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Odyssey

I want the spring again, but not this falling.

Or rather both, without the return: each season

Shows us not enough, birth ending

In death, hearts renewed and dried

And restless in the chill October—

Seeking in vain to be shattered

Finally

Into joy.

Feet wander under a cerulean sky, alone.

Vermillion hands caress the wind with whispers

Of some fierce and homely thing, so near

That our hearts break for proximity

But cannot remember. What is its name? Do we

Have names?

We cannot see behind the clouds, nor catch

The singing of the trees at dawn. Their leaves are

Drifting. Our hearts fall with them, fluttering

With crimson desire.

Will the wandering lead us home?

And who shall brave for us

The quiet winter

And who shall clothe these thunderings

With words

And who shall grace us

With fire

********************************

Advent

The old ways surrender

To the unity of snow,

Forgotten. This at last

Is the soul of their pattern.

What mystery troubles the air

With peace? What purity

Glints on the lamp-lit world

And makes it small?

Night is swaddled in stillness and stars,

And everything waits—without

The restlessness of summer,

Or the pang of autumn, or the sudden

Comfort of spring; and patience

Dances at midnight

With joy.

It is the heart of winter

The silent benediction

Soothing daffodils and dead leaves,

Birth and death and aching

Desire—

Silent waiting for a Coming,

Silent knowledge that it has already come,

And the second coming will justify

The schism of the seasons.

I am like a veritable Jack Bauer. ...except I haven't been saving America every ten minutes. Details.
Speaking of which. Tony. What are you doing, man. Don't do this to me. I thought you were on our side.
ANYWAY
I have been very pleased by things today. Here they are.
There were strawberries at dinner. Real, whole, ripe strawberries with delicious, serious chocolate dip stuff. Sooo delicious!
Dr. Freeh, my cheerful Italian English teacher, took us all the way down to the Arb for class today, and it was lovely.
The grass is getting very green and thick. Yay, spring! And there are daffodills coming out, and there were SUCH lovely clouds hustling by today. It was a little cool but after FINALLY turning my paper in I laid under a tree for about 20 minutes. Trees are so EXCITING from that angle! (I mean they are from every angle, but we are rather desensitized from the vertical position). They're so preposterously bristly, strange stiff living things that have shot out of the earth...and all of them have branches, little particular ones against the blue sky and the clouds. And pleasingly patterned bark sticking off at all angles. Things are so beautiful.
Pipe band was good tonight. We played some hard stuff and Iain was happy--those two don't often go together :). And every now and then I just get really pleased that I know how to play the bagpipes, because it seems like something that I should always want to do and never get to, but....I do. What are the chances.
Oh, and I got to go for a wee sunrise walk around 7 this morning, seems how I was awake...
I think the occasional all-nighter is good for one. At least the day of. I've been much more attentive to things just being--good. All the things that usually I'm too awake and busy to notice. There are so many small, beautiful things in this world.
So. I'm feeling a little giddy and in need of sleep, so I better take a whack at my Greek homework and then call it a night.
Exciting news though: Centralhallapalooza (big tent, student bands, blow-up obstacle courses and bouncy things, cotton candy, you know the sort of shindig I mean) is happening on Saturday and THERE IS GOING TO BE AN ELEPHANT. I DON'T KNOW WHY THERE IS GOING TO BE AN ELEPHANT. ONE DOES NOT QUESTION INEXPLICABLE ELEPHANTS. BUT WE CAN RIDE THE ELEPHANT. AND I'm VERY EXCITED! ^_^
 

