LISTEN. Yesterday was my first post-operative walk in the park. Finally got out of the driveway and over to the Richland Creek Greenway. 40 minutes, new spring in the step with not a hint of the old stenosis-related discomfort. Feels truly like a return to life, to the peripatetic life (which as I told my solicitous neighbor across the street the other morning, each of us at the end of our respective drives, is for me Life Itself). Will check in with the medical team tomorrow and see if they don't agree I'm ready to walk my path again, an hour a day at dawn at least. Thank goodness.
It was in a spirit of renewal that I received yesterday's David Budbill poem Seventy-Two is Not Thirty- Five, which concludes
...The wheel turns, generation after generation,
around and around. We ride for a little while, get off and
somebody else gets on. Over and over, again and again.
And so we go, around the drive, the block, the park, the trail, the star. Pretty banal on the surface, repetitive, "full of misery, loneliness, and suffering" and "over much too soon."
But those who learn to look past themselves know the circle is unbroken -- not in the sky by and by, but right here on this terrestrial merry-go-round.
That too may seem to some superficially banal, at first glance, but the poet/philosopher looks deeper and finds something profoundly meaningful in our participation in the daily round. The privilege of getting up and going, again and again, feels restorative -- even after a short disruption. I kept walking right up until surgery in mid-June, but each outing was a labored struggle. I was having to collapse onto my collapsible stool every ten minutes. Not yesterday.
It was in that same spirit of renewal in small victories and "ordinary" life that I read Stephen Dunn's obituary yesterday. "Mr. Dunn specialized in poems about surviving, coping with and looking for meaning in the ordinary passages of life." He was frequently featured on Writers Almanac, just five days ago with "Achilles in Love" and the next with "An Evolution of Prayer"--
...As a child, some of his prayers were answered
because he prayed out loud for a kite or bike,
which his mother would overhear, and pass on
to her husband, his father, the Lord.
Later, he understood that when he prayed
he was mostly talking to himself—albeit a better,
more moral part of himself—which accounted
for why he heard nothing back from the void...
But on this side of the void, Stephen's left us a lot to think and talk about. And so he's not left at all.
No comments:
Post a Comment