Head In The Clouds
Today I found a letter my beloved father wrote to me many years ago, in which he said this: "It is possible to have both feet on the earth and still keep your head in the clouds. I believe in this."
I believe in this too. I am putting it in practice every day. Those clouds about my head are exceptionally beautiful today, and there are stars in my eyes, and I am holding on to thoughts of hope and love to keep me steady on the ground.
Oh, how I miss my father! I was twenty-seven when he died. Even after nearly fifty years, the ache of missing him is unabated. It’s just the regular background to everything else in my life. But somehow, paradoxically, so is his presence, so is his voice. And because he wrote letters, I can see these words he wrote upon the page, and hold them in my heart, and tell him, “Yes, Daddy. I believe in this also.”
What I don’t share as readily because it makes me so sad is the next line of that letter, in which he wrote: “Cyn, I am very tired and I don’t know how much sense this makes.”
He was so very tired. Sometimes he had doubts that all his efforts and aspirations meant anything. Sometimes he wondered if there was sense in what he said to me.
Nevertheless, he’d added, “I believe in this.” It was optional, that affirmation, but it was an was an aye, an amen. And in adding this, he turned the statement of what is possible into a kind of doctrine, and he gifted to me an intrepid hopefulness and a capacity for wonder.
Yes, it is tempered by the need for practicality and balance, that admonition to keep both feet on the earth, but somehow permission is granted, across the chasm of time and despite cataclysmic change, to dream myself sky-high and keep trying.
I am working hard to prepare for a community event next week. I keep reading the words that I plan to say, and I hope that they are not simply urgent but also light enough to beam through the current darkness. We’ll have music, which adds magic, and the comfort of friends and neighbors gathered in a beautiful space. And I hope it will be inspiring. We shall see.
In the meantime, and through it all, it is vital to bear witness to the miracles and delights, great and small, and accept the grace the world offers. These words from Mary Oliver say more succinctly than I ever could what I experience daily:
Every day
I see or hear
Something that more or less
Kills me
With delight,
That leaves me
Like a needle
In the haystack of light.
This week has galloped by so swiftly I can barely process all the input. Sometimes the heaviness and sadness bow me down. And yet, in joyful contradiction, the miracles are lifting me. One day the chatter and laughter of the women made a kind of music when we hiked on a bluff above the sea. Yesterday I got back on my trusty bicycle and my legs remembered what to do. Someone I know is practicing a new song, bread is baking in the oven, and a white moon is perched in the branches of an oak. These hills, the shine of sea, a graceful hawk—it all feels like a prayer sometimes.
I am bearing witness as I near the edge, and my head is high, and I resolve to do my best because I must.
It is possible. I believe in this.