To what degree after death will consciousness remember?
Will Earth feel old then?
Like when after decades, we drive home through the very streets and neighborhoods of our childhood to find lanes closed or widened, windows boarded and buildings removed. The colors and shapes of new constructions replace what we once experienced in a single frame of space, where we did breathe and speak and laugh.
But it is ours no longer; we are without effect, at a strange and lonely distance.
One spring afternoon when I was in sixth grade a boy literally dropped dead on the schoolyard during recess. Though he had a congenital heart problem, none of the students knew. A few months before during the Christmas season he had brought a gift to school for me. I was shy and not yet interested in boys and didn’t really know what the gift meant so I had a teacher quietly return it.
Instead she must have given it to his older sister who came to me very distraught. She didn’t want her brother’s feelings hurt and took pains to explain that he wasn’t trying to be a boyfriend; he just thought I was nice and wanted to give me something.
So I accepted the most beautiful box of stationary I have ever owned. The pages were full notebook size with blue and purple mountains in the background. Gazing upon the scene an elegant lady with a long flowing dress held her pen in the air as if in thought.
Our class was asked to sing “I Am the Bread of Life” at the boy’s funeral. Somehow they transported all 20 of us.
I am the bread of life
He who comes to me shall not hunger
He who believes in me shall not thirst
No one can come to me
Unless the Father draws him
And I will raise him up
On the last day
A friend recently brought this poem by D. H. Lawrence to my attention, “The Enkindled Spring.” A total of only 12 lines and yet a whole essay could be written in discussion. Like
*The irony of using hot, consuming imagery to describe something refreshing and regenerative.
*Feeling belittled within the power of the universe.
*Shadows versus reflections in Plato’s Cave.
*The ramifications of what is feeding or supplying them.
*Determined or Free.
I offer in answer,
a single brushstroke of blue in Vermeer’s girl
a solitary rock contour beneath the waterfall
silence beyond the air of one retreating note
Winter months are ones for searching, for digging up questions carefully stored to feed on during languid snow-filled hours. I have listened for the prodding; waited by the still, cold morning; slept between volumes of pages. In voices preserved, they have unashamedly examined my very uncertainties.
I am grateful.
But now I feel again the Bloodroot pressing through.
It is time, then, to place these stacks of verse and prose—their waves of philosophies and theologies—back on the farthest shelf. For there is air to breathe and
Living.
