Remembering

About five years ago I saw a mockingbird make a straight vertical descent from the roof gutter of a four-story building. It was an act as careless and spontaneous as the curl of a steam or the kindling of a star. 

The mockingbird took a single step into the air and dropped. His wings were still folded against his sides as thought he was singing from a limb and not falling, accelerating thirty-two feet per second per second, through empty air. Just a breath before he would have been dashed to the ground, he unfurled his wings with exact, deliberate care, revealing the broad bars of white, spread his elegant, white-banded tail, and so floated onto the grass. I had just rounded a corner when his insouciant step caught my eye; there was no one else in sight. The fact of his free fall was like the old philosophical conundrum about the tree that falls in the forest. The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there. 

-Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Somewhere around the time that the birds were warming up their singing pipes this morning, I rolled to my left in bed and saw a light behind my closed eyes. Huh? my fuzzy sleep-wrapped brain mumbled; my myopic eyes opened and squinted through the open blinds. The light came not from the horizon but from the sky. From the nearly full moon on this crystal clear morning.

How often are you woken by the light of the moon?

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I read the excerpt from Dillard's book in The Sun yesterday while travelling with friends down to Wilmington. It with with this reminder - that we are not the reason for the existence of beauty, that we merely have tools with which to appreciate it, should we choose to - that I strolled the streets of this coastal town.

Admiring equally the beautiful, old homes and their manicured gardens and the spray of wildflowers growing around the fence of an area in development. 

What is it about the bones of an old house? Beautiful yet treacherous. Directly across from one well-preserved was another that had been condemned. Chunks of wood tore from the front porch, the windows boarded up.

I want to know the story of that house. 

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Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, Dillard writes. 

Sometimes, I get so frustrated and impatient with trying to foresee the next turn that tracing will take. 

But sometimes, the light of the moon behind closed eyes is enough to wake you to the beauty of it.

Mountains

I know I've been posting irregularly but I've been busy going from the mountains in the east...

...to the west.

Be back soon.

28

I am flying to Denver, having been sent there for a conference that my new employer wishes me to attend. I am typing on my employer-issued laptop (never had such a thing), marveling at the shift my life has taken in the past two weeks.

Two weeks ago, I was flying home from a weekend in St. Louis where I celebrated the first three decades of my life with family and friends, with libations and foodstuffs, with talking and running.

My actual birthday dawned relatively clear and I took myself up to Raleigh, to the North Carolina Museum of Art, hoping that the weather would hold. Historically, it rains on my birthday; I tell myself this every year so that I am not disappointed when it does.

I bought myself some bread, some cheese, some fruit and headed there to the great expanse of green. The museum itself is closed on Monday, but the attached park is open all of the time. It was chilly when I arrived, the wind blowing across the hill, the sun trying to poke through the clouds.

I spread out a blanket and sat back. The sun, she came through.

From late morning until midafternoon, I laid about on that blanket in that park. Listened to the birds, watched a group of schoolchildren. Noshed on some bread with goat cheese, nibbled on some unripe mango. Savored the slow passing of time, loved the warmth and then even the burn that the sun gave my cheeks. Walked the paths, wondered at the trail of my life.

I thought about the upcoming weekend, the writer’s retreat in Little Switzerland, North Carolina at Wild Acres, on a hilltop near the Blue Ridge Parkway.

The afternoon turned rather warm and my face flushed painfully. I gathered my things and headed home, where friends waited to toast me.

And as evening, fell, it rained.

The rest of the week passed slowly; much like the laziness with which North Carolina has been getting around to summer, I tried to study this last week in slowness. I laid in the sun, shading my red face with a floppy hat. I went to town for iced tea. I did yoga, I ran. I gathered myself.

I read the stories assigned to the workshops I wanted to attend. I toyed with packing my coffee making equipment, wondered if my assigned roommate would find it charming or snobbish. But on Wednesday, I almost panicked, almost gave up my place, because I had to write an introduction to myself in no more than thirty words. As if I were going to be published in the magazine.

But you are not a writer, the voice in my head said plainly.

I stared stupidly at my email, thinking about the note I would compose. But then I stopped; I sat with my coffee and thought about what I have been doing the past few years of my life. Then, the introduction came easily, rose up from the depths:

Erin is a Midwesterner living in the North Carolina sandflats. Though dubbed “spatially challenged” by close friends, she has managed to run and write about twelve half marathons.

28 words to introduce myself to over 100 strangers.