Driving The Plague Before Us

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Last night was a dark mood, but I had the company of my wife. She soothed me as best she could and for that I am grateful. I am trying to learn compassion for my limitations, but I am a poor student.


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This morning was much improved. Getting up early helped. It was cool and dark at five thirty, and it's clear that the season is changing. What a gift. Big wheel turning. Little wheel within it. Smaller one. Bigger one outside that you can't see. Infinity of nested scales, all turning.

Halfway through the run the world opened its eyes and turned on the lights. Birdsong and the heavy rumble and rattle of the trucks on Santa Rosa Creek Road hauling rocks from the quarry. The coach opening up the gym at the high school, propping the side door open with a trash can.

The dog running wild with glee and fierce intention.

My labored breathing and the heat in me.


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Listen, all I want in life is to have everything that I want and nothing that I don't want.


Ha.


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This weekend Lineberger posted a link to John Donne's "for whom the bell tolls." In my nearly limitless ignorance of the world, I had not read it except for once in a high school english class. Here's a passage that nearly killed me:


"And when she buries a man, that action concerns me: all mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God's hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another. "



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"Some by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice: but God's hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another."



Well okay then.

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Just before I drifted off to sleep last night I had a brief epiphany about our place in the world, about the turning and meshing of the great gilded gears at the heart of the wheezy, whanging machine we are all a part of.

"Of course," I said to myself, picturing the exact way things worked to bring us each to our knees with our guts looped in our dirty hands and our eyes glowing with grief and happiness. Our hair wild or burned away.

"I get it. It all makes sense. It couldn't be any other way."


And I did get it. Something was given to me, as if God had opened the big book to a certain page and let me gaze until I had my fill.



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Peace like a river in my soul.


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Of course, I wanted to capture the knowledge. Write it down somewhere. But I was so sleepy.

Now its gone. Leaving only the taste of something fine.


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It is small, but I am thankful. Even imagined or imaginary grace is but grace.




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We are all entwined. Ensnared.


Embraced.



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The farmer, he was headed for the boneyard any minute, but he wasn't goin' around squawkin' about like some people...








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