A Hundred-Thousand Questions

"The Prayer" by Donata Wenders

I'll never know how you do it. Flip a switch, and turn the world white. Place gentle strangers in my path. Close a door, open a window. And all that.

Sometimes, I try to find you in that blurry moment before my body settles into sleep. You are warm: full-tummy, hands-extended-toward-an-open-flame warm. You are shapeless, and yet, sometimes I envision you as all of the space. Every inch of it. The whole world, filling in the atmosphere around my one body. As though my arms were always extended, and you were always rushing forward toward me.

I know what I am supposed to believe: that you are in the wine, in the bread. And oh, I try. To believe, to feel you as you rush into my bloodstream. But more often, I find you in the quiet spaces. Before the others have filed into the pews. When my eyes are closed, and my breathing is slow, and even. I feel you in my stomach—that deep pocket the yoga teacher always says to breathe from. When I try to breathe from my stomach, I always fail. But in those moments, in those quieter-than-quiet moments, I find myself breathing from my stomach. And there is light beneath my closed and fluttering eyelids. And you are there: in that soft, slow, silent space.

And most days, my only prayer is “thank you.” I used to offer you full sentences, of the long-and-rambling variety. But for some reason, my monologues seem trite now. Well, they probably are. (And isn’t this just that?) You know I have a hundred-thousand questions to ask you. But I know that life is too short for all those answers, and that even if you offered them to me, the only appropriate response would ever be “thank you,” anyway.

Anyway, thank you. For those deep-stomach-breathing moments. For the leaves changing in the fall. For the human ability to hope, despite history, science, and sin. For all of the miracles of water, fire, and sand, and watching my breath rise to the sky when it’s cold. And for love—for letting us feel it. Feel you.

Thank you for being all of that, to me. Thank you. (And when my words fail me—fail you—know that my hands are perpetually reaching toward you, waiting for you to fill in all of the empty spaces).

a penny or a blossom

When Annie Dillard was a small girl, she hid pennies in sidewalk cracks and sycamore trees as a game. After hiding the penny, she might draw directions on the sidewalk in chalk, pointing to the surprise gift. She writes that her penny-hiding game was not for her benefit; she derived joy simply from the knowledge that another person would find her penny and imagine it as a free gift from the universe.

Earlier this week, as I was walking to school, I happened upon a blooming bush of forsythia.

The days were miraculously warm last week, and the trees burst into life intrepidly. I whispered to them: not yet and not yet. Their rapid blooming caught at my heartstrings. What a feat is vulnerability.

And this week, the temperatures dropped in tens: ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty degrees colder. Last week we baked, this week we are drawing our coats back from the closets where we had hoped they might remain until next fall. Gathering up our defenses. Spring spoke over a loudspeaker into the morning air: Remember: I am beautiful, but I am fickle. We should have known. She is capricious, but that is her nature.

I could not save the flowers with my warm whispers. They began to wither: the magnolia blooms trembled and folded. They drew their soft petals around themselves as cloaks and became small: is that not what you or I would have done?

As I walked to school, I observed the differences in the neighborhood. I eavesdropped on some dogwoods, who were speaking in stage whispers to one another: Hello, old friend. Oh yes, we will remain at our winter home until mid-April. Yes, yes, we thought we might return sooner... the sun seemed to be quite sure about its return to town... but there is no rush. See you back in a few.

Many of the blooms had tucked in, but the forsythia was rather plucky. I picked off a strand and twirled it between my fingers. My intention was to pluck its flowers and tuck them in my hair--reminiscent of my high school days in southern California. But the wind was particularly bullish, and I had a sense that the flowers would shrivel once they left their branch. So I simply held it, and kissed its fragile blossoms. It is nice to kiss a flower. Lips and petals were destined to meet.

We walked about a mile together. I was busy contemplating the meaning of love, the fickleness of the weather, the strange and restless tuggings at my heart these days. I wanted to keep the branch with me, but the wind was wrestling with its tender flowers. So, almost at my final destination, I placed it carefully on some soft grass underneath a sycamore tree. We parted ways. A bit of yellow for my colder day.

Today, rushing up the same hill, I found my forsythia branch exactly where I had left it, three days earlier. Nestled into the grass, safe from the busy street. The strong winds could not budge it. My penny.

There are lots of things to see, unwrapped gifts and free surprises. The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside from a generous hand. But—and this is the point—who gets excited by a mere penny? It is dire poverty indeed when a man is so malnourished and fatigued that he won’t stoop to pick up a penny. But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days. It is that simple. What you see is what you get (Dillard, 17).

The universe is constantly gifting us with pennies. They come in the form of flowers or birdsong, the smile of an unassuming child, a particularly lovely shaft of light coming through a window in the afternoon. And our only job is to be present.

O, that we might arrive, receive, and be gratious.

On Learning to See, Again

It's all very strange, isn't it? I walked into this office and set my things down upon the desk. I flipped a switch on the computer below me, and took a quick sip of my too-hot coffee, and turned my attention, immediately, greedily toward the monitor in front of me. The monitor is extra-large, perhaps 20" x 14". Every day, my routine is the same. I gaze into this beast with longing: to travel, to escape, to receive immediate feedback from a world of distant millions. I spend hours looking into this soulless machine that doesn't so much as blink an eye at me.

