photo by Chris Choat
Dawn takes forever some days.
the sky remains unchanged for hours,
oblivious to the ticking of the clock
growing louder each second.
It’s no use to sit and watch for it.
I know. I’ve tried.
The best you can do is
go on about your business,
muddle through however you can in the dark,
until you are surprised, dazzled by the light.
~ Rebekah Choat
By my late teen years, I had packed away my baby dolls and started collecting china dolls. Daddy was pastoring a little church then. Most of the twenty-five or thirty congregants were older folks. Many of them I’d known all my life, but there was an occasional newcomer. One ‘new’ old gentleman who lived alone became quite active in the church and accordingly spent a fair amount of time with our family.
Frank often told my parents, in my hearing, that I was ‘a little porcelain doll.’ He meant it as the sincerest compliment; it was his way of saying that I was pretty and delicate and well-mannered.
Collectible dolls are usually meticulously molded and constructed, perfectly painted, elegantly dressed. They are lovely, but not precisely lovable. They don’t hold up well under the strain of ordinary day-to-day handling. They are cold, and stiff, and fragile.
At that point in time, I had most of the qualifications for being a china doll. I wore a vaguely pleasant, noncommittal expression on my face. I went where I was supposed to go and filled the place assigned to me without argument. I behaved properly, as expected. I didn’t talk out of turn. My feelings were carefully concealed beneath an aesthetically pleasing surface.
image courtesy stock.xchng
The Branch Delicate
E.B. White, Trees of Winter
Oh, they are lovely trees that wait
In the still hall of winter,
Silent and good where the Good Planter
Fixed the root, wove the branch delicate.
Friendly the birches in the thin light
By the frost sanctified,
And here, too, silent by their side,
I stand in the woods listening, upright,
Hearing in the cold of the long pause
Of the full year
What trees intend that I should hear:
Interpretations of old laws…
Hearing the faint, the chickadee cry
Of root that molders,
Of branch bent, and leaf that withers
And little brown seed that does not die.
The cadence of this poem transports me to a great open-roofed cathedral, in which the trees are the pillars and the Planter the unseen celebrant. I stand under the bare, arching branches, the only human for miles, wrapped in a solitude dense with an almost-tangible Presence.
It is good to be here, just to breathe, just to be. All shall be well. It is good to know that this is the place ordained for me to be, for a season. All shall be well. It is good to commune with the trees in this vast stillness, to partake in the mystery of the falling leaf and the moldering root and the seed biding its time. All manner of thing shall be well.
This piece was originally posted on http://www.allninemuses.wordpress.com, the lovely blog of a lovely lady, Kelly Belmonte, without whose encouragement I would not be where I am today.
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