Thoughts and prayers
I’ve just begun Paulo Coelho’s Pilgrimage, the non-fiction tale of Coelho’s spiritual journey. Much of the journey is quite literal - a walking path taken across Spain when Coelho was 30. So far I can hardly put it down.
Monumental current events have a way of worming their way into much that I read, so it isn’t much wonder that Katrina came to mind as I read the following passage:
Everything in our surroundings [along his path in Spain] reflected an uneasy peace, the peace of a world that was still in the process of growing and being created - a world that seemed to know that, in order to grow, it had to continue moving along, always moving along. Great earthquakes and killer storms might make nature seem cruel, but I could see that these were just the vicissitudes of being on the road. Nature itself journeyed, seeking illumination. (36)
Do you think this could be true?…a way, maybe, of depersonalizing the devastation that nature inflicts on itself? Or, rather, personalizing it in a different way than we often do? Rather than nature being cruel, maybe nature is traveling its own path, doing its best, like many of us are, to balance and counterbalance its own self out. When too much pressure builds up here, an earthquake or volcano gets released. When too much moisture or heat builds up there, a huricane spins and dumps the access where it wasn’t before.
I don’t know. A journeying nature is somehow easier for me to respect and relate with, easier for me to swallow than one that’s malevolent or randomly unfair. It doesn’t diminish the suffering so many bear because of that journey, but it puts the suffering, for me, into a different light. It also begs we ask the tough questions of why, when nature does its thing, the poor are so often those that suffer most. That’s a different set of questions than the ones around why nature is so mean.
I’ve also been reading Mary Oliver this week. Two of her poems have been echoing again and again in my mind as prayers…prayers in response, again, to Katrina. Prayers for hope that light follows darkness.
The Lily
Night after night
darkness
enters the face
of the lily
which, lightly,
closes its five walls
around itself,
and its purse
of honey,
and its fragrance,
and is content
to stand there
in the garden,
not quite sleeping,
and, maybe,
saying in lily language
some small words
we can’t hear
even when there is no wind
anywhere,
its lips
are so secret,
its tongue
is so hidden–
or, maybe,
it says nothing at all
but just stands there
with the patience
of vegetables
and saints
until the whole earth has turned around
and the silver moon
becomes the golden sun–
as the lily absolutely knew it would,
which is itself, isn’t it,
the perfect prayer?
At Black River
All day
its dark, slick bronze soaks
in a mossy place,
its teeth,
a multitude
set
for the comedy
that never comes–
its tail
knobbed and shiny,
and with a heavyweight’s punch
packed around the bone.
In beautiful Florida [or the Gulf region…]
he is king
of his own part
of the black river,
and from his nap
he will wake […or she, Katrina]
into the warm darkness
to boom, and thrust forward,
paralyzing
the swift, thin-waisted fish,
or the bird
in its frilled, white gown,
that has dipped down
from the heaven of leaves
one last time
to drink.
Don’t think
I’m not afraid.
There is such an unleashing
of horror.
Then I remember:
death comes before
the rolling away
of the stone.