rapture

and redemption shoes

thoughts on love

After all, it would have ended anyway. I've never seen a sunset or felt a wind that didn't. The levitating saints came down at last, and their two feet bore real weight. No, the point is that not only does time fly and do we die, but that in these reckless conditions we live at all, and are vouchsafed, for the duration of certain, inexplicable moments, to know it. --Annie Dillard (who else?)

A day gone backwards. It ended here, at this sign:


Lab ended and I rushed for the bus, and earlier in that day a child at Sophie's school had said, "You have a really skinny neck. Sophie does, too." And I realized I love my neck. It is hard to say that about many parts of one's body, so herewith, photo-ode to my neck:



and for the lovely light, filtering through the windows of the girl's bathroom in Sutton Hall...



and for my friend, Melissa, who is a brilliant anthropologist and wonderful mother of three gorgeous girls and one fiercely-blonde son, who has made me laugh till my sides ache and speaks incredibly beautiful, fluent Castellano...


and the delicious mung dahl filled with love purchased at a sidewalk vendor on the way to try to find "the dress of desire" for the ballet on Friday...


and for the wild, secret path behind the castle that we walk each morning on the way to school, and the sculptress that once lived there, carving her passion into stone. Our lives (my life) is shockingly abundant and filled with love, and that I still long, that I still wish to levitate like the saints, how can I but love that longing also?

Tinker Creek of the mind

It may be Annie Dillard week for months, for ever. Last night awake at three and sifting through the pages of an old paper (someone had requested it as a submission of student work) and suddenly our lives are upturned like an apple cart --we had cake for breakfast and the dinner table is an incomprehensible pile of books and leaves of paper, precious linguistic notions, surprising sometimes, scarily profound, trailing off no where, meaning nothing in particular.

Because I was awake half the night I bumped my head twice and felt peculiarly oppressed by a woman at work who has been reminding me, almost every day, that we are not all watching the trees for movement, or gasping in sudden apprehension of a momentary, pinkish cloud-streaked sky. That is head-banging of the worst kind, and probably the type of experience that kept Rilke flitting along the edges of productive society like an etiolated moth.

After half an hour, the last of the stragglers had vanished into the trees. I stood with difficulty, bashed by the unexpectedness of this beauty, and my spread lungs roared. My eyes pricked from the effort of trying to trace a feathered dot’s passage through a weft of limbs. Could tiny birds be sifting through me right now, through the gaps between my cells, touching nothing, but quickening my cells, fleet? (Dillard, PaTC, p. 40)

the week in review

the nothingness between me and the light

Shading the glass with a hand, I can
see how shadow has pooled in the valley. It washes up the sandstone
cliffs on Tinker Mountain and obliterates them in a deluge: freshets of
shadow leak into the sky…The shadow’s the thing. Outside shadows are
blue, I read, because they are lighted by the blue sky and not the
yellow sun. Their blueness bespeaks infinitesimal particles scattered
down inestimable distance…They give the light distance; they put it in
its place. They inform my eyes of my location here, O Israel, here in
the world’s flawed sculpture, here in the flickering shade of
nothingness between me and the light. --Annie Dillard
Yes, it is Annie Dillard week. Each night before going to bed, I fall
in rhythm with her solitary explorations of Tinker Creek. Last night
she was collecting mantis eggs, reporting on the mating ritual, and the
memory of a tragic mutation of a Polyphemous moth at the hands of an
ignorant but perhaps well-meaning teacher.