I just walked back through one campus and it was possibly the most beautiful I have ever seen it. 3am, early April, and four inches of (still falling) wet, flaky snow that has clung to everything. Every twig, every branch, the bark and the lamps, everything—covered in inches of snow. Everything filled out, made larger, made new and mysterious; and for the first time I saw the lamps dotting campus for what they really are. They are the lights of faerie. They are not the dull orange lamps of the rest of the year; they are the bright eyes of another realm filling the alabaster world with their cheerful, cold, living glow. Trees and bushes bend beneath the weight of the snow, sometimes rustle beautifully in the wind, dropping chunks of their burden (silvae laborantes!); it is faerie. Campus is literally different tonight. There is reality out there, in the snow carefully clinging to every point of the eagles’ wings, and the shining seldom-revealed lights and the tall white enrobed trees; reality that only now and then—perhaps only today, only today out of all eternity—has shown itself to the mortal eyes of a few students, stumbling to their dorms through grace and wonder and falling snow.  
I wish you were all here to see it :)

A walk back from late night Latin studying, and a new world of fresh fluffy snow to walk through: half an hour's scribbling later, and here we are. Just thoughts, scattered and free as the snow though considerably less delicate and tragically less graceful. Perhaps I shall someday harmonize them into poetry. perhaps not.
*** 

The ways that had become familiar

Collide softly with the less known

Campus bisected and defined by circuitous paths

Becomes a mysterious unity of whiteness

Shapes usually large and imposing in the daily air

Shrink before the simple monstrosity of purity

 .

All thoughts are suspended, all daily life

(which should have this at its heart, which should

Through the paths remember the whole

And remember the waiting which our patterns

Are meant to enfold, to reveal) is swaddled in stillness

And everything waits: without the restlessness

Of summer twilight, without the vague dissatisfaction

Of autumn or the sudden comfort of spring, waits

And patience is indissoluble from joy 
 .

In the stillness, between the bleary awe of finals-weary students,

The snow angels cheerfully emblazoned by the more industrious, and

Cloudcover and covered paths and yellow lights of Fairie—

Silent waiting for a Coming, silent knowledge that it has already come

And the second fulfillment will justify the schism of the seasons
***
Joy and peace to all
And to all a good night...that 8am Latin final is looking less and less agreeable...

The world hangs gently

Between the stars’ bright eyes

And your dragon breath

On the winter air

Walk softly, lest you wake

Our Savior, coming now with the frost

Sparkling hard on the fall ground

(your heart too frosted, and beautiful

In its breaking, His breaking, and

Rising again)

Through these half-fallen leaves

And branches bare in the restless crisp

Of darkness, walk softly

(at the edges of things, where hope is sharp

And souls are sleeping);

Somewhere behind these trees,

Behind your soul—more bare than they—

One is moving with the deep thrill

Of winter wind

And trees leaf-fallen and fallen heart

Will birth to life again

I just got back from the ’08 VPA graduation.

It was weird…and inspiring.

Weird because it seems like yesterday that I was walking down that isle in cap and gown, looking at a fairly formless future and my heart breaking to say goodbye. And now another class has risen and walked and goes out into the future.

Inspiring, because it brought me back. Back to friends and teachers who really form a home for me. They are my roots in a way I have never realized. And also—and so importantly—back to the ideas that are just as much a home, but which I have allowed myself to forget. Veritas had high expectations of us, and Hillsdale does too; but I can get by without meeting them, and in many ways I have let myself do so. Striving for nobility and excellence for their own sakes, pondering Aristotle and Latin grammar because they are worth it, living the examined life because it is the only life worth living--It is at Veritas I learned to see the necessity of these things. It is at Veritas I learned to love these things, among teachers whose love of them was infectious and their expectations, inspiring. I was brought back to that basis today. I was reminded and sobered and encouraged. For the true, the good, and the beautiful are worth our eternal search--even if we search alone. And some of the best gifts of all (as I well know, as my own tears upon this day a year ago bear witness to) are the deep and powerful friendships formed between seekers after the truth.

So it was a good time. I rejoiced to see this class complete their time at Veritas, and I realized ever more deeply—as I shall, I think, through the years—just how much Veritas (its people and friendships and ideals) has taught me, how much it has formed me, how very much it still challenges and inspires me.

