The great affair, the love affair with life, is to live as variously as possible, to groom one’s curiosity like a high-spirited thoroughbred, climb aboard, and gallop over the thick, sun-struck hills every day.
Where there is no risk, the emotional terrain is flat and unyielding, and, despite all its dimensions, valleys, pinnacles, and detours, life will seem to have none of its magnificent geography, only a length. It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between. ~Diane Ackerman from A Natural History of the Senses
…once more the quiet mystery is present to me, the throng’s clamor recedes: the mystery that there is anything, anything at all, let alone cosmos, joy, memory, everything, rather than void: and that, O Lord, Creator, Hallowed One, You still, hour by hour sustain it. ~Denise Levertov “Primary Wonder” from Selected Poems
It’s strange to be here. The mystery never leaves you. ~John O’Donohue from Anam Cara
We must learn to acknowledge that the creation is full of mystery; we will never entirely understand it. We must abandon arrogance and stand in awe. We must recover the sense of the majesty of creation, and the ability to be worshipful in its presence. ~Wendell Berry from The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays
…being a living mystery: means to live in such a way that one’s life would not make sense if God did not exist. ~ Emmanuel Cardinal Suhard of Parisquoted in Walking on Water
It is our love affair with each day: even when the going is rough and the way is unknown territory.
The road I walk makes no sense without the knowledge God’s Hand created me, His breath becoming mine.
He forms the bridge over the chasm, so I may safely cross.
It’s astonishing, to be truthful. I want to point out the mystery to anyone who will listen so we can bow down together, amazed and awed.
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…I saw a mom take her raincoat off and give it to her young daughter when a storm took over the afternoon. My god, I thought, my whole life I’ve been under her raincoat thinking it was somehow a marvel that I never got wet. ~Ada Limón from “The Raincoat”
My mother, Elna Schmitz Polis, was born 106 years ago today in the lonely isolation of a Palouse wheat and lentil farm in eastern Washington. She drew her first breath in a two story white house located down a long poplar-lined lane and nestled in a draw between the undulating hills.
She attended a one room school house until 8th grade, located a mile away in the rural countryside, then moved in with her grandmother “in town” in Rosalia to attend high school, seeing her parents only a couple times a month.
It was a childhood which accustomed her to solitude and creative play inside her mind and heart – her only sibling, an older brother, was busy helping their father on the farm. All her life and especially in her later years, she would prefer the quiet of her own thoughts over the bustle of a room full of activities and conversation.
Her childhood was filled with exploration of the rolling hills, the barns and buildings where her father built and repaired farm equipment, and the chilly cellar where the fresh eggs were stored after she reached under cranky hens to gather them. She sat in the cool breeze of the picketed yard, watching the huge windmill turn and creak next to the house. She helped her weary mother feed farm crews who came for harvest time and then settled in the screened porch listening to the adults talk about lentil prices and bushel production. She woke to the mourning dove call in the mornings and heard the coyote yips and howls at night.
She nearly died at the age of 13 from a ruptured appendix, before antibiotics were an option. That near-miss haunted her life-long, filling her with worry that it was a mistake that she survived that episode at all. Yet she thrived despite the anxiety, and ended up, much to her surprise, living a long life full of family and faith, letting go at age 88 after fracturing a femur, which also broke her will to live.
As a young woman, she was ready to leave the wheat farm behind for college, devoting herself to the skills of speech, and the creativity of acting and directing in drama, later teaching rural high school students, including a future Pulitzer Prize winning poet, Carolyn Kizer. She loved words and the power and beauty they wielded.
Marrying my father was a brave and impulsive act, traveling by train to the east coast only a week before he shipped out for almost 3 years to the South Pacific to fight as a Marine in WWII. She must have wondered about the man who returned from war changed and undoubtedly scarred in ways she could not see or touch. They worked it out mostly in silence, as rocky as it must have been at times.
Her episode of Graves’ disease, before I was born, must have been agonizing for both of them and my older sister, as her storm of thyroid overactivity resulted in months of sleepless full time panic. Only thyroid removal saved her, but radical surgeries take their toll. Their marriage never fully recovered.