What about longing for the world that is just beyond these doors? What about seeking attention from only the bare, fragile trees, who are longing to be gazed upon with tenderness despite their broken state? Why do I search for answers in rooms which are not rooms, not really, but pages upon pages of the human language shackled up in type and the inhibited world of screen?

Once I walked into this building, and rode the elevator to the second floor. I do not usually take the elevator, but I took it one day late last fall. And as I stepped inside, another world greeted me. Right there, inside of the elevator! The walls were covered with white sheets. In one corner sat a little white wooden chair, and a small table with a little lamp and some flowers resting on top. Maybe I fell into a Norman Rockwell painting or the set of Our Town. Somehow, the elevator on the west end of Devlin Hall had transfigured into a small moving world of possibility. It was gone the next day, which only made me believe even more firmly that I must have stumbled into something much realer than a dream.

This morning, as I waited for that same elevator, I let me gaze fall upon a classroom to the right, nestled in the corner of the building. The sun made its entrance just as I did, settling, gently amidst the rows of tired looking desk and chair sets. For a brief moment, I wondered at the conversation I had stumbled upon. The groggy morning talk of desk to desk, cranky old grandmothers who had born the weight of disgruntled students for long years. The chalkboard stretching its long arms against the surface of the wall, yawning, coughing ivory dust. The windows, squinting furiously at the intruding sun: a mother waking her still-sleeping children, beckoning them to rise as the school bell rings just outside the walls of Devlin Hall.

There are worlds within our worlds. And all that we think we know falls open upon one more glance. When I look deeper, I see stories in chairs and elevator shafts and abandoned rooms. The floors we walk on whisper old tales to us, the earth groans with the weight of our bodies, yet serves us just the same. And we spend our moments sitting on and touching and looking at objects we assume are dead. Using them for utility rather than seeing them as beautiful, engaging beings. A chair is not a chair is not a chair. Same as an elevator shaft is not an elevator shaft.

When I turn away from the beast in front of me, I encounter meaning in the most ordinary things! A thousand possibilities in one cup, this closet, an imperfect apple, your two, lovely eyes.

something different.

To a Tree, in the Absence of Negative Space

Kristina Simes

February 7, 2012

The way 

the sun bows to the trees 

in the morning light

slays me.

Stops my heart, full force.

As though I had never known a human love:

whisper, touch,

(elbow, hand, cheek)

the wild, erratic murmur of

my own

restless

heart.

Maybe I need no lover but the sea—

that solitary black thing,

big enough to swallow me whole.

Perhaps the glance of a falling sunbeam

is heavier than the warmth of your hand.

And the oak trees that sing me home

in the afternoon, in the cold,

grasp and seize me—

they dazzle my path with the remains of their

scattered fragile wintered leaves.

Branches extending,

beckoning to me,

as the sun floods into the negative space

of their bare arms.

I do not know a love song that is true.

Or that has lasted for eternity.

But I know many trees through and through.

Trees last much longer than one hand in mine,

and constancy equals more than passion,

though I have only just come to this.

I dream of shoulders,

and the space they carve.

One shoulder, that I might dive into,

Nose, chin, all.

But I am content to settle for the reality of tree trunks,

vagabond sunbeams,

passing fleets of sparrows—

graceful and certain.

My love will have to come to me

not in shoulders but in wide open space.

Too big to be named,

too wild to be tamed,

too everlasting to be afraid of.

a bit of beauty for your day.

Am I Not Among The Early Risers - Mary Oliver

Am I not among the early risers
and the long-distance walkers?

Have I not stood, amazed, as I consider
the perfection of the morning star
above the peaks of the houses, and the crowns of the trees
blue in the first light?
Do I not see how the trees tremble, as though
sheets of water flowed over them
though it is only wind, that common thing,
free to everyone, and everything?

Have I not thought, for years, what it would be
worthy to do, and then gone off, barefoot and with a silver pail,
to gather blueberries,
thus coming, as I think, upon a right answer?

What will ambition do for me that the fox, appearing suddenly
at the top of the field,
her eyes sharp and confident as she stared into mine,
has not already done?

What countries, what visitations,
what pomp
would satisfy me as thoroughly as Blackwater Woods
on a sun-filled morning, or, equally, in the rain?

Here is an amazement–––once I was twenty years old and in
every motion of my body there was a delicious ease,
and in every motion of the green earth there was
a hint of  paradise,
and now I am sixty years old, and it is the same.

Above the modest house and the palace–––the same darkness.
Above the evil man and the just, the same stars.
Above the child who will recover and the child who will
not recover, the same energies roll forward,
from one tragedy to the next and from one foolishness to the next.

I bow down.

Have I not loved as though the beloved could vanish at any moment,
or become preoccupied, or whisper a name other that mine
in the stretched curvatures of lust, or over the dinner table?
Have I ever taken good fortune for granted?

Have I not, every spring, befriended the swarm that pours forth?
Have I not summoned the honey-man to come, to hurry,
to bring with him the white and comfortable hive?

And while I waited, have I not leaned close, to see everything?
Have I not been stung as I watched their milling and gleaming,
and stung hard?

Have I not been ready always at the iron door,
not knowing to what country it opens–––to death or to more life?

Have I ever said that the day was too hot or too cold
or the night too long and as black as oil anyway,
or the morning, washed blue and emptied entirely
of the second-rate, less than happiness

as I stepped down from the porch and set out along
the green paths of the world?