When land is under a heavy weight, whether due to glaciation or the presence of a large mountain, and that weight diminishes - the glacier recedes, the mountain erodes - the surface begins to rise as it is released from beneath that mass.
At some point, everything that could go wrong stopped going wrong.
At some point, the worst had already happened so many times over that there was no more worst left to happen. There were only ordinary catastrophes, the sort that, given context, are revealed to be inconveniences masked with borrowed significance. Stripped of their finery, they can be dealt with in an orderly fashion and forgotten entirely by week’s end.
When this happens, things do not merely settle as they are. After a year of being surprised by tragedy, one does not stop being surprised, but one’s eyes become opened instead to joy.
“Man found alive with two legs.” I and Innocent Smith delight to, borrowing Denise Levertov’s words, “take pleasure in what is seemly.”
Waking up to a day with manageable cares. The purrs of a contented cat. A bus right on time that was thought to have already passed the stop. The scolding of a jay. The many-voiced song of a mockingbird. A quiet word of encouragement. The morning light through the pines, laid across a field of ghostly dandelion globes dancing like drunkards who hear silent music out of Faerie. A silly text from one who is beloved. Laughter shared amid well-earned exhaustion. Lines of poetry to restore one’s soul.
Levertov again: “for though I felt nothing, no embrace: I have not plummeted.”
Instead, as the ice age’s cruelty draws back its frozen fingers, I surge forth in isostatic rebound, not content to settle as I was before but rising “like the earth’s empowering brew […] in root and branch.” It is the nature of all spring times that what was dormant now draws toward the sun.
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