i’m stuck by the number of times, when digging through the mess that often covers me, and the ones around me, that the stuff beneath it all seems to be flowing from the same source… the dear hearts of those i love, tragically even, if given enough time to find the words, tend to share some common voice, a familiar theme of coming to life… we are always being born, which is to say we are often in some kind of pain. we are broken, and it is beautiful… beautifully tragic… real love takes place in the cracks and crevices of our fragmented relationships. There are times when i can see nothing but the cracks, but there also are those incredible moments when i see that incredible substance which fills us in, coloring us, covering us, we have God’s highlights. And because of that, you, i, the world around us trembles beneath God’s massive love.
Even now i am trembling.
Tonight I sing soft and low
Just like the moon over the snow
I hear icicles falling in the dark
We’re just like anyone else we just want a little bit
Of sun for ourselves and a little bit of rain
To make it all grow maybe a minute or two
To get lost in the glow of love
There’s always someone throwing matches around
Waving the shiny new knife
The first to run when the house burns down
I’ve seen it everyday of my life
I must confess there appears to be
Way more darkness than light
I want to fall like a pearl to the bottom of the sea
No one will find us tonight
Tonight it might look pretty bad
We might lose everything we thought that we had
But shadows will pass, smoke it will clear
If something survives of us around here
I’ll be glad ’cause I know I was lost in the glow of love
- Patty Griffin
It takes the better part of an hour to reach stillness and silence
before i can find that voice inside of me,
before i can manage the words to speak
what i don’t understand of my self, of life, of people getting old.
Of myself, i chose the words:
’shard of rock, painfully smoothed by the passing of our years…
the hard lines of youth erodes, as time,
a thing more mysterious to me than the stuff of souls,
wears away at my rough edges (carrying with it my childhood)
my only comfort, are the memories i keep, sealed in little woolen pockets
along with bits of lint, and dust (difficult things i remember too),
and perhaps a small piece of paper that has your name on it.’
what words did you choose?
its around 9 45 on tuesday morning, and i have a window seat at a downtown coffee shop… and its raining. its almost pretty. i was noticing the tailights of cars on the way over and the way they seem to sink fifteen feet into the street, leaving long flickering trails of watery red paint on the pavement. Everything flickers, the leaves still bleeding their colors, shiver with each drip, the hundreds of little mirrors made of water seem to blink, almost like you or i when a drop of water hits us in the eye. the leaves on the street, totally defeated.
its been a good fall. all these blue skys. did anyone catch the sunset two or three days ago? A.L. described it as a Mackerel sky…
i’m gonna grow wings…
i got an email from an old friend. I call him friend, though i knew very little of him. I met him during those awkward days in lynchburg when every face was a stranger, and every voice an unfamiliar sound, and every struggle for conversation made worse because i found i did not speak their language. i only have a handful of memories of him, and yet i remember him a poet, a singer, a romantic. well, he also used to sing around the local coffee shop scene and it was in his songs, in the words really, where i met him and became familiar with him. and i, like so many of us, like to steal from his creativity, for my own is wanting, and take his music and make it my own. claiming it as if i had lived the things he mentions. of course, in some ways i have, very much indeed, experienced the absurd blending of my life away from stable friendships for a whirling carousel of names and faces over a four year span, most of them having nothing to do with the ‘other’ life i lived during the 22 years away from that place. however, every once and a while you find a person, who is not so unfamiliar, who indeed acts and talks and looks a bit like you do. well this is how i met him, not in some great flurry of words, but passing silently in a hallway and taking note of his somewhat familiar gait, in some way it was my own.
and so i have been listening to his music again, reliving in some way a vivid and clear remake of things that took place in lynchburg, the fog like sorrow everyone carries for feeling so out of place, the mad flurry of words as if to comfort our silences and awkward pauses. for those of you who know me, this is not a skill i possess, the one requiring audible sound. Words for me do not come in rushing tides, at least not words that you are apt to hear, but words for me are rather very difficult to find, i suppose i spend most of my time somewhere other than the places most people live, i am not to be found in the external world, the place on which my feet are standing, but rather in my thoughts. and it takes a certain language, a certain patience, a certain kind of embracing of all things, no matter how happy or how sad, to reach me… well this friend, as little as i perhaps know him in real life, i feel i know him in my heart and in my head, and through his music which has come to symbolize that four years away from home, when i mostly floated like a leaf in some pond, the occasional blind interaction with someone special, but mostly just trying to stay afloat so that i could one day come home.
