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I just stumbled over an Innocence Mission interview re: their Birds of My Neighborhood release. My current love is the song on this album called “I Haven’t Seen This Day Before,” and here are Karen’s words on this song:
“‘We tried to have a child for many years, and there were things we felt we needed to express,’ she says. ‘When I was writing “I Haven’t Seen This Day Before,” I didn’t really think about the idea of recording it; I was just writing it. It was the first song I wrote after I became pregnant – and I was of course elated but also frightened because I had lost a child before and it was an overwhelming time. I really wanted to write about the newness and the possibilities of each day’” (Acoustic Guitar Magazine, June 2000).
An epiphany.
You walk in and out of storms, that’s all. There doesn’t seem to be a language for the present time, for today or for yesterday, or tomorrow.
I’m learning to talk about my college years, three or five years ago, and that rests on me like a weight, comforting, like the wrist tied to the end of a balloon. Of course, my mood swings, or these microbursts I keep entering and exiting, are about my frustration with not knowing how to understand the current time. The revelation is that today is unknowable because it’s not yet formed; it’s still forming. I listen to The Innocence Mission’s “I Haven’t Seen This Day Before” six hundred times in a row and cry my eyes out because it’s true, I don’t know what’s happening, because it’s not done happening. I’m so stormily at peace with this, so peacefully at storm.
My birthday enters the past, I leave it and enter the future. I’ve lived, as far as I know, 25 years.
My little sister opens her heart to me like a flower and I am struck inwardly, all my nerves and synapses vibrating with the blow, this surprise of joy. Haven’t I been living like the world didn’t hold surprises of joy anymore? My little brother is becoming a man and I am struck inwardly. For my birthday, Marshall’s mother gave me her first sewing machine, the one she sewed her wedding dress on, and I’m struck like a key, like a bell.
I discover that my smallest gestures and words, even the places I walk and my movements in secret are held in the mind of God. I discover that my solitary walks in childhood were watched, that my expressions are noticed even now, every word I write is read by God, every ache or shudder is seen, and read, by the watchful eye of God, and kept in the secret place, to be understood in a later time. I feel the truth of this.
The day after my birthday, I went to Cherokee Park and watched the sun move toward the horizon. The grass spread green and viral to the river, glistening like a beach in the Emerald City. I couldn’t believe that I was allowed to live, for how little I had to show for my 25 years. Scars. Fear. Some organized rows of books, some organized beds of flowers, some essays on gender theory and neo-formalism. Some poems, some gestures of kindness, some irreparable harm. I drove away in a daze, the benediction of the beauty of the world having such power to awaken hope. The beauty of the world corresponding directly to the beauty of God.
“If I could I would break into flower, if I could I would no longer be barren. [...] Oh mourning dove, we’ll go up to my roof. Oh mourning dove, we’ll go into the sky. This day is filling up my room, is coming through my door. Oh, I have not seen this day before.” from Birds of My Neighborhood
…having cave days again. includes being sick, reading a lot (a lot), listening to music, putting things in order. I wonder if making friends will ever be easy for me.
now, I’m housesitting, and the kitten is climbing the back of my rungback chair, then climbing my knee. you know, with claws! and I watched the day go by, processions of grim clouds and then sky, clouds, sky, rain, all the while remembering my love for the song, “Oh Do Not Fly Away,” Innocence Mission.
oh I love these still, open places. a gang of swallows prowls the backyard, nesting, swooping, nesting, swooping.
Karen Peris,
you spin threads of longing, long
threads of wist and wishes and leave them
in the paths of strangers,
drop them out of your window high
on the fifteenth floor or from
the car as you
are going by.
You worry that a thousand miles are needed,
that a thousand words are necessary,
a thousand gestures from the thousand
slenderest muscles,
but the nine hundred ninety-nine
meets your single mile,
single word, single gesture of your slender
finger, slender tongue.
I am here at the thousandth mile,
catching hold of your longing, long
thread of wist and the eternal
ache, I am here. I
can almost see you.
I’ve just emailed myself two recipes, chewy granola bars and a cauliflower and caramelized onion tart. The problem of breakfast and the photo of roasted cauliflower clinched it all.
