![thirty-one [thirty-one days of december]](http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7015/6610845151_7556f8362c_s.jpg)
![thirty [thirty-one days of december]](http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7148/6600868189_3aa88a8dd4_s.jpg)
we are not idealized wild things.
we are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves.
as we were. as we are no longer. as we will one day not be at all.
(joan didion, the year of magical thinking)
twenty-six years ago today, i was sitting in mr. quincy’s fifth grade class. on a media cart at the front of the classroom was a television broadcasting the launch of the space shuttle challenger, carrying it’s crew of seven. among them was christa mcauliffe, who was to be the first teacher in space.
in an instant, the image of the shuttle was replaced with plumes of smoke and falling debris. the classroom went silent.
in those first moments, i don’t think anyone understood what was happening. i kept waiting for the parachutes. they never came.
i remember walking home from the bus stop later that day and looking up at the sky. as a child who wanted to be an astronaut and a teacher, that day changed my life. i followed the aftermath with intense interest — the recovery, the tributes, the funerals, the investigation. i needed to know how, and perhaps more importantly to a child of ten, WHY this happened.
i don’t know that the answers really ever came. lost somewhere in the talk of sub-freezing temperatures, and o-rings and miscommunications were the dreams of a child. i was touched by tragedy that day, and for perhaps the first time in my life, i was truly afraid. and so i wept for the loss of those seven astronauts, and for the lesson plans that would never be carried out in space, and for the youth of our nation, who, like me, would have to grow up with a little less magic in their world.
today, as i have every january 28th, i pause to remember.
oh! i have slipped the surly bonds of earth
and danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things
you have not dreamed of—wheeled and soared and swung
high in the sunlit silence. hov’ring there,
i’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
my eager craft through footless halls of air….up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
i’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
where never lark nor even eagle flew—
and, while with silent lifting mind i’ve trod
the high untrespassed sanctity of space,
put out my hand, and touched the face of god.(j.g. magee, jr)
it’s the Longing that ultimately undoes you.
when it finds you, it gnaws at your bones and tugs at your chest. it fills you up inside and makes you dream dreams and it drowns you.
the Longing keeps you in bed, clutching at your sheets while the world goes on outside. it smells like old leaves and cigarette smoke, mixed with the scent of far-off places you will hear of, but never see. it’s the gloss on a lover’s lips the moment you realize you will never kiss those lips again. it is the bittersweet, unrequited love of creation and it will break your heart again and again and again.
if you know the Longing the way i do, then these words are redundant. we understand each other perfectly, you and i.
(matthew sturges, house of mystery)
life will break you.
nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning.
you have to love. you have to feel. it is the reason you are here on earth.
you are here to risk your heart.
you are here to be swallowed up.
and when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness.
tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.
(louise erdrich, the painted drum)
Every year
everything
I have ever learnedin my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other sideis salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this worldyou must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold itagainst your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.(mary oliver)
© heather dyan 2012 | admin | rss feed | colophon
powered by wordpress using the depo skinny theme