The Road Not Taken

“‘My son’, he said gently, ‘There is a wonderful wind blowing in my mind. I drank the moon tonight. The stars are playing on a flute. The air is sweet with the music of an invisible genius. Love is crying in my flesh, singing strange songs. The rain is full of flowers and their scent makes me tremble as if I am becoming a real man. I see great happiness in our future. I see joy. I see you walking out of the sun. I see gold in your eyes. Your flesh glitters with the dust of diamonds. I see your mother as the most beautiful woman in the world. 

I see us dancing on lovely beaches. The water-maiden sings for us. I see the days of our misery turn over and become bright. My son, my only son, your mother has never ceased being a young woman rich with hopes, and me a young man. We are poor. We have little to give you but our love. You came out of our deepest joy. We prayed for you. We wanted you. And when you were born you had a mysterious smile on your face. The years passed and we watched the smile grow smaller but its mystery remains. Don’t you feel for us? 

We are the miracles that God made to taste the bitter fruits of time. We are precious, and one day our suffering will turn into the wonders of the earth. The sky is not our enemy. There are things that burn me now which turn golden when I am happy. Do you not see the mystery of our pain? That we bear poverty, are able to sing and dream sweet things, and that we never curse the air when it is warm, or the fruit when it tastes so good, or the lights that bounce gently on the waters. We bless things even in our pain. We bless them in silence. That is why our music is sweet. It makes the air remember. There are secret miracles at work, my son, that only time will bring forth. I too have heard the dead singing. They tell me that this life is good. They tell me to live it gently, with fire, and always with hope, my son. There is wonder here and there is surprise in everything that you cannot see. The ocean is full of songs. The sky is not our enemy. Destiny is our friend.’ 

“Everywhere man has become aware of himself as a transient animal and is battling desperately to assert his right to the best of the world for the short time that he sojourns in it. The Nepalese haunted by his mountain demons, the coolie hauling his heart muscle into exhaustion between the shafts of the rickshaw, the Israeli beleaguered at every frontier, everyone all at once asserting his claim to identity; everyone has an ear for any prophet who can promise him one...Everywhere the cry is for survival, but since the supreme irony of creation was that man must inevitably die, those who strived for the mastery of his mind or his muscle have to promise him an extension of his span into some semblance of immortality. The Marxist promises a oneness with the workers of the world. The Nationalist gives him a flag and a frontier, and a local enlargement of himself. The Democrat offers him liberty through a ballot box, but warns that he might have to die to preserve it. 

But for man, and all the prophets he raises up for himself, the last enemy is time; and time is a relative dimension, limited directly by man’s capacity to make use of it. Modern communication, swift as light, has diminished to nothing the time between a human act and its consequences. A shot fired in Berlin can detonate the world within minutes. A plague in the Philippines can infect Australia within a day. A man toppling from a high wire in a Moscow circus can be watched in his death agony from London and New York. 

So at every moment, every man is besieged by the consequences of his own sins and those of his fellows. So, too, every prophet and every pundit is haunted by the swift lapse of time and the knowledge that the accounting for false predictions and broken promises is swifter than it has ever been in history. Here precisely is the cause of the crisis. Here the winds and the waves are born and the thunderbolts are forged that may, any week, any month, go roaring around the world under a sky black with mushroom clouds.”

 In recent weeks I finished a beautiful book entitled “Home” by the American author Marilynne Robinson. It is a story of family and relationship and the narrative of homecoming. It is about forgiveness and the times when our fallible humanity finds the parameters of the promise of boundless grace. It is about the burdens we never fully learn to set down, choosing to carry them with us despite the back pain and heartache they continue to cause us. 

I have been consumed in reflection and deep thought ever since I set the book down, considering what exactly I understand home to be. Some of these thoughts I wrote down to try and clarify it in my mind. Although I am far from a clear picture, it has certainly been an exercise in self awareness and gratitude. Below is a little section from my notes on the matter.

“Home is more than a geography or a landscape. It is more than the street where you grew up or even the house where your parents live. Home is a sacred space, a hallowed dimension of our hearts marked by the laying down of arms and the weathered shoes abandoned at the doorstep. Its gates are carved from purest honesty and gilded with burnished vulnerability. As we step through, our brokenness is not ignored or forgotten but known and held as part of the joy of knowing and holding one another. Home is the sound that filters through our minds like the morning light filters through closed eyelids, waking us from the doldrums of our day-to-day survival and calling us back into glory, into the remembering of ourselves, into the full recognition of one another and the freedom of living in that fullness. It is the voice of God that calls out of the mystery, "Return to your fortress you prisoners of hope." (Zechariah 9:12) We are all slaves to so many things in this life. I pray that hope is a chain that binds your heart each and every day, holding you fast to your fortress home, your place of strength.