At church today we saw Rex & Shaina’s baby, their new one, the one with eyelashes of spun gold. In Market Square today we saw Duke & Carry’s baby, who was grumbling at no-one in particular and then suddenly was smiling hugely at me. Babies, huh? And we talked about vasectomies a little, the impact of them. We talked about all kinds of things today, because today was the day we were going to have fun, do something adventurous. This adventure turned out to be small things, like church, mimosas downtown, walking and coffee, walking and sunlight, walking and shadow, sushi at Tomo. Talking while everything. I miss M when I don’t have quality time w/him for a while. Working so much is kind of lame, but if it necessarily creates sweet and mellow days like this, then so be it.
We’ll have to work like mules this week, so the weekend will be blessed, we hope. I hope, so so so much. I hope I can get my car fixed, pay taxes & bills, get a grant meeting scheduled, teach Goethe, clean houses and nanny and caretake (?), and … so on. Maybe that was all. But I hope the week is full of activity and purpose, that I hear from another school (but not another waiting list, geez, so far I’ve not been rejected outright but am on two waiting lists), that I see the sun, and can find a corner of a day to write a little. And then the weekend is here and we’re going to see a movie (Alice in Wonderland) and have brunch. I just made that up about brunch, but that would be so awesome. We could have that cauliflower tart.
Even if I have a breakdown tomorrow, today will still have existed.
lately about Peter, and how he dealt with Christ leaving. I’ve been having a still and silent couple of days, walking in and out of rooms like every one was a garden, and following sunlight like a leaf. I have so much to do but I’m only doing what I can, and not crying about the rest, which is normally what I do. Yesterday I bought two new tires and got a partial alignment. Good, that my Dad wants to take care of me, wants to drive away from his workplace to meet me and look at tires, wants to loan me enough to get tires with 40,000 miles on them. I got a kefir at the Co-op, and he got fig bars.
Stillness of days has to do with thinking, this about how I get cared-for, this about how rich I feel, being the owner of two new tires! Also with Innocence Mission, since I put on Christ is my Hope yesterday and haven’t taken it off. I take it to the car when I have to drive, bring it inside when I have to come inside. I realized (an aside) that “O Lord of Light” is a Gregorian chant. Of course, oh of course. Maybe someday I will meet the Perises on earth … otherwise, it will be after. The stillness also has to do with an empty house (wonder where my roommates are), and with reading Acts, thinking about Paul and Peter. How were things, just after Christ left? It seems that paradigms were being broken. Strange, that things would change so much … but only after He left. It’s like Him being there was so many years of people being incredulous, so many years of people standing there looking at the sky, wondering if they were dreaming. Sometimes you have to leave the presence of a miracle before you can understand it, or let your life be changed by it, I think. I’m still thinking.
a trip could be planned, a trip away, since the days are getting cooler and the trees are starting to change, only just starting. you have all these thoughts about getting away, how everyone else is getting away and even the birds are migrating. you see the geese, now, and I think those are starlings that are starting to fan out in huge flocks over fields, on and off phone lines, curving into boomerangs and brushing the mapletops, weaving, waving.
I was in college when I saw my first flock of cedar waxwings, the same semester Jonathan wrote a sonnet mentioning waxwings, the same semester I was editing Exordium and had a staff of six. these are things no one here knows, and I could fill a hot air balloon with everything and let it go and no one would know. because of this & things similar, I live in houses of words because I hope that things that are impossible to say can somehow be said. you have dreams of the wind blowing through your hair or the sun setting over something but my dreamworld is a place where the signifier leads inexorably to the signified and you understand what I mean to say. in all the webs between, the lines being restrung twice a week, I wish silently that a method can be found to tell you what I’m saying, or to be told what you are saying, the pith of it, the center of all the trebly-shifting variables, the place the real arrow is pointing.
the clouds; hills covered with trees; color gradients; the rise and fall of the shuddering cicada song like someone breathing, in sleep: not even nature is direct. it’s as if words don’t ease or further complicate things. it’s as if the spikes, the racemes, the panicles are not signifying any more or less particularly than my five hundred words. if the thing to be understood was a sign, less than a division of a word but covering in its single skin the whole of what you were trying to say, and if things were organized here such that leaves were never bipinnate and you were never torn between two opposing metaphors, would anything be better?
