morethanenoughtruth

It had been a long and lovely summer, living at the widow Shaw’s home down the hall from Daddy and taking voice lessons from Madge Weeks.  She drove every week from her home in Darien all the way to Westport just to help me improve my vocal performance.  Life was good.

Juliette Shaw had two daughters, Carolyn who was my age, and Sharon a couple of years older.  Sharon of course got a room of her own, and I split a bunk bed with Carolyn.  The three of us didn’t get to be anywhere near close because I was always studying or practicing, while the Shaw girls were off socializing with friends.  All this was possible because of Daddy’s ability to project a need to be rescued by wealthy women.  Yes, it was complicated.

Then my idyll suddenly took a turn.  One day as I was vocalizing arpeggios for Mrs. Weeks, Daddy stuck his head in the door to the music hall.  He was just passing through on his way to work.

“Got a minute?” Mrs. Weeks asked.  “Want to hear how well your daughter is doing?”

He hadn’t thought to be caught up in such a time devastating complexity, but agreed to listen.

Mrs. Weeks began her accompaniment to Gounod’s Ave Maria, and taking a shallow panicky breath, I began to sing.  How well did I render the piece?  I don’t really know.  I got through it without stopping or running from the room in terror.  When the last lovely piano note hung as an echo in the room, we looked around to see what Daddy thought.  He was gone.

Madge Weeks set her jaw and slid off the piano bench.  She marched across the room into the hallway and located my Dad.  He was scrutinizing the paintings that graced the Widow Shaw’s entryway, and seemed mildly startled to see my teacher.

“Did you hear Dorothy sing?” she asked—a fair question.

“Yes,” he assured her, clearing his throat.  “Er—I was just admiring Juliette’s new acquisitions.  The Gounod sounded fine.”  More throat clearing.  “But now I’ve got to get on the road.”

I was privy to that exchange because Mrs. Weeks came back to the piano and shared her parent/teacher frustration with me.  According to her, it was common for parents to behave that way.  “Don’t feel bad,” she commiserated, “He’s got a lot on his mind.”

My Dad and I spent a lifetime making excuses for each other.  We did a spectacular job of reciprocal disappointment.

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Lord, you have touched me,                  
And you have known me.
You are there when I sleep,
Still there as I rise.
You understand my thoughts.
You light the turnings of my path
And speak meaning to my days.

No word slips from my tongue
That you first have not heard.
You challenge me on every side.
Your hand is laid upon me.
Such intimacy confounds.
It is more than I can bear.

Where can I hide from your spirit?
Where can I flee from your being?
If I scale the vault of Heaven,
You are waiting for me there.
If I turn spitted over coals in Sheol,
Your blessing cools
And soothes my brow.

If I soar pink and purple
On gilded wings of dawn
Or sink with groans and bubbles
To the ink black
Bosom of the sea,
Even there your hand reaches for me
And draws me to your way.

If I drown in darkness,
You fill me with the light
That darkness cannot hide.
Night shines as though it were day.
Your darkness and your light
Are both the yin and the yang
Of my soul’s complex desire.

You called my soul to life
As I floated in the womb.
Thank you for this my form,
So exquisitely wrought.
My bones and my flesh,
My blood, all are yours,
Though made in mystery
And knit in pulse and blood.

You trace my geometry of form,
The secret alchemy it hides.
My formulae were writ upon your mind,
Encoded there before I ever was.
It was your dream that made me, God.
Can I be aught but good?

You who dare to ply such skill
To make this miracle of me,
Can you not arrest the grip of rage?
Silence voices taut with pain?
Heal the leper, lame and blind?
Guide the crazed back to sane mind?
Declare the Brotherhood of Man?

But must you do it all?
You’ve done your part.
The rest is up to human kind.
What shall we say to those
Who offer up your name in praise
But wander from your way,
Who chant your song from choir stall
But chase the beggar from the gate?

Look deep into my heart, O God.
Is selfishness my game,
Or is my promise really yours?
These hands you made for me,
This mind that toys with rhyme,
Can they ever learn to do your work,
Or are they only meant for mine?

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It was your dream that made me, God.
You called my soul to life
as I swam,
fluttering gills and twitching tail,
recapitulating the phylogeny
of the ancients, wet and
naked in my mother’s womb. 
My DNA spirals in your thought,
a twining universe of suns.
When I sleep I dream of you,
grasping tangles of raw force
that throb and pulse,
energy that summons thunder
to the palms of your hands
and sends it cavorting
out across the darkling plain.
I hear you toast, “To Life!”
as your face incandesces
the radiance of a million suns,
and you hurl nascent galaxies
out beyond the swirls of yearning
that grip the Milky Way. 