In their reconciliation after a painful divorce decades later, I finally could see the devotion and mutual respect between life companions who had finally found shared purpose and love.
As a wife and mother, she rediscovered her calling as a steward of the land and a tireless steward of her family, gardening and harvesting fruits, vegetables and us children. When I think of my mother, I most often think of her tending us children in the middle of the night whenever we were ill; her over-vigilance was undoubtedly due to her worry we might die in childhood, as she almost did.
She never did stop worrying until the last few months. As she became more dependent on others in her physical decline, she gave up the control she thought she had to maintain through her “worry energy” and became much more accepting about the control the Lord maintains over all we are and will become.
I know from where my shyness comes, my preference for birdsongs rather than radio music, my love of naps, and my tendency to be serious and straight-laced with a twinkle in my eye. This is my German-Palouse side–immersing in the quietness of solitude, thrilling to the sight of the spring wheat flowing like a green ocean wave in the breeze and appreciating the warmth of rich soil held in my hands.
My mother came from that heritage and it is the legacy she left with me. I am forever grateful for her unconditional love to the end of her life; her willingness to share the sunshine and warmth of her nest whenever we felt the need to fly back home and shelter, overprotected but safe nonetheless, under her wings.
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Done are the toils and the wearisome marches, Done is the summons of bugle and drum. Softly and sweetly the sky overarches, Shelt’ring a land where Rebellion is dumb. Dark were the days of the country’s derangement, Sad were the hours when the conflict was on, But through the gloom of fraternal estrangement God sent his light, and we welcome the dawn. O’er the expanse of our mighty dominions, Sweeping away to the uttermost parts, Peace, the wide-flying, on untiring pinions, Bringeth her message of joy to our hearts.
Ah, but this joy which our minds cannot measure, What did it cost for our fathers to gain! Bought at the price of the heart’s dearest treasure, Born out of travail and sorrow and pain; Born in the battle where fleet Death was flying, Slaying with sabre-stroke bloody and fell; Born where the heroes and martyrs were dying, Torn by the fury of bullet and shell. Ah, but the day is past; silent the rattle, And the confusion that followed the fight. Peace to the heroes who died in the battle, Martyrs to truth and the crowning of Right!
Out of the blood of a conflict fraternal, Out of the dust and dimness of death, Burst into blossoms of glory eternal Flowers that sweeten the world with the breath. Flowers of charity, peace, and devotion Bloom in the hearts that are empty of strife; Love that is boundless and broad as the ocean Leaps into beauty and fullness of life. So, with the singing of paeans and chorals, And with the flag flashing high in the sun, Place on the graves of our heroes the laurels Which their unfaltering valor has won! ~Paul Dunbar “Ode for Memorial Day”
I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground. So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned. Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you. Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew, A formula, a phrase remains,—but the best is lost. The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,— They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world. Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave. I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned. ~Edna St. Vincent Millay “Dirge Without Music”
Each Memorial Day weekend without fail ~
we gather with family, have lunch, reminisce, and trek to a cemetery high above the Sound to catch up with our relatives who lie there, still. Some for nearly 120 years, some more recent, some we knew and loved and miss every day, others not so much, unknown to us except on genealogy charts, their long-ago names and dates and these stones all that is left of them.
Seven generations together briefly, above and below the ground, age 6 through 200 years.
Yet we know each (as we know for ourselves and others) was tender and kind, even though flawed and broken, was beautiful and strong, even though wrinkled and frail, was hopeful and faithful, even though too soon in the ground.
We know this about them as we know it about ourselves: someday we too will feed roses, the light in our eyes transformed into elegant swirls emitting the fragrant scent of heaven.
No one asks if we approve. Nor am I resigned to this but only know: So it is, so it has been, so it will be.
Goin’ home, goin’ home, I’m a goin’ home; Quiet like, some still day, I’m jes’ goin’ home. It’s not far, jes’ close by, Through an open door; Work all done, care laid by, gwine to fear no more.
Mother’s there ‘spectin’ me, Father’s waitin’ too; Lots o’folk gather’d there, All the friends I knew.
Home, home, I’m goin’ home! Nothin’ lost, all’s gain, No more fret nor pain, No more stumblin’ on the way, No more longin’ for the day, Gwine to roam no more!
