I sincerely hope everyone had a lovely Thanksgiving. Several times I started to do the morning note yesterday but I was too distracted by everything going on, by food, and family, and just general busyness. It seems a shame to sit at the computer and look for a poem when I had the poetry of family all around me, so I chose the moments I had. Today Mikayla has to go to work very early, and so I am up in the house, the only one awake, Mikayla having left for work already. This is the first morning in a while I have heard so many birds, cardinals and jays, and perhaps a mockingbird or two, hard to tell if you don't actually see them, they could be anything! It's cool and damp and still out and there are birds everywhere. I thought I actually saw a hummingbird buzz past the window but it's early and I might have been mistaken. It's really late in the year for them, they should be gone to some other lovely place by this time.
Usually I see people out walking or jogging or even running by this time; it's light already, but this morning, no one. Several cars have gone past, but no one on foot. Perhaps it's the combination of post-holiday fatigue and the clouds, it's not raining but it looks like it might if the clouds pile up just a little more. The squirrels are out, several just ran down the power line in a kind of squirrel train, nose to tail, moving in their fluid way. I don't know if they were chasing each other or just moving on, but they are certainly fast!
Sometimes I find a poem that I like, and when I read it, even though I have read it before, it's like the first time all over again. Nothing about it is the same as the first time, I get a whole new world from it and am happy about that. It seems like . . . cheating to get so much from so few words and that the joy in it is you can keep coming back and getting something new each time.
From . . . what counts
The world's body is not our body,
although we'd have it so.
Our body's not infinite, although
This afternoon, under the underwater slant-shine
Of sunlight and cloud shadow,
It almost seems that way in the wind,
a wind that comes
From a world away with its sweet breath and its tart tongue
And casts us loose, like a cloud,
Heaven-ravaged, blue pocket, small change for the hand.
I used to think the power of words was inexhaustible,
That how we said the world
was how it was, and how it would be.
I used to imagine that word-sway and word-thunder
Would silence the Silence and all that,
That words were the Word,
That language could lead us inexplicably to grace,
As though it were geographical.
I used to think these things when I was young.
I still do.
Charles Wright
And here the power of words, how everything lives in them, how even silence is related to words and can't escape them. Here it's not afternoon, and there is no wind, but I know what he is saying, I feel cast loose, looking out my own window, and experiencing the Word, knowing I am blessed this morning and have so much to be thankful. When we went around at dinner and said what we were thankful for, things lost out, it was people, and work, and love that counted more than any other things, discoveries, exploration, learning, cooperating, accepting each other and all our kinds of love that was important, and being together, though we are never truly apart. Language can leads us inexplicably to grace, over and over again. And I am glad of a world where I have the joy of telling my family, all of them, how I love them, and can send words laid down by other people to give them that love in so many different ways. I am not limited to just telling it the way I can tell it, I can invent it and reinvent it by sending other people's words too. And so, I am grateful today for . . . words, for all the writers and poets who have given me their lives in words and so enriched me, and given me their stories as gifts to share. I am grateful I have the kind of family, actual and extended, with whom I can share this grace of words.
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