Tuesday, November 25, 2014
Becoming Yes
I had a sense as the moose disappeared into shadows that we had informed one another, in the way that water fills a mug, or starlight my cupped palm. One struggles at times to see any imperfection at all anymore. Cutting bittersweet where the yard falls away, adjusting the oven so the the bread will crisp just so. A world of coffee will not long sustain me, nor do I dream anymore of anything frightening. Syllables precede us, lighting the way, exactly as Roland Barthes suggested. Or was it Gertrude Stein? Well, someone pointed to a window, someone said "here's how it opens." And does it matter now, being no longer on either side of but rather in the bourn? Its eternal beneficent flow? He said to me a long time ago, when he knew - but I was yet learning - that I had it, what do you want to do with it? And now this: sentence after sentence becoming yes. Yes.
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I don't understand why, but the phrase "becoming yes. Yes" stirs me, like "yes" is yearning to break out from inside me. Or for me to say it, and mean it, without any reservations...
ReplyDeleteYesterday morning I read this in a book I happened upon in the A.R.E. library (one woman sharing her mother's death):
ReplyDelete"Listening to her breath, as usual in the night,
It turned out to be her last night in this lifetime,
her breath changed totally
just from no to yes.
From this heavy, anxious `no, no' and all her sorrows,
her worrying and her feelings of guilt and all this incredible
resistance, which was with her for nearly all her life,
she turned to yes.
Yes.
And, then, last night I read your two most recent offerings. And thought, how remarkable and lovely the river that flows through it all...
That is lovely writing . . . and yes is the penultimate syllable in a way . . . perhaps the sound of the river itself . . .
ReplyDeleteYes! I feel the same way, or did, in writing it - the sense that yes is what needs to be uttered - sung from the mountain - and this utterance entails a liberation, a letting go that must be entire - total - with nothing held back . . . Thank you, Hazel . . .
ReplyDeleteEverything fits together, doesn't it? I read your piece on Tuesday morning, Sean, and replied. The same day my husband's mother died. She went peacefully, just a change in her breathing. That night he wrote a poem about her, saying how at the end there was no more pain or fear, only acceptance.
ReplyDeleteI feel so connected. Thank you both.
Hazel.
Thank you, Hazel . . . it does all fit together, and we are in it together, and what else could we ask for?
ReplyDelete