Traveling with Crows

The Last Battle Before Bed

Watching the days advance slowly, with an earthly dose of doubt in the pressurized cabin of twenty-first century hyperactivity disorder, I chart the planets on astro.com and consider how already the frost has lifted from the grass. I’m taking truth in small doses these days, aimed at quarter under the hour, not right on time. To have lost my mind in the whiz and whir of days and blinking cursors feels like the greatest blessing I’ll ever know. What stirs in the imagination is the half-concern that all this might not add up to anything but a standing door in the middle of a rich orchard somewhere.  The last battle of Narnia, with the insistence of Aslan’s observations about perception, hangs in the air in the evening as I kiss my son to sleep. We are on the other side of the door, just for tonight, looking back through a peephole at the dark battlefield of the world.

 

I suppose I should summarize the text. But the book itself, The Last Battle, by C.S. Lewis, is in my son’s room, on the nightstand, and to recapitulate the events of the last five minutes, I would have to disturb the respite I cajoled him into. So then, no true summary is needed, only the waiting for his breath to deepen, before I conclude the last of the evening’s whir and blink and send myself into dreams. I have my to-do list ready for tomorrow. Tonight, with the moon sextile something or another, I can click back on yesterday, forward on tomorrow, and through the looking glass see the mirror shimmer of events. No event competes with now.  And now.  And the projection of just ahead of now, in the bed on the beech-woven sheets.

Resolutions

Asked what we're giving up, what we're making up for the New Year, and I have no pat answers this time.  I have decided to limit myself to a word, vulnerability.  The word becomes a statement, Be vulnerability.  I think about the trees in my yard, standing maple against the onslaught of winter storm.  Their armor is their woody essence, and their essence is their vulnerability.  Though they are hardwoods, they do not think "hardwood" into the wind.  I know I have.  I have bound myself to hardness, to creating a shell, and leaned into the wind defiantly.  Yesterday, among the tidepools of La Jolla, I admired the delicate fronds of sea kelp waving into the currents that rose through shallow rocks from open ocean, and I found hermit crabs.  They gather a shell to live in, pull it on and gently rock it toward debris good enough to eat.  Their antennae are delicate and accurate.  But the shell they put on, hard as it is, is not part of their thoughts.  It will be discarded soon enough, when the eating and the molting make it cramped and difficult to maneuver.  I think of all my old shells, and my similar taste for them, and the ways I thought myself into them, letting my thoughts run through the shells, animating them.  Now I want to discard the need for all of that for 2007 and beyond.  There is warmth enough here to do it.  I let my thoughts ride out with the tide.