Fading Phrases, Rising Words

The sky clears, a rising wind from the north sending a fog of celebration out to sea.  The moon herself rides high and fast between the scudding clouds.  This moon called Blue, not blue at all but white, whiter than any snow, shines brilliant and harsh, lighting the transition between old and new as one year gives way to the next.

Standing solitary and moonlit in these ephemeral hours, tangled in this fragile web of no-longer and not-yet, it’s possible to glimpse tokens of a truth hidden to hordes of thoughtless revelers in the street: this is the way of life. What has been passes away into that which was, even as the yet-to-be stirs toward vitality. Armies rise and nations fall. Children squall into existence while parents sigh into death. In the farthest reaches of the galaxies, stars explode with pulsing light while on our own shy, spinning globe rotting leaves and the stench of mud evoke a season’s final turn.

Solstice Silence, Solstice Song

There’s no escaping the scent of gentle chaos wafting through these last days before Christmas. “I loves me some Christmas,” says the woman to her companion in the checkout line, squinting at her notebook . “But I swear. If I never make another cookie it’ll be too soon.” I love cookies as much as the next person, but my sympathies are all with the woman. Even as I’ve pulled out angels and garlands, decorated trees, wrapped gifts, sent cards and done my own baking I’ve found myself thinking, “I could stand some peace and quiet.”

The quiet’s as important as the peace. The pressures of the Christmas to-do list are one thing, but the season can be noisy to the point of distraction. Grandma doesn’t go quietly when she gets run over by that reindeer, and hearing the Chipmunks’ version of Jingle Bell Rock piped through the produce aisle at full volume is more annoying than festive. While the carols and seasonal songs blare away, families squabble and impatient horns fill shopping mall parking lots with the honking of a thousand demented geese. The decible level of life rises perceptibly.

Even at night, the peace and quiet of hours meant for sleep is disturbed by the ebb and flow of incessant, internal questioning. “What have I forgotten?” “Who will be offended..?” “Can we afford..?” “Will there be time..?” If dawn brings nagging children and snappish adults, it’s little wonder that by Christmas Day many are ready to throw out the tree with the wrapping paper and get on with it. Twelve days of Christmas, stretching on to the Feast of the Epiphany, seem a horror. Who needs more Christmas when we already are exhausted and drained?

The Scrooges of the world, cynics and misanthropes alike, describe these seasonal excesses in terms that range from “pathetic” to “evil”. Obviously, they are neither. Gathering with family and friends, luxuriating in the beauty of worship and enjoying the exchange of gifts can be sheer delight. Most people find these Christmas pleasures to be well worth the time and energy they require. But as we anticipate our celebration, it’s worth pausing to remember we prepare in the context of a world far older than our customs and far larger than our plans. The world in which we celebrate Christmas travels an ages-old path and turns on an ageless axis with no regard for human intent and purpose. It is a hidden world, though imperfectly so. It can be searched out and surprised, and it can reveal itself in unexpected ways.

I experienced that hidden world one Christmas holiday in England. After a stopover in London I traveled on to Wiltshire, intending to celebrate Christmas at Salisbury Cathedral. Arriving without reservations, I discovered a wonderful inn where I came to enjoy long conversations with the innkeeper and his wife. They were cheerful sorts, bubbly and accomodating, just as keepers of inns should be. Best of all, they were full of practical advice to make my English sojourn perfect.

Discovering I hadn’t planned to make the trek to Stonehenge (“that pile of rocks in a pasture”, as another guest put it), they were aghast. “But you must go to Stonehenge!”, they implored. Laughing, I asked if Stonehenge wasn’t better visited in summer. Giving me a look that clearly translated, “Now see what this poor, benighted American is saying”, they replied that while the summer solstice celebrations are more publicized, the winter solstice has its own good qualities. “For on thing”, they said with only a hint of a smile, “in the dead of winter there are far fewer tourists to clog up the roads.”

On the slightly ironic basis of there being fewer tourists about, I agreed to make the trip with them. As we traveled, they unraveled strands of solstice lore. I knew the basics – that the winter solstice marks the shortest day and the longest night of the year, with the sun descending to its lowest point in the sky. What I didn’t know was that the sun’s noontime elevation appears to be the same for several days before and after the event. The word itself, “solstice”, comes from the Latin solstitium, a combination of “sun” (sol) and “a stoppage” (stitium). According to my guides, legend has it that at the very moment of solstice, it is not only the sun that stops. If you are in a silent place, with a quiet mind and a stilled heart, you can hear the earth pause and catch her breath as she waits for the sun to turn and move, beginning his ageless journey toward the spring.

Charmed by the legend and intrigued by the science, I’d finally become truly interested to explore the “pile of rocks in a pasture”. We arrived at Stonehenge not at the precise time of solstice, but on the day after. What crowds had gathered were gone. There were no ticket-takers, no vendors, no guides. There was only emptiness – a cold sun shining through high, thin clouds, cold gray rock and winter-singed grass dusted with snow. There was a wind that sighed, and a single bird, circling above the plain.

Moving away from my companions toward the stones, I found the silence so complete I could hear my heart beating in my ears. A sense of presence, profound and palpable, gripped my heart. Anxious, no longer certain of my solitude, I turned as if to confront an assailant. There was no one there. There were only the rocks, the sky and the hush of wind, singing across Salisbury plain.

Each year as darkness deepens, days grow shorter and the sun hastens his journey toward the solstice turn, I remember Salisbury Plain – the stones, the silence and the song. My first experience of that deep and richly textured silence was not to be my last. Blessedly, such experiences depend neither upon the stones of an ancient culture nor the shades of a people lost in time. A sense of presence, an experience of deep connection to the larger world in which we live seems intrinsic to life itself. It comes to us as birthright, although there is no predicting how or where it will appear.

