Sometimes there is grace, inexplicable grace.

from mosaic (4) by freda karpf

The loneliest place she had felt within her being was desire not met. There were times she would wish for a new sense of desire. She would ride it like a wave, stretch her arms out until she could catch the momentum and lift her head out of the water, then pull her arms to her sides in one motion and fly to shore.  She had been played too often by her passion. She felt sorry for the time wasted. But she was right there one night with her friend in Provincetown, consoling all the stray men that feared they were too fat, too ugly, too anything for the men they desired. Whether desire had left her or the women she desired, was she now free to find beauty? 

~

     She returned from the Pink Tea Cup to her brother’s hospice room. For the first time in her life her brother held his life partner’s hands in front of her. They were together thirty years. A nurse came into the room and they quietly slid their hands apart. He might not have felt how that hurt but she did. 

~

     The world is a strange and wondrous place.  Sometimes there is grace, inexplicable grace.  The blood in our veins a sister to the rivers and our eyes a mirror for the sky.  Have we burned our bridge to the inside land?  Is this what poets try to mend?  Melville called it the “insular Tahiti.”  We follow trails even if we don’t know it.  Some do it through an interior passage and some, like Claire will go onto trails. Ask Claire which parks she’s been to.  ‘Have you gone to this one?’  ‘Yeah, I’ve been there a few times.’  ‘That one?’  She looks down.  She smiles. You would not believe how many times she’s been to that one. She knows the woods.  She’s thinking, they know her too.  We won’t speak for the woods. Within her being the fold of reason’s attention is slipped through the opening in the tree cover, the underside of reality. It’s just life, teeming with incomprehensible energy. 

~

     Sometimes, without looking, you find a birds’ nest.  Wisdom has us collect things. We don’t know why. If it is a natural thing it is a way for us to connect with the world that is not manipulated.  Are we guided by the animal still faintly alive in us? Claire collects birds’ nests.  Mrs. Scattergood might wish for the secrecy of the egg.  Up in the trees close to the sky, the world of becoming.  The eggs direct from the fecund fertile darkness of yin. Encased in the yin night.  It would almost be insane not to want to collect birds’ nests.

     Wisdom is like water; seeks its own level beyond the consciousness we know, beyond the scope of language. Most is always unspoken and some comes in a language we don’t know. “My mother’s first language was Yiddish and mine,” Mrs. Scattergood followed, “was the ocean.”  Even as Mrs. Scattergood was living her life in Newark she was waiting for the time she could go down the shore. Years later, missing her mother, she would write the River Lena, for if her mother was not named after the river, surely the river, was a metaphor for the connection she felt to her – flowing when she was alive, and though frozen in the winter since her death, a road she could travel on to be with her.

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Except from riding the waves:  a tale about being home in the world by freda karpf