March 26 2018 – “a mutual commitment to noticing”
Over 4 decades of kinship, Connie de Biase and I partnered in a mutual commitment to noticing. Now that she’s left us, I miss her most on Saturday mornings when driving into center city to buy community bread. While I drove home, we talked about the condition of our inner lives. Through Connie’s last year, our talk was more brave and sad as she recognized her growing diminishment, her grief at losing the life in Madison that she loved and lived so gracefully. Ignatius calls such talk paying attention to “inner disturbances,” both consolations and desolations. Noticing.
originally posted January 23, 2017 (c, 2 weeks before she died)
Perhaps this Denise Levertov poem came to mind because I flew into JFK Saturday, braved Long Island’s expressways with their too tight turns matched by slightly-too-narrow lanes, to spend time with my dying soul friend, Sr. Consuela de Biase, csj. Connie has become frail, like the ancient poet in today’s poem. She misses nothing, I realized, but you have to lean in close to hear; worn with fatigue, she whispers, and pauses to breathe. We visited three times (c. 90 minutes, 25 minutes, and 4 or 5 when we said goodbye before I headed back to JFK early Sunday). I love it that the 40 mile drive on the parkway was wearing; it reminds me that those miles and our 3 conversations are of a piece with decades of mutual listening, the fabric of Connie’s life.
Monday of Holy Week, 2018
In today’s poem Denise Levertov writes of an ancient poet whose frail strengths remind me of my friend. This Monday of Holy Week, so fresh with sun and crisp winds might tempt you to open your window or step outside so you can read “In Love” while bathed in beauty, and breathing a little too.
Have a blest Holy Week.
johns sj
Today’s Post “In Love”
Over gin and tonic (an unusual treat) the ancient poet
haltingly —not because mind and memory
falter, but because language, now,
weary from so many years
of intense partnership,
comes stiffly to her summons,
with unsure footing —
recounts, for the first time in my hearing, each step
of that graceful sarabande, her husband’s
last days, last minutes, fifteen years ago.
She files her belongings freestyle, jumbled
in plastic bags — poems, old letters, ribbons,
old socks, an empty picture frame;
but keeps her fifty years of marriage wrapped, flawless,
in something we sense and almost see —
diaphanous as those saris one can pass through a wedding ring.
Denise Levertov 1923 – 1997
Connie laughing, smiling, contemplative August 2006