When the mystery of connectedness surprises us – in a snowstorm-emptied New York street or a grove of Redwoods shrouded in mist, at a baby’s crib or a parent’s grave, in an empty classroom or an overflowing church, near a dawn-touched shoreline or in the fading shadows of a suburban yard, its nature is unmistakable, and the poet’s words apply:

If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

T.S. Eliot ~ Little Gidding

There will be no Stonehenge in my travels this year, no moment of wonder in the emptiness of a windswept English plain. But still the sun lowers and still comes the pause, and once again Solstice has arrived. If we are wise, we will find a bit of space, a little emptiness, some moments of silence in the midst of our celebrations to embrace its coming and its promise. If we dare to stop – preparing for ourselves a room built of those moments of solitude and silent attentiveness that so often elude us – then as surely as the sun stops, and the earth breathes, and the cold wind sings over the silent plain, we will sense the vertiginous joy which connects us to creation.

 

 

 

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The Allure of Failure

 

I love questions that feel like a game of “let’s pretend”, and the question Becca asked at Write on Wednesday made me eager to play.  “What would you do,” she asked, “if you knew you couldn’t fail?”  Would you “Go skydiving?  Become a doctor?  Take up ballroom dancing or acting?  Hockey or figure skating?”

Before I could respond with my own list of exotic fantasies (Float the Amazon?  Photograph Timbuktu?  Walkabout in Woop Woop?) I found myself compiling a mental list of things I already do consistently well – activities I haven’t failed at in years.  There’s bed-making, for example.  I’m deadly with hospital corners, and can do them in my sleep.  I’m so good at loading the dishwasher I’m willing to risk putting crystal next to the Pyrex baking dishes.  The only times I fail to take out the trash are those days when I have a little internal debate and out-vote myself.  That’s not a failure, just politics-as-usual. 

As my list of failure-safe activities began to expand and take shape, it seemed a bit pedestrian.   A little thought yielded more creative additions: pie-baking, plumeria culture, choosing a perfect canteloupe.  I can do them all, and haven’t failed at one for years.

Each of these skills is good.  Some are necessary.  Being able to accomplish them with ease and without risk of failure isn’t critical, but it’s nice. On the other hand, the activities aren’t precisely stimulating. Done with little attention, very little engagement and no particular thought, they’re a sometimes-enjoyable part of life, but not life-giving.

If someone asked, “What was the best part of your week?”, I certainly wouldn’t say, “Taking out the trash.”  I might say, “Baking an apple pie”, but despite the fact that I love pie and could eat some every day, there’s nothing particularly stimulating or engaging about pie baking.  I’ve done it so well, so often, I can’t even imagine failing.  It’s simply something I do, while thinking of something else.

The truth is I find all  these activities more or less boring.  If knew with certainty I wouldn’t fail at sky-diving, acting, figure skating or the dance, I might become equally bored.   If I knew the pirogue wouldn’t sink, the f-stops would be correct and the visionary madness of Outback isolation would be nothing more than a passing phenomenon – it’s entirely possible I’d yawn and turn away.  Eliminating failure may seem a worthy goal, but when failure is sent packing, so are the thrill of meeting challenges, the joys of edgy creativity, and the satisfaction of enduring achievement.

The Flooded Heart: Singing Again at the River

 T.S. Eliot was so identified with England that most have forgotten – or never knew – that he was born in St. Louis, Missouri. It may have been a faint, visceral memory of the American heartland that informed his verse when he gave those flowing English waters an appraising glance and said,

I do not know much about gods;
but I think that the river is a strong brown god–sullen, untamed and intractable,
Patient to some degree, at first recognized as a frontier;
Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;
Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.
The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten
By the dwellers in cities–ever, however, implacable.
Keeping his seasons, and rages, destroyer, reminder
Of what men choose to forget. Unhonored, unpropitiated
By worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and waiting.

T. S. Eliot, Dry Salvages, The Four Quartets

The phrase “strong brown god” is apt. Anyone who has seen the roiling, swollen reality of an unbanked river knows that, like the Lord, the river giveth and the river taketh away. It can be difficult to bless the rivers of our lives when they cease their ”waiting, watching and waiting”, and become forces of destruction, implacable reminders of truths we prefer to forget. The world is the world, after all, and while we may inhabit it for a time, ultimately it is beyond our ability to control.

When the river, the “strong, brown god” gives up its waiting and overflows its banks, memory itself floods like water, breaching levees built of forgetfulness and buttressed with time. Everyone knows the Mississippi, but not everyone knows the Cedar, the Iowa, the Des Moines, the Raccoon and the Skunk. Those were the rivers of my childhood and youth, forgotten until today’s flooding started.  Today, everyone with ties to the Heartland is remembering their own rivers and watching them wash away vestiges of the past. The Missouri, Grand and Blackwater in the state of Missouri, the Rock River in Wisconsin and Illinois, the Vermillion in South Dakota, the White and the Wabash in Indiana – each has declared its allegiance to the strong, brown god.

Even the creeks – meandering bits of water with homey names like Indiana’s Mill, Plum and Sugar  - have done their damage. Along the banks of those creeks and rivers, in the small towns, down country roads as innundated as the fields that surround them, people understand the meaning of “neighbor”. In the town ofOakville, on the Iowa River, “when it became clear the levee would fail, trucking company owners Trina and Ward Gabeline scrambled to help friends save whatever they could.They gathered about three dozen truck trailers and dropped them off at houses so families could load them with furniture and heirlooms. Then the company retrieved them and carried the cargo to higher ground.