A quick lunchtime walk the other day found me on the Mount Vernon trail. The little connector path took me past banks of honeysuckle and edgings of little geranium-looking flowers.
I kept shifting my gaze from the close to the faraway. In the background, the Washington Monument rose behind National Airport’s runways. In the foreground, all the bluster and bother of modern transportation: trains, buses, cars and jets.
Movement all around but striving for stillness within.
This morning I heard a minute of The Writer’s Almanac as I turned into the parking garage at Vienna Metro. It’s the birthday of Soren Kierkegaard, said Garrison Keillor in his mellifluous voice. Kierkegaard, the philosopher who gave us the leap of faith — “that faith is not possible without doubt. That one must doubt the existence of God to have faith in the existence of God.”
Thinking of the basement study room in my freshman dorm where I wrestled with Kierkegaard and (I think it’s safe to say) Kierkegaard won. Realizing then that philosophy was not just admiring big ideas, it was grappling with them, plumbing them, going deeper and deeper into their caverns until I wasn’t sure I could claw my way out.
But those same ideas are how we live our lives. The leap of faith, for instance. How difficult to summon it — yet how utterly imperative.
I spent some quality time with the climbing rose on Saturday. Well, it wasn’t quality time at first, but after a while we came to know each other better.
I was trying to train it, you see, to make its long sinewy branches go up rather than down, left rather than right. I was trying to create a rosy bower using the pergola that Tom and Appolinaire built a couple weeks ago.
At first I just stood there, stumped by the enormous tangle. The rose needs to grow up and out, but without something to anchor it, the poor thing had been an unruly mess. It didn’t like being pushed too hard, though. Quick movements guaranteed puncture wounds.
But in time I got into the zen of the task, moving slowly to avoid snags, taking off the gloves (which were just getting caught up on the thorns) and following each ascender to its descender — puzzling out the plant’s internal order before fastening branches to wood with twisty green wire.
It’s still a work in progress, this splendid, gangly plant — but at least it’s in training.
When I returned with the great haul from Chincoteague I soaked the shells for a week. The bucket was so heavy I could barely pick it up. But over the weekend I mustered the muscle and shook out each whelk, rinsed residual sand from its core, and put it on the glass-topped table on the deck.
And there they sit, rain doused rather than surf doused, collecting tree pollen and stray sticks. The damp weather clouding the glass, giving the shells a soft-edged frame.
Though I took no care in their arranging, they easily fell into a tableaux. A companionable collection. A still life with shells.
Lines from a book I just finished, A Slant of Light, by Jeffrey Lent. It was better than most at charting the ripples and eddies of a mind on a walk:
And he paused then and let his mind drift off a bit, as if overhead, riding the thermals of a hawk, or better, the air as a crow flies. And saw then his route, not along the road, but among the fields and farm lanes, the wooded ravines and gulleys that stitched together than land as a rumpled quilt, and continued walking until he came to the next to the last home on the rise of land.
It was a book filled with long sentences that didn’t ramble but were well-tuned to the ramble, to the sight collage one experiences while moving through space and time.
It was a book that plumbed daily routines to tackle large topics. And one of the most elemental of these routines, of course, is walking — the thoughts and images to which it gives rise, the poetry it inspires.
Ours starts out with rain, and not even warm rain. A cool 50-degree soaking that I hope hasn’t shocked the ferns, which I moved up from the basement yesterday.
It is, however, a green and portentous day, the beginning of a new month, a lovely, flower-filled one.
In the distance a cardinal sings. I can imagine it puffed up against the chill, delighting in the moisture as birds do.
The rain is making the companionable sound it does when it flows down the gutters and into the grass The yard is seeded and needs to be weeded. The rose is (mostly) trained. There are scads of to-dos on my list. But on this quiet Sunday morning, I sip my tea, make a list — and turn to words.
A new job, a new routine, a new commute. After a couple of long, miserable slogs on Metro, I tried a bus that whisks me from a parking lot in Reston to a stop five minutes from my new office. It will be a godsend — if I can figure out the parking.
Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned about D.C. traffic and commuting, it’s that every shortcut has already been found, every new route tried. It hasn’t been designated the second worst traffic city in the nation (bested only by L.A., I believe) for nothing!
But so far I can say this: the bus is a fundamentally different way to travel. It moves you through space above ground, for one thing. I see the white stones of Arlington in military precision. I see the Washington monument looming in the distance when we stop at the Pentagon.
Connections are clearer, the way road leads to road. It’s a good way to begin a new chapter, seeing more clearly, perched high above the fray. Not road warrior but bus warrior.
Brackish waters belong to both the sea and the land, and Chincoteague is surrounded by them, by estuaries and lagoons. In fact (I read on Wikipedia, just checking my terms), the Chesapeake Bay, which surrounds these tidal lowlands, is the largest estuary in the U.S. It’s “the drowned river valley of the Susquehanna” — something I never knew but will remember, due to its poetic turn of phrase.
But the word and concept of “brackish” sets the mind to spinning. How often do we run into situations that are a little of this and a little of that; that would be, if transferred into salinity equations, brackish?
Most of the time, I’d say. And that makes the brackish beautiful, which it most certainly is. So even though one is tempted to turn up one’s nose at brackish water, to think of it as sluggish and unhealthy, I warmed to it at Chincoteague: the mud flats, the marshy reeds, the waters shining in the late-day sun.
A walk early this morning, a walk from night into day. The road inky black beneath my feet to start, I rely on memory for the dips and bumps to step around along the way.
No music this morning. I wanted to hear the birds wake up — and I did.
But what I hadn’t reckoned on was catching the first crickets of the season. A chorus of them at Harvest Glen Court. They were chirping their little hearts out, glad to be alive on this muggy morning.
I listened to them, thrilled to them, took note.
Ten days after my last day at Georgetown Law came my first day at Winrock International. A welcome sign, a tour, a lunch and a meet-and-greet all made me feel at home. As did lots of friendly people.
Now I just have to remember the new names, learn a new line of work and adjust to a new routine.
Ah, change! Can’t live with it; can’t live without it.
But of course we all live with it. Every day we grow a little older, a little bit different than we were yesterday. Those of us with children need no reminder that life moves on. But no one can avoid the truth entirely.
A change in routine merely makes more obvious what is true all the time.