Sincerely, Issie

“If I told you that a flower bloomed in a dark room, would you trust it?”

“To wait is the most anodyne of verbs, a familiar no-man’s land of lost or useless time that threads itself through daily life: we wait in line at the pharmacy; we wait for a thundershower to pass; we wait for a friend to call. This waiting is empty time, a lull in the forward rush of life, of getting things done. It stops us in our tracks and temporarily suspends our power. It can make us feel annoyed or helpless. ‘There’s nothing to do but wait,’ we tell ourselves. Then the prescription is delivered, the sky clears, the phone rings – and off we go again, our power to do and to be mercifully restored. But there is a larger waiting, a cosmic waiting that precedes and cradles within itself all the other times and modes and tenses of being. It tells us that our puny power to do and to be in this world is the exception, not the rule. Waiting is not the suspension of human business-as-usual, but rather the oldest and most elemental form of time. The modern meaning of the English verb to wait in its most banal sense, ‘to remain stationary’, derives from a trio of Old English verbs: waeccan, ‘to keep watch’; wacian, ‘to be awake’, and wacan, ‘to become awake, arise, be born’. This is waiting as sheer presence, watchfulness, the quickening spark of life. It is ruach elohim, the breath of God, moving over the face of the waters the instant before creation: time before time. To wait in this way means simply to bear witness to breath, the gift of wakefulness, as it lights up (here, now) in this accidental vessel that is myself. It asks nothing more of the time that remains.”

“Many people seem to think it foolish, even superstitious, to believe that the world could still change for the better. And it is true that in winter it is sometimes so bitingly cold that one is tempted to say, ‘What do I care if there is a summer; its warmth is no help to me now.’ Yes, evil often seems to surpass good. But then, in spite of us, and without our permission, there comes at last an end to the bitter frosts. One morning the wind turns, and there is a thaw. And so I must still have hope.”

I know I miss you because it happens in daylight. When I’m driving down a road with a view and the sun is hitting me, I think of how good you’d look beside me. And how great your laugh would sound, joining me when I’m out with friends. Or how much warmer the bed would be with you in it.