Visions

 January 27, 2025

So, the Lord wakes me out of nothingness. I do not know he is the Lord. He looks like a beautiful youth to me. We are in a garden, surpassingly beautiful. He says, “Will you tend my garden?” I fall down upon my knees. When I am done giving thanks, I rise up to tend the garden. 

What if all things rise to a point severe and exquisite as a single molecule of diamond? 

What if in our last stumbling steps we see of a sudden the pattern of all, so intricate there was no keeping track of it while we bore the burden of life, but, on the last few tiles before the Door, revealed in such complexity and majesty we must cry out, as a baby being born.

I go to my little pond to feed the fish. The pond has been swallowed by a wide sea under moonlight, under the full moon setting the waves ablaze. Far out, Leviathan aims for shore, aims for the place where I stand, ready to take the morsel from my hand. 

The bird that flutters to my hand is a great hawk of the Zenith. His eyes pierce. His talons close around my hand. I am fearful for a moment, until I perceive he is lifting me. Lifting. 

The praises which have fallen from my lips have become blue flowers. I step out of a dark wood and see rolling meadows of blue flowers, stretching way to blue mountains, which are the Mountains of the Lord. 

 January 26, 2025

One is overcome by the hatred and mendacity of those who seem to have any power at all, a thickening, universal web of deceit and misery. But if you look below the web, there’s DJ’s neighbor getting out of bed to jump his battery so we can get to church. There’s townsfolk painting the houses of strangers so that, someday, they may have a home. We need a news network that just reports the good, the decent, the everyday miraculous. The world is more balanced than the reporting of it is. 

 January 25, 2025

Briefly excited about being in A’s play, because it was A and I’d be Richard Burbage. Signed up for an audition time and memorized a monolog. Backed out, though, because of time & chorus conflicts, and looking on the webpage and seeing performances stretch through the entire month of May. Too little time to do too much. One of the advantages of being old is that one can back out of things for the vaguest “health reasons” and one is never questioned. 

Enduring cold. 

Working hard on ICY. It contains some of the most beautiful writing I have ever done. It’s either silly or lovely that I can still be ravished by my own words. 

Video of a driver hurdling off the fishing pier in Virginia Beach, “barely missing a pedestrian.” The pedestrian was D, out jogging. Brushes with fame. . . . 

Strange events, sometimes in dreams, mostly in waking, when, like a mirror shivering in the distance, some mystery come clear, some conundrum resolves. The experience is sensual rather than intellectual. I see an opacity, then its moving and shattering, and then some great (or little) clarity. I was watching videos of babies and young children racing for their fathers when they came home from work, dancing and crying out in transports of love. I felt sad for my father, wondering if he ever experienced that. Then I realized– remembered, beheld-- that yes indeed he had, and that when those moments ended, it was because he ended them. The vision did not reveal why. I was, in some moment now irretrievable, thrown back upon myself, and three quarters of a century could not undo it. I remember two or three times when he was uncharacteristically loving toward me: the thought came into my brain that perhaps my father had been hidden or taken away all this time, replaced by an imposter, and this new man, the one who seemed to love me, was the original finally returned after the expiation of I did not know what trespass. But, no. It was back to normal in the next hour. I’ve sought in my heart for the behavior that turned him away. It was not me. What baby has that power? Some great angel or gift of fortitude allowed me to go forward another way, relying on myself, asking little but cobbling my own world together, in which it was possible to live. But not to live unscathed. I am as one returned to the nursery where he grew up, finding all the broken toys, helpless to put even one of them back together. I feel sad for my sister, because I think I almost remember when things were well, and I’m not sure she can. Mother’s rather glorious loyalty to her husband made sure she went the way he led. Or perhaps they warred in the silence of the house, and she could not overcome him. 

Enigma

 January 22, 2025

Blizzard in New Orleans. Snow on the beaches of Florida.  Flurries in Key West. The kids, anyway, are ecstatic. Trying to sled down the banks of levees. Bitter cold here. I went to get the mail and froze my chest.

Pot-luck before ASC rehearsal– convivial, full of variety. I made brazed cabbage, which I liked so much I devoured the left-overs through the following day. Rehearsal bore out my theory about choral directors: K insisted that we separate the K from the rest of Kyrie (which is wrong), then had to stop to correct someone for not leaving a gap Every Single Time the word occurred, then had to begin correcting us when the duration of the gap was too much. I stopped counting at the twelfth stop to deal with the single word “Kyrie.” If you have to repeat and repeat your instructions, you are wrong. 

Deeply affected by a video of a shark (a great white) coming to shore to solicit the aid of bathers, he having gotten himself wrapped up in fishing line. They cut him loose. This is what we were made for. 

Elgar from Alexa downstairs. 

January 20, 2025

Instead of watching the Inauguration, I’ll be filling the bird feeders. I’ be making sure the mealworms set out for the bluebirds sit on top of last night’s snow.

ML said, “Here I am, starting over at 70.”

 

January 19, 2025

Grainy snow,  mercury dropping like mad. Complex dreams, intertwining with my waking life to an unusual degree. Dreams which try to inform my life many minutes after waking. 

Met ML in The Fresh Market. She was one of those whose home was totally destroyed, and who faces that with an equanimity I find laudable and foreign. Her little creek became a raging torrent when the floodgates were opened at North Folk. Gallantly, she affirmed that opening the gates “saved everybody in my neighborhood.” She was buying supplies for a trip to the beach, to “get away from it all for a while.” FEMA paid to clean her property up, but no farther than that. America is not set up to save her people. I think of the Irishman in the bar in Sligo, “I’d be terrified to be an American. There’s nothing to break your fall.” 

 January 18, 2025

Sat on my porch in the afternoon sun. Led to cleansing. Also a finished crossword. 

Porch sitting becomes complicated. The couple– especially the man–at 52 Lakeshore are dedicated porch sitters, and their front porch looks directly at the western side of my house. Not an issue in summer when the leaves are on, but in leafless seasons they have a direct view into my bathroom, with the toilet right up against the window. Again, during the day this is probably not a problem, but when the bathroom light is on, I’m lit up like a Broadway stage. I could close the blinds, but I love looking out into that bit of garden. I’m also paranoid about ruining the blinds by pulling them up and down too often. I tell myself that if they don’t want to see, they’ll look away– but is that fair? Should I influence their porch-sitting time in that way? At night I’ve looked from my toilet seat at his shadow scurrying into the house. Did he catch a chill, or was it because of me? Decided to pretend I never thought of this, and allow them to choose their reaction, look or look away. 

Napping, I was sure Circe lay against me. I made certain not to move, so as not to disturb her.