Tag: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

A Bumbling Intricacy

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photo by Josh Scholten

Here is a new light on the intricate texture of things in the world…: the way we the living are nibbled and nibbling — not held aloft on a cloud in the air but bumbling pitted and scarred and broken through a frayed and beautiful land.
Annie Dillard in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

The weather is getting brisker so the outdoor critters, some invited, some not,  are starting to move inside.  The cats scoot between our legs as we open the front door, heading straight for the fireplace to bask in the warmth rather than a cold wind.  The puppy comes in from the yard for his nightly snack and chew bone, and stretches out on the rug, acting every bit like a piece of furry furniture.  And today there was another mouse in the trap under the sink.  I almost thought we were mouse-free with three weeks of none sighted and none trapped, but there he was waiting for me when I got home from work, well fed and quite dead.  He became an opportune meal for a cat too lazy to go get himself a living breathing mouse.  From nibbling to nibbled.  It is a tough world, inside and out.

Our most numerous and ambitious visitors from outside are the spiders, appearing miraculously crawling futilely up the sides in the bathtub, or scurrying across the kitchen floor, or webbing themselves into a corner of the ceiling with little hope of catching anything but a stray house moth or two this time of year.   Arachnids are certainly determined yet stationary predators, rebuilding their sticky traps as needed to ensure their victims won’t rip away, thereby destroying the web.

I don’t really mind sharing living quarters with another of God’s creatures, but I do prefer the ones that are officially invited into our space and not surprise guests.  The rest are interlopers that I tolerate with grudging admiration for their instinctive ingenuity.  I admit I’m much too inept and bumbling to find my way into someone else’s house through a barely perceptible crack, and I’m certainly incapable of weaving the intricate beauty of a symmetrical web placed just so in a high corner.

After all, I am just another creature in the same boat.  There is something quite humbling about being actually invited into this complex and broken world, “pitted and scarred” as I am.    I’m grateful I’ve so far escaped capture in the various insidious traps of life,  not just the spring-loaded kind and the sticky filament kind.

So it is okay that I’m settled in, cozy in front of the fireplace, just a piece of the furniture.  Just so long as I don’t startle anyone or nibble too much of what I shouldn’t, I just might be invited to stay awhile.

photo by Josh Scholten

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.”