Stalking Spirit

“You have to stalk the spirit, too. You can wait forgetful anywhere, for anywhere is the way of his fleet passage, and hope to catch him by the tail and shout something in his ear before he wrestles away. Or you can pursue him whenever you dare, risking the shrunken sinew in the hollow of the thigh; you can bang at the door all night till the innkeeper relents, if he ever relents;......” 

“I sit on a bridge as [Moses] on Pisgah or Sinai, and I am both waiting becalmed in a clift of the rock and banging with all my will, calling like a child beating on a door: Come on out!........I know you’re there!” “And then occasionally the mountains part...” “When Moses came down from the cliff in Mount Sinai, the people were afraid of him: the very skin on his face shone.”* I think everyone knows this yearning.....to be burnt alive; no, to be alive, burning. 

[from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard; one of my favorite books.]

Being

Just to pursue a bit of logic in the unrolling of this blog I should say that for practical reasons, the trip to Africa has been put off until September. A blessing really, as there is so much to do at work for me, and for my oldest daughter, we’d be hard put to be leaving for Africa today. So perhaps I got my wish: my worklife is now BEYOND engrossing, although not quite in the way I might wish. But I think we always “get our wish”.....i.e not the one we might be conscious of, but the one we wished when we decided to incarnate this time around. So this alteration in trip-plans is part of the bigger picture, and may have a meaning entirely unknown to me. 

I took my daily walk with my young dog today, my old dog having sighed her last breath on my living room floor just before Christmas. No more golden tail waving as we walk. No more silken head just under my hand. Most of my walks are to “get my heart rate up,” “to give Angie some exercise,” to “lose some weight,” or some such. This one started out that way, but I veered off the road at one point and went down the hill toward the creek, just far enough to see the trail is still clear and that would be a great route for an all-afternoon walk sometime soon. A bright Spring-like day, warm even, after a month of snow; slanted light thru the deep green of the pines this late winter morning. And on the way back I started looking at the ground, remembering a piece of jewelry I’d tried after last week’s walk, imitating a crack of ground in which ran this river of stones. I decided that real rocks might be the answer for the piece, rather than ones made out of polymer clay.....I started looking for little tiny rocks in varying colors - brick red, ochre, grey-almost-teal. I’m squatting in the middle of our dirt road, sun on my shoulders, eyes on the ground, picking out 1/32” pieces of rock, selecting one after the other, delighting in each find. And pretty soon I’m not even picking up rock, I’m just letting my eyes travel over the display in front of me, following lines and patterns............and soon after I realize my head is just empty, my eyes full......and I’m just being, like a kid.