These times are no more or less extraordinary than others.
I have been reading Annie Dillard’s ought-to-be-a-classic book For the Time Being very slowly. It’s a book that warrants the rereading of pages. There’s this one passage I’m totally stuck on. I’ve been reading it to everyone–in workshops, over the telephone. The passage calls me again and again. Here it is:
There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and so it has always been: a people busy and powerful, knowledgeable, ambivalent, important, fearful, and self-aware; a people who scheme, promote, deceive, and conquer; who pray for their loved ones, and long to flee misery and skip death. It is a weakening and discoloring idea, that rustic people knew God personally once upon a time–or even knew selflessness or courage or literature–but that it is too late for us. In fact, the absolute is available to everyone in every age. There was never a more holy age than ours, and never a less.
There is no less holiness at this time–as you are reading this–than there was the day the Red Sea parted….In any instant the sacred may wipe you with its finger. In any instant the bush may flare, your feet may rise, or you may see a bunch of souls in a tree. In any instant you may avail yourself of the power to love your enemies; to accept failure, slander, or the grief of loss; or to endure torture.
I hadn’t even realized, until I read this, how fully I was vacillating between two ideas:
- That the most sacred time had passed, that I have been living in a shadow, a copy of a copy and alternately,
- That the past was some kind of distant scene-setting prologue, and this, our time, is the real show.
Neither is true. I am no more important than the people whose names I’ll never learn, and no less important than the people whose lives I studied in school. My actions have no more or less consequence than the actions of anyone else in the long, connected tradition of people doing their best to make their world a little better, a tradition in which I hope to tie a small link with my hands. What a simple thing to learn so far along in my life, and what an absolute relief. There were hands before mine and there will be hands after, it is okay.
Thursday afternoon, I was so fortunate to be in conversation with the poet Jon Sands, in his series “Ps and Qs” on Instagram live. Every Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, Sands invites a poet to join him in a conversation about poetry. He’s such a gracious and enthusiastic interviewer, and he chooses most of the poems his guest poets read from their own work. But guests get to read *one* poem by another author. With much difficulty, I chose this one by Aracelis Girmay.
Elegy
What to do with this knowledge that our living is not guaranteed?
Perhaps one day you touch the young branch
of something beautiful. & it grows & grows
despite your birthdays & the death certificate,
& it one day shades the heads of something beautiful
or makes itself useful to the nest. Walk out
of your house, then, believing in this.
Nothing else matters.
All above us is the touching
of strangers & parrots,
some of them human,
some of them not human.
Listen to me. I am telling you
from Kingdom Animalia
a true thing. This is the only kingdom.
The kingdom of touching;
the touches of the disappearing, things.
It has been a really overwhelming week and this idea has been comforting, has helped me turn again and again to the uphill battles in my work and has eased my heart as I do it, has given me permission to celebrate work well done, and has allowed me to succumb to my small griefs when needed. Maybe it will do the same for you.
I hope so.
