Monday, December 12 “Stories of beauty, fatigue, and doubt”
No post last Friday, I was hanging out with my sister Midge in Carson City, NV, including time along the north eastern shore of Lake Tahoe. Wiki tells me: “Lake Tahoe (/ˈtɑːhoʊ/) is a large freshwater lake in the Sierra Nevada of the United States. At a surface elevation of 6,225 ft (1,897 m), it straddles the border between California and Nevada, west of Carson City. Lake Tahoe is the largest alpine lake in North America.[3] Its depth is 1,645 ft (501 m), making it the second deepest in the United States after Crater Lake (1,945 ft (593 m)).[1]Additionally, Lake Tahoe is the sixth largest lake by volume in the United States at 122,160,280 acre·ft (150,682,490 dam3), behind the five Great Lakes.”
Our first notable snow storm welcomed me back to Motown last evening and gave the university a lovely 10:00 am start, time to plow parking lots. The snow reminded me of Jane Kenyon’s taut, crisp poem about the coming of winter as people around here re-learn winter skills for driving and walking and for tasting the beauty of gradually dimming light. The further north you live, the steeper the decline of light as the sun’s angle casts longer shadows over shorter patches of daylight. What we call Winter around here is as much about the thinning of the light as it is about ice and cold. As I walk around campus running M&I errands these days of December, I hear stories of courage and kindness along with fatigue and doubt. Perhaps that’s why the Christian Advent poetry brings captivity and fear close to hope and promise. Several Swedish friends who live a little further north than I do, have designed their homes with small pools of bright light within dim spaces. Learning from them, I try some of the same where I live. Maybe the jagged self-doubt today’s poet finds while watching the last frozen apple fall into an early snow bank is part of what helps us recognize some necessary balance:
if no doubt, no new discovery;
if no fatigue, no joy,
if no discouragement, no place where soul friends can love us.
Thomas Merton wrote once, perhaps in the teeth of our doubts:
“There is no way of telling strangers they are all walking around shining like the sun.”
Have a blest Monday,
john sj
Today’s Post: Jane Kenyon: “Apple Dropping Into Deep Early Snow”
Posted by Phyllis Cole-Dai on Nov 24, 2014 12:00 am
A jay settled on a branch, making it sway.
The one shrivelled fruit that remained
gave way to the deepening drift below.
I happened to see it the moment it fell.
Dusk is eager and comes early. A car
creeps over the hill. Still in the dark I try
to tell if I am numbered with the damned,
who cry, outraged, Lord, when did we see you?
“Apple Dropping Into Deep Early Snow” by Jane Kenyon, from American Poetry Review (online edition, March/April 1985).
Art credit: “Apple in the Snow,” photograph by Roger Lynn.