The art of homecoming too is so much more than we might imagine. More than a simple arrival, more, even, than the presenting of ourselves and all that we have become to the people who used to know us. It is the culmination of our longest and most arduous journey. It is the dirt on our soles, the scuffs on our boots, the tears in our clothes, the tears in our eyes and all the marks the road has made upon us. It is the crescendo to our symphony, the heartrending climax to our story, the end of all our departures and the little deaths we experience at every leave-taking. It is all the places we've been, people we've loved and persons we used to be. It is the truest and most genuine cry of our heart. That at the end of all the confusion and uncertainty of earthly life, we might arrive at the doorstep and be understood and welcomed in.”

A voice said, Look me in the stars

And tell me truly, men of earth,

If all the soul-and-body scars

Were not too much to pay for birth.

Since you, Mind, think to diagnose Experience As summer, satin, nightingale or rose, Of the senses making sense - Follow my nose, Attend all other points of contact, Deserve your berth: My brain-child, help me find my own way back To fire, air, water, earth. I am, in fact, More than a bag of skin and bone. My person is A chamber where the elements postpone In lively synthesis, In peace on loan, Old wars of flood and earthquake, storm And holocaust, Their attributes most temperately reformed Of heatwave and of frost, They take my form, Learn from my arteries their pace. They leave alarms And excursions for my heart and lungs to face. I hold them in my arms And keep in place. To walk, to run, to leap, to stand - Of the litany Of movement I the vicar in command, The prophet in my country, The priest at hand, Take steps to make it understood The occupants Assembled here in narrow neighbourhood Are my constituents For bad or good. Body and Mind, I turn to you. It's me you fit. Whatever you think, whatever you do, Include me in on it, Essential Two. Who house philosophy and force, Wed well in me The elements, for fever's their divorce, Nightmare and ecstasy, And death of course. My sponsor, Mind, my satellite, Keep my balance, Steer me through my heyday, through my night, My senses' common sense, Selfcentered light. And you who set me in my ways, Immaculate, In full possession of my faculties - Till you disintegrate, Exist to please. Lest I with fears and hopes capsize, By your own lights Sail, Body, cargoless towards surprise. And come, Mind, raise your sights - Believe my eyes.

The river that flows from there

Has grown so vast and full and swift

And here

After the rush of its rapid beginning

Before the gentle ebb of it's oceanic end

It has laid its body and speed and depth down between us.

The meandering curves crafting borders between our bodies

Shushing silence into our stories

Making separate shores from our same earth.

We have stood at those boundaries

Walked along the waters edge

In search of safe passage.

We have dipped our toes

Put messages in paper boats

Gently pushed them out in hope

And watched them all sail helplessly downstream

Spiralling out of sight, off the edge of the world.

Even the faithful have turned their backs

"It is hopeless" they mutter "leave them be"

I must confess

It is difficult to admit defeat

But it is easier to sink a paper fleet

To bare our shins and wet our feet

Than to break our backs

Building bridges 

Where the two of us could meet.

In the summer she sleeps with the curtains slightly parted.

No alarm clock buzzing by her bedside

No church bells ringing in the distance

Only the sunrise to prise open her eyes

With the sound of silent trumpets

Hailing the coming glory

The whispered songs of a hallowed story

She wakes to a chorus of quiet amens.

With sleepy eyes she stumbles to the kitchen

To make ready for adventure

She fills a flask with gold-blend

For today’s memories will be made in an instant

She steps outside to strap her surfboard to the roof of her car

and makes her pilgrimage to the coast

Windows down

The Lumineers on her stereo

Volume up

Upon the shore a biting breeze lends her speed as she sprints

at the sea

Where her burning heart meets the breaking waves

Where her spirit hovers over the waters

and it pushes and pulls and spins and falls and splashes and tumbles and swims and gasps for air

through blue lips and chattering teeth

For today, like the first day

Is for fearsome recreation  

And as she plays she anticipates the firewood piled on the beach

The cold sand beneath her feet

The warm flask of nescafe

The woody smell of smoke in her hair and her sweater the next day

In the evening she laughs

Holding her hands out toward the fire

Toward the little girls, who smile and dance like sparks

Reaching back to her

Wishing they were older and beautiful as she

Out toward her mother

Who is still as beautiful as she hopes to be in ten or twenty or thirty years

Her hands cling to theirs

Palms pressed like the pages of prayers she has written for them

To keep them where the light is.

At night

She leaves the world of salt and sand behind

To move between the secret and sacred spaces

Appearing in scenes of dreams that I almost see

From the corner of my minds eye.

Each night I glimpse her golden curls

Stepping onto the platform at a busy subway station or

hailing a taxi on a New York street in the rain at 2am

and each night I give chase and race through a crowd of faceless people

Always a heartbeat behind

As she steps out of sight

Her laughter trapped by the click of the door on a departing taxi cab

and she is gone

Like sea spray on the wind

Like a rush of sparks soaring toward a glowing sunset sky

Like a day that is done

And I wake to a whisper

to a chorus of quiet amens.

A Benjisemps Original