The Wonder and The Grief

The morning began with a rocket launch. In the aftermath of the rumbling and the sonic boom, what astonishes me is the quiet, punctuated by frog song, but mostly just the lovely, comforting quiet. I imagine all the creatures blinking in bewilderment, then resuming their grazing and their roaming. A redtail hawk cruises aimlessly in the sky, the thick curl of the rocket’s contrail still visible in the far distance.

Now the bees are singing hymns in the orchard, and the macadamia blossoms continue to drip lavishly from the trees, like pink bracelets flung onto the branches by an extravagant duchess, her perfume infusing the air with its assertively sweet fragrance.

Yesterday we received word that our friend Jeff has died. He was brave and graceful in his exit as he was throughout his life. All of us were young together, riding bikes, camping, falling in love, raising children, working, fully aware that the world was wondrous, but sometimes too busy to look up, and suddenly we were no longer young, and now one of us in this little circle has passed. It’s hard to shake the sadness, but Jeff was gracious, exuberant, good-natured to the end, a man of great faith and a ready smile, and we were so lucky to have known him. As I wrote in an email to another of our friends, “We are all walking each other home, and often the path is dark, but some of us carry light.” Our friend Jeff carried light. He was a light.

It had been a full week, and even the great sigh of this leaving could not breathe away the abundance of it. I got an actual letter in the mail, written in pen, full of breezy news, stuffed into an envelope adorned with two colorful postage stamps. I bought a pair of lavender hiking shoes and tested them out in the mountains. I brought oranges to Aristotle, my curmudgeonly compatriot at the West end of the ranch, and we stood over the sink eating them, the juice dripping down our chins, messy and delicious, and outside his window the green hills gleamed and a lone silver boat glinted on the sea.

Monte and I had a FaceTime visit with our grandson Felix, who informed us that he has a pond in the backyard, which he is going to fill with frogs and beetles, butterflies, and owls. He also initiated a sport called bagel jumps in which he places a buttered bagel on the floor and jumps onto it, or near it, from the sofa. He demonstrated repeatedly during the course of our visit, but we had to end the call abruptly because we kept getting disconnected. He sent a follow-up video in which he thanked us for talking to him, asked why Nonna’s connection was so “unstable”, and suggested that we talk another time soon, but not on a Green Shop day. I was not clear about the meaning of the latter, but I am impressed that this three-year-old has enough technological familiarity to wonder about the instability of an internet connection.

That also happened to be the day of the eclipse, so I punched holes into a small sheet of cardboard and enjoyed watching the circles of sunlight transform themselves into little crescents on the ground as the eclipse progressed. I also noticed proud crowds of lupines along the road and a procession of northbound whales fairly close to shore, which always feels a little bit like glimpsing God.

My sound track as I walked that day was sometimes Beyonce’s cover of Blackbird…very nice…along with some Jackson Browne stuff that holds up beautifully, as does he. I’m grateful that there is music in the world. And I’m grateful that there are people making art, who understand that nothing is monotone, that the sea and the grassy hillsides hold a thousand colors.

I’m grateful too that poets are writing poems, healing the wounds inflicted by reason (as Novalis summed it up). My friend Dan has composed an exquisite chapbook of poems he wrote in the shadow and the glare of the loss of beloved friends, himself as he put it “a short ride from nothing at all” but honoring the memories of those who have left, continuing the conversation, asking the questions, falling silent and contemplating light. His words are like prayers to a God who may be a metaphor for love, who may or may not hear him, whom he senses near and praises as he bears witness to the wonders.

I wish I could convey a sense of the light right now. Picture the sky as a sheer white scarf of silk with shy sun behind it, rendering everything silvery and dream-soft.

Yes, it’s the same theme that keeps arising in everything I write, and forgive me for being redundant, but there it is. It is a miracle to be here. It is never not mysterious, and each moment contains a dichotomy of terrible and beautiful truths and we are somehow to navigate, to improvise, to find a worthy compass and stay steady.