She loves the wind.
There on the edge of the known world, at ninety,
In her tall house, any wildness in the elements
Is as welcome as an old friend.
When the surgically patched elms and sycamores
Crack off their heavy limbs in the freak snow storm
Of October, she rejoices; the massy hail
That drives craters into her groomed lawn
Stirs her sluggish heart to a riot of beating.
A cluster of cottonwood trees in the swale
Of the prairie, oasis now in a desert of wheat fields,
Is all that is left of the home place. No one
Is left to remember the days there with her:
The playhouse sheltered behind the cowshed,
The whirlwinds that made a column of corn shucks,
Winters when snow brushed out all the fences,
Springs when the white of the snow turned to daisies,
Wind-bent as were the urchins who picked them.
To her in her tall house in the tame town, the wind
That escapes the windbreaks of man’s constructing
Blows from a distance beyond the young’s conceiving,
Is rife with excitements of the world’s beginning
And its end.
‘The old one and the wind’
Clarice Short
One reason for making room for discomfort when I am undertaking a journey, is that it will inevitably come and make its presence felt sooner or later. True, discomfort and physical, mental or emotional pain can make me squirm and be inattentive. I can miss things, what someone says in an aside, for example, that might be the most important thing they have said in a week. I miss raising my head to see the needs of others or to look at at the reality of my surroundings. Instead, I curl in on myself further and eventually become entirely self-absorbed.
Being reminded to make room, to shake loose of my navel-gazing to feel the truth of what I feel in body, heart, mind and soul in that moment, is what this whole series is about. For in that moment of truth with myself I create enough of a gap between the what is and the wanting it to be different, that there might just be a pause into which Spirit can plunge and do Her transforming work (as She so longs to do).
In A writer’s Daybook, Ronald Blythe brought Bruce Cummings to my attention, a ‘brilliant young naturalist’ who died when he was in his late twenties in 1919, from disseminated sclerosis. Cummings wrote about his illness with such clarity. It made him want to ‘swallow landscapes and swill down sunsets, or grapple the whole earth to me with ropes of steel’. In his Journal of a Disappointed Man, when talking of London, he said, ‘I live in a bigger, dirtier city – ill-health’. It was because of this that he constantly plunged himself into a cleansing countryside:
It is fine to walk over the elastic earth with the wind bellowing into each ear and swirling all around in a mighty sea of air until I was as clean-blown and resonant as a sea-shell, and almost transparent. I moved along as easily as a disembodied spirit and felt free, almost transparent. The old earth seemed to have soaked me up into itself, I became dissolved into it, my separate body was melted away from, and Nature received me into her deepest communion – until, UNTIL, I got back to the lee side of the hedge where the calm brought me back to my gaol of clay. (7)
Cummings was able to experience the exhilaration of Unity precisely because he was able to fully admit the depth of discomfort of his ill body, imprisoned in his ‘gaol of clay’. What he felt in his body affected his psyche, his soul.
Illumination comes when I admit the darkness. Comfort comes when I admit the fear. Change comes when I admit the state of my stagnation. God-with-Us comes when I wait and walk, and wait and walk, toward the One-Who-Is-Coming: when I feel all my pain and discomfort, my uneasiness and my aches, and yet, still I decide to journey into the heart of God.
In our secret yearnings
we wait for your coming,
and in our grinding despair
we doubt that you will.
And in this privileged place
we are surrounded by witnesses who yearn more than do we
and by those who despair more deeply than do we.
Look upon your church and its pastors
in this season of hope
which runs so quickly to fatigue
and this season of yearning
which becomes so easily quarrelsome.
Give us the grace and the impatience
to wait for your coming to the bottom of our toes,
to the edge of our finger tips.
We do not want our several worlds to end.
Come in your power
and come in your weakness
in any case come and make all things new.
Amen.
Walter Brueggemann, Awed to Heaven, Rooted to Earth
- a note about the image: I saw this couple down by the southern shore of England last year. Their body language was what drew my attention, wrapped against the pelting raining wind on a decidedly unseasonal, inhospitable day. Now though, the discomfort implicit in the image is surrounded by (drowned out by?) the noisy discussions surrounding Jewish identity given Israel’s prolonged and violent response to the events of October 7th 2023, and the suffering of Palestinian, Israeli and Lebanese peoples alike. This image cannot but help be affected by (distorted by?) those discussions about Judaism, but I hope -trust- that a yarmulke will not be the only thing you see here.
braced. (iPhone image).
image into ikon 