Tag: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

A Flash of Exuberance

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photo by Josh Scholten

The point of the dragonfly’s terrible lip, the giant water bug, birdsong, or the beautiful dazzle and flash of sunlighted minnows, is not that it all fits together like clockwork–for it doesn’t particularly, not even inside the goldfish bowl—but that it all flows so freely wild, like the creek, that it all surges in such a free, fringed tangle. Freedom is the world’s water and weather, the world’s nourishment freely given, its soil and sap: and the creator loves exuberance.
~Annie Dillard from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

photo by Josh Scholten
photo by Josh Scholten
photo by Josh Scholten

Inexhaustible Grace

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photo by Josh Scholten

“It has always been a happy thought to me that the creek runs on all night, new every minute, whether I wish it or know it or care, as a closed book on a shelf continues to whisper to itself its own inexhaustible tale. So many things have been shown so to me on these banks, so much light has illumined me by reflection here where the water comes down, that I can hardly believe that this grace never flags, that the pouring from ever-renewable sources is endless, impartial, and free.”
Annie Dillard in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

This grace never flags, never exhausts itself, flows free and endlessly.
And that is so– yet free comes at great cost.  Freedom can never be free.
Snow and ice melt, clouds deplete, emptying out their weight,
transfigured into something other.
There is sacrifice upstream and from the heavens.
It could and has run red, it is so costly.
Quenching our every thirst,  we no longer lie panting and parched.
Revived, renewed, transformed, grateful,
Forever changed.
Amazed and amazing, we are purchased and paid in full.

photo by Josh Scholten

Washed Downstream

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photo by Josh Scholten

“Last forever!’ Who hasn’t prayed that prayer? You were lucky to get it in the first place. The present is a freely given canvas. That it is constantly being ripped apart and washed downstream goes without saying.”
― Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Of course there are days that I wish could go on forever. The weather is perfect, there is the fragrance of apple blossoms in the air, the garden growing, the grass all mowed, the feeling of lightness of being, a family together and enjoying each others’ company, a day of worship and gladness within the church. Who wouldn’t want it to continue unstopped and unchanged, just as it is?

But it is a momentary gift on an ever-moving timeline, as status quo transforms with each clock tick. There is no holding on to this present moment for safekeeping. It must be greeted with a loving embrace that then lets go, today slipping away downstream as a new present replaces it.

All those blended moments ultimately gather together in an ocean of remembrance, lasting forever, as memories do, forever lasting.

Snow and Ice Sublime

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From Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, one of my favorite books of all time–I suspect she wrote this on a winter evening that felt much like this one:

“In a dry wind like this, snow and ice can pass directly into the air as a gas without having first melted to water.  This process is called sublimation; tonight the snow in the yard and the ice in the creek sublime.  A breeze buffets my palm held a foot from the wall.  A wind like this does my breathing for me: it engenders something quick and kicking in my lungs.  Pliny believed the mares of the Portuguese used to raise their tails to the wind, ‘and turn them full against it, and so conceive that genital air instead of natural seed; in such sort, as they become great withal, and quicken in their time, and bring forth foals as swift as the wind…’.

A single cell quivers at a windy embrace; it swells and splits, it bubbles into a raspberry; a dark clot starts to throb.  Soon something perfect is born. Something wholly new rides the wind, something fleet and fleeting I’m likely to miss.”