Mornin’ star lights the way, Res’less dreams all done; Shadows gone, break o’day, Real life jes’ begun.
Dere’s no break, ain’t no end, Jes’ a livin’ on; Wide awake, with a smile. Goin’ on and on.
Goin’ home, goin’ home, I’m jes’ goin’ home. It’s not far, jes’ close by, Through an open door; I’m jes’ goin’ home. Goin’ home.
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A shadow is hard to seize by the throat and dash to the ground. ~Victor Hugo from Les Miserables
Be comforted; the world is very old, And generations pass, as they have passed, A troop of shadows moving with the sun; Thousands of times has the old tale been told; The world belongs to those who come the last, They will find hope and strength as we have done. ~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow from “A Shadow”
The shadow’s the thing. If I no longer see shadows as “dark marks,” as do the newly sighted, then I see them as making some sort of sense of the light. They give the light distance; they put it in its place. They inform my eyes of my location here, here O Israel, here in the world’s flawed sculpture, here in the flickering shade of the nothingness between me and the light. ~Annie Dillard from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
In faith there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadows to blind those who don’t. ~Blaise Pascal
These days I find myself seeking safety hiding in the shadows under a rock where lukewarm moderates tend to congregate in times of disagreement and dispute.
Extremist views often predominate simply for the sake of differentiating one’s political turf from the opposition.
The chasm is most gaping in any discussion of faith issues. Religion and politics have become angry neighbors constantly arguing over how high to build the fence between them, what it should be made out of, what color it should be, should there be peek holes, should it be electrified with barbed wire to prevent moving back and forth, should there be a gate with or without a lock and who pays for the labor.
And so it goes. We bring out the worst in our leaders as facts are distorted, the truth is stretched or completely abandoned, unseemly pandering abounds and curried favors are served for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Enough already. In the midst of this morass, we who believe still choose to believe.
There is just enough Light for those who seek it. No need to remain blinded in the shadowlands.
I’ll come out from under my rock if you do.
In fact…I think I just did.
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Above photos from Gombe Stream National Park, 1975
Reflecting on, and with respect for, the courage shown by Tanzanian park rangers and my kidnapped research colleagues on this unforgettable day 51 years ago —
I’m reposting this again as part of my Gombe saga from when I worked as a student research assistant for Jane Goodall in western Tanzania in 1975.An archived New York Times account is found here.
At first glance, Gombe National Park in Tanzania felt like paradise—a serene piece of the earth filled with exotic and fascinating wildlife, an abundance of fish and fruit to eat, and the rich unfamiliar sounds and smells of the tropical jungle. It was a façade. It was surrounded by the turmoil and upheaval of political rebellion and insurgencies in its neighboring countries, inflamed even more by the fall of Saigon in Vietnam a month previously due to the earlier pull out of the Americans from that long and tragic war.
Only a few miles north of our research station in Gombe National Park in western Tanzania, there had been years of civil war in the small land locked country of Burundi. When the wind was just right, we could hear gunfire and explosions echoing over the valleys that separated us. Escaping refugees would sometimes stop for food on their way to villages in Tanzania to the south, seeking safe haven in one of the poorest countries in the world, only a decade into its own experiment with socialism, Ujamaa.
There was also word of ongoing military rebellion against the dictatorship of President Mobutu in the mountainous country of Zaire twelve miles west across Lake Tanganyika.
Morning comes early for field studies of wildlife, as the research day must start before the chimpanzee and baboon subjects wake up and begin to stir. Before midnight, while we slept soundly in our metal huts scattered up the mountainside, a group of armed soldiers arrived by boat to the shore of Gombe National Park.
Storming the beach huts housing two unarmed Gombe park rangers and their families, the soldiers seized one and demanded to be told where the researchers were. The ranger refused to provide information and was severely beaten about the head and face by the butts of the rifles carried by the invaders. The armed soldiers then divided into smaller groups and headed up the trails leading to the huts, coming upon four sleeping student researchers, tying them up, taking them hostage, forcing them into boats and taking them across the lake back to Zaire.
