spring

a play i finished reading today began this way:

"There's a certain slant of light,
Winter afternoons--
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes--


Heavenly Hurt, it gives us--
We can find no scar,
But internal difference,
Where the Meanings, are--


None may teach it-- Any--
'Tis the Seal Despair--
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the Air--


When it comes, the Landscape listens--
Shadows-- hold their breath--
When it goes 'tis like the Distance
On the look of Death--"
-Emily Dickinson, 258

I was thinking, walking home yesterday, about the remarkable alteration in my Lenten experience since i've been in New York. It occurred to me that perhaps the oppressive long dark of evenings in this northern latitude, and then the suddenness of the lightening of the late day, was something of a Lent and Easter happening to me.

Today is a spring day. I thought of it with my eyes closed riding the express train home, speeding miles underground, eyes closed. I could feel the smell of the almost-summer evening outside, composed words remarking on the joy it brings, remembering the scent of a long day coming to rest, the sitting on the porch steps with a bowl of ice cream, the spinning to cricket rhythms with eyes clenched shut, laughing.

These thoughts wave over a low and throbbing buzzing in my chest, my belly. A buzzing that wakes up on days when i am low. It wakes up and brings me low. Through it a voice says, "You're dying. You're going to die." And i practice here and here again, saying, "I am not dying. I am not going to die," which is of course a kind of lie. We are of course all dying. But i am not in this moment on the brink of being overtaken by death. ("I will die, but that is all i will do for death," Edna SVM wrote).

And there are those words i memorized once, "I AM the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though he dies. And the one who lives and believes in me will never die." What a terrible and comforting declaration. I do not begin to understand what it means, certainly not in English.

But there's the buzzing, that still follows me home, goes home with me, into the arms of someone who loves me and what a strange thing that is! But here's the buzzing, the thrumming still, like the train coming by now, and now, and now. The train i learn to ignore, the sound that is background and tells me things are well, that people are living out there, things are going.

The silence that surrounds me now when i sleep in other places, it seems to have no life in it. How strange, for this lover of silence, this child of forests. Although, you know, when i was a girl, it really was never silent. My childhood lived with the constant running burbling of two streams on either side our house. I noticed it when i went back, how constantly present was the sound of running ("living") water in that place.

I am tired of running to stand still. I am tired of standing still, of making it possible for others to Do, and making myself too tired to Do what i am made to.

Time it is to Do what i must. Time it is to Act.

This is how i fight the Death trying to take me over. This is how i resist the massacre.