Good Medicine

I've felt a bit tired and run down lately, between a couple of long work weeks, a lack of exercise, and then some fun, but exhausting weekends. At some point, I was starting to feel the first dire warning signs of illness, so I got myself a bag of lemons with the intention of dosing myself heavily with hot lemon juice, fresh ginger, and raw honey (actually, if we're going to be precise, Katrina got the lemons, because she's an amazing sister and was stopping by the grocery store, but details, details). I never actually got around to it, and the lemons just sat in the fruit bowl for a while. Meanwhile, I did in fact come down with a cold, from which I've mostly recovered. If only lemon juice in theory worked as well as lemon juice in fact.

I was thinking about this for a while as I attempted to pithily caption a picture I took of the lemons and was posting it on Instagram (yes, I admit this). For the past many months since I've graduated, I've tried out a few different possible futures--in theory. There have been job applications, an interview or two, a few ideas tossed around because maybe the problem is just that I haven't thought of the right thing yet. But, all the same, here I am six months later, for some good reasons and some not so good reasons, still doing almost exactly what I was doing in May. 

There are times when it is right and good to be still. When we not only can, but should pause to be at peace with ourselves or to be receptive to what is around us. Inaction is not identical with passivity or apathy, and rest is as essential to the end as work. 

It is equally true, however, that when we confine our action to our heads, to the hypotheticals and to dreaming, without ever putting feet to our desires, we sicken. Challenges, life's lemons, may be bitter medicine when they come. But that which is unpalatable is not always therefore harmful. So too, that which is difficult is also an invitation to heal or to strengthen or to grow. If you're feeling stagnant, one of the first questions to ask yourself is: when is the last time you did something for the first time?

I have tried to take this idea to heart with some recent changes that I've been making in my own life. No, I don't have a flashy job to offer as proof that I've made it to adulthood. But I'm identifying what my interests are now that they're not dictated by the courses on offer for a given semester, and I'm trying new things. I love language, so I'm teaching myself Latin and trying to brush up on my German at the same time. I'm learning how to bind hardcover books. Thanks in large part to my siblings and the perfect birthday gift, I'm taking up calligraphy, both on my own time and through a workshop on medieval Irish uncial hand. I have a new job beginning in December that I intend to be the first half of a move into Philadelphia. And finally, I adopted a cat, who in two days has already given me a sobering sense of responsibility and the need for selflessness (she's also pretty cute when she chases lasers and sleeps on me). 

As fun as all of these things are, they require work. Even keeping up this blog, such as it is, requires me to put forth some effort. But the challenges we choose to accept (because, yes, we do often have to choose our challenges) are also rewarding and invigorating. I don't want to feel dead: I want to know that I'm alive, even when being alive means that I'm squirming over how incredibly awkward I feel in a social setting--one that I put myself in because I'm sick of sitting back and anxiously watching my opportunities disappear into the past. The point isn't even to accomplish something amazing, although that would be awesome. It's the challenge itself and embracing it, whatever the result, that we can focus on and build on for the future.

So, for all my friends who are at a point of uncertainty in their lives--because I think you face these moments of decision at all times of life and not just when you're graduating--don't get stuck in the trap of thinking about what could be and letting that be enough. We have an incredibly abstract culture, from the movies we entertain ourselves with to the technologies that we use, and that can make it easy to cheat our way out of the test of real life. At some point, you have to move past your "lemon juice in theory" and drink your "lemon juice in fact" or you won't move at all. And that wouldn't be much a story to tell now would it?

The Gift of Gravity by Wendell Berry

All that passes descends,

and ascends again unseen

into the light: the river

coming down from sky

to hills, from hills to sea,

and carving as it moves,

to rise invisible,

gathered to light, to return

again. "The river's injury

is its shape." I've learned no more.

We are what we are given

and what is taken away;

blessed be the name

of the giver and taker.

For everything that comes

is a gift, the meaning always

carried out of sight

to renew our whereabouts,

always a starting place.

And every gift is perfect

in its beginning, for it

is "from above, and cometh down

from the Father of lights."

Gravity is grace.

All that has come to us

has come as the river comes,

given in passing away.

And if our wickedness

destroys the watershed,

dissolves the beautiful field,

then I must grieve and learn

that I possess by loss

the earth I live upon

and stand in and am. The dark

and then the light will have it.

I am newborn of pain

to love the new-shaped shore

where young cottonwoods

take hold and thrive in the wound,

kingfishers already nesting

in a hole in the sheared bank.

"What is left is what is"--

have learned no more. The shore

turns green under the songs

of the fires of the world's end,

and what is there to do?

Imagine what exists

so that it may shine

in thought light and day light,

lifted up in the mind.

The dark returns to light 

in the kingfisher's blue and white

richly laid together.

He falls into flight

from the broken ground,

with strident outcry gathers

air under his wings.

In work of love, the body

forgets its weight. And once

again with love and singing

in mind, I come to what

must come to me, carried

as a dancer by a song.

This grace is gravity.

Self-Talk

For the moments when you want to scream and tear your hair out in frustration:

Remember.

From three years, five years, ten years

"Down the road," as they say,

Or downstream, even better.

Remember this moment

As it will be when

The hot flush has long cooled,

The tears have evaporated

Behind a veil of laughter and other griefs.

Perhaps the memory will give you

A little consolation and

A little perspective.

A little and yet enough to get by.

In a Subjunctive Mood

A morning spent enthralled by

The bobbing dance of a rose thrust

On its stem toward the sky blue;

An afternoon lulled to watchful stillness by

The birdsong of a hundred unseen friends hid

High in the crowns of the trees;

A night caught breathless and trembling by

The span of the starry sphere laid

Out like a map inked with fire.

And you come,

Foreign traveler, alien and stranger,

Invader in this, my other place,

With hands full of beauty

And fingers spread wide. It is

A generosity unspecific, and yet,

I take it to myself and cherish:

In the songless, flowerless winter,

Your light would keep me warm.

So Sorry; After the Fall

Ich und du; aber
Du bist "ich" und
Ich bin "du."
She who comes from nothing
And likewise dissolves
Into naught, distributed
Unequally (like a comet trail in space).
Or:
Not even such dignity as that,
For:
If thou exist not for I,
Then thou never wert at all.

"we are for each other." The riddle at the heart of being is the autonomous man and the situated self: I am as I am, but I am for you also, in that I exist for you in a particular way, composed by you in your mind and bound up in a concept. It is, shall we say, your particular nominal essence of me. cummings wrote of love, or at least of feeling, and perhaps did not mean any such philosophical observation. Even so, the observation holds.

What happens when you are for me, but I am not for you? Then only one of us exists, and the other remains bound. There can be no mutually life-giving relationship between a person and an inanimate object. It is the slow starvation of a soul, through refusal to acknowledge its independently valuable existence. The two part ways, and that, itself, is a death in the ending.