LIFTING, RISING
Peter Christopher
Rather than running from it, I have returned to the world of slides and swings. I need to feel swing wind on my face. It is early now, first light, and the air is so cool and clean, the grass and bushes and leaves of the live oak dew-scented. I perch at the top of the wire hurricane fence. I lower myself over and grab the chains, climb on, begin to swing my legs.
The biggest surprise is how you spend a life hammering your life together: trying to make it out of childhood alive, school, jobs, service to country, brothers in blood, a marriage, a child, and how quickly it all comes undone. Who can ever imagine where life, where the big-horse life, will carry you, unaware and humbled and hopeful, often taking every wrong turn looking for a way back home. I do not mean home as a place so much, although it can be, but rather where the heart lives as its true self, and then somehow losing oneself, the feeling, and finding it again, and then losing it again, but always searching for it.
I guess what I really want and I am searching for is mostly everything. I am familiar with watching ruin that is not a dream, not an illusion. I have seen some things and what this life requires most is the hunger, the desire and will, to belong to something or someone truly worth giving yourself over to, then going after it, or them, with everything you have, and in so doing, making sure you are changing yourself and others for the better, changing yourself beyond yourself.
I also want to say all we have are the small moments. Moment by moment things loom large, the memories of our own making, the doing, the becoming, and the hope that all requires. After everything, I want to say it is doomed madness to live every single moment, little and big, but I cannot honestly say that. Somehow, for me, the despair and the hope are sweeter now, more pure to the taste, moment- by-moment, day-by-day, the light as its own kind of explanation.
My wounds, my love are what keep me alive.
And what about all my dead? I think the dead are not all that detached from the living. Both linger in the strangely mysterious and cannot speak truly for the other. If I could come to understand the living of this world, the worst sort of ongoing destruction and unbelievable kindness, often in the same breath, the great sorrow and the great beauty, if I can get used to that, then I might learn something more.
Yesterday is dead and gone and the only way forward is harder and higher.
I swing higher as the sun begins its climb, sunlight shooting through the fluttering leaves of the live oak. I swing higher, losing myself in the patches of sky between the long, massive branches. My body is outstretched, open and aching.
Overhead, close enough so their wing strokes are heavy whispers, I see three crows. They flap as fast silhouettes across the clearing blue, their shadows crossing over my legs, over the grass, gone but for their crow talk echoing and fading.
I am feathered by shadow, also flying.
For once, for here and now, the moment is relieved of vision and history and simply is a moment of all we mean, or wish it to mean. This broken world, in memory, in actuality, is burnished. We are made liars by time, by the long beauty of these short days where everything is so quick and glancing, so mysterious, until only the dreaming words, the coursing blood and knobbed-solid bone, are what is left.
As for love, what we can find and give of it, every sign and instance—all slippery and wanting and sore and shining—every moment of it, is a blessing.
I pump harder, higher. I swing until there is only the lifting, the rising of the heart thrown into light.