My Life Was Better Before My Iphone
Before I checked my email in bed.
Before the ceaseless alerts of every Facebook message and like and friend request.
Before I played Scramble with Friends, the words reflecting in the glow of my glasses late into the night.
Before I knew the day's forecast cuddled in my sheets, no need to open the window to let in the day's mostly sunny partly cloudy qualities to see for myself.
Before group text ping ding donged from each room in my house.
Before GPS slashed time and distance and adventure indiscriminately.
Before relentless reachability.
Maybe not before Instagram.Loving Something Alive
Upon first read, Annie Dillard's Holy the Firm remained aloof, inaccessible, coy even.
The words, poetic and charged,--genius though I knew--clung flat to the page.
But--I also knew--he loved her. My teacher. This man who delights in words and parsings of words and sumptuous sentences loved this work.
On I read. On I hoped to see what he saw.
I didn't. Not quite right away.
We love because He first loved us (a different he, a different teacher, but really is he so different after all?). We know the care and genius of it all, but the words fall flat. Our lives fall flat. We fall face down dusty flat.
Until He reads us anew. The motifs, the symbols, the genius, the love and care placed in each pairing of eyes, of feet, of fingers enlivened in His careful, awestruck reading. Of our lives.
The Master Teacher, awestruck? With me? With us? With this little old book forgotten in a seat back pocket?
Yes. A billionish times yes.
We've only to show up for class.
T.S. Tuesday: The Sun Away
Don't think I forgot T.S. Tuesday. It's a little late, but finally here.
"Time and the bell have buried the day,
The black cloud carries the sun away.
Will the sunflower turn to us, will the clematis
Stray down, bend to us; tendril and spray
Clutch and cling?
Chill
Fingers of yew be curled
Down on us? After the kingfisher's wing
Has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still
At the still point of the turning world." From T.S. Eliot's Burnt Norton
The black cloud of night carries the sun away. Away from our ambling conversations, from the rusty red bricks of garden planters, from the flowers that clutch and cling. Cling and clutch. Clutched to the smooth cold, concrete, drawing light. Light draws us like a sunflower.
The sun away, it is only us. Us soaked in rays, in freckled remnants of radiant light, burned across our very skin.