Belmont, North Carolina 4.9.91: Sun Spots and Dogwood Berries

Steve successfully defended his dissertation yesterday. I’ve noticed since he has been away that, fittingly, one of Mr. Bickham’s rose cuttings on which we had given up has sprouted: new life out of the old.

As I sit on the back porch, the glass thingamabob that causes the wind chimes to work swings and catches the sun, throwing sun spots on the rail of the porch. For awhile, I couldn’t figure out where the light originated—my glasses? Now I know, as much as anyone knows about where the light comes from, because one source leads to another, and then . . . .

Down in the foliage of the sloping dell beneath the porch, a spot of sun pickes out one sole dogwood berry at the tip of a branch, a crimson jewel in a green setting, like some promise that the darkness contains fiery lights, hidden riches.

And I think about receptivity, the need to meet each person I meet as one capable of revealing hidden depths. I’m not good at this, and I become less so as I struggle with the panic that always wants to choke me, and drives me to frenzied work.

I believe so little in moralizing, anymore. What’s left? Grace, I reckon.

Belmont, North Carolina 22.8.91: Nacreous Skies and Calls to Listen

What’s closest to our heart is usually the most difficult thing to write about—not because of the inadequacy of language to express deep thought, but because we rarely even see what’s closest to us. Can I see my own nose, the expression of my own face? I don’t know what to write about, except here, now.

I sit on this back porch canopied by late summer green. Sun’s not exactly gilding the sky—more turning the pearl gray of cloud to nacreous. I sit. Hummingbirds come and go and won’t feed if I make the slightest move. Some lesson there . . . . Something about things coming not when we demand, but when we’ve achieved the right balance, equipoise, so that our own compulsions won’t unbalance and send spinning to futility the promise they bring.

But, Lord, what promise? I suppose unconsciously I ask the same old semester-beginning questions: how will I teach? How will I be myself, teach what I know in my inmost being, a being the church denies and denies me the right even to speak, and engage students?

I’m not sure there is an answer, other than patience, apprenticeship: in face of life’s biggest challenges (e.g, learning, teaching) one will always be the disciple. Obsculta, o filii . . . .

Belmont, North Carolina 22.7.91: Hummingbirds and Angels Unaware

I saw my first hummingbird today. When I got up, groggy and sleep drunk, it was at the feeder outside the kitchen window—surprisingly assiduous as it poked its beak into the slot and extracted sugar water. My glasses were so foggy, and I was watching from an angle for fear that if I turned my head I’d spook it, so that I couldn’t see the color well.

Once, it stopped feeding and approached the window head-on to look in, then returned to feed. Steve was standing to my right; he had been drawing a kettle of water when I saw the bird, and I stopped him. Finally something alerted the bird to our presence and away it flew.

Then I went onto the back porch and after awhile, when Steve went in to get orange juice, the bird returned. It whizzed in front of me looking tiny as a bee, then lit—or the closest to that birds come—and began to feed. Then I turned my head slightly, and the bird must have seen, because it stopped, turned to face me as if peering myopically down its long nose, and away it went. I saw it at least twice more flitting by—or maybe there were several—but it did not feed again. When it turned to face me at the feeder, I saw its throat, a beautiful ruby color.

Why am I so excited? For one thing, because I’m the last to see it. Both Steve and Mother saw the bird last week. And because Steve and I are going on vacation today, and somehow my sighting of the bird seems an auspicious omen. No. That’s fancying it up. What I mean to say is that the two seem connected. Both seem to point to the need for a vast (spiritual) sea-change inside me: a retrieval of my ability to see hummingbirds and angels unaware.

Belmont, North Carolina 12.10.93: Leaves and Falling Creation

Sitting now on a bright fall day on the back porch—except that the leaves are still mostly green, if tinged yellow and red, and so block the sun, making it cool down here.

I think of that marvelous passage in Walden in which Thoreau speaks of leaves. He notes the etymological link between “leaf,” lapsus, “lobe.” In creativity, in creation, all falls to something else. The body and its organs, as he notes, its lobes, are leaves—lapses—as the matter runs into what it must become to support this kind of life.

This links us so intimately to all created matter that it calls for utter compassion for all created things. Yet I thought this morning as I meditated how hard it is for me to have compassion for myself.

What I can forgive and understand in others, I cannot in myself—that so much of my tortured and defensive and self- and other-crucifying behavior is the suppressed cry of a much abused small child with alcoholic, immature, flawed parents. That I go through life sucking at its tit for love and feeling unsatisfied.

And I wonder, consequently, how much I truly love others, have compassion for them. Until we love and accept (and forgive) ourselves, can we love anyone else?

What made me think all this was looking at a dead and leafless branch of the redbud tree. How exactly like a skeletal arm and hand upraised it appears. How sad it makes me feel to see the tree die. As if a part of me is dying . . . .