March 16, 2012

I've been paying bills, and waiting for the light, really, not metaphorically!  I don't think there is any light in paying bills, just so much routine that has to be done.  It's still dark though, the one streetlight is shining its orange light through all those new leaves, and the trees are still absent in the darkness.  Birds are not awake, but planes are, I hear one of the big jets going over, high and almost sounding like distant thunder, but more regular somehow.  The 5:30 truck has left already, a few minutes late this morning, either spring break or daylight savings time making it hard to keep strictly to time routines.  The paper has not come yet, I have not heard it, but some mornings since the paper has gotten so skinny and the truck that used to bring it now a smaller car, I just miss hearing it, and it is there when Honey goes out to get it. 

Still darkness, though I am sure it should be light by now, it must be cloudy or foggy or both, or perhaps this is the place the light is taken from to give us light longer in the evening.  A poem this morning about night, about the night sky and how we look at it, or how we don't.

Now that no one looking
     
Now that no one looking at the night—
Sky blanked by leakage from electric lamps
And headlights prowling through the parking lot
Could recognize the Babylonian dance
That once held every gazer; now that spoons
And scales, and swordsmen battling with beasts
Have decomposed into a few stars strewn
Illegibly across an empty space,
Maybe the old unfalsifiable
Predictions and extrapolated spheres
No longer need to be an obstacle
To hearing what it is the stars declare:
That there are things created of a size
We can't and weren't meant to understand,
As fish know nothing of the sun that writes
Its bright glyphs on the black waves overhead.

Adam Kirsch

There are things like the vast reaches of space, and the concept of plurality of infinities, or God, that the mind just balks at.  We are small in our measure, yet we can hold such concepts, if only lightly.  We can cast our mind back to history, even if we can't understand it, or accept what we have done, or change it, we are unlike the fish in that regard.  We know something of all these things, we know enough to realize there will always be things beyond our understanding, that we can only understand our own small part of the puzzle, that the entire picture is bigger and more vast than we can know.  Yet, we go on learning, we go on looking for answers, even while accepting we might not find all the answers we need.  It's the search for them that keeps us going, that keeps us human.

I am waiting for the light this morning, to see what kind of day it will be.  So far, still dark, but I believe the trees are slowly condensing.  I hear an owl, it must be going to bed, sounding sleepy, sounding far away.  Perhaps it will be asleep before the crows wake up, or the sun.  There are no stars out this morning, only blankness, and the one-star streetlight.