This is a Great Day

What a gorgeous day.  Dawning so bright, so bright.  Today I pulled the curtains, took a shower, cut my hair, made biscuits, peered at Brittany’s lustrous ring, finally vanquished the confused tomatoes, tore up the nasty old vines next to my back porch, and planted my birthday-present bulbs (Alpine Bells, Dainty Dutch irises and Angelique tulips) (thanks, Mom and Dad) in the tomato beds and in the bed next to the Dear Spot.  THEN!  I studied for the GRE, making lists of important points and vocabulary words, and feeling the chills of excitement.  I like taking standardized tests, not because I’m a minion of the machine, but just because I’ve learned how to do it.  And I feel like I just want to take the practice test NOW.

By the way, does anyone know which phrase refers to the act of pulling a curtain aside to let in light: “pull the curtain” or “draw the curtain”?  I’ve always been confused about this, and now that I’m taking the GRE — well!

I’ve been thinking a lot about the future, of course.  As I always do.  Sometimes I think it is terrible, contains monsters, or death and decay, sometimes I think it is full of warmth and light.  The latter lived mostly in high school … the former is living mostly these days.  I drove to Marshall’s parents’ house with him last night, as his grandmother was in from Phoenix and all the Knoxville family was coming over for dinner, and felt like I was hurtling into space.  I wasn’t sure anything was going to be ok.  I know this is normal for people in my position, but even normal things are sometimes horrible.  I’m coming back to a kind of equilibrium today, today all full of a kind of peace I didn’t even think to ask for.  The kind I ought to have gotten up in the middle of the night to pray for, before I got.

I’m getting further and further from the fear of love, too.  I was thinking about this this morning, how it’s not dangerous to love, it’s just dangerous to live more with yourself than with God.  Everything that happens when you love someone has the potential to become beautiful, if you’re patient.  I want to put a Rilke quote up here about patience and love and living.  I would someday like to have become a patient person.

I’m getting ready to put together a portfolio of poems.  If anybody wants to help me sift & proofread, let me know.

Three Long Paragraphs Which I Would Attach Except That I do Have a Sense of Propriety

I woke up this morning to sun & muffled birdsong, which is normal except that it’s been raining and grey for days and days, out here.  I felt so relaxed and wondered why, since I’ve been anxious about work and money and relationships and everything else every morning for a long time.  Turns out my 7:54 a.m. alarm didn’t go off so I had slept till 9:45, maybe since I had just taken a shower at midnight and was sleeping on these extremely soft sheets I just got washed.  Maybe also the vitamin D sifting through the shingles and attic rafters, and having been in Nashville over the weekend with such dear friends, such gifted people, such gifts.  I forget how much I’m loved, a lot.  I forget how much I love a lot, too.  Not today, though, with so much sun and piercing birdsong, with me getting up with hair pinned up, with tea in one hand and watering can in the other, watering the three baby Rutgers tomatoes, the big new rosemary, the basil and echinacea shoots, the Ox-Heart and cayenne seeds, waiting for their first big push.

And today I found two quotes from Lewis’ The Weight of Glory that reminded me of the significance of my desires, how they are more important that many things I devote brain-space to.  One is: “Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak.”  I hefted my big wooden chair with purple kusson onto my tiny romantic back porch to do this, to read my desires from the sermon on the mount, seeing the tall grass and beating greens all waving, with my desires.  Trees taking over the backyard, opening leaves like a hundred thousand ladies’ fans over a hundred thousand ladies’ faces.  I need significance to keep me alive: nothing else can do that well enough.  Hearing someone tell me I’m beautiful, that my eyes aren’t enough seen, twists something in me and pure wonder’s wrung out but more than this I need words from God, who invests with meaning.  I feel tall, I feel strong, I feel the seam on my stomach and feel like I can meet things as they’re coming, like I can meet anything or anyone, go anywhere … and it’s so hard to see no entrances anywhere, right now.  I’m sitting on my porch underneath those thousands of opened fans wanting Christ to be near enough.

I read something else this morning about the Holy Spirit, the Walker-Alongside, the witness of Christ, paraclete etc., that Christ didn’t leave taking everyone with Him because for fuck’s sake shouldn’t history be over by now … He left and sent back this holy ghost to walk with us, which ought to be a sign to us that life, the walking of it, the length, is holy.  The interminableness of it must somehow be holy.  I’ve heard so many people say this and I’m trying to work it out for myself this morning, in my freckled skin, behind my hazel eyes, on my wooden back porch.  I’ve been in awe of the Beatitudes for weeks and have been thinking and saying the words like Billy Collins was saying the haiku about the moth and the temple bell.  The merciful, the mourning, the meek, those who hunger & thirst for righteousness which I somehow do even though I don’t say ‘righteous’ to myself, ever; these are promised their desires, and are promised time of absence of their desires.  It is incredible to be honored while mourning with a promise of comfort.  Incredible to be recognized as hungry and thirsty with a promise of being filled.  I’ve seen how much more profound comfort is as it comes slowly, by walking interminably, walking in silence, walking with God whom I’ve hardly begun to understand.  Persevering can’t be purposeless, then, and must therefore be purposeful.  I must be signing on to a Purpose, by persevering.  This means somehow so much to me this morning.