Walking in Darkness

Walking in Darkness

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I walked this morning before the sun rose. It was cold, and the flashlight in my hand was heavy enough to double as a weight. The moon was bright but waning. I heard an owl in the woods.

To walk in darkness diminishes landscape but broadens possibility. I could be a walker in the city or the country instead of the suburbs. I could be almost anywhere.

But because the traveler takes herself wherever she goes (Montaigne?), I was most of all in my own thoughts. I was pondering the freedom of darkness, how not knowing what lies ahead can liberate us from the here and now.

A Seed to Water

A Seed to Water

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Our parish Lenten mission has me thinking about hope. Not the dusty old hope I remember from parochial school. This is a green ribbon, a shoot, a new leaf. It is born of letting go, and it is fed by reading, prayer and quiet meditation. It is not the answer to everything, but already it has loosened the shoulders, smoothed the brow. It is a seed. I plan to water it.

The Willow

The Willow

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Every year at this time I think about the order of spring colors. The yellows come first — forsythia and daffodil — followed by the pink of the flowering cherries and the blooming oaks. If we’re lucky and it doesn’t warm up too quickly, spring in these mid-Atlantic climes will last six to eight weeks. The light hues will give way to vivid purple and fuschia from the tulips and azaleas. Spring is a three-act play of color. And one of its opening scenes is the willow tree. It is the billowy curtain that sways in the March sun. Push it aside, hear the hum of summer in its bended branch.

A Pond

A Pond

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In a passage about landscape and writing in her book American Bloomsbury, Susan Cheever describes Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts. It was one of many ponds in that area created by the uneven melting of glacial ice centuries ago, she writes. It was surrounded by thick forests, and went from being a few feet deep at the shore line to 100 feet deep in the middle. It was beside this pond that Henry David Thoreau built his tiny house.

Thoreau was 28 years old. His brother had died, and the woman he loved had married another. He had also lost the prospect of both a teaching and a writing career. ” Now his work could begin,” writes Cheever.

“I went to the woods to live deliberately, so that I might front the essential facts of things, and might not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived,” Thoreau wrote.

More than 150 years later, we still count those lines as among the finest written by an American author. “Although no one in Concord … would realize it for decades,” Cheever wrote. “The shimmering surface of the kettle pond named Walden would be the mirror of Thoreau’s genius for generations to come.”

Closed Wounds

Closed Wounds

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Spring may be here, the trees may be budding, but branches are still gaping open-mouthed from their winter wounds. Split, shorn and lightened by a snow storm that happened almost two months ago now, the trees are ready for new life. Ready for their camouflage of green. In a few weeks the damage will be obscured. But I will remember the broken places. I will feel tenderly toward those trees.

Shoulders Back

Shoulders Back

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The correction came when I walked into exercise class Thursday, and the instructor, the jolly British Maureen, said she noticed my posture as I walked toward the gym. “You’re leaning forward, ” she said. Of course I am, I think to myself. This is how I barrel through life.

“Pull your shoulders back, tilt your hips forward,” Maureen said. “Walk as if you have a pillow on your head.” So yesterday, as I did my three miles, I righted my shoulders, felt a plumb line stretch from my head to the sky. My chest filled with air. I felt taller and a little uneasy, as if I was on stilts. As if I was pretending.

The Driving Lesson

The Driving Lesson

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I bite my lip. I still my heart. I fight the urge to press the ball of my right foot firmly onto the floor mat, my phantom brake. But my hands, they are not easy to hide. They flutter. They grasp. They reach for the side of the car.

Try as hard as I might, I will never be a calm driving instructor. When we’re skimming along one of our area’s “picturesque” two-lane roads — the ones that look so lovely on a sweet summer morning but are so terrifying for the novice driver with their twists and turns and nonexistent shoulders — I imagine the worst.

I’ve done this twice before now; I should be calmer. But this is one skill that doesn’t improve with age. And so, my hands remain. I clasp them in my lap. I dig them into the seat cushions. I try not to grab the side of the car; that looks desperate.

Instead, I practice my yogic breathing. I keep my eyes straight ahead and my voice as calm as can be: “That’s good. Now straighten out. Check your mirrors. Lower your speed. Great. You’re doing great.”

I wish I could say the same about myself.

Green

Green

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The pale yellow-green of the witch hazel flower. The dark waxy green of the magnolia leaf. The slight green cast of the March lawn as it stirs to life — these are the greens I see here today.

But in my mind are other greens: the Cliffs of Moher, their ancient, mossy backs emerging from the fog on the west coast of Ireland. The furze that carpets the barren ground. The fields emerald in the sunlight. The many greens of the old sod. It is a day when sentimentality is allowed, singing is encouraged — and green is celebrated.

Great Gate

Great Gate

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When I work at home I walk in the suburbs; when I work downtown I walk in the city. Or, if I’m too busy for that (usually the case), I dash from one building on campus to the other. Even a few minutes away from my desk lightens my mood.

Take yesterday, for example. It was about 10 when I went for my mid-morning stroll to the cafe for a cup of tea and heard piano music coming from the small chapel in the middle of the ground floor. It was the “Great Gate of Kiev” from “Pictures at an Exhibition” by Modest Mussorgsky. A noble, stately and expansive piece. A bit grand for a coffee break, but I wasn’t complaining. I slowed my pace, I listened as long as I could. I was all tingly from the swell of sound.

The Great Gate of Kiev Mussorgsky celebrated wasn’t ever a real gate, but the artist Victor Hartmann’s design for it (pictured in the copyrighted image above; pardon the “watermark”). The gate was never built. It is the art and the music that remain.

Japan

Japan

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Yesterday: a walk at lunchtime. A still morning with just enough warmth in the air that I only wear a sweatshirt — but just enough chill in the air that I wish I had worn more. In my ears, Vivaldi, “The Four Seasons.” In my head: thoughts of the tragedy in Japan, “thoughts that lie too deep for words.” The multiple catastrophes, the layered ironies — they are almost too much to comprehend.

Some offers of help have come with a statement saying that this is not Japan’s disaster alone; that it belongs to the world community, that we will all help however we can. With the worsening news of nuclear explosions and meltdowns the disaster may yet belong to all of us. But it belongs first of all to the Japanese people, and what I find most heartbreaking is their stoicism and dignity. To say that we pray for them is a given. Would it help to say we can’t stop thinking about them, that those of us on safe, dry ground (if there is such a thing) are crying for them?