Bon Courage

The fog was crawling up the canyon, such a delicate thing. I felt there was a word for it. Gossamer? Diaphanous? I love finding the right word. When I was a child, my father gave me a thesaurus for my birthday. It was like a box of chocolates to unwrap, so many ways to say things, so many things to say. Pablo Neruda understood the magic power, how each word fills with meaning, “always with child”.

“Everything exists in the word,” he said. “A whole idea changes because a word shifts its place, or because another one sat down like a little queen inside a phrase that was not expecting her but obeys her…”

Meanwhile, the sky beyond that gossamer fog was blue, porcelain blue perhaps, or cornflower. It was so lovely that my heart ached. And why does loveliness make my heart ache? Maybe because I know it cannot last. But I was sitting at a table where a meeting was in progress, for which I was taking notes. I like seeing community in action and hearing the thoughts of very smart people.

The day had begun with dissonant news, inevitable and tragic, a revocation of a personal right hard-won fifty years ago. How dare they?! It’s part of a frightening slide towards an extremist, racist, theocratic movement that gained huge momentum with the election of the thug whose name I seldom say. Incisive wordsmith David Pell summarized it this way: “We've witnessed a dramatic judicial shift to the right powered by Mitch McConnell's shady Supreme Court pick maneuvering. And thanks to the leak, we've known this decision was coming for weeks. And yet, its arrival still lands like an epochal punch to gut. That's how it feels when a slow motion plot carried about by the minority takes the country in a direction the majority doesn't want to go.”

I don’t have much to add, maybe because I’m still bent over by the epochal punch to my gut, but what are we going to do? I’ve been watching the January 6 hearings with a mounting sense of horror, feelings that hover between heartbreak and fury. I keep saying that we cannot give up, but it’s hard to know what tangible actions we can take. I’m trying to gather a network of friends and ideas, and here’s one group, AIRLIFT, that advocates grassroots organizing and might offer a start. I’m trying to believe that within my own small sphere of influence, I can do some good, and perhaps collectively there are millions of us also trying, and this beautiful experiment of democracy, noble and flawed, will not go under. It would be nice too if the planet survives. The other day someone was expressing his belief that we were gravely underestimating the urgency of the crisis and how terrible the outcome was going to be, and all I could think of was, “I wonder which crisis he means?”

And yet, I got to sit outside and watch the fog and listen to intelligent citizens engage in constructive conversation and build upon hopeful ideas. Why am I so privileged? And what will I do with this privilege? The sun grew hotter as the fog dispersed, and I had forgotten my hat, and my mind was wandering. I scribbled phrases into my notebook with a blotchy pen, my fingers stained in black. I even love these kinds of words: infrastructure, optimal strategy, collaborative effort, conservation initiatives, baseline studies…these are civic-minded, rolled-up shirt sleeve words, hearty handshake words, functional and well-intentioned, words that line up into a plan, ideas that might be implemented within a given framework, a framework that might be reconfigured with imagination. Policy, politics, the art of the possible, based upon principle. I think this is a good thing, by and large.

But also in my hand there was a page with the heading, “Rilke on Rodin”, handwritten in the beautiful calligraphy of my friend Dan, like a treasured sheet of parchment from an attic trunk. It was part of a surprise packet from him that had arrived in my mailbox the day before, along with a slender book of poetry, and a poem of his own. But I read the timely words of Rilke as I sat in the sun:

“Learning this: to live, to have patience, to work and never to miss an inducement to joy….a joy as nameless as one remembers from childhood…”

And they brought tears to my eyes. Tears of joy and gratitude.

They continued:

“I believe in age, dear friend, to work and grow old, this it is that life expects of us. And then someday to be old and still not by any means to understand everything, no, but to begin, but to love, but to sense, but to link up with what is distant and inexpressible, even to the stars. I say to myself how good, how precious life must be, when I hear this old man so grand in his speaking of it, so torrential in his silence. Often indeed we do not know this, we who are in the difficult up over our knees, up to our chests, up to our chins. But are we then happy in the easy, aren’t we almost embarrassed in the easy? Our hearts lie deep, but if we are not pressed down into them, we never go all the way to the bottom. That is the point. Bon courage, Rodin says to me sometimes for no apparent reason when we part in the evening, even when we have been talking of very good things. He knows how necessary that is every day.”

And so those words by Rilke, lovingly transcribed by Dan onto an ivory sheet of paper and read in the sunlight, shed their own light and brought me courage.

As Neruda said, “They have everything they gathered after so much rolling down the river, from so much wandering from country to country, from being roots so long . . .” Onto my lap, into my heart.

The words. May we choose the right ones.

Bon courage, my friends.