Advent, Day 3: Blessed Are Those/Our Lady Of The Morning

(Day 3 of this year’s Advent series. Yesterday’s piece was about time, beasts, and problem children; today we consider stillness vs. silence vs. surveillance.)

As previously noted, these pieces were written in 2022 as an Advent surprise for my parents. The original piece for today – Blessed Are Those Who Walk Out In Stillness – was also shared on this blog at that time.

Re-reading it now, I note that my understanding has – changed. Obviously I’m deeply interested in not just re-sharing something which some of you (maybe?) have already read; but the nice thing about three years’ passage is that I can invent completely new meanings out of things past-me took pains to set down precisely(ish).

Let us briefly tangent away to context-land. On the mornings when writing occurs, I enact a three-step plan. Step A: catch the 6:28 a.m. bus. Step B: walk 1.1 miles along a precise street in a precise neighborhood in East Austin. Step C: spend the rest of the day helping students in an academic lab and completely coincidentally, writing stuff in the down time. The only part of that which is currently important is Step B: walking. Most of the Advent pieces were thought up during Step B. So when I say:

Blessed are those
Who walk out in stillness – 
Who walk out
In the calm of the day
The early sun
Or afternoon’s scorched hum,
In the byways and alleys,
Shadows and lanes
Or the tracks’ farther lonely side.

What I probably mean is… it was a nice walk to work.

The really odd thing, though, is over the intervening years I somehow convinced myself the piece was actually about silence. “Blessed are those/who walk out in silence –”

Nice try, memory.

The first thing is: the street I walk along is not quiet. It’s not busy in the sense of “traffic” – in fact it is blessedly car-less except for a bus every 15 minutes, each direction – but it has: roosters, ducks, donkeys (the small urban farm); squirrels; the sounds of pecans hitting the ground, often just after the sounds of squirrels; dogs; mockingbirds; grackles (if you haven’t heard a grackle, imagine a rusty door hinge gaining sentience and turbo-powered vocal chords); and the high voices of school children and their caretakers, overlaying the deeper sounds of workers and diesel engines arriving early to the aforementioned farm, the tree nursery, road work, and intermittent home demolition/rebuilding projects.

The second thing is, the whole street (and broader neighborhood) is watched by Mary.

I’m not exaggerating. There’s a Mary in almost every yard. Sometimes painted blue and sometimes painted seashell pink or neon green. She shows up on porches, car dashboards, bird baths, upstairs windows, a church (obviously) that has two grottos each with their own Mary. I have this terribly uneasy feeling that there’s a duct tape line down the center of the churchyard demarcating territories in such a setup.

There is even, in my favorite yard, a small shrine. The shrine is about the size of a doghouse, neatly painted with contrasting trim and a shingled roof. It is fully furnished inside, with tiny glowing LED candles, and glassed over so that the shadow of blue can just be seen within.

The overall effect… is not one of surveillance. It’s more – a kind of consistent stillness that accepts and dances through all the movement and sound: not silence, but the counterpoint swell that lifts and carries along each part of the whole.

Well anyway. You may take that as literally or as metaphorically as you like. Enough to say I wrote a piece about it, a different morning.

Our Lady of The Morning

Our Lady of the Morning
Lives in twilight –
White walls, candle glow
Through spotted glass.

Against dark trees she flames 
Like mockingbird –
She trills like silhouette 
In topmost branch, 
Like gift of song on every
Throat’s behalf.

Where donkeys graze, and chickens 
Ask the earth – 
In mounded mould, tangled fence
And sectioned rounds 
Of tree trunk once so strong 
And home to squirrels. 

In the squash and in the seed
In the corn and in the corn
Tortilla, wrapped in foil
Gilt with grease. 

In the hand that gives,
Or holds the gate;
In the workman’s glove
Or child’s bag of books
On parent’s arm;

In the coffee’s scent
Of deepest wake;
Or oil burned
And spilled across
Each road and bridge.

She moves in these
She walks in these
She gifts us these
That we may know her
In the chapel yard’s 
Small holy dwell
Of bright blue paint.

Our Lady of the Morning 
Walks through darkness – 
From night’s far edge 
Towards night drawn down again.

She walks all day 
Beyond white walls, 
In any guise and place –

As candle glow grows back
Towards night-time’s grace.

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