up late last night, watching The Curious Case of Benjamin Button; up late this morning, sleeping in till 9:50 a.m., the first time in weeks and weeks. after checking email and facebooking Barbara about flea medicine for Patrick I am drinking tea on the back porch, watching the vines climbing the pillars, thinking about how loving someone teaches you the peculiar language of their beauty, and also about my life, how I woke this morning feeling guilt and dread and asked the LORD to give me hope and purpose and he did. how I didn’t even remember that I’d asked for these until I finally got to the back porch with tea and John and read “whatever you ask in my name, that I will do,” and “if you ask anything in my name, I will do it” and “if you abide in me, and my words abide in you, you will ask what you desire, and it shall be done for you” (ch.s 14, 15). I wasn’t through-reading; I just stopped there and my eye fell on these like a skipping rock. I think I understand, and I have started asking for things.
if you could ask for whatever you desired (not “wanted,” this is a profound longing we’re discussing, here), and it was promised, what would you ask for? I discover that what I desire is not a job but a fulfilling work, and the ability to pay what I owe. I want my vocation to become my occupation, if not really bringing in money at least sitting in a place of honor at the table of my soul, at least brought out of the chimney it lives in and made a queen like it ought to be, like it will be someday. I want the room in my heart for flourishing new loves. I want forgiveness to clear away scar tissue and all my fear and other adhesions. I want to be able to close all the windows that are letting the wind blow through, scattering papers in eddies and curtains in tangled piles of curtains.
last night at Josh’s house, after hot dogs, beer and watermelon, post-prandial cigarettes, someone said that the sunset we were watching was the same sunset that’s been happening for five thousand years. this in an emotionless tone… this person could look at the mid-morning sky, huge blown cumulus islands with sharpened white edges and the sun crowning, and say the same, but this is new because this day has never existed before, never in five thousand years or ten billion has this day been seen before. never before has anyone lived this day.
you and I, we here, we’re meeting this day with as much honor as we care to give it, it having been given to us to honor us as little gods, walking around feeling defeated and like everything we have ever thought or felt has been thought and felt as many times as a baby has been born on this planet. this morning, having been called by the risen LORD to ask, having been given a day that no-one had seen before 12 a.m. this morning, I’m meeting my desires, meeting the day, meeting the LORD, where I am. which is an unimpressive place, except that it’s in today, which I have not seen before. I think it’s also possible / probable / certain that the woman I am today is a woman I have never been, before. as easily as I imagine that I’ve lived this day fifteen-hundred times already and will live it three thousand more times, I imagine I am the same person as I was last year. and that my habits, the hamster wheel of my disobedience & destructive coping mechanisms, is the same as it’s always been and will always be. not to be histrionic, but not only have I not lived this day before; I have not lived this day before. can I even understand what that means. well, I mean to try.
final thought from Kierkegaard: “So then, go with God to God, continually take that one step more, that single step that even you, who cannot move a limb, are still able to take; that single step, that even the prisoner, who has lost his freedom, even the one in chains, whose feet are not free, is still able to take: and you are committed to the Good. Nobody, not even the greatest that has ever lived, can do more than you” (Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing, 154).
Trying to find balance in life is essential. Finding balance = not as essential as trying. Because if you don’t try you almost certainly will not just trip over it one day, lying in your path, but if you try and never find it, well, there’s more balance there than one would think. Probably. I’m trying very hard today to balance my wanting to hang out (watch movies, have popcorn, have pie, have fried green tomatoes, sit around drinking and talking, etc., candlelight is involved here, as is jumping in the car and heading toward the mountains and the odd flea market) and my having to keep alive. To conserve candlewax, to not be burning the candle at both ends.
For some reason I feel like I want to blog about this, and at the same time am pretty positive that it’s not interesting to anyone but me, and not even me in six hours. If this is true, then I’ll erase this in six hours. I just keep checking my blog and seeing that comic. Which is hilarious and great, but not very expressive of myself as a soul, existing, currently. I need several things, my soul, right now: to sleep seven hours a night, possibly eight. To make time to read. To not eat out unless absolutely necessary; to eat in, out of my own kitchen cabinets and fridge. To start job-searching again, flurries of applications, a filed-down resume. To tie up my tomatoes. To work on journals (my own, Ashley’s friend’s, and two more for two other people). To be with God at the present time. To make bread, and to be out on my back porch often.
So many people are out of jobs. What’s going to happen? I’m almost at six months. I’ve not starved so far, though, and won’t. I just need courage, more of it, and rest. I can summon these I think. Now I’m going to make a couple of text blocks and listen to … Band of Horses? Or, who? Who should I listen to? No, it should be Innocence Mission, Small Planes. Yeah of course.
