The bridge that is paradox

It seems like a paradox exists between hope and change.  Actually, it appears more like a rope bridge between the two – linked by cross pieces and knotted ropes holding it all together.  The connection strong but over a tenuous territory. Maybe it’s about hope and chance and luck has everything to do with it.  This is what an old friend told me once.  She is my mentor too.  So I listen.

I imagine walking across this bridge as I would an Adirondack path.  Danger in each vibration and all that holds me to the world is a tenuous connection between rope and rock. Now I’m thinking, “What is a paradox after all?  A dock on either side of the abyss.”  Nothing in the middle making sense but when you come from one side to the other, how right, if unconsidered before.  What is a paradox?  A new partner, an unexpected guest, a friend’s revelation, a new friend after a personal holocaust when a moment before, it would seem, nothing would grow, as if salt on the ground at Nineveh? For all I know Nineveh is now an orchard where oranges bright as dice pulse pectin through their thick skin.  Oranges turn their colors in the night.  Imagine the desert illuminated by these juicy globes.  Who would have thought such sweet light would cast shadows on these wretched plains?

In the crevasse between left brain and right you’ll find the jump, the spilt milk of synapses, the positive charge of hope connecting through the gray matter, the knotted rope bridges within our skulls, to the other side, where the negatively charged chance waits; pausing at the edge, a hopeful caesura, which is the poet’s way of saying, “Stop – but don’t, stop.”

When Lynn was little, she was certain, as she came upon an abandoned lot surrounded by a metal fence in the Bronx, that she had discovered the Iron Curtain.  She also moved towards the wall when in bed to leave room for God, who was probably very tired and needed a place to rest his head.  And, she once told me about the time she ran home from school to check the oven to make sure God wasn’t dead because she was told that day that God was everywhere. Decades later, her stories give me hope in innocence; faith in what freedom from prejudice can bring – compassion, caring, simple worries about mighty beings.  Hope often seems tenuous when we ache for the tangible. The other night I felt my mother’s hands in mine.  It was completely unexpected.

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