beginnings and endings
"And I'll know my song well before I start singin'"
- Bob Dylan, "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall"
Charleston has been locked into a kind of paralysis -- tonight, sitting on the brink of a rare snowstorm. Devoid of wheels and feet, the roads and sidewalks are just what they actually are -- grey plaster. The bravest finches -- foraging and flittering just yesterday -- are now nowhere to be found. This little corner of the world is quiet, bracing.
I've been quiet, too.
Maybe no more.
Mary Oliver would leave pencils in the trees along the trails she'd walk, so that she'd never be without one.
Little invitations, reminders.
On this, the first day, we see more clearly than before, perhaps, that there are no first days.
A hidden pencil writes:
We will be known as a culture that feared death
and adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity
for the few and cared little for the penury of the
many. We will be known as a culture that taught
and rewarded the amassing of things, that spoke
little if at all about the quality of life for
people (other people), for dogs, for rivers. All
the world, in our eyes, they will say, was a
commodity. And they will say that this structure
was held together politically, which it was, and
they will say also that our politics was no more
than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of
the heart, and that the heart, in those days,
was small, and hard, and full of meanness.
© 2008 by Mary Oliver
From her 2008 collection, Red Bird, p. 46
The snow is falling now.
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