Stone or Star

We went to a concert Friday night at the Santa Barbara Bowl. Mavis Staples was the highlight for me, Ziggy Marley put on a good show, and then there was an intermission to set up for Trombone Shorty. We wandered downstairs and stood listening for a bit. They sounded great and probably would have been exciting to watch, but we left. Yes, we left early, while the hard core folks were probably just beginning to dance and cut loose.

But you know what? The walk back to our car was magical. For a while, you could still hear the distant strains of the music in the air, and the sidewalks were all dappled with streetlight and leaf shadow. The porch lights of sweet little bungalows cast a warm glow, and there was an undercurrent of cricket song. What a lovely place this is, I thought, and how grateful I was to discover such delight in the layers of the night, even on the side streets of town.

I drank it all in. Across the street from where our car was parked, a little neighborhood market was shining like a Hopper-esque mirage in the darkness. It was both defiant and poignant, haunting in its loneliness and welcome-ness, with dark and stillness all around.

You know you’re an introvert if you enjoy the walk home perhaps more than the concert. But I am lost and found many times each day.

My faithful correspondent, Dan, recently sent me a quote from Keats that clicked with me: “I scarcely remember counting on any Happiness—I look not for it if it be not in the present hour—nothing startles me beyond the Moment.  The setting sun will always set me to right—or if a Sparrow come before my Window I take part in its existence and pick about the Gravel.”

I think this is the very magic I experience, and it saves me, again and again. (Like that canyon wren singing outside my window…right now.)

Dan also referred me to Rilke, as he so often does, and in particular this poem, Evening:

The sky puts on the darkening blue coat
held for it by a row of ancient trees;
you watch: and the lands grow distant in your sight,
one journeying to heaven, one that falls;

and leave you, not at home in either one,
not quite so still and dark as the darkened houses,
not calling to eternity with the passion of what becomes
    a star each night, and rises;

and leave you (inexpressibly to unravel)
your life, with its immensity and fear,
so that, now bounded, now immeasurable,
it is alternately stone in you and star.

Exactly! A stone or a star.

“The good news about what you’re feeling is that it will change,” Dan writes. “Guaranteed.  In the meantime, it’s okay to have the blues. The world is too much for us to fix.  It always was that way, and right now it all seems really in our faces.  Don’t forget to enjoy the bobcat, the coyote, and even the mouse…”

I am not forgetting.