the same time so transient, held my mind in thrall, lending each scene a fresh poignancy.

The earth is full of the knowledge of God. I felt this powerfully: a knowledge, unspoken but palpable and immense, on that long drive. I felt it as the source of the "dearest freshness deep down things" that you rejoice in when you pause to note it. The sun knew, radiating its wave/lines of energy across the landscape. The mountains knew, bristling with their current crop of plants and creatures, enfolding the memories of generations before in the accrued sediments of centuries. "For all this, nature is never spent."

But how many of us knew--in our houses, playgrounds, trailers, gas stations, cars? In our landscape bleared, smeared with toil, dressed in our very scent and smudge? In the heartbeat span of our generation treading water (how briefly), the memories of the trodden ones before us?

How do we then not reck His rod?

Sometimes I think about how much nicer life would be if feelings did not exist. When I wake up tired and sluggish and perhaps a wee bit grumpy, for example. What is the use of feeling those things? They are like that obnoxious person who is bound to point out the obvious reasons for the things that ail you, without offering any solution. "You should not have gone to bed so late last night," your heavy eyelids admonish. "Nor should you have had so many sugary things," your puffy face avers, while your aching muscles demand, "What were you thinking, drinking all that coffee?" They have no bearing on the fact that I am nevertheless required to get out of bed, shower, dress, glug a mug of coffee, and go to work. They just make it more difficult to do so with cheer.

Of course, experience has taught me that the best way to deal with such unsolicited and unhelpful input is simply to nod my head in agreement and then count my blessings and focus on the hours ahead. No use letting them get on my nerves. No use arguing. They are right--they are oh so right--but that's all behind me, and today is a completely different matter.

I'm going to go find some pleasant feelings to keep me company.

I have a dream.

The dream is Italy.

Everyone falls in love with Italy, to some extent. For some it is a fleeting and faraway crush, a brief fascination. For many the fall is irrevocable and enduring. I have yet to meet a single person who was not at one time intrigued by some aspect of this peerless nation.

Even before the few thrilling days I spent there, I was being primed. I was learning about the Roman Empire and the days of the early church, about the Roman Catholic Church and the Renaissance. I was reading Mandie and the Catacombs, Quo Vadis, An Echo in the Darkness. Middlemarch and A Room With A View and Where Angels Fear to Tread. Under The Tuscan Sun and The Age of Innocence. Roderick Hudson and The Marble Faun. I was watching While You were Sleeping and Return To Me and Gladiator. I was spending my afternoons after school poring over art books in the library: DaVinci and Fra Angelico, Botticelli and Bellini and Caravaggio, Donatello and Giotto and Fra Fillippo Lippi, Titian and Veronese. I was acquiring an idea of Italy.

Then I was there. I only spent a week there, but it was long enough to understand that this was a place I wanted to know, to befriend. It was like meeting a famous person, a person I'd heard of but never met, and feeling an affinity...a sense that, under other circumstances, we would become kindred spirits. She would tell me all her secrets, and they would help me understand things about her. I would love her for them. Our friendship would help me understand myself better. It would transform me.

I am determined to live there. It doesn't have to be soon, nor does it have to be forever. But somehow I need to be a part of Italy's story. Italy is already a part of mine.

hidden will of iron

I am always thrown when relatives express any unsolicited interest in my plans, despite the uncontestable truth that my upbringing should have prepared to me to expect such involvement.

Why do I find it so hard to imagine that my aunts, uncles, cousins, and even siblings, do actually care about me? Why is it so difficult for me to take my family members at face value, rather than reading motivations like pity and a sense of duty into their kindly questions and gentle advice? I guess I am more suspicious and guarded than I give myself credit. And that is saying a lot.

Also, I am private to a fault, particularly in areas of my life where I am unsure of myself. If I am going to go out on a limb, there is no way I'm going to let anyone in on it until I've attained a measure of success. Probably not even then.

Perhaps I've convinced myself that my family truly doesn't care a great deal about the actions I take because I fear the prospect of being a disappointment more than I fear the prospect of being a failure.

Last year I took a personality test in the book Wired That Way and came out very strongly in the "peaceful phlegmatic" camp. One phrase they used to describe this personality group has lingered in my memory. While asserting that peaceful phlegmatics place a high priority on making sure everyone is happy, the book also warned that these outwardly pliable individuals happen to possess a "hidden will of iron."

In a nutshell, this describes my approach to life. I hate when people are unhappy with me, I hate the prospect of disappointing anyone, but there are certain areas of my life where I am brutally inflexible. I will pursue my own dreams. I will try to make these dreams appear as innocuous and palatable as possible in order to make others as happy about them as I am. Or I will simply not share them if I am sure that they will offend. But I will persist in them.

I guess it is this fiercely guarded will of iron that I am nursing when I persuade myself that my family is not truly interested in my plans. I am afraid that if they are truly interested, that if for some reason they are opposed to my will, I will be forced to disappoint them. Much easier to pretend that they are just being polite, and therefore it is okay for me to be casual and evasive in my response.