Today a juvenile possum was out at midday on the balcony of Battle
Hall. Campus Safety officers were poised with long nets in what seemed
a futile attempt to capture the wary creature. People gathered, took
pictures. In class minutes later, we realized that the balcony in
question was actually the bathroom at the end of the hall, and various
students gathered to watch the pathetic drama from a better vantage
point. I returned to class intensely sad. The ripples of laughter and
jokes about how ugly possums are made me feel even more disconnected
from my so-called cohort (we were discussing cohort-component analysis
today). Many times I contrasted in my mind Dillard's silent, solitary
walks with the unhinged and un-self-conscious laugher of being almost thirty. I can never go back. Some part of me already resides in semi-retirement, among waving
prairie grasses, fussily watching over lupine seeds and the ceaseless
manufacturing of spider webs.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life,
and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came
to die, to discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what
was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice
resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and
suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like
as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave
close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms,
and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine
meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were
sublime, to know it by experience, and to be able to give a true
account of it in my next excursion.

Walden or Life in the Woods
- Henry David Thoreau (1817 – 1862

"the thing illuminated cannot be lighter than the illuminator"

The light is diffuse and hueless, like the light of paper inside a pewter bowl. The snow looks light and the sky dark, bu in fact the sky is lighter than the snow. Obviously the thing illuminated cannot be lighter than the illuminator...The dark is overhead and the light at my feet; I am walking upside-down in the sky
--Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Yesterday I went running with S., and we went farther than I am accustomed. During the night I awoke with aching muscles, drank a glass of wine and took some ibuprofen, then spent the next two hours plucking out a tune on the guitar. I can feel the tug of spring. It is music, and aching muscles, and sunburned skin--the delicious reminders of that delirious weight--of being earthly and mortal and poised for emergence into the next act of the drama.

This morning we did the grocery shopping then packed a small picnic to take down to the creek. It is still barren and grey, but this will change in a matter of weeks. I can already see the buds on the trees, tiny packages of new life waiting to burst open. It has changed so much in the twenty years since I first arrived here. There are more bicycles on the trails, and the old overgrown paths are now weary and denuded. It is seldom as quiet as it was years ago when you could sit perched on a rock and not see another soul for over an hour. This creek is the refuge for so many, and so much more fragile for that very reason.

I wonder what readers will think a generation from now, encountering Annie Dillard or Aldo Leopold, Edward Abbey or Wendell Berry. Will it all seem like a dream--this once wild and untameable nature?

trusting delilah

Anthonis van Dyck (1599-1641)


To carve an elephant from a rock, you simply carve away anything that does not look like an elephant…

She was there in front of the mirror with scissors, and had hoped to carve from among the wisps, a self she might recognize. Every day a snip here, a snip there. But with each lock falling away onto the cold bathroom floor, she grew less familiar, less recognizable.

Finally she made the appointment. She had two options (maybe three): acupuncture, a mammogram, a haircut. She chose the haircut.

She taps on the thick glass of the salon door early in the morning. The hairdresser is there, in the quasi-dark, dressed as if for a date, and she swishes across the floor to the door and when the door is opened, she enters the calm, fragrant world of the eternally feminine.

She explains to the hairdresser the situation, the endless days of snipping, of seeking. The hairdresser nods understandingly, more understanding than a therapist or a doctor.

“You understand,” she confides, “this is a last resort.”

The hairdresser seats her in a thick-cushioned chair from the early 1900s, and massages her tense shoulders. Her hands are so warm, so reassuring, that all the hours of the last two years fall away to the pine floor. Then the scissors flash, and the wisps fall. Some of them are gray, already betraying the New Year’s Day henna.

The whole procedure takes only a few minutes. Much too soon she must pay and walk back out into the bright morning light, the bitter winter air. But the hairdresser confides one last thing. “For me,” she says, “it is this…” and she lifts her skirt slightly to mid-calf to reveal a blazing purple iris. “I’m getting rid of it.”

Walking to work she doesn’t try to capture a fleeting reflection in the glass; she doesn’t rush to the bathroom to apply make-up or put on earrings; she just walks, noticing the levity, thankful that she has freed herself from the tyranny of the scissors. She is no longer who she thought she was an hour ago, a month ago, a year ago, and she doesn’t yet know who she might have become, but she might not, she thinks hopefully, she might not even care.