(Day 16 of this year’s Advent series. Yesterday’s piece was about eye games; today we consider lighting rods.)
Advent-Struck
Star and flower, wood and wave
Smoke of peat or grassland
Cracked with flame –
Each of these, carbon rare,
Fruit that bears your Tree
And bound by name –
By holy lightning framed,
Struck by an Advent:
If they know change,
How much more transformed we?
Changes grave,
Towards and past,
Voices split by sky
Or sky-spilt harmony:
This world moved
Each second of
Eternity.
Five days a week, I walk to and from work. My jobs are on two different routes, but the distance to each is roughly the same.
This gives me plenty of time to take in the world – sort of.
You see, when I walk I’m constantly in motion. I have yet to find a time that is “too early” to leave, shall we say.
And yet sometimes the glimpse of something – light or leaves, a dead frog, a playing card face up on the sidewalk – or a single oblong cloud hitting the moon; will bring a split-second of stillness so intense that it fractures the rest of my day.
But I can never stay. The rules of my morning commute are that I have to keep walking.
Have you ever tried to walk and pay attention… at the same time?
(It’s definitely cheating if you think you can just pay attention to walking. I’m sure people would already do that if it worked.)
Some things are too important not to see. Especially when they’re the things that no one sees.
Dead frogs and cats and torn-up book pages and perfect pieces of glass, for example. Cicada shells, bird wings, water gushing up from the road, a hole in the sidewalk.
(Alright: those last two I did in fact call about. Someone else did need to see them.)
Over and through all of this, it seems the act of watching, of having been struck by those split seconds of weird or gorgeous or grotesque, is incredibly important. Not “an answer”, but a part of something: an act of witness. Or perhaps – a volunteer, temporary lightning rod: to ground a life or death or displacement.
Advent crystallizes the act of paying attention, as question marks are wont to do.
And by paying attention, the one thing that becomes clear is that it is never enough. Never enough to ground the moment. And never enough attention for what that split-second is worth.
Skeleton At The Feast 