You know the story of the little Dutch boy who held back the water all night from cracks in the dam and saved his town? I know this dam, the one I’ve depended upon. I’m running around, sticking my finger in one crack and then the next. This is old age, I take it. Where we live, of course, people are intensely aware of aging. People start needing a cane, then a walker, then they have a fall or something that precipitates a fast decline.
Shiver.
I got a letter from a dear old friend who lives in a retirement village in Ashville. Things have been pretty awful lately in Ashville, as you know. And his wife has Parkinson’s and beginning to have more mobility problems. He’s a minister and can no longer find a church that is meaningful to him. And, with the world’s poverty, he struggles with living in such an upscale retirement community. And just over the hill is the drumbeat of the Trump administration, amassing its forces. He’s not in a Christmas mood, he says.
“I realize that this is not a particularly joyful Christmas letter but that is where we are,” he writes. Good for him! He’s not forcing a holiday mood. Moods change, minute by minute. Situations change more slowly, but they do change. They are what they are. They’re to be honored, grappled with, and allowed to pass on. My sonnet-a-day (sort of) practice seems to do just that, honor a moment in time. I mean these as serious poems, not exercises in self-therapy, but they do release the mood, if I can get them to “work.” I assume they will eventually be a book. I’m allowed to think that, since I have a track record.
Meanwhile, I’m pleased that the cover of “Doctor of the World” has gotten such praise. I hope you’ll click below to order the book before January 24, to get the pre-publication discount. Oddly, the press bases the percentage of royalties on how many books are sold before that date. Not that I’m going to get rich, as any poet knows.
Meanwhile, in our own upscale retirement community, lights on the bushes are blazing, many trees are decorated inside, the choir has had its first concert, a men’s chorus has been here to sing, a cookie-party is scheduled, yesterday was a special holiday brunch, our exercise class teacher is wearing a Santa hat, and some of us have signed up to go to Interlochen to hear the Traverse City Philharmonic plus combined choruses. Christmas is a big deal here, but then, everything is a big deal! Any chance to celebrate!
Need I add, this is in the middle of a disastrous year for the country, in the middle of all this aging and death? Makes sense to me. Both are true at the same time. We’re alive: that’s first on the joyous list. Our senses are alive. We have people we love. Even in the worst of circumstances, few of us would wish to be dead.
I’m so fortunate, so grateful. I can still write, I am relatively healthy. Those I especially love are all alive, most are healthy.
Charles Lamb
I think of the English writer Charles Lamb (17715-1834). Most of his siblings died at infancy (remember this when we talk about health care) , who lay ill in bed for a long time from smallpox (remember vaccines), who was placed in a brutal boarding school, who stuttered, who fell in love twice, with women who finally married someone else, who spent six weeks in a mental hospital, and whose sister was in and out of mental institutions and one day in a manic fit stabbed their mother in the heart. On his deathbed, he was reported to have said, “I have had a wonderful life.”
What he had was a life. Any life is a miracle, a flowering of the cosmos, you might say.
My minister friend, the one in Ashville, said they have finally come to realize that they aren’t Episcopalians. They tried a Unitarian Congregation, but found that “too funky.” I notice that in the need to express the inexpressible, many, many people are floundering, not being able to find the right way or place to do that. Abandoning the three-tiered universe with God up there in [his] heaven, acknowledging the interdependence of all things, has made it hard to find a single location, a church, an icon, a story, to rest upon. There are so many stories.
A poem can provide a location, but few people are trained to read well enough to make use of it. Not all poems, of course, but when one poem “takes the top of our head off,” as Emily Dickinson said, there we are, deliciously unmoored, absorbed into mystery.
The P.S.
Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, my former student at the Rainier Writing Workshop in Tacoma, WA, just won the National Book Award for Poetry! I wasn’t one of her three mentors, but she was in several of my workshops. Her book is called Something About Living. You can order it via this link.