There is a stay-at-home dad I know who is funny and kind and gracious in conversation. He loves his two young daughters immensely. He writes about birds and trees in a large pad which he keeps in his back pocket at every playgroup. He also suffers from debilitating mental attacks and sometimes struggles deeply and intensely to cope with life and move forward.
This morning, I saw him. The man's smile could swallow an entire street. His youngest daughter walked beside him, her smile echoing his.
The great South African poet Dennis Brutus--who fought against the apartheid system and was even jailed at Robben Island in the cell next to Mandela's for his work--has two of the most beautiful lines I've ever read within his poem, "Somehow We Survive." Brutus writes, "Somehow we survive / and tenderness, frustrated, does not wither."
To think of the horror Brutus watched unfold in his lifetime--both that subjected to others and to himself--and yet to still be able to write these lines. To still be able to claim the survival of tenderness, the endurance of beauty.
Many of us face attacks that come in all forms and circumstances. If you're reading this, then most likely you and I are similar in that we do not face imprisonment for our beliefs and our quests for justice like Brutus did. And yet, the battles my friend, the stay-at-home-dad, faces threaten also to wither tenderness.
And each of us experiences, perhaps a thousand times a day, the subtle assaults from both within and without that long to make us believe that tenderness withers. Beauty is not sustained.
And that is true if we allow for the world's definition of beauty. If we assent to the notion that beauty is perfection, that tenderness is only possible where no mistakes are made, then we're sunk.
But if we, like Brutus, are willing to fight back against injustice in small ways and large, then we begin to forge a claim on the definition of beauty, the true meaning of tenderness.
What Beautiful is appears after attacks have been mounted and weathered. Rather than throw our hands up in despair and rage, then, we open our hands in readiness--willing the future to be different from the past. Knowing the present is our only genre for writing new stories, we learn to smile wide enough to swallow a street. We learn that tenderness may be frustrated, but it does not wither. True beauty never can.
SOMEHOW WE SURVIVE
by Dennis Brutus
Somehow we survive
and tenderness, frustrated, does not wither.
Investigating searchlights rake
our naked unprotected contours;
over our heads the monolithic decalogue
of fascist prohibition glowers
and teeters for a catastrophic fall;
boots club the peeling door.
But somehow we survive
severance, deprivation, loss.
Patrols uncoil along the asphalt dark
hissing their menace to our lives,
most cruel, all our land is scarred with terror,
rendered unlovely and unloveable;
sundered are we and all our passionate surrender
but somehow tenderness survives.
Showing posts with label beauty. Show all posts
Showing posts with label beauty. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 27, 2012
Sunday, September 25, 2011
Shirkshare Dales and the 426 Steps
Yesterday, the three of us were carried two hours north by a good friend to the magical land of the Yorkshire Dales. I woke with an allergy attack the likes of which I hadn't seen in a year--but which enjoyed making my nose blast as regularly and forcefully as Old Faithful. Tyler woke with a cough. Needless to say, Jennifer got us together, packed a picnic lunch fit for the Queen, and we made it into our friend's car and two hours later?
Magic.
We stopped first at Gordale Scar, which is essentially a massive rock wall enclosure built by years of water wearing down stone. (Analogies ad infinitum ensue: the way persistence wears down resistance; the way faithful work as a writer wears down rejection; the way steady, loving parenting wears down temper tantrums; the way believing wears down doubt; the way humor wears down grumpiness; the way writing wears down not-writing; the way voices that continue to seek justice wear down nay-sayers...).
Tyler loved walking over the many rocks strewn about on the path to the rock enclosure, and at one point, he asked, "Where are we?"
Us: The Yorkshire Dales!
Tyler: The Shirkshare Dales! I like the Shirkshare Dales!
Us: We do too. We like them too!
After Tyler left a fairly substantial water supply by one of the rocks, we made our way back to the Park Headquarters for this area of the Dales, at Malham. We ate a picnic lunch as rain drizzled and three ducks and two roosters sauntered about, ever more boldly requesting various foods from us.
Next, we walked the one mile trek to the bottom of Malham Cove (where we were told, on good authority, that a section of one of the Harry Potter movies had been shot). We learned that 426 steps led to the top of the Cove. The three parents (myself, Jen, and our friend) looked at each other and considered the facts:
Time: 3:30pm.
Who: Three adults and a two-year old, a four-year old
Status: Children becoming slightly delirious, throwing various items in nearby brook (all natural items, of course)
Decision: Go for it.
The five of us began the long trek up the top to Malham Cove. And here's the stunning thing--the really shocking thing: my legs complained more than Tyler's. He climbed those steps like it was part of any two year old's job description--eat ice cream, have the occasional tantrum, look super-cute and say the occasional highly charming thing, laugh like the rain, climb 426 steps to top of Malham Cove in the Yorkshire Dales.
At the top, the five of us sat, sharing three oranges, two granola bars, and a Cadbury milk chocolate dream. While the pieces of chocolate melted, carrying sweetness everywhere inside of us, the view that confronted us was like this: the way you feel when the mail arrives, and there's an unexpected letter from a fabulous source, and just looking at the outside of that envelope--stamps slightly covered in ink, your own name scrawled about the middle, the return address gorgeous ion its corner--gives you the indelible feeling that life is really something. Really beautiful.
