Every Day Is A God

The day is lush and demanding, a drunk of a day, staggering in and knocking things around, impossible to ignore. I am sick in bed but the windows are open. A distant motor buzzes, a train whistles, a hawk screams.

The needles of the pine tree just outside my bedroom window are glinting and shimmying, the canyon road is shining like a river, and dust motes are dancing on currents of air.

Now parallelograms of sunlight have traversed the window seat and flung themselves onto my bed. This morning won't leave me alone.

Rain would be more compatible with the way I feel right now. When your head is congested and you lack the will and energy to participate, a gorgeous day just seems dissonant and intrusive.

And I know I lose perspective when I'm sick, but as self-indulgent as it sounds, I'm feeling blue. I'm floundering, doubting myself, uncertain of my path.

It could be, as my dear friend Vickie put it, that this is just what happens when things change. We need to remodel our lives, and with that there comes a messy, "under construction" feeling.

Well, things are always changing, but I do have the sense lately that I'm hammering out some new spaces, and I'm working without a blueprint or a vision.

So maybe it's a good and necessary mess, but sometimes I feel a bit lost.

Another friend, Dorothy, suggested that I write down and burn a list of what I do not want to carry into the new year. After that, she says, I should write, keep, and elaborate a list of what I do want, and how I want to be.

I want to be…I don’t know. Maybe I just want to be the way I am and feel okay about it.

Last night I began reading a slender book by Annie Dillard called Holy the Firm. Wow. Powerful stuff. It explores fundamental questions about God and suffering, about art and life, about beauty and mortality, and it is in some ways a rather disturbing book for the middle of the night, but it reads like an extended poem; the writing is lyrical, dazzling, at times almost hallucinogenic. I kept finding phrases I wanted to hold onto, such as this one:

"There are no events but thoughts and the heart's hard turning, the heart's slow learning where to love and whom."

That's similar to what my father told me many years ago about what really matters. But yes, the heart learns slowly and our lives spin fast. We must not miss our chance to love what we love, and whom, and where. I have already wasted so much time, lost pivotal moments to passivity and fear, let slip the irrevocable.

But I think my favorite lines may be the very first two sentences:

"Every day is a god, each day is a god, and holiness holds forth in time. I worship each god, I praise each day splintered down and wrapped in time like a husk, a husk of many colors spreading, at dawn fast over the mountains split."

I want to live my life with that kind of awareness. Even when my spirit flags and my head hurts and the bright brash day intrudes, I want to recognize how precious is the moment and ask for nothing more.

(Photo above by Miranda Ward)