So congratulations, seniors; thank you, Veritas; and goodnight to all.

Current Mood:

thoughtful

Yesterday was warm (relatively speaking), the grass wet and fog wrapping the trees into one immense secret—or rather unfolding it. The trees are too large and obvious (as Chesterton would say) for our seeing, but when they wrap their terrible towering forms in mist, rearing up with dripping fingers, we catch for the first time a glimpse of what those trees really are. So fair, so unlikely, forms living in a slumber too Other for our knowing—we would say they were a product of faerie did they not exist impossibly before us; those trees would haunt our dreams if they did not already astonish our waking. It was the sort of day when elves might appear,--or trees; the sort of day that makes one want to tread softly and dart about in the furtive mist, a day when adventure is just beyond the next arboreal phantom.
*************************************************
Today it is 10 degrees, with a sharp wind plunging temperatures below zero. All is cold, and hard, and clean, taking a sort of fierce joy in clarity: the virginal barrenness of winter, beautiful in a sense foreign to our human paradigms. High up, clouds drift by in lazy mockery of the gusts and ice below; all is frozen and steely and subject to the furious rationality of the wind. Those tall clean trees, this weather sharp and hard as rock, yet without being bitter: all these things*are* reason, echoes perhaps of the cold and wistful beauty of the reason which is part of our nature, but which—as Virgil and Dante know—is not yet flowered into the End of man’s desire. Nay, that comes later—or rather that has come, that incomprehensible birth which allowed reason (like the trees) to burst into a life more full and terrible and joyous than the crystal pride of winter could ever give. The Fall made trees—and men—old, and with lives stripped bare of leaves and laughter men clung (as the trees still cling) to that last hard glimmer of God, the rationality which is man’s last one-sided sliver of imagio Dei; the best of men clung to that hard and tragic purity, and wept as Virgil did to find that winter and reason are truth, but truth without joy.

Yet joy comes in the morning. The irrational dawn which is the fulfillment and the vindication of all reason catches those branches and barren souls, and—with the riotous joy of spring and salvation— turns them into song. Spring is coming, and Christ has come; and He too is coming.

So don’t let anyone beguile you into finding it frivolous to talk about the weather. There is meaning in the seasons, and in nature. There is a reason I love trees: much that is strange and wonderful is written in that fantastic foliage, that leafy script that we shall never understand. Perhaps they mean more than branches and bark and molecules. Perhaps we walk unheeding by while a thousand verdant tongues whisper of the End of desire.

On an only distantly related note, I was thinking today of the notion of "comfort food," or "comfort" anything for that matter (books, music, etc.); something that helps when life seems too busy or the future too shaky or home too far away. Shakespeare's one of my comfort writers, where I just read him and everything seems a little more calm, a little better. The Aeneid (in Latin) is like that for me too. On another level, I suppose comfort music and comfort movies are possible as well: Ken Perlman's banjo music, Bach's Partita no. 2; Pride and Prejudice and LOTR.
Anyhoo. Interesting phenomenon. What are *your* "comfort" things? Where do you go to calm down a little and lose yourself a little and remember that the world is sane, and good?
Well I know where I ought to be, and that is in bed. Goodnight all. Cheers.

I have discovered that leaf-catching is a very satisfying sport. It presents challenge, exercise and the unprecidented occasion to amuse onlookers.

I am still fascinated by the trees, by the way. I don't understand how everyone scuttles about beneath them without even noticing them. Chesterton tells us that the poets have never gotten used to the stars, and I suppose it must be the same way with trees. They're so huge and--green, with their wuthering leaves in a tremulous dance of substance and space, a symphony of shadows...fascinating. I wonder if it will one day be granted us to know what that leaf-dance means, if on the last day we will look up and understand what the trees really are, and what they have stood for...

Well, I'm off to do my essay. Cheers all around. I miss you guys.