Scraps

And again, always, the day manages to save me.  And the field, with its green and yellow song.

*****

I swear that this is true!  I saw a daisy shaped like a smile--a yellow caterpillar on a frilly pillow.  It was a strange sight but, come to think of it, not entirely unexpected.

*****

The orange butterfly, thanks to the lightness of its cares, can rest comfortably on the thistle.

*****

The nuthatch blesses by its closeness, by allowing me to pretend that, maybe, she thinks I'm part of the tree.

*****

 

Poem

Mourning the Temple

 

Did we not feel, with these empty hands, once,

the warm stone, the cool stone?

Did we not see the walls take on the moods

of the sky, whether cloud, rain, whether sun,

whether joy?  Oh did we not run to its shelter

when the rains did come!

 

Of fired clay, industry and insight

it was made, and glory was in its gates.

Now the walls have come down, rubble bears

our fingerprints, still, rumour of blood

from our hands.

 

The Lord's doing is marvelous in our eyes.

 

Clay is clay.  Glory is unquenchable fire.

The sun that rose over the walls

will set over the revealed ground.

 

In our hands, still, the cool stone,

the warm stone.

 

Amen.  Hallowed be Your name.

"Self-portrait with Radiator"

       I received a package in the mail this week--my mother sent me two books, a linen napkin and a silk scarf.  The books are what  I want to talk about--they arrived like lifelines.  Both by the same French author, Christian Bobin, whose other book (one among very many) To Rise Again is one of the most beautiful things I have ever read, and which also contains, for me, this imperative:  this is how you must write.  Mom had told me that Self-Portrait with Radiator was just as good as To Rise Again, which was almost hard to believe but you want to believe it could be true, and she sent it, along with The Simple Enchantment (all translations mine--oh yeah, I forgot to mention the books are in French.  And that I'm a francophone.  Well, now you know.)   They got here right in time.

 

      It dawned on me recently that most of my recent posts are a little, well, melancholy, and that this doesn't paint an accurate portrait of my days.   There is sadness, yes--but this sadness isn't lacking in beauty, isn't unpleasant company, and comes with a crowd of joyful playmates. 

As an illustration, I decided to share with you my translations of favourite passages from Self-Portrait with Radiator, which is a luminous book that skips and splashes like a trout in a brook.
 
 
 
Monday, April 8th
 
     Upon waking I immediately look for what is necessary for the day to be a day:  a bit of merriment.  I search without searching.  It can come from anywhere.  It is given in a second for the entire day.
 
     Merriment, what I name thus, is minuscule and unpredictable.  A little hammer of light hitting the bronze of what is real.  The note which comes out of it, spreads in the air, over the neighbourhood and far away.
 
     When we are merry, God wakes up.
 
Tuesday, April 9th
 
     To the embarrassing question: what are you writing these days, I answer that I write about flowers, and that some other day I will choose, if possible, another subject that will be even slighter and more humble.  A cup of black coffee.  The adventures of a cherry tree leaf.  But for now, there is much to see:  nine tulips stifling their laughter in a clear vase.  I watch them trembling beneath the wings of passing time.  They have a shining way of being defenseless, and I write this sentence, which they dictate: "What is an event is what is alive, and what is alive is what doesn't shield itself from loss."
 
Friday, April 19th

      The smell of freshly-cut grass,  below the buildings,  brings the day to the height of its glory.  All else that will come will be superfluous.  One could say that this is making a big deal out of very little, but consider--money, success, work, reading and loving, none of these give such intense rapture as this handful of cut grasses, putting their small fragrant souls into the hands of the air.

 

(more to come...)

  
      

How was your week?

We've had remarkable rains this week. Raw, muscled, they ruled over a morning, an afternoon, then tentative sun, then rain again. Many times I was stilled and awed by the rain's straightness--how it draws a hard, fast line between what lives up there and us down here and how much, at times, it seemed to want to be a curtain.

Rain is good--this isn't news--it gives life and feeds. Yet I have to wonder at its violence: it snaps off branches of the Douglas firs that shelter my cabin, it ruins roses, it drums madly on my roof and gutters. Bestows its blessings like a thief and a vandal. Rain, rain, go away, the little ones sing, yet the gardeners and lovers of lawns sing hallelujah, and as it beats down on the roof and slicks the roads with murder every old man and woman I check out books to at the library where I work tells me how much we need the rain. And I believe them, for hard rain is beautiful, and I, too, have a garden.

We live our days operating on certain assumptions: what I will do, whom I will love. The rest is gravy, or else small tributaries of these two main veins. This week, for me, both have taken a beating. I have been forced to face the facts--though it isn't for the first time--that what I think is a castle built on sand, and that what I want is irrelevant, could even kill me. I remember one time, walking into church being absolutely convinced of my heart and its inclinations, being told in a sermon that my heart was the most deceitful thing on earth, and my certainty shattered like the cheap plastic that it was. Since then I've often had the feeling that I'm walking around with a time bomb ticking away in my chest, that will go off and reduce me to blood and pulp whenever its little engine of desire gets in a mood. This is most worrisome. If I can't trust my own heart, which keeps me alive, then what?!

I have also been in the habit of blaming my brain. Too much thinking up there, entirely too much! How often have I expressed the wish to remove my head as though it were a hat, set in on a shelf for awhile and walk away to get some rest. How I sometimes (though wrongly, I know) envy the simpler people who aren't so preoccupied with matters ontological. How I desire to bury my talent deep in the dirt and forget about it.

A friend of mine--though it seems too weak a word to call him friend, for I have lots of friends and only one of him--pointed out to me, bless his cotton socks, that perhaps the problem lay not with my brain or my heart, but with my will. I decide on something--yes! positively, it must be thus!!--and my brain is sent off like a legal clerk to gather evidence and build a case. Once convinced of this case, the heart sets about the task of blowing up the dream bubble which, the bigger it gets, the thinner the membrane that holds it. Ah, the will, old rascal--some gift. I am glad that my organs are no longer under such suspicion, and that the will, that wild horse, is what needs harnessing, to put it to the plow of good and not evil.

Yet this raises an interesting question--how to will the will to change?

So--matters of work, matters of love, both have taken a fall this week. Two bubbles burst. And I see now that the only reason they took a fall is that I set them up in a place from which they could fall. Since I have no one but myself to blame, then I cannot but laugh. Pick myself up, dust myself off, and be on my merry way. The bubbles gone, I realize that I was exhausted from the effort of carrying them aloft, and that I am still myself, and life still good, and blessed, and shining.

Never would I have wished for a week like this--did I mention I also worked six days straight?--and I couldn't be happier that it's over. But we all know how good it feels after a hard rain, how fresh the air smells, how everything glistens, what peace prevails, and how, for a long time, the rain's goodness trickles down, how gently and deeply it keeps on feeding the ground it so pounded on.