The book didn't mention cowardice as a side effect of pleaceful phlegmaticism.

Notice, too, the questions I leave pointedly unaddressed. (For example: Am I afraid of talking things out because such discussions might reveal me to be in the wrong? Should I even be pursuing a path that I feel positive my loving devoted family would oppose? Didn't God write a lot about the folly of ignoring advice...of leaning on one's own understanding? Aren't relationships more important than agendas?) Listen to these questions clang against the iron vault of my hidden will.

let this eye be not folly's loophole

I've been re-reading Marilynne Robinson's Home, and feeling that something about this book is special. For some reason it moves me more deeply than usual.

When I actually took a moment to analyze why this is, I had a revelation. I realized that the difference is not so much in the book itself as it is in my attitude towards it.

Usually when I read a book, my attitude is one of conquest, of entitlement. I'm the conquistador blazing through foreign terrain and seeking to understand it only for my own personal profit. It can be easy for me to emerge from a book having made very little connection with the characters, caring very little about how they end up (or caring only from a scientific distance), and feeling strongly only about how beautifully the author managed to render the scenery. I can draw from it a sense of the picturesque, and perhaps a sweeping overview of the themes that I can, if I desire, apply sweepingly to myself. I can walk away more experienced, perhaps, smarter...but essentially unchanged.

With this book, however, I quickly discover that I am on native soil. It doesn't take long for me to recognize these faces. I am one of them, and that makes all the difference to my posture. I pay each scene, each character, each event the sort of attention (critical and loving) that an insider pays to each landmark or passerby or local occurance. I'm no tourist here, rushing through the highlights of the Baedecker and going my way with only a blur of faces and places lingering in my memory. Rather, these pages turn my gaze both backward and inward, prompt me to pause over memories of the people and places that produced me, and to reflect on my motivations and behavior in both the past and the present.

Embedded in the fictional setting of Gilead, Iowa is a truth I can identify because I have experienced it. And I can let it effect me deeply.

This whole line of thought has me reevaluating the sort of attention I pay to other books. I want to read in order to become a better human--not in order to be regarded as cultured or well-educated. Not to take a little vacation from reality. Not for my own glory or because it simply is the thing to do or because I feel that it will strengthen my morals or broaden my experience. I don't want to be a Cortez of literary frontiers; I don't even want to be a Miss Lavish or an Innocent Abroad.

Books are another sphere in which I can "see in all bodies the beat of spirit," an arena where the "alien hands of love" can touch me if, I let them. Reading opens up yet another place in which I can love my neighbor as myself--where I can learn to be "giver of due regard."

So no more arrogance, entitlement, patronization, generalization as I open each new book.

Instead: humility, teachability, attention, gratitude.

Maundy Thursday

I love the religious calendar. It is as though a bunch of alarm clocks were smuggled into the year, strategically timed to rouse my heart from slumber and open my eyes to the full meaning of my experience.

With every passing year, this song means more for me. Incarnation, Epiphany, Lent, Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Easter, Ascension, Pentecost, and Advent again. This cycle, Christ's cycle, is my cycle, too. Each milestone reminds me of my own experience: new creation, death to self, resurrection, ascension, life eternal. The pattern contains revelation to assure me, promise to thrill me, mystery to keep me reaching.

I look into my heart and count the rings, read the weathers of each particular season: sunshine and rain, draught and flood, harvests abundant and scant. I am consoled to see that, even without my knowledge or desire, each ring came to completion. Each new ring grew wider than the one before.

I think: You are growing.

I may at times feel vulnerable to the elements, at the mercy of the weathers of the world. But then I am reminded that I am a sacred tree, planted beside the living water. My roots tighten their grip. My branches curve up and spread out.

I photosynthesize with zeal.

fry me, sunny side up

Tu Wi's Considers April Sunlight
[Barbara Crooker]

Some cook in the sky must be ladling it out, pouring liquid gold
from her copper saucepan, basting the meadow in hollondaise.
Where it drips: buttercups, dandelions, butter & eggs.
Where it splashes: forsythia, daffodils, tulips.
After this long hard winter, I reach out my arms,
lift my face to the sky.
Fry me, sunny side up,
on spring's hot griddle; clarify me, anoint me,
in your lavish lemon light.

neediness

I want to share exactly how it felt yesterday, to roam an uncharted landscape in a restless sunshine. I want you to partake of Janie's exuberance, as I did, watching her leap from lichened rocks to long-stemmed grasses, snuffle through the wind-wakened cellulite of muddy red puddles, stiffen and prick at the sound of a distant howl.

I want you to feel the strong gentle fingers of the wind rifle through your hair, and the sloppy suction of clay on your tennis shoes, and the pale solar glow warming the backs of your legs. I want you to picture the tiny black flies dancing over every inch of water, and then I want you to zoom out and see the textured earth, hummocks and power lines, trees and grasses, somersaulting down to the skyline.

