pull up a chair

my hair is gray. my left shoulder is frozen. my right middle finger locks most mornings. and half of one of my lungs is no longer. 

there’s more (darn that paralyzed vocal cord), but the dirge needn’t drone on. the point is i’ve been quarried by time. which is close to the way annie dillard, my polestar and patron saint of seeing, put it in a passage i read –– and couldn’t forget –– this week. 

on page 238 of pilgrim at tinker creek, my bible of the woods, annie D. turns her otherworldly attentions to living creatures in various states of disarray: spiders with only six or seven of eight species-imperative legs; grasshoppers missing antennae; butterflies whose wings are torn; a swallowtailed sparrow minus its tail. and, yet, and yet, they creep and leap and flutter and glide on anyway. nature is not daunted by its disassembling. 

nor should we be. 

when it comes to us humans –– the species with the power to wonder, to question, to connect the occasional dots –– each quarrying carries its own volume, its own mysteries and humilities and sometimes epiphanies. each nick or chink in the armament of flesh and sinew and bone both takes us down a notch, and, if we’re paying soulful attention, points us closer to our soul, to that essence that bellows our being.

dillard writes thusly:

I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too. I am not washed and beautiful, in control of a shining world in which everything fits, but instead am wandering awed about on a splintered wreck I’ve come to care for, whose gnawed trees breathe a delicate air, whose bloodied and scarred creatures are my dearest companions, and whose beauty beats and shines not in its imperfections but overwhelmingly in spite of them, under the wind-rent clouds, upstream and down.

she got me to thinking about the beauty in brokenness. in disrepair. in all the parts of me that no longer follow instructions. 

and then four pages in, annie lands on the phrase that’s entranced me all week. she wonders aloud if, rather than somehow thinking it our birthright to come into existence “with the spangling marks of a grace like beauty rained down from eternity,” we might be wiser to realize we’re most whole “with the botched assaults and quarryings of time?”

“we are all of us clocks,” she goes on, quoting british astrophysicist arthur stanley eddington, who described us as clocks “whose faces tell the passing years.”

there, in those time-etched crowsfeet and the lines that furrow our brow, lie some of our deepest wisdoms. and most hard-earned beauties. that is, if you, like me, consider it a dazzling thing to have tucked into your brain files those rare few ideas whose staying power drives your every step thereafter. 

i’ve been in hospitals more times than i can count, have sat with eyes squeezed shut as someone drew needle and thread through my torn flesh, have felt the warm ooze of plaster cast being swaddled round my broken wrist. and each and every time, the wounds have left me more awake to life’s unscripted, oft-unspoken ponderings. (except maybe not the time when i made like peter pan, and flew off a garage roof when a rope swing escaped my grasp.) each and every time, we emerge keener to the pains –– and wonders –– of the world.

the most lasting empathies are forged in ERs and aftermaths.

and think about this: might you tally the innumerable times you’ve broken into smile, or squinched your eyes in irrepressible delight, to earn yourselves those hieroglyphs that now stand testament to your life’s-long accumulation of joy, or the hours you bent in deep concentration. or worried for the someones you love.

such are the quarryings of time. they inch us toward our holiest core.

it’s an excavation i’d not surrender.

now in my seventh decade (egad, that sounds sooooo old), i’ve been reminded time and again that none of this is a given. and we are breakable vessels nearly every time. and yet, without the botched assaults and the quarryings, from whence would come our vast acquired wisdoms? 

how would i know how precious each birthday candle is if i’d not wondered “will there ever be another?” how would i know the utterly-taken-for-granted gift of seamlessly sliding an arm down a sleeve if i’d not done so yelping the whole while?

doesn’t our brokenness bring us the pricelessness of knowing how deeply perishable we are? and how we’d best get on with what we know to be those few defining pursuits: whatever is the thumbprint we aim to leave behind on the life and lives we’ve loved? 

aren’t our depths — even the impossible-to-ask-aloud parts –– the prize that comes via our frayed and nibbled selves? 

none of us asked for nor expected the choreography of our lives. but with each and every quarrying there’s come an unintended plus. even if it took awhile to make itself apparent. 

all of which brings me roundabout to this prayer for beauty in the mundane. beauty in the brokenness is another prayer for which i pray. but first, this from writer and poet Cole Arthur Riley*’s breathtaking book Black Liturgies, in which she prays for our capacity to hold together the extraordinary and the ordinary:

God of every beautiful thing,

Make us people of wonder. Show us how to hold on to nuance and vision when our souls become addicted to pain, to the unlovely. It is far easier to see the gloom and decay; so often it sings a louder song. Attune our hearts to the good still stirring in our midst, not that we would give ourselves to toxic positivity or neglect the pain of the world, but that we would be people capable of existing in the tension. Grant us habits of sacred pause. Let us marvel not just at the grand or majestic, but beauty’s name etched into every ordinary moment. Let the mundane swell with a mystery that makes us breathe deeper still. And by this, may we be sustained and kept from despair. Amen.

cole arthur riley

*i am reading cole, stockpiling her wisdoms, as i begin to stock my larder for the lean months to come, when i sense the discord of the world beyond my quarter acre might otherwise knock me asunder. i intend to find a path toward the light. and i will, of course, bring it here.

how has time quarried you? what treasures did you find down deep beneath the dug-out parts?