Tanagra

I can breathe.  Aaaaahhhhhhhhhhh....  There is still a hint of pain, but all in all, I can breathe without wincing.  I can also write.  It's not even 8am on this Monday morning and my writing - rough drafts, fragments of paragraphs, great books of quotes and scribbles on paper - are all before me.  Today is the day that I will finish the rough draft of the manuscript and send it in for the workshop in July.  You all with me on this? 

Yesterday, I made it to church, trekked through the dreaded grocery store and then spent the rest of the day horizontal, and unfortunately I wasn't positioned in that way for fun, but rather because I was so tired and worn out that I couldn't do much but work the remote control on the tv.  I suffered through endless weird movies, snippets of comedians and then fell into the chick flicks that in the past ten years I failed to watch.  Bored.

To tears.

I felt sorry for myself.  The tears came due to the sickness, the isolation and the feeling that I stepped into another rut, unnerving me and the transformation I embarked upon so long ago.

As happens to me, a poem came to mind.  This one written by Rainer Maria Rilke entitle Tanagra.  This poem talks of transformation through the hands of a woman kneading and forming clay from the earth - using that which is in front of her to make something.  (At least that's my interpretation).  As I stood outside on the back deck and looked at the horizon, realizing the reality of the tears for what they were (nothing more than sickness and exhaustion), I did a full circle and looked around.  I looked at  my house, my deck furniture, my garden, my dogs playing, the kids play yard and took as deep of a breath I could take without wincing, and silently recited the poem.

Tanagra

A bit of baked earth,
baked as by a mighty sun.
As if the gesture
that a girl's hand makes
had suddenly remained:
without reaching for anything,
leading from its feeling
toward no object,
only touching itself
like a hand raised to a chin.

We lift and we keep turning
the same few figures;
we can almost understand
why they don't perish, --
but we're meant only
more deeply and wonderingly
to cling to what once was
and smile:  a bit more clearly
perhaps than a year before.

I'm a clinger, I suppose.  Yet, my grasp is pretty weak because there is a constant revolution of the objects I grasp.  The standard staples remain (friends, family, truth, God), yet the illusions are constantly turning and transforming.  I cling to those illusions.  Over time however, the reality of what they truly are allows me to smile more broadly.  And breathing it all in really, really helps.