Written in the Wind

When an airplane’s engines fail, it is not the end of the flight. Airplanes don’t fall out of the sky like stones. They glide on, the enormous multi-engined passenger jets, for thirty, forty-five minutes, only to smash themselves up when they attempt a landing. The passengers don’t notice a thing.

From The Reader by Bernhard Schlink

**********

Dear Alex,

Holidays are hefty with hurts. Winter grey softens the shards of visible truth. Beauty booms from a plenitude of breakage.

I am writing in a season of ineffable hope - ties twinkling, toes tangoing. Lights up, lipsticks on, engine thriving. It is not the end of a flight. We’re just jazzing towards the New Year.

Last week on my way to work, I heard the leaf blower before seeing him bright in his orange vest and ear muffs. He paused to yield to bypassers like me on campus ground, gliding on, his enormously roaring backpack of engine on hold for thirty, forty-five seconds, only to be cranked up again as folks veered off. People didn’t notice a thing.

Strangely this scene spoke to me in verse. I am not a poet but here we go:

    Wind Maker

    The leaf blower makes wind
    visible in wisps of leaves
    alive from their lively wilting.

    I watch him sweep
    memories off curb -
    a swipe so swift,
    the year tears in flakes.

     Wind makes reason
    howl in den of throat.

A few friends of hurt have come to me in this windy month. I want to be a reader.

Yours, Kate

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Dear Kate,

People start to speak honest not until they're quite dead.  It is not for the lack of sincere effort: the language is just not available before we've joined the lineup.

That makes most of what is written and spoken by mankind rather clumsy--but not unworthy of attention, if we know to read is to read between the lines and stare at blank spaces.  Like watching movie, if not for a "persistence of vision," we are literally staring at blank wall.

Listen to the dying ones.  Those with nothing to lose have too much in their canned sales spiel that needs to be lidded on, and we owe ourselves and the world a duty to resist the usefulness of an illusion.

“What you must realize, what you must even come to praise, is the fact that there is no right way that is going to become apparent to you once and for all. The most blinding illumination that strikes and perhaps radically changes your life will be so attenuated and obscured by doubts and dailiness that you may one day come to suspect the truth of that moment at all. The calling that seemed so clear will be lost in echoes of questionings and indecision; the church that seemed to save you will fester with egos, complacencies, banalities; the deepest love of your life will work itself like a thorn in your heart until all you can think of is plucking it out. Wisdom is accepting the truth of this. Courage is persisting with life in spite of it. And faith is finding yourself, in the deepest part of your soul, in the very heart of who you are, moved to praise it.”

Yours, Alex