3rd Sunday of Lent
Lent, like old man river, keeps rolling along. This is pretty much all it does, in fact, and that’s why we tend not to be very good at it. Anyone who has lived in a city with a river understands that the typical perception of the waterway is very different from Heraclitus’s (i.e. you never step in the same river twice, on account of its flowing). No, we tend to think of the river the same way we think of the bridges that cross it: just a thing that’s there. Static, and you can go to it if you wish, or you can ignore it.
Lent doesn’t like this fixed, observational relationship. It would like you to dive in and feel the rush, and be changed by it. Lent is understanding, though. It knows we aren’t monks, and it knows we have lives, so it would be rather content for us just to take dips in it daily, re-feel its swirls, the gritty mud it carries (it’s a swollen, rain-fed, silty river), the hard current. And it asks us to get used to it, and never to get used to it.
(Jenny Downing)
I remember, when I transferred schools in the middle of first gradeI believe the move had something to do with my great humiliation of self-urination at Chuck E Cheese. In defense of my bladder control, I was galloping through Mario Brothers, and I thought the princess would trump my pee. Apparently not. And woolen Catholic uniforms don’t mix well with micturation., being ahead of the class in math lessons. “Ha,” I thought to myself, “these nincompoops can’t do double-digits yet.” And so I ignored most of the lessons, using that time instead to zip ahead in the SRA game (some sort of incremented reading comprehension thing).
There was a lot to learn there, not only in the obvious sign of my ditching numbers for words, but also in the value of practice. Sadly, I didn’t get some comeuppance where my lack of practice led to a great shame or failureBelieve me, I had practiced pissing plenty before the previously sidenoted incident., but I remember well what I was shirking, and I remember feeling that, despite my self-certainty, I was somehow impoverishing myself. I always cast a quick glance to the sum at hand, mostly in case I was called upon, but also to ensure I still knew it.
A wise friend whom I owe an email once posed me these rhetorical questions:
How many times have you seen a flower?
How many times have you looked a flower?
Well?
(James Jordan)
The fundamental difference here is agency. I see flowers all the time (although less so in this concrete-coated city), but I rarely choose to look. When I do, usually the flower has reminded me, by its contrast, of the concrete coating that silently depresses us daily. It is as different from the stone as the water is from land, and I do so like to choose to look at it. I wish I did it more.
In my current state of affairs, I’m supposed to write a book. Thus far, I’ve excused myself: I don’t have a genre, I don’t have a theme, I don’t have to do it — it will do itself. I thought of it the way I thought of the Ohio: something that was just there. But, as at my back I hear time’s winged chariot, I have lately begun to look at it, and to go to it. I see its motion; I see its current; I see its true and unsettled shape. I have a lot of work to do, I know, now that I feel what water really is.
Lent keeps rolling along whether we go to it or not. It seems like a shame not to, just like it seems like a shame that so many front lawns around this city are barely tended, overrun, and never in any real bloom. I understand; people here make themselves so very busy, and a good garden demands a lot of water and a lot of careful watching. But oh, what a thing to look at!
Posted: March 7th, 2010 to: Whom It May Concern.
Re: flowers, God, Lent, micturation, practice, river
Furtherings: none