A Remembrance of Miracles

Words fail me. Or maybe I just fail the words. I don’t ever recall entering a new year with quite this sense of free falling into it.

On New Year's Day, though, we went for a steadying walk to an enchanted valley with Jeanne and Gary, our neighbors. We even found chanterelles. We had just been talking about the secret places where they grow, and there, in moist black earth beneath the oaks, we glimpsed their pumpkin colored crowns. We knelt and dug them out and crammed them into our backpacks, later dividing them among us, feeling very rich. Jeanne and Gary have already eaten theirs and seemed hale and hearty afterwards, so I am reassured. I shall sauté them in butter and garlic this evening.

Meanwhile, the macadamia blossoms have attracted so many bees that when I step outside I can hear them humming like a choir, like a symphony of life, the music of the spheres. Where there are bees and blooms, there is promise.

I am going back to being a teacher for a few months, starting this very Monday. Last night I had the old familiar anxiety dreams. I stood befuddled at the helm of a classroom while chaos erupted. I overslept and then forgot how to get to school and wandered in a panic along unfamiliar streets and finally came to a bridge that led only to the open sea. Funny how these kinds of dreams never go away.

But it will be fine. My innate optimism trumps my trepidation.

Better to be focused on a tangible role, anyway, than the amorphous daily challenge of trying to make sense of things.

And I rode my bike this morning through a chill silver fog past cottonwood treeswhose leaves have turned bright yellow.

Here then are closing thoughts (and opening ones) by E.E. Cummings, who neither failed nor was failed by words:

"Miracles are to come. With you I leave a remembrance of miracles: they are somebody who can love and who shall be continually reborn, a human being; somebody who said to those near him, when his fingers would not hold a brush 'tie it to my hand'--"