I want you to know the heady smallness of standing on a mountain-top, drawn to scale, engulfed.

I would even wish for you the satisfaction of scratched ankles, aching muscles, dirt-caked laundry.

I want all of this for you, selfishly, because the only thing that is missing to make my experience complete is human fellowship, and I will not be able to fully enjoy it until I have attempted to share with someone.

fragments

"I stood there and felt the melancholy / of growing older in such a season"... (Evan Boland)

Growing older in springtime does involve a dimension of melancholy. I am still young, but at the same time I percieve the shadow lengthening behind me where I used to sense only sunshine.

“Youth never sees its shadow till the sun’s about to set: and then you wonder where the person went who you were speaking to in all your thoughts for all those years.” (Marianne Wiggins)

The distance between feeling the melancholy of growing older and seeing that shadow is increasingly short. A degree of circumspection would better befit my behavior than the heedless dithering that has characterized it of late.

Nostalgia

When I think of nostalgia, I think of the poem by Emily Dickinson about the certain slant of light. So often the trigger for nostalgia is as simple as that: a slant of light, a waft of fragrance, a familiar melody.

There's a certain slant of light,

On winter afternoons,

That oppresses, like the weight

Of cathedral tunes.

Heavenly hurt it gives us;

We can find no scar,

But internal difference

Where the meanings are.

None may teach it anything,

'Tis the seal, despair,-

An imperial affliction

Sent us of the air.

When it comes, the landscape listens,

Shadows hold their breath;

When it goes, 't is like the distance

On the look of death.

The language Dickinson uses is so powerful that some might object to my labeling it "nostalgic." I would argue that nostalgia and mourning share plenty of common ground. When I feel nostalgic, there is often an element of regret and melancholy, a sense of loss, wistfulness, sentimentality. Similarly, mourning (sorrow over something lost) involves feelings of regret, yearning, and sentimentality. The difference between the two is one of directness. Mourning is always transitive; nostalgia is frequently intransitive. When you mourn, your emotion has a direct object: a clear idea of something or someone that once was there and now is gone. On the other hand, it is possible to feel nostalgic and not even know precisely why. The direct cause can elude you, although you perhaps can link your emotion to the indirect object, which is often its trigger.

In this poem, Emily she isn't speaking about her sorrow over the loss of any tangible thing. She is talking about a slant of light, a familiar enough atmospheric condition that happens on winter afternoons, and about how it makes her feel. How when she sees this slant of light, the injury it gives her is a spiritual affliction, a sense of despair that leaves no outer scar but nevertheless changes the meanings of things for her. It seems to her as though the world is holding its breath, listening. And when it passes, it reminds her of "the distance / on the look of death."

The slant of light is not the cause of her despair. But the sight of it pierces deep to the place where she stores her meanings--the things that are important to her, that help her make sense of the world (memories, for instance)--and casts a painful chill over her spirit.

That is nostalgia. It doesn't always come with such intensity, nor is it always a stirrer of grief. But it always makes internal difference, where our meanings are.

I'm ready for a ready heart

I found in this quote the sting of conviction and the relief of enlightenment. Blessed are the meek, indeed.

"Isn't this the simple explanation for our being so heavy-laden, so tired, so overburdened and confused and bitter? We drag around such prodigious loads of resentment and self-assertion. ... Meekness is teachability. It is the readiness to be shown, which includes the readiness to lay down my fixed notions, my objections and 'what ifs' or 'but what abouts,' my certainties about the rightness of what I have always done or thought or said. It is the child's glad 'Show me! Is this the way? Please help me.' It shows in the kind of attention we pay to one another, the tone of voice we use, the facial expression. The weapon of meekness counters all enmity, says author Dietrich Von Hildebrand, with the offer of an unshielded heart." [Elisabeth Elliot]

fancy

The World
I would like to write a poem about the world that has in it

nothing fancy.

But it seems impossible.

Whatever the subject, the morning sun
glimmers it.

The tulip feels the heat and flaps its petals open

and becomes a star.

The ants bore into the peony bud and there is the dark
pinprick well of sweetness.

As for the stones on the beach, forget it.

Each one could be set in gold.

So I tried with my eyes shut, but of course the birds

were singing.

And the aspen trees were shaking the sweetest music

out of their leaves.

And that was followed by, guess what, a momentous and

beautiful silence

as comes to all of us, in little earfuls, if we're not too

hurried to hear it.

As for spiders, how the dew hangs in their webs

even if they say nothing, or seem to say nothing.

So fancy is the world, who knows, maybe they sing.

So fancy is the world, who knows, maybe the stars sing too,

and the ants, and the peonies, and the warm stones,

so happy to be where they are, on the beach, instead of being
locked up in gold.

-Mary Oliver-