How Could I Not Be Moved?
I love! I am alive!
The world is violent and mercurial - it will have its way with you. We are saved only by loveālove for each other and the love we pour into the art we feel compelled to share: being a parent; being a writer; being a painter; being a friend. We live in a perpetually burning building, and what we must save from it, all the time, is love.
ā Tennessee Williams, from a 1982 interview with James Grissom.
We have to loveāto love is to really live, to know for certain that we are alive. I love! I am alive!
The pale slice of moon hanging by a thread in the morning sky, the little ducks moving over the water, the birch trees waving perfect and silver beyond the windowpane. I have to love them; I have to praise them. When I sing for them I know that I am alive, I know that I am a part of the turning Earth.
I touch the spectral beauty of your skin. I throw my hands down into the cold moving stream. I lay in the bed that the field made for me and I watch how the clouds drift; I watch them for a very long time, and I do not worry that perhaps I should be somewhere other than right here, watching the drifting clouds. This is where I am, and this is enough. More than enoughāit is everything.
I make my way through the world and I allow the world to fill me with feeling. The overflow spills out onto the page. A procession of shades and textures slipping into emotion. Because I am moved by what I encounter, I feel I am no longer confined to the limits of myself. And so, in loving, the body is free to become more than it appears to be: to transfigure into a falling feather, liquify into the puddle of rainwater, float upward into the kingdom of sky, or slip down into a river the colour of lead.
I fall in love with the slanting kisses of sunlight that press gently against the trees; with the blood-red of the Rosa canina hips decorating the hedgerows. So, too, I fall in love with the rippling laughter of my friends, and with the sight of a loving hand (so strong, so alive) closed quietly around mine in the curve of the night. I am devastated by the little brown wings of the wren, and by the confetti of softly coloured leaves that empties down from the maple tree. I am brought to my knees at the sight of the days last light dropping down over the fields of late autumn, crisscrossed by the dark wings of rooks and ravens. This, all of thisāhow could I not be moved? How could I not love wildly and without restraint?
In form I am human, yes. But in truth it doesn't matter what I am. I could be a smooth little stone, or the stamen of a flower, or a seabird ruddy with oil and salt. It is of little consequence, for it is in loving the world that we can find the edges of ourselves, and discover that they are endlessly permeable, and infinitely negotiable. And so I could be anyone, or anything; I could be anywhere, and I could be forever.
There is coffee on the stove, bread on the counter, and a cool wind blowing through the streets outside. There is my pen against the page, and the song of a robin peeling through the open window. There is a determined bloom of peace in these small and precious fragments of living; a peace that is seemingly unfazed by the chaotic scramble of being in the world.
No, I cannot follow your clocks todayāI am too busy for your sterile theatre of modern life. I am loving the world, I am feeling everything deeply. I will walk out into the fields, into the circle of my life, into the arms of the trees, the arms of a lover, and I will be moved by what awaits me there. Through love I will join myself to the world, over and over and over again.
autumn dispatch 04 | 30.11.2024 | the wind moves easily through the bareness of the trees. I hear whistling, long and low. A fine dusting of snow has touched the edges of the fallen leaves that I am slowly raking into small mounds across the lawn. The ground is cold and hard. I will collect the leaves and barrow them to the boundaries, where they will be heaped together in great fragrant piles and left to decompose over the wintertime. November whispers a final farewell, and the burning flame of landscape is gradually snuffed out. All is slowly spun with quiet ice. Cold, clear sky of chiming honesty stretches above. I hurry to get the final bulbs into their coffers in the ground. I hurry to make peace with the darkest sides of myself, to adjust my eyes to new visions in the waning light, before we are all moored in our private shores of deep and total quiet.
Beautiful and so true x