Then the darkness of the cave
replies, “To Death!” a blessing on
the gentle peace to come.
But that’s another day.

This day I live!  I breathe!  I recall
with thanks my Cambrian ancestor
exploring an ancient shore, its gills
reaching for air as it rides the tide up
a sandy beachhead.
Curious, it persists
and evolves at last
a better tool for tasting air,
pure free-wafting air,
not captive to watery depths,
but gasping to be freed
from its primal watery grave.

Eons skate the aching curve of time,
and gills become alveoli. 
Lungs are born to capture air.
My ancient uncles breathe,
and now do I.
Breathe deeply upright hairy biped
I have become.
Breathe and cry and shout!
Give voice to Bach, Mozart, and Beatles.
Oh Fortuna!  Carmina Burana
shouts of brave fortune
that gave us tools to sing with angels
and join the rowdy music of the spheres.

Daedalus tried to fly on air and fell,
but other winged phyla soared.
Air offers a multiplicity of uses.
Birds can sing and fly. 
That’s hardly fair.
When I return to spirit,
I will fly—and sing.

For now I sleep and dream and hope.
When morning comes
and dream gives way
to thought, wrought solid,
but leaving in its granite wake,
a cheerful crack of whimsy. 
From such splits in ancient truth,
spring-fed streams of fancy
feed the flow of thought at play,
a Holy Spirit prattling
even to the dreams of day.

See now, as morning dawns,
and shadows flee, I am newly thankful
for all God has created
and declared it “Good.”
His living eyes tear up with love
for all I am and ever hope to be.

Come spirit God,
inventor of all burbling blood,
and stalwart bone.
Join me in my paean to ecstasy. 
Sing with me in heavenly harmony,
as worlds implode
and galaxies are born
to spiral, gasp and die.
We scintillate in laughing arcs
of love and light and joy,
while time implodes,
and all that was and is
and may ever yet become
thread the needle eye of Now.

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Sitting at my friendly computer desk last night in my cozy flannel PJ’s, lining up lovely words into erudite phrases, I was lulled into a relaxed state of wellbeing.  Then something wiggled inside my right pajama leg.  I was up in half a flash.  It’s good the blinds were closed as I shrieked and tore off the entire bottom half of my sleepers.  I only stopped my frenzied jig when I spied the instigator of my terror, a big black cricket, creeping away to hide hopefully behind a white wicker wastebasket.

Why was I so afraid?

First: Things that wiggle don’t belong inside my pajamas.

Second: Things with exoskeletons are unnatural and meant to be observed from afar.

Third:  Things without any skeletons at all are weird and inspire a natural revulsion.

By deduction:  The more different a thing is from me, the more I am repelled by it.

It just may be the case that we are hard wired to fear the other.  Xenophobia is a feature of not just being human, but of being a sentient life form.  No wonder we assume racial differences to be perceptive demarcations.  But just because the big X is a natural feature of being a living creature, that doesn’t mean we should accept it as a fixed and irrevocable cognitive error.  We are intelligent.  We can undertake a fine tuning of our perceptions to make them more accurate and more loving.  We must try.

I can begin by acknowledging that it was actually a tiny black cricket—not a big one.  Why is it so easy to jump to the conclusion that scary black things are big?  Our subconscious always so readily connects for alliterative possibility, big black bugaboos vis-à-vis white wicker wastebaskets, easy to hide behind and restore hope, given their whiteness and their dainty thoughtful interlocked pattern of construct.  In my confrontation it was the cricket who demonstrated the enlightened intellect.  Bless him!  No doubt his perception of me was big, pink, and butt-ugly.

In retrospect, having calmed myself, I remember that this particular arthropod, so typically given to singing with gusto, was undertaking a studied silence while scaling the inner mystery of my pajama leg.  Perhaps it was because his music isn’t actually song.  It is more accurately an exuberant scritch-scritching between hinged parts of his scary exoskeleton.  Those induced vibrations author the happy reverberation we enjoy as cricket song.  Soft cotton flannel no doubt had a damping effect on the acoustics of his music.  Empathy is always a good approach to rivalry, whether inter- or intra-species.  How frustrating it must have been for his urge to expression to be muffled by my fusty old flannel.  When you gotta scratch you gotta scratch. When you gotta’ sing, you gotta’ sing.

Finally, I need to make the acquaintance of the individual cricket before making unwarranted conclusions about his character, motives, and personal integrity.  He might have actually been Jiminy Cricket, of Disney fame, personifying high conscience in the physiognomy of a bug.

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