ABANDONMENT

"Morning Star", oil, by V...Vaughn

         It’s interesting that the word “abandon” originally meant simply giving up trying to control a situation or a person, a definition that doesn’t necessarily give the gloomy feeling the word usually brings these days. For instance, I could easily take pleasure in abandoning myself now and then, just giving myself up to the whims that waft through my life moment by moment. I’m so accustomed to keeping control of my life that it would be wonderful, now and again, to get free of self-imposed restraints and just loosen up and let go. I wish my friends could occasionally say, “Ham’s so fortunate to be able to abandon himself and be free now and then!” Surely the small, spindly, defenseless, and always anxious “self” I have been painstakingly protecting all these 71 years deserves to be abandoned, just as I would abandon a ship with no sails and lots of leaks. This strange sense that I am a separate, struggling entity in a world of separate, struggling entities needs to be renounced, disavowed, and discarded – abandoned as fast as I would walk out on a project that promised nothing but disappointment. I need to live with a little (perhaps a lot ) more abandon, just trusting this single, startling universe to take me where it will. Stars shine in limitless and always surprising ways, and I should allow myself to do the same.  

DEAREST FRESHNESS

"Grand Canyon",  oil,  by Karen Winters

“There lives the dearest freshness deepdown things.”      
-- Gerard Manley Hopkins, “God’s Grandeur”

     Sometimes my small world seems even smaller than usual, with almost none of the freshness Hopkins speaks of, and yet his words were an opening, this morning, to the fact that far down inside all things is freshness so plentiful it’s always overflowing. I find it so easy to be bored by my life – to let commonplace things pass by me like so much tiresome, insignificant stuff – and yet I know beyond a doubt that even the dust on the dashboard of my car is something special – that it has atoms inside it that were made billions of years ago, makes designs on the dashboard that have never been made just that way before, and lets sunlight shine across it in entirely fresh ways. I rarely even notice the dust that’s always all around us, which -- because dust, in its own way, is as stunning as any canyon -- is like living beside the Grand Canyon but never noticing it. Freshness like dust’s overflows around me, moment by moment – in smiles I see in the supermarket, in singular patterns of shadows spreading for the first time across roads, in streetlights whose shine seems ever so slightly different today from any earlier day. Even the keyboard I’m typing on has taken on fresh dust and dirt since yesterday, new specks here and there that create, in a way, a new, unused keyboard for my morning fun.

A quiet, cold late winter day. Breakfast side by side with Delycia -- spinach omelet and raisin toast for me, healthy cold cereal for her. A good part of the day -- at least the afternoon -- was spent in front of the fire -- reading, talking, finding places for some pieces in our newest jigsaw puzzle. Lucky us.

GOOD GIFTS

"Morning Sky", oil. by Laurel Daniel

Every good gift and every perfect (free, large, full) gift is from above; it comes down from the Father of all [that gives] light, in [the shining of] Whom there can be no variation [rising or setting] or shadow cast by His turning [as in an eclipse].

-- James 1: 17, Amplified Bible

My life has been loaded with good gifts, all springing upon me by surprise and all from secret beginnings, so I can easily relate to what James says in this sentence. My life, moment after moment, is as free and full as the sea my wife and I sometimes stroll beside. My thoughts are thoroughly full of possibilities, and each one seems as large as the light-filled sky I see outside my window this morning. As James suggests, there’s a shining quality in the moments of my life – all of them – as though something like suns or stars are inside every one. I don’t mean to suggest that I believe these glowing moments, these steady and splendid gifts, come from the God I grew up believing in, and that James perhaps believed in -- the human-like super-being who could be as cruel as he was kind. No, I’ve come to see these gifts as being the spontaneous and easy-going cascade that pours down on all of us simply because we’re alive.  Most of us, for countless different reasons, don’t always notice these gifts, but I’ve come to see that they’re always with us, like the sunlight is with us even on the cloudiest days, or like breathing is bringing us new life even when our world seems to have broken into pieces. Just now, a thought of one of my brave and gentle sons came to me from somewhere, and, in an unrestricted and effortless way, I can soar on that thought and feel its light lifting me. Amazingly, any thought has that power, any of the tens of thousands of these good gifts that flood over me each day.

Today Delycia drove up to UConn for her class in Victorian Literature, and I did some writing and split and stacked some firewood. It was a windy, frosty day, but I was breathing hard and perspiring before long. It was wonderful to be working in our own lovely, fairly large yard, with a slight sense of spring in the air. It was cold, but there were new kinds of birdsongs all around, suggesting that some newcomers had come back from the south for the summer.

"Amazing Grays", oil, by Pam Holnback

Tonight we went to the Mystic Arts Cafe to hear one of my former students read his poems, and it was a festive and engaging evening.  My student's poems were strong and smooth, and the music by a local band was equally so.

Now, just after 9:00, we're easing into sleep with some quiet reading and (for me) some slow sips of Chardonnay.

Gerard Manley Hopkins and George Eliot

I've gone back to reading Hopkins' distinctively odd poems, and once more I see the charm and force in his phrases. Somehow he captures the power inherent in words -- the power that has started all wars and all loves -- and I find myself getting swept away with the flow and tumble of his lines. Next to Shakespeare and Whitman (ahead of even Keats!), Hopkins may be my favorite poet. I look forward to spending some of my coming spring days with him, perhaps feeling his words (to quote him) "stealing as Spring through [me]."