Asleep farther up the mountain, we were wakened by other researchers who were fleeing, hearing the commotion. No one really understood what was happening down lower on the mountain. There were shouts and screams, and gun shots had been heard. Had someone been injured or killed? There was no choice but to run and hide deep in the bush at a predetermined gathering spot until an “all clear” signal was given by the rangers.
We hurried along barely familiar trails in the black of the jungle night, using no flashlights, our hearts beating hard, knowing we had no defense available to us other than the cover of darkness.
That was the longest wait for morning of my life, sitting alongside Jane holding her eight year old son Grub. A hand full of other students had also made their way to the hiding spot, none of us knowing what to think, say or do. We could only barely see each other’s faces in the darkness and were too frightened to make any sounds. We carried no weapons, and there was no way to communicate with the outside world. We had no idea how many of us may be missing, or possibly dead.
Jane clasped Grub in her arms, endeavoring in vain to keep him quiet, but his fears was ignited by the events that had just unfolded.
“Will they kidnap me, Jane? Will they come for me? Where will they take us? Will they shoot us dead?”
Jane, her face hidden by her blonde hair loose about her shoulders, sat rocking him, cradling him. “Shhh, shhh, we don’t want them to find us. We’re safe staying right here. Everything will be fine in the morning. No one will take you from me.”
Grub began to sob silently into her shoulder.
When the morning of May 20 dawned, the park rangers located us, and pieced together the events as best they could–the soldiers were Zairean rebels living in remote mountains, fighting an insurgency against the Zaire government. Seeking funds for their cause, they saw a kidnapping of Americans and Europeans as a way to raise quick funds and world publicity and sympathy. Four of our friends/coworkers were missing, the camp was ransacked and the rangers beaten but with no life threatening injuries. There was no way to remain safe at the Park, and our colleagues needed whatever help we could offer for their rescue.
We were able to send a messenger to a nearby fishing village, and a radio call was sent out to the small town of Kigoma, then relayed to Dar Es Salaam and Nairobi. Help arrived within a few hours, when a United Nations boat monitoring the civil war activities in Burundi pulled off shore near our camp. We were told we needed to evacuate Gombe that day, and would be taken to Kigoma, and then flown by bush pilot to Nairobi, Kenya to cooperate in the investigation of the kidnapping.
In Nairobi, at the US Embassy, I met CIA agents who viewed our wild primate studies with suspicion. Each of us were grilled individually as to our political beliefs, our activities at the camp and whether we may be somehow involved in subversive actions against the Zaire or Tanzanian governments. We were dumbfounded that our own countrymen would be so skeptical about our motives for being in Africa. It became clear our own government could be no help in resolving the kidnapping and bringing our friends home to safety. The agents did not shed any light on whether they knew our friends were alive or dead.
We were then hustled into a press conference (preserved video here) where we were interviewed for television and print media by the worldwide news agencies, and my parents saw me on the CBS evening news before they actually heard my voice over the phone. I flew back to Stanford the next day, spending 24 hours on a plane that made six stops up the coast of West Africa on its way back west, to tell what I knew to Stanford President Lyman and other administration officials as they prepared a plan to locate and free the students. I then returned home to Washington state to await any news that came too slowly from a place so far away that I remain astonished to this day that I was ever there at all.
It took over three months, private negotiations and ransom money to free all four of our friends back to safety. They have remained close to each other and to the remarkable man who helped free them, Dr. David Hamburg. We have had several reunions together over the years to remember those days of living in a place that at one time seemed like paradise.
In the past several years, we lost both Dr. Hamburg and Dr. Donald Kennedy, both instrumental as our faculty and mentors during our years at Stanford.
Dr. Goodall, who passed away last fall in her sleep at age 91, while on a lecture tour in Los Angeles, remained a vital part of the global message not only to preserve the wild chimpanzee, but to reverse the destruction of our natural world. Her message and life’s work continues through her organization www.janegoodall.org
Several of my colleagues have written about their experience at Gombe:
It doesn’t have to be the blue iris, it could be weeds in a vacant lot, or a few small stones; just pay attention, then patch a few words together and don’t try to make them elaborate. This isn’t a contest but the doorway into thanks, and a silence in which another voice may speak. ~Mary Oliver“Praying” from Thirst
Now that I’m free to be myself, who am I? Can’t fly, can’t run, and see how slowly I walk. Well, I think, I can read books.
