thoughts at the end of a world
there is no going back (wendell berry)
No, no, there is no going back.
Less and less you are
that possibility you were.
More and more you have become
those lives and deaths
that have belonged to you.
You have become a sort of grave
containing much that was
and is no more in time, beloved
then, now, and always.
And so you have become a sort of tree
standing over a grave.
Now more than ever you can be
generous toward each day
that comes, young, to disappear
forever, and yet remain
unaging in the mind.
Every day you have less reason
not to give yourself away.
instructions for the journey (pat schneider)
The self you leave behind
is only a skin you have outgrown.
Don’t grieve for it.
Look to the wet, raw, unfinished
self, the one you are becoming.
The world, too, sheds its skin:
politicians, cataclysms, ordinary days.
It’s easy to lose this tenderly
unfolding moment. Look for it
as if it were the first green blade
after a long winter. Listen for it
as if it were the first clear tone
in a place where dawn is heralded by bells.And if all that fails,
wash your own dishes.
Rinse them.
Stand in your kitchen at your sink.
Let cold water run between your fingers.
Feel it.
I've been thinking a lot about the end of the world lately, against my better judgement. You probably have too. The thick brown smoke blanketing the autumn sky, the horrific mistreatment of immigrants at the border, the virus raging on, an invisible foe inciting anxiety and fear, and preventing us from the physical closeness we long for. The stains of racial injustice seem to grow deeper and spread wider every day (in the face of heartbreaking silence from the Church). Disappointment is palpable in the heart of every person, and hatred is festering like an open wound, division encouraged by the very people whose job it is to prevent it.
In labor all creation groans.
The other night, after a particularly terrible day, my mom said to me, "maybe it is the end of the world." My heart jumped, wanting to scream of course it isn't! I didn't (I don't!) want to believe it, didn't want to venture into the unknown of what that means. (I'm very resistant to the whole THE END IS NIGH rhetoric, if I'm honest with you. It just doesn't seem useful, only scary.) I told this all to a friend the next day, and she laughed and said to me, "let your mom know she is not alone." Great, I thought. My denial is falling apart before my eyes. There's nowhere to run. I'm trapped in a world that is going to implode, doomsday approaching rapidly, and it's going to be horrible.
And then she said, "Maybe it's not the end of the world. But it is the end of a world. And that is something we have to grieve. We have to let ourselves grieve it."
And somehow- what a gift!- she put this year, with all it's unexpected detours, into a perspective that seems to be more in my wheelhouse of understanding. She gave me permission to grieve the death of my home, the death of expectation, the death of a world that will never come back. I want to give that gift of permission to grieve the end of that world to you, too. To quote Pat Schneider, "the end of the world is a private thing." It is something different for each of us, an utterly terrifying business of daring to imagine, and to accept, that your life is going to be different. We all ache for different reasons, wading through this new place with giant, and particular, holes in our hearts. How we need grace from each other, our fellow wounded healers. Both of the poems I included at the top of this post have, like messages from kindred spirits, floated into my life from unexpected sources during this time of change, and seem to me to say the same thing: deep change in the midst of the liturgy of our lives is, while painful (and lately, particularly so), natural, and it is inevitable. They remind me that, in this time of upheaval, we can run from the change, or we can embrace it.
Because, ultimately, as Wendell Berry writes, "there is no going back." The sun rises and sets, and the seasons march on. In the last week, I have run out of shaving cream and used up another tube of mascara. My shampoo is almost gone, ordinary signals that daily life is flowing along, that bravery in the new world begins with washing your hair and shaving your legs, and beginning another day. Bravery is standing, soapy and momentarily content, under the hot water and remembering you are not the same woman who stepped from the shower yesterday, last week, a year ago. Bravery is choosing to step out, wiping the water from your eyes, and making the choice to go on, again.
Friends, the world, the new world we find our broken hearts alive in, needs us. It needs us to get uncomfortable as we confront biases, as we fight for change, as we make active choices to protect and steward our earth, as we learn to love our neighbor as ourselves, as we vote, as we forgive and seek forgiveness, as we allow our minds and opinions to shift as we learn, as we rest, as we open our hands and hold them out to the people who need us to apologize, to accompany, to pray, to join, to create. As we learn to actually trust. As we choose to see beauty amidst the brokenness, to search for gifts are that are there but harder, lately, to find.
An artist I admire recently said, "we miss the beauty of maturing when we don't evolve as artists" (or humans, I would add.) This is everything, I think. We miss the beauty of maturing when we don't allow ourselves to be different, when we are too stubborn to open ourselves to the possibility that we are new, constantly learning as we grow. The skin we have outgrown lays like the papery shell of a snake, slithered out of and discarded on the path behind us.
"It is easy to lose/ this tenderly unfolding moment."
The cells of our body die and are reborn hundreds of times, our bodies in constant practice of the concept our brains struggle to comprehend. As a woman of faith, I believe that I am birthed again, every day as I grow with Jesus, a journey of mind and heart and soul and body refined into something more like Jesus and less like who Liar wants me to become.
The instrument in your hands sounds different when your feet go from dangling off the bench, to touching the pedals, to learning to use them. The words mean something different when you have life enough to inform them.
It is hard to release what was, what has been, for the sake of what is in front of me, for the woman I am growing into.
It is painful. It is terrifying. It is private. It is natural. It is beautiful.
It is the end of an imperfect world, and the beginning of another.
And perhaps, best of all, it is hope.
Hope in the mystery of the kingdom come. That one day, the world will fall away, the labor will cease, the new world birthed. I don't have all the answers, but I know that in the end, the real end, there will no longer be any darkness, nor will there be any more pain. As the musician sang this morning, "this is not okay, so I know this is not, this is not the end." The mystery of a world better than this one, untainted by lies, a place where "dawn is heralded by bells," still sings through the heartbreak, through the tears, through the death. It is the song our heart is singing, remembering a garden we have never been to but know is coming again.
Until then, my breath is tight in my chest, my hands shake, the ache more than usual. Growth spurts of the spirit, of the mind, of the season, one to the next. The fall from the tree, golden, the soft push of the bud, the opening, the stretch, the fall again, as the tree of my body-- permission unequivocally granted-- grows taller, and stronger, and somehow, lighter for it.
-alyssa
p.s. I included a few of my own poems around these themes, one up now, some coming soon, under the poetry tab on the top bar. Thank you for reading dear ones, as always. Hang in there. Feel free to comment if you so choose!