Delycia and I are continuing to enjoy George Eliot's Middlemarch. It's a very long book, and I often get lost among the many confusing characters and sub-plots, but Delycia helps to straighten me out. The book, unlike Eliot's other novels, has very little of what we would call "excitement" in it -- very little rising action and tension. Instead, it's a quiet, accurate picture of life the way it probably was in a typical English village in the 1830's. This surely accounts for the "dullness" I sometimes see in some of the chapters, for no doubt a certain amount of dullness is commonplace among the lives of everyday people. Eliot seems to be seeking real life in these pages, as opposed to simple melodrama.

LIGHTNING AND LOVE

"Spring on the Hudson", watercolor and gouache,
by Gretchen Kelly

“Thou art lightning and love, I found it, a winter and warm.”
        -- Gerard Manley Hopkins, “The Wreck of the Deutschland”

   The 19th century British poet Gerard Manley Hopkins always wrote with a distinctive oddness, but some of his lines leap up to me, like this one this morning, making me think, once more, about the seemingly self-contradictory aspects of life. There is, indeed, a lot of lightning in any experience of love -- a lot of flashing and flare-ups and apparent possibilities of destruction. In fact, there are flashes of possible danger in the distance of any enjoyable experience. There’s always tails on the opposite side of heads, always bitterness in the last residue of a choice cup of coffee, always darkness after the best of days. This, though, is not discouraging to me, for it simply shows the mystery and bottomlessness of genuine pleasure. While delighting in a gentle day in March, for instance, I must also see the blessings in subsequent cold spells. When walking with high spirits with my wife, I must, in the back of my mind, be ready to praise those possible future days when walking will be less like sauntering and more like tottering. There’s something special and precious in every experience, if I can only keep my eyes searching for the secret flawlessness. Even on a dusky and frozen day in February, I can, as Hopkins says, find “a winter and warm”.

I taught a fairly successful college class last night, mostly because I made all of us, myself included, do some serious thinking as we read and summarized paragraphs in a James Baldwin essay. He is a sometimes perplexing writer, and all of us had varying difficulties trying to take in his main points and present them in shipshape summaries. It was a good workout for the students (and their professor). I might try to find more time for this kind of in-class mental calisthenics. 

"Breakfast at Don Gaspar", oil,
by Sharman Owings

This morning Delycia and I joined some good friends for breakfast in Stonington Borough -- boiling hot coffee for me and a well-made omelet to share. Then home for some reading aloud of Middlemarch, an hour or so of quiet writing for me, and then some trips to various shops with Delycia to find some new frames for my glasses. 

Music I listened to today:  2nd movement, Beethoven Piano Trio No. 1 in E Flat, Op. 1 No.1

DUSTINGS

Snow-dusted Field", watercolor and pastel,
by Carol Engels

This morning we woke to a slight dusting of snow – just a brushing of whiteness on streets and stone walls and roofs – and it brought to my mind other kinds of dustings. Thoughts, for instance, seem to dust themselves across my life almost constantly. Falling as if from nowhere, thoughts of gladness, glory, sorrow, or purposelessness  sprinkle themselves around me moment by moment. It’s as if every passing second sees a new assortment of thoughts coming down to settle inside me like the thin sheet of snow across our yard this morning.  It occurs to me that I should be as happy to see all these various thoughts as I am to see this dusting of snow. I didn’t dash out to sweep away the inch or so of snow, and I shouldn’t wish the flurries of thoughts inside me to stop. This morning I sighed with pleasure and smiled to see the new-fallen snow, and I should sit back and do the same as I feel the fresh thoughts descending upon me each moment. After all, my thoughts are as harmless – and yes, as lovely – as the snow. Even thoughts of anger and fear can foster an unflustered sense of astonishment – like, Where in the world did these foolish but fascinating thoughts come from? If I can loosen up and understand their inoffensiveness and charisma, the steady descent of thoughts across my days can be a dance worth watching.

FRESH AND ASTONISHING FIRES

"Every poet, I thought, must be original and originality a condition of poetic genius; so that each poet is like a species in nature […] and can never recur.”

     -- Gerard Manley Hopkins, in a letter to Robert Bridges

"Campfire below the Dunes", oil, by Roxanne Steed

     I agree with Hopkins, but I would take it further and say that, not just each poet, but each person is “a species in nature”, a totally original and irreplaceable part of the universe, a miracle that will never be made again. We make all too little of the significance and uniqueness of each of us. All the people I pass on the street are inimitable marvels, never before seen on earth and never to be replicated. Somehow this mysterious universe sent them into existence, to spread their special sparks here and there for a few years and then to disappear back into the universe that owns them. All of us are mysteries forever, mostly because we are made by a cosmos that simply can’t be explained. The stars stretch out for measureless distances, and so do the inner lives of each us, even the lowest-paid employee, even the poorest lost person on the street. None of us will ever recur; the miracles we are made of will never be known again. We are fresh and astonishing fires that flame up for a few years and then perish as additional unparalleled fires start up and bring a new brightness to the world.

I have enjoyed my first few days of spring vacation, mostly just making the most of many hours of absolute freedom -- nothing particularly important to do and nowhere to definitely go. It's a gift to be able to spend an entire day with Delycia, sometimes doing things together, and sometimes taking pleasure in simply being in the same place with each other, whether it's at home before the fire with our books or beside the sea in a mostly silent walk.

"From the Sketchbook:
Amish Family, Holmes County. Ohio",
by Robin Weiss

I have several happy plans for my break, and among them is a few reading projects. 
I would like to re-read as much of Walt Whitman as possible -- all of his poems, and perhaps some of his letters and journals. Also, I hope to read all of Gerard Manley Hopkins again, including his letters, and perhaps Paradise Lost once again. Finally, I hope to get out my sketch pad and pencils and do some easy and soothing sketching.

Music I listened to today on my new Bose: Beethoven, Piano Trio No. 1 in E Flat, Op. 1 No.1