for those of you who are about to read this, i preface this by saying i am writing to myself as much as any of you…
i feel sorry for those of you
who cannot feel – a thing.
who do not relish a sorrow but instead
get weak knees when standing in lonely spaces.
who have never spent the desperate morning hours -
before the sky catches fire -
driving a four hundred mile stretch of road
away from everything and everyone
you have ever known and loved.
for what whispers in those dark hours
are not just the words of the accuser
but the words of the one who is calling you
to a place you’ve never been.
a place where truth and grace are twisted
together like a life-line and tossed
to you who frantically swims away.
there are more voices then just
the ones we choose to hear,
words that comfort us, console us,
strengthen us.
and until you are comfortable living
life within your self -
you shall never be comfortable living
life without your self.
1.
Dear relatives and friends, when my last breath
Grows large and free in air, don’t call it death –
A word to enrich the undertaker and inspire
His surly art of imitating life; conspire
Against him. Say that my body cannot now
Be improved upon; it has no fault to show
To the sly cosmetician. Say that my flesh
Has a perfect compliance with the grass
Truer than any it could have striven for.
You will recognize the earth in me, as before
I wished to know it in myself: my earth
That has been my care and faithful charge from birth,
And toward which all my sorrows were surely bound,
And all my hopes. Say that I have found
A good solution, and am on my way
To the roots. And say I have left my native clay
At last, to be a traveler; that too will be so.
Traveler to where? Say you don’t know.
2.
But do not let your ignorance
Of my spirit’s whereabouts dismay
You, or overwhelm your thoughts.
Be careful not to say
Anything too final. Whatever
Is unsure is possible, and life is bigger
Than flesh. Beyond reach of thought
Let imagination figure
Your hope. That will be generous
To me and to yourselves. Why settle
For some know-it-all’s despair
When the dead may dance to the fiddle
Hereafter, for all anybody knows?
And remember that the Heavenly soil
Need not be too rich to please
One who was happy in Port Royal.
I may be already heading back,
A new and better man, toward
That town. The thought’s unreasonable,
But so is life, thank the Lord!
3.
So treat me, even dead,
As a man who has a place
To go, and something to do.
Don’t muck up my face
With wax and powder and rouge
As one would prettify
An unalterable fact
To give bitterness the lie.
Admit the native earth
My body is and will be,
Admit its freedom and
Its changeability.
Dress me in the clothes
I wore in the day’s round.
Lay me in a wooden box.
Put the box in the ground.
4.
Beneath this stone a Berry is planted
In his home land, as he wanted.
He has come to the gathering of his kin,
Among whom some were worthy men,
Farmers mostly, who lived by hand,
But one was a cobbler from Ireland,
Another played the eternal fool
By riding on a circus mule
To be remembered in grateful laughter
Longer than the rest. After
Doing that they had to do
They are at ease here. Let all of you
Who yet for pain find force and voice
Look on their peace, and rejoice.
Wendell Berry
the clouds today were magnificent. like an army off to war or something, head forward and shoulders back.
When I do count the clock that tells the time,
And see the brave day sunk in hideous night;
When I behold the violet past prime,
And sable curls all silvered o’er with white;
When lofty trees I see barren of leaves,
Which erst from heat did canopy the herd,
And summer’s green all girded up in sheaves
Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard;
Then of thy beauty do I question make,
That thou among the wastes of time must go,
Since sweets and beauties do themselves forsake
And die as fast as they see others grow,
And nothing ‘gainst Time’s scythe can make defense
Save breed to brave him when he takes thee hence.
-Shakespeare
Found this today in a book i was glancing through…
what do i become?
the night hidden things.
what does the desert dream?
it suffers if it looks back.
whose heart is the oceans heart?
the one who does ghosts work.
has the will been broken?
yes, but into an answer.
has the shadow spoken?
yes, but it’s a song it whispers.
fourth dawn and silence comes.
we see the mountain.
beasts see you cut the limb
and i would not go.
they see you bind my hands
and i would not go.
they see you bring the flame
and i will not go.
they see you raise the blade
let this be done.
changes teach changes, lord
blood teaches blood to blood
is there always a way home?
has there ever been one?
has there ever been one?
has there ever been one?
has there ever been one?