Well, I can write down words, like these, softly.
It doesn’t happen all of a sudden, you know.
“Doesn’t it?” says the wind, and breaks open, releasing distillation of blue iris.
And my heart panics not to be, as I long to be, the empty, waiting, pure, speechless receptacle. ~Mary Oliver from The Blue Iris
To plunge headlong into the heart of a blossom, its amber eyes inscrutably focusing on your own, magnified by a lens of dew. Whose scent, invisible, drowns you in opulence, and for which you can find nothing adequate to say.
You sense that you are loved wholly, yet are quite unable to understand why. But then, you lift your face, creased with the ordinary, to a heaven that is breaking into blue, and find your contentment utterly beyond telling, unspeakable, uncontained. ~Luci Shaw from “Speechless” from Sea Glass
Now that I’m free to be myself, I’m also free to tell about how creased with the ordinary, I notice things I passed by before.
Fleeting moments become more precious, as I long to be – while time pours through my fingers.
It doesn’t have to be the blue iris, it doesn’t have to be glistening raindrops, but today it is both…
I fall headlong into their depths, through a doorway into thanks, lost in their earthbound ethereal beauty, to a heaven that is breaking into blue.
Oh, and so grateful to Mary and Luci, I am no longer a speechless receptacle without words…
There we shall rest and we shall see; we shall see and we shall love; we shall love and we shall praise. Behold what shall be in the end and shall not end. ~St. Augustine: ‘The City of God,’ Bk. XXII, Chap. 30.
The cows know. Standing still in the pasture, chewing cud and steadily swishing flies. With those enormous eyes, they look for all the world as if they know.
The wind knows. It whispers to the grass. The grass tells the trees who pass it on to the birds. The crickets discover it all on their own.
But you and I, we don’t. Though on a day like today when the sun is bright and the cattails let loose a flurry of tiny parachutes, we sense there’s something the world knows.
A man crosses the street in rain, stepping gently, looking two times north and south, because his son is asleep on his shoulder.
No car must splash him. No car drive too near to his shadow.
This man carries the world’s most sensitive cargo but he’s not marked. Nowhere does his jacket say FRAGILE, HANDLE WITH CARE.
His ear fills up with breathing. He hears the hum of a boy’s dream deep inside him.
We’re not going to be able to live in this world if we’re not willing to do what he’s doing with one another.
The road will only be wide. The rain will never stop falling. ~Naomi Shihab Nye “Shoulder” from Red Suitcase
And just what is it that we should know? What are we missing that the cows, the wind, the trees, the grass, the birds, the crickets, the cattails, and certainly dogs know that we struggle to understand?
Simply this: be content, live aware of each moment as it comes, be grateful for it and say so, then have hope for the next moment, no matter how hard it may be.
Cherish whatever and whoever depends on us, love them with all we’ve got. Provide the shoulder that someone else needs. Give ourselves away without expecting something in return. Write it down so it is not lost.
We can see it deep in our dogs’ eyes. They know.
photo by Nate Gibson
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First of all, we’ve been using the wrong word all these years. It means without rhythm. The only arrhythmia is asystole, I tell my students. That’s the flat line accompanied by the clang of alarms in all the television dramas. There’s not much you can do about it; the patient is dead and usually stays dead. The correct word to describe all the ways a heart can dance and die is dysrhythmia, which means a disordered rhythm. There’s the soldiered march of ventricular tachycardia or the pirouette twirl of Torsades. Ventricular fibrillation simply quivers on the monitor. When these rhythms occur, the patient is pulseless and sometimes you give magnesium, usually shock, and always pump their chest to the beat of whatever song lives in your head. Once I was speaking with a man who stopped in the middle of a word, and I watched the rhythm on the monitor change. When I didn’t feel a pulse, I started CPR, and then we placed the paddles on his chest and shouted, Clear, just like in the movies. And it worked. He opened his eyes and looked at me and said, I don’t feel good. And I said, It’s okay, I’m going to get you better and smoothed the fair from his forehead, but then the alarms blared and the V tach returned, and we did it all over again—the drugs and compressions and shocks, and his eyes opened one more time and he mouthed I’m scared around the tube I’d placed in his throat, and I said, I’m here with you. But that was the last time he said anything. We didn’t stop for thirty minutes or more. He’d waved to his family when the medics loaded him into the ambulance with just a little chest pain, so they were shocked when I entered the small consult room to tell them he had died. His teenage son collapsed and landed on his knees and punched the ground and said, But we were fighting, and I think the last thing I said was I hate you.
