  
Some Thoughts on Having Lupus
(Sunday, July 13, 2008)
You once told me prayer is that which casts itself among the trees. And so, take the wren, a delicate prayer spoken in fervent whispers. I catch small phrases as she twitters about with a great purpose:
life.
We all have our place in things. I discover everyday my place is among the small miracles, among the wrens and the leaves. The urgency, the burning fever in my mind, is slowly giving way to the pleasure of discovery. I am drowsy at the thought of it, a lazy afternoon.
I am learning everything I need is within me; and everything within me is something I need. Sometimes I look out across the ocean. Waves thrash the armor of boulders, while the tide laps gently around fragile sea shells. The ocean is both beautiful and terrible, and somehow I think I understand why. It is the ocean of my own heart.
And does the wren understand why too, in her own way, though she has never seen the ocean? She doesn't doubt the flow of life; she simply watches us with her black beady eyes. I wonder if we seem like lost souls to her, as we stumble through life.
But I don't want to be a lost soul. I want to grow where I am planted, with only those things I was born to have. What else is there, but that for which we were born. I want to offer my small words of adoration and hope that it is enough. I want to taste honey suckle and birch bark like saints taste communion. I want the prayers in my mind to be the rustling breeze...
like the wren, whose life is not easy and yet she still remembers to sing.
But what of the heavy purple rim of my eyes that drop like overburdened dendrobium. But what of the days I can't even remember my name or yours. And I think, I will never remember what if feels like to have life pressing in, holy or unholy, like two hands upon my skin. In fact, all I can remember is afternoon rain and the smell of wet cement. So, I lick dreary clouds off my lips, and try to remember to sing...
like the wren, whose life is not easy,
but sometimes I can't even remember that. I know enough to go to Mary Oliver and she reminds me that loss is the great lesson. I just didn't know how much I had to lose, wrapped up inside the fibers of my body. I ask one last question, and she answers:
that light
is an invitation
to happiness,
and that happiness,
when it's done right,
is a kind of holiness,
palpable and redemptive.
She has the right of it, as she always does. My great purpose, like the wren, is to find the sunlight which has cast itself among the trees, to find happiness among great loss. After all, no one promised me life would be easy, or fair, or just. The only true promise is that it will be both beautiful and terrible. And, somehow, I think I understand why.
Comments
<< Return to most the recent articles.
|
