Being away is …a different way to experience what is, essentially, a day set aside for grief in the United States. Today, while my American-ness shows up like a slash of color on my sleeves, I didn’t know what to expect.
I didn’t want anyone to say anything to me today. I didn’t want to wear a flag on my lapel, to elicit comments. I didn’t want to be anything but silent. Silently… wordless. Because it still seems to me that so much of this craziness is simply unspeakable. Yet it rolls on, and on…
Channel 4 showed the Michel Moore film last night, which put me in a state of mind so dark that this morning I found myself almost unable to get on with the day. So, when L. sent me this poem today, a poem she’s recently set to music for a class, I thought it serendipitous.
“The Summer Day” by Mary Oliver, from House of Light. Beacon Press, © 1992
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean–
the one who has flung herself out of the grass, the one who is eating
sugar out of my hand, who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of
up and down– who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to
kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll
through the fields, which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
To honor lives ended, voices silenced, to stop madness reigning; what do you do? How do you act? What indeed will you do with your one wild and precious life?
– D & T
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I am exceedingly picky about poetry, but I loved that one. It’s a wonderful message, too: how beautifully and carefully we are all made, how precious life is and how fast it is over. How we should all use our gift of life thoughtfully and joyfully instead of nurturing grudges and plotting destruction against those we see as our enemies.
9/11 always gets to me. The image of those two people holding hands as they leapt to their deaths; the unfortunate footage of those people rejoicing in the streets over what they saw as a timely message aptly delivered to a spoiled and Godless nation. There is just too much to take in, and 9/11 is always one day when I grieve as I wonder about the fate of the human race.
Watched a mindless program during dinner last night called TMZ. They try to make celebrities “real”. Along with providing a bunch of inane information.
I was very disturbed to watch one of their segments, though. Outside a nightclub they asked patrons which year the Sept 11 attacks occurred in. No one they showed was able to correctly identify the year. But each of those could recite the names of Brad and Angelina’s children.
Terrible.