If you break break going out not in. How you live your life I don’t care but I’ll sell my arms for you, hold your secrets for ever.
If I speak of death which you fear now, greatly, it is without answers, except that each one we know is in our blood. Don’t recall graves. Memory is permanent. ~Michael Ondaatje from “To a Sad Daughter”
I was still a kid interning at State he reminisces late in the meal— It was a young red-headed woman looked like my sister when the lines went flat I fell apart shook like a car with a broken axle Went to the head surgeon a fatherly man Boy, he said, you got to fill a graveyard before you know this business and you just did row one, plot one. ~Alicia Suskin Ostriker, “The Surgeon” from The Book of Seventy
Like many other medical professionals who have worked in the trenches of frontline healthcare, I too am fascinated by the emergency room streaming drama “The Pitt.”
At first, I couldn’t watch without feeling I too should be working at the bedside alongside the ER team, trying my best to do the task assigned to me, responding to each new instruction, grateful when things go as hoped, crushed when nothing helps and the patient is lost.
The Pitt is the newest addition to the canon of medical dramas and feels like the real thing. All the technology is there, the medical terminology and procedures are real, in addition to the fraught interaction of professionals under stress. Most of all, it feels real because it shows patients and their families trying to cope with the worst day of their lives.
And medical miracles do happen, on TV and in real life.
Recently, a church friend was rescued in a drowning event, was unconscious on a ventilator for nearly a week, with much uncertainty about how much damage his brain had endured while under water. Several weeks later, he is now home, dealing with some memory gaps and muscle weakness, but improving strength daily.
Last week, I had the privilege of meeting a middle-aged pastor who was saved a few weeks ago when his heart stopped in his sleep. His wife started CPR, paramedics shocked his heart in the field more than once, he was stabilized in the ER, unconscious on a ventilator, cooled down to a lower body temperature to preserve his brain function.
His care team, along with family and friends, watched and waited and prayed, uncertain what would be the rest of his story.
When he was warmed up 24 hours later, he woke up, able to breathe on his own. Other than no memory for those brief hours of unconsciousness, he is still himself – living with a new awareness of his vulnerability and an immense gratitude, now with an implanted defibrillator in his chest.
The right words after being brought back from the dead? The right words when we never know if they will be the last words we utter or the last we will ever hear?
I know what they would be for me. I carry them in my heart…
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Every morning I sit across from you at the same small table, the sun all over the breakfast things— curve of a blue-and-white pitcher, a dish of berries— me in a sweatshirt or robe, you invisible.
Most days, we are suspended over a deep pool of silence. I stare straight through you or look out the window at the garden, the powerful sky, a cloud passing behind a tree.
There is no need to pass the toast, the pot of jam, or pour you a cup of tea, and I can hide behind the paper, rotate in its drum of calamitous news.
But some days I may notice a little door swinging open in the morning air, and maybe the tea leaves of some dream will be stuck to the china slope of the hour— then I will lean forward, elbows on the table, with something to tell you, and you look up, as always, your spoon dripping milk, ready to listen. ~Billy Collins “A Portrait of the Reader With a Bowl of Cereal”from Picnic, Lightning
The smell of that buttered toast simply spoke to Toad, and with no uncertain voice; talked of warm kitchens, of breakfasts on bright frosty mornings, of cozy parlour firesides on winter evenings, when one’s ramble was over and slippered feet were propped on the fender; of the purring of contented cats, and the twitter of sleepy canaries. ~Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows
Some of what we do, we do to make things happen, the alarm to wake us up, the coffee to perc, the car to start.
