You Find It In Yourself

On the occasion of my thirty-second birthday I am thinking about age, of course, and this poem by John Koethe is the perfect companion for such thoughts. What does it mean to be young or even to feel young? How do we feel age at all?

Enjoy the excerpts below, but take 5 minutes to read the original magnificent piece, too. It is so good that I find it sends me to different paths of wonder and delight each time I read it. I dare you to read it and let it lead you to contemplate the beauty of your life.

A Private Singularity 
by John Koethe

I used to like being young, and I still do,
Because I think I still am. There are physical
Objections to that thought, and yet what
Fascinates me now is how obsessed I was at thirty-five
With feeling older than I was: it seemed so smart
And worldly, so fastidiously knowing to dwell so much
On time — on what it gives, what it destroys, on how it feels.
And now it’s here and doesn’t feel like anything at all [...]

You find it in yourself: the ways that led inexorably from
Home to here are simply stories now, leading nowhere anymore;
The wilderness they led through is the space behind a door
Through which a sentence flows, following a map in the heart.
Along the way the self that you were born with turns into
The self that you created, but they come together at the end,
United in the memory where time began: [...]

It feels like such a miracle, this life: it promises everything,
And even keeps its promise when you’ve grown too old to care.
It seems unremarkable at first, and then as time goes by it
Starts to seem unreal, a figment of the years inside a universe
That flows around them and dissolves them in the end,
But meanwhile lets you linger in a universe of one — 
A village on a summer afternoon, a garden after dark,
A small backyard beneath a boring California sky.
I said I still felt young, and so I am, yet what that means
Eludes me. Maybe it’s the feeling of the presence
Of the past, or of its disappearance, or both of them at once — 
A long estrangement and a private singularity, intact
Within a tinkling bell, an iron nail, a pure, angelic clang — 
The echo of a clear, metallic sound from childhood,
Where time began: “Oh, beautiful sound, strike again!”

New South Wales

waiting on the Lord

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To WAIT ON THE LORD is not like waiting for the tide (it just basically has to come to you, doesn't it?), and to WAIT ON THE LORD is not like waiting for your ride to show up (they may never come at all). 

To WAIT ON THE LORD is like waiting for a person --- a wise and loving person who never forgets --- is like waiting on a promise that is not obligated out of gravity but out of everlasting kindness --- is like waiting on a kindness that cannot lie. 

So we will never be put to shame. 

No one whose hope is in you
will ever be put to shame. 

psalm 25:3

And we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.  Romans 5:2b-5

thin faith

When put into a narrow place, a strait and still straiter space,
the impulse of the breath is up up up and in
to rearrange the organs and turn sideways the gait
to make the self disappear and the breath turn thin.

The mountain range is an insistent endless danger. 
The hope to see the summit has gone dry.
---Hope now to shrink our bodies, and hurry in anger
at ourselves for childish feelings and long lives.

Whatever pocket once held the mustard seeds
had some hole, eaten through maybe in our sleep?
We ask nothing of these cliffs, this sea,
but to spare us. They have no promises to keep.

So we force ourselves thin to fit, to slide
unsuccessfully past the crush of narrow paths
---or, fat, we succumb and try to hide
beneath falling rocks, to feel their fatal wrath.

No one is casting any mountains in the sea or begging
for the crooked ways to go straight.
The problem is not with the landscape, we reckon,
but with our bodies. So we lose weight.

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queensland

How to Eat a 10¢ Blueberry

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okay, THESE berries I picked with my own two hands (pictured)

You do not chomp these berries. You do not inhale them or devour them. You do not hurry these berries.

We misread the sign at the grocery store. Organic Blueberries 97¢. A half-pint of pesticide-free, God's-best-work blueberries for ninety-seven cents? Sounds too good to believe. But we believed. We believed it four times over. 

The receipt on our dining table showed us that each little container of unconventional berries cost $5.97. Five dollars and ninety-seven cents.

This one quart of blueberries cost us $24.

So you do not hurry these berries. You set the berry before you. You carefully, thoughtfully bathe the berry in clean water. You greet the berry and dry it gently, like you would like to be toweled off when you are old and weak: with dignity.

You transport the berry to your lips. You invite it inside, and if it obliges you, you thank it. You say, "No, thank you," and you welcome it to your tongue.

If you must do more than wait for it to dissolve of its own will, going gently into that good night, you press the berry between your muscly tongue and the smooth roof of your mouth––don't waste any on the untasting teeth!––and massage the flesh, the skin, the juice of the berry.

When the organic blueberry is pleased, when the berry acquiesces, when the berry bursts, you make the berry totally your own and you swallow it and you remember your ten cents as a purple dream down the throat.