Category: Essay Musings

I love the National Cathedral, though I’ve only been there once. I’ve spent much more times in the cathedrals of Europe – and its small parish churches, and its village halls. I love old church architecture and interesting new twists on it. And it’s all equally, genuinely lovely first thing in the morning. That’s one of the best things – to be on a trip somewhere and to get up before the traffic snarls and the commuters are hurrying with their coffee, and just… look up. Look around. And see how the light changes things.

Morning

Why do we bother with the rest of the day,
the swale of the afternoon,
the sudden dip into evening,

then night with his notorious perfumes,
his many-pointed stars?

This is the best—
throwing off the light covers,
feet on the cold floor,
and buzzing around the house on espresso—

Read the rest here.

Good morning! May the light of the day put you in the proper mood to begin anew.

Last Thursday, I stood in a driveway – properly masked and distanced – with my mother and a couple of sisters, my brother, and nephews for the first time since March of last year. We all have different distancing protocols and needs, and it’s safest for us to be away from each other, or outside for fifteen or twenty minutes – but it was lovely to see them not on a screen. And it was still so hard not to hug… which is one of the other reasons we don’t meet often. Somehow, I ended up in a family of huggers.

I’d forgotten how fast boy-children grow, and was slightly horrified to see my youngest nephew the same height as his mother. I’d forgotten my mother’s penchant for wearing Ugg-adjacent boots, and laughed at the furry Muppet-style vibe she was giving. I’d forgotten how long my sister was growing out her hair – and that my youngest sister had stopped dyeing hers for a minute. It’s weird, what you forget when you’re not seeing each other every week. But, what we remember, of course, is obvious.

Sun-Down Shining

I forget these things –
   where a trail begins,
   where a trail ends.

I forget these things –
   white of dawn,
   and sun-going down.

I forget these things –
   hunger for piki,
   thirst for the springs ….

But I forget not you,
   O beloved,
   with the night.

I have an older friend whose somewhat disorganized chaos of an orderly life by turns astounds and horrifies me. She is on too many committees, does too much volunteering, and works too many hours – and puts up with too much. In this year of abrupt reversals and sudden losses, what I have learned at least faintly is how ludicrous it is to keep on living that way, when so much is lost so soon. I want to tell her “Choose what you love, and walk away from the rest!”, but the things we do are nine-tenths habit, and one-tenth cement, and change is hard. So, I gentle my words, and bite my tongue. But this poem made me think of her – and all of us – walking in circles this year. May this coming year we wend a path through the year, out walking only regrets and hurrying toward what makes us shine.

Heaven’s Gate

In her nineties and afraid
of weather and of falling if
she wandered far outside her door,
my mother took to strolling in
the house. Around and round she’d go,
stalking into corners, backtrack,
then turn and speed down hallway, stop
almost at doorways, skirt a table,
march up to the kitchen sink and
wheel to left, then swing into
the bathroom, almost stumble on
a carpet there. She must have walked
a hundred miles or more among
her furniture and family pics,
mementos of her late husband.
Exercising heart and limb,
outwalking stroke, attack, she strode,
not restless like a lion in zoo,
but with a purpose and a gait,
and kept her eyes on heaven’s gate.

– Robert Morgan

There’s something about the end of a year that makes me think… about all manner of things. I know people who have made it habit and tradition to do a major clearing out – of clothing, of photographs and possessions, and I think it’s also useful to do a major clearing out of the mind. We always have two or three opportunities per year – there’s the Lunar New Year, there’s Rosh Hashanah, for some, there’s Shab-e-Barat, or National Day of Forgiveness, which seems as good a day as any to begin again… but as with many things, renewals and new beginnings first require distance.

The mushrooms in the photo are so teensy-tiny that it took a high-powered lens to capture them… and you can’t really tell, can you? When we’ve stepped away from something, it’s sometimes easier to see – and other times, a lot harder. I’m intrigued by how such small things can be mistaken for something large. I’m pretty sure there’s some kind of object lesson in that, but… I’ll just leave you with the pretty picture instead of belaboring it, hm?

I’m already tired of people’s predictions.

Days into the annual interstice of just-finished and not-yet, and already the air is thick with the blether of people telling us how next year will be.

As they, too, were surprised by incidents in this current year, I am disinclined to take much heed of them.

This does not, however, have much effect on their speaking.

We spend a lot of time waiting, in life. Airports, post office, doctor’s offices, only the vaguest idea of what will come next, of what more will be required of us. This week between the last holiday of one year and the first of the next always puts me in mind of the labyrinthine waiting rooms in medical centers, moving between a series of larger and smaller waiting rooms down astonishingly similar beige-and-green hallways. It’s always a relief to just get out of the whole building.

Of course, it always occurs to me later that maybe the waiting bit isn’t the worst part…

Oddly, at the time of year when we’re most supposed to be keyed in to other people, Christmas and New Year’s people tend to become super insular… which is why it’s a lonely time for many. Getting all of these jolly cards and holiday posts on social media, it might be difficult to remember that there are people waiting for an answer, waiting to feel better, waiting to see if their test comes back clear… we need that little bit of hope in Pandora’s jar.

I had so much fun speculating on the truthiness of history the other day, so perhaps we can apply that brush to the Christian tale of The Birth, and remove the soft-focus and the endearing, talking animals today? We have to eliminate, too, the preconception that the stable was a terrible, filthy cave and open our minds to the fact that other cultures live closer to their animals than those in suburbia. In other countries, it’s perfectly reasonable that the stable is on the first floor of a home. So, not so poor and wretched – certainly not ideal, no, but not quite so “away” in a manger as all of that.

Meanwhile, the wise men wanted to go home…

Oh, to discover how to be human now… isn’t that #lifegoals.

For The Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio was written by W.H. Auden in 1942 – after the British entry into World War II. It isn’t one most people have heard, except for in excerpts, because it’s still under copyright AND because it’s…1500 lines long, or 52 pages. (For comparison: Shakespeare’s Macbeth is about 2100 lines long. Yes. Let the mind boggle.) If you’d like to read the whole, it’s found in his Collected Poems. If you’d like to read a bigger chunk, check this out.