The rest of what we do, we do trying to keep something from doing something the skin from aging, the hoe from rusting, the truth from getting out.
With yes and no like the poles of a battery powering our passage through the days, we move, as we call it, forward, wanting to be wanted, wanting not to lose the rain forest, wanting the water to boil, wanting not to have cancer, wanting to be home by dark, wanting not to run out of gas,
as each of us wants the other watching at the end, as both want not to leave the other alone, as wanting to love beyond this meat and bone, we gaze across breakfast and pretend. ~Miller Williams “Love Poem with Toast” from Some Jazz a While: Collected Poems
“Do you remember the Shire, Mr. Frodo? It’ll be spring soon. And the orchards will be in blossom. And the birds will be nesting in the hazel thicket. And they’ll be sowing the summer barley in the lower fields… and eating the first of the strawberries with cream. Do you remember the taste of strawberries?” ― J.R.R. Tolkienfrom Lord of the Rings
In our despairing moments, we hold on to memories most precious to us, recalling what makes each moment, indeed life itself, special and worthwhile.
It can be something so seemingly simple becoming cherished and retrievable– the aroma of cinnamon in a warm kitchen, the splash of colors in a carefully tended garden spot, the cooing of mourning doves as light begins to dawn, the velvety soft of a newborn foal’s fur, the embrace of welcoming arms.
This morning, dear reader, I lean forward, elbows on the table, with something to tell you, and you look up, as always, in the middle of whatever you are doing, ready to listen.
That is no small thing. Thank you.
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At the gate, I sit in a row of blue seats with the possible company of my death, this sprawling miscellany of people— carry-on bags and paperbacks—
that could be gathered in a flash into a band of pilgrims on the last open road. Not that I think if our plane crumpled into a mountain
we would all ascend together, holding hands like a ring of skydivers, into a sudden gasp of brightness, or that there would be some common place
for us to reunite to jubilize the moment, some spaceless, pillarless Greece where we could, at the count of three, toss our ashes into the sunny air.
It’s just that the way that man has his briefcase so carefully arranged, the way that girl is cooling her tea, and the flow of the comb that woman
passes through her daughter’s hair . . . and when you consider the altitude, the secret parts of the engines, and all the hard water and the deep canyons below . . .
well, I just think it would be good if one of us maybe stood up and said a few words, or, so as not to involve the police, at least quietly wrote something down. ~Billy Collins “Passengers”
Tell us of a bypassed heart beating in 12C, how the woman holds a stranger’s hand to the battery sewn in beneath her collarbone, and says feel this. Tell us of the man’s ear listening across the aisle, hugging itself, a fist long since blistered by blaze. Outside, morning sun buckling up. Inside, twitching bonesacks of bat, birdsong erupting as light cracks the far jungle canopy. Ten thousand feet below ours, a grey cat tongues the morning’s butter left out to soft. Last night we broke open the sweet folds around two paper fortunes. One said variety. One said caution. The woman in 12C would hold that her heart needs its hidden spark, but the man shows how some live the rest of their lives with half a face remembering its before expression. Who was it that said our souls know one another by smell, like horses? ~Jenny Browne “Love Letter to a Stranger”
These days, I spend as little time as possible in airports and airplanes among strangers. As an introvert who prefers to read quietly and stay securely in my shell, I politely converse with the people next to me but prefer a book and silence.
It is always a wonder to me when seat partners across from me or in front of me will spend the trip finding out all about each other’s lives, destinations and feelings about the state of the world.
Even so, like Billy Collins in his poem, I’m struck by the affinity I feel for my fellow passengers as we embark on a trip by air – so different from each of us independently traveling down a highway in our individual vehicles.
In an airplane, our fates are lashed together. What happens to one will happen to all.
Because we are bound together – sometimes randomly, sometimes not – I do believe that we should try to find kindred and sympathetic souls in a mysterious way when we are thrust among strangers.
We are created for connection, whether by smell or sight or spirit.
And perhaps, scrolling through the internet, as we all do at times, you ran across this Barnstorming blog…not expecting a connection to happen.
And here we are –connected because I wrote something quietly down. One never knows how we may become bound together.
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