And you feel gratitude for the letter that's been sent your way; excitement to open it and learn what's inside.
Magic.
We stopped first at Gordale Scar, which is essentially a massive rock wall enclosure built by years of water wearing down stone. (Analogies ad infinitum ensue: the way persistence wears down resistance; the way faithful work as a writer wears down rejection; the way steady, loving parenting wears down temper tantrums; the way believing wears down doubt; the way humor wears down grumpiness; the way writing wears down not-writing; the way voices that continue to seek justice wear down nay-sayers...).
Tyler loved walking over the many rocks strewn about on the path to the rock enclosure, and at one point, he asked, "Where are we?"
Us: The Yorkshire Dales!
Tyler: The Shirkshare Dales! I like the Shirkshare Dales!
Us: We do too. We like them too!
After Tyler left a fairly substantial water supply by one of the rocks, we made our way back to the Park Headquarters for this area of the Dales, at Malham. We ate a picnic lunch as rain drizzled and three ducks and two roosters sauntered about, ever more boldly requesting various foods from us.
Next, we walked the one mile trek to the bottom of Malham Cove (where we were told, on good authority, that a section of one of the Harry Potter movies had been shot). We learned that 426 steps led to the top of the Cove. The three parents (myself, Jen, and our friend) looked at each other and considered the facts:
Time: 3:30pm.
Who: Three adults and a two-year old, a four-year old
Status: Children becoming slightly delirious, throwing various items in nearby brook (all natural items, of course)
Decision: Go for it.
The five of us began the long trek up the top to Malham Cove. And here's the stunning thing--the really shocking thing: my legs complained more than Tyler's. He climbed those steps like it was part of any two year old's job description--eat ice cream, have the occasional tantrum, look super-cute and say the occasional highly charming thing, laugh like the rain, climb 426 steps to top of Malham Cove in the Yorkshire Dales.
At the top, the five of us sat, sharing three oranges, two granola bars, and a Cadbury milk chocolate dream. While the pieces of chocolate melted, carrying sweetness everywhere inside of us, the view that confronted us was like this: the way you feel when the mail arrives, and there's an unexpected letter from a fabulous source, and just looking at the outside of that envelope--stamps slightly covered in ink, your own name scrawled about the middle, the return address gorgeous ion its corner--gives you the indelible feeling that life is really something. Really beautiful.
And you feel gratitude for the letter that's been sent your way; excitement to open it and learn what's inside.
Friday, May 27, 2011
On Reading The Road
The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, is more a book you walk than read. On every page, it was impossible not to envision myself as a father in such a place, in such a time: after the sun has shivered away, and the land is filled with never ending gray ash.
McCarthy recreates the world in its end, and reveals the inhumane souls that people it, ravaging the land and one another for any way to stay alive. And indeed, the vision is bleak.
And yet.
There is a father and a son, and they walk the road together, refusing to cave to what seems a paramount fact of life: it's over. But they go on. Always they go on.
This passage, words which the father shares with his son, forced me to read it three times and record it in my journal:
When your dreams are of some world that never was or of some world that never will be and you are happy again then you will have given up. Do you understand? And you cant give up. I wont let you (202).
What the father shares here is nothing short of a definition of hope--that authentic hope lies not in dreaming up a world that never was or never will be, but instead lies in confronting the world in which we live, day after day, and refusing to give up in the face of all that we find there. Such hope involves looking at the havoc we wreak upon one another and saying, I refuse to give up. I refuse to believe that this is all it ever will be, and instead I will keep walking in a way that speaks of humanity, love even.
And that is McCarthy's final reflection in The Road: love outlasts. Love outlasts every possible hunger; loves outlasts every vision of pain and tragedy. Love outlasts every offer of quick release. Love outlasts every brutal sin we have created. Love outlasts and it outlasts and still, it outlasts.
When I closed the pages of The Road, sitting in the old archives room at the city center library in York, I cried. For the sadness of what wasn't, yes. But also for the beauty of what is.
McCarthy recreates the world in its end, and reveals the inhumane souls that people it, ravaging the land and one another for any way to stay alive. And indeed, the vision is bleak.
And yet.
There is a father and a son, and they walk the road together, refusing to cave to what seems a paramount fact of life: it's over. But they go on. Always they go on.
This passage, words which the father shares with his son, forced me to read it three times and record it in my journal:
When your dreams are of some world that never was or of some world that never will be and you are happy again then you will have given up. Do you understand? And you cant give up. I wont let you (202).
What the father shares here is nothing short of a definition of hope--that authentic hope lies not in dreaming up a world that never was or never will be, but instead lies in confronting the world in which we live, day after day, and refusing to give up in the face of all that we find there. Such hope involves looking at the havoc we wreak upon one another and saying, I refuse to give up. I refuse to believe that this is all it ever will be, and instead I will keep walking in a way that speaks of humanity, love even.
And that is McCarthy's final reflection in The Road: love outlasts. Love outlasts every possible hunger; loves outlasts every vision of pain and tragedy. Love outlasts every offer of quick release. Love outlasts every brutal sin we have created. Love outlasts and it outlasts and still, it outlasts.
When I closed the pages of The Road, sitting in the old archives room at the city center library in York, I cried. For the sadness of what wasn't, yes. But also for the beauty of what is.
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