Reassurance

By: Elaine Lehman

 

I am writing my column in isolation. I do not mind. I am accustomed to aloneness. I spend much time researching how to help our communities attain much-needed services and coalescence – how our FACC, as mindful steward, can help us contribute to and participate in larger society. But these days, the silence is profound. I feel the weight of ambient dread hanging over us and, like everyone, I am struggling to concentrate on anything other than the pandemic that continues to spread and cause chaos worldwide.

These days, I wake up early morning, usually, around 2:00 am. I listen to the reports, stories, and interviews from the BBC World Service. In the darkness, I look out the window eastwardly toward Lake Michigan, straining to see Manhattan and our old neighborhood in Brooklyn. I remember the faint rooster’s crow over Osmena Boulevard. It is answered by others in close neighborhood and further. I remember the smell and warmth of Phillippines before sunlight. I remember sitting at the edge of Alaska, watching the giant waves rise high above the sky.

I listen to classical music and sit with my cat. And I think. I think about the disease ecology we created. We have abandoned ourselves to folly and have exhausted the stores of ethical patience.

I think We have become lost. Where do we go from here?

I turn to the beauty of language for the wisdom of the emotions. Poetry, by American poet Robert Frost’s definition, offers “a momentary stay against confusion.” I read The Physician’s Prayer, attributed to the medieval physician and philosopher Maimonides. In it is the passage “Thou sendest to man diseases as beneficent messengers to foretell approaching danger and to urge him to avert it.” I think Hope. We are being given an opportunity to repair, heal, and recover.

I sort through my shelves to find my weathered copy of Robert Frost’s poetry. Ari presented this book to me shortly after 11 September 2001. I look for the poem “Directive.” The page is dog-eared.

I read it out loud several times. This journey poem gives me reassurance. It depicts a grief so enormous and incomprehensible. It depicts an inevitable loss. It tests our earned humanity and our ability to understand and appreciate our lostness, which may give way to finding wholeness – If we allow ourselves to enter a place within each us of greater clarity.

Directive by Robert Frost
Back out of all this now too much for us,
Back in a time made simple by the loss
Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off
Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather,
There is a house that is no more a house
Upon a farm that is no more a farm
And in a town that is no more a town.
The road there, if you’ll let a guide direct you
Who only has at heart your getting lost,
May seem as if it should have been a quarry–
Great monolithic knees the former town
Long since gave up pretence of keeping covered.
And there’s a story in a book about it:
Besides the wear of iron wagon wheels
The ledges show lines ruled southeast-northwest,
The chisel work of an enormous Glacier
That braced his feet against the Arctic Pole.
You must not mind a certain coolness from him
Still said to haunt this side of Panther Mountain.
Nor need you mind the serial ordeal
Of being watched from forty cellar holes
As if by eye pairs out of forty firkins.
As for the woods’ excitement over you
That sends light rustle rushes to their leaves,

Charge that to upstart inexperience.
Where were they all not twenty years ago?
They think too much of having shaded out A few old pecker-fretted apple trees.
Make yourself up a cheering song of how Someone’s road home from work this once was Who may be just ahead of you on foot Or creaking with a buggy load of grain.
The height of the adventure is the height Of country where two village cultures faded Into each other. Both of them are lost.
And if you’re lost enough to find yourself By now, pull in your ladder road behind you And put a sign up CLOSED to all but me.
Then make yourself at home. The only field Now left’s no bigger than a harness gall.
First there’s the children’s house of make believe, Some shattered dishes underneath a pine, The playthings in the playhouse of the children.
Weep for what little things could make them glad.
Then for the house that is no more a house, But only a belilaced cellar hole, Now slowly closing like a dent in dough.
This was no playhouse but a house in earnest.
Your destination and your destiny’s A brook that was the water of the house, Cold as a spring as yet so near its source,
Too lofty and original to rage.
(We know the valley streams that when aroused Will leave their tatters hung on barb and thorn.)
I have kept hidden in the instep arch Of an old cedar at the waterside A broken drinking goblet like the Grail Under a spell so the wrong ones can’t find it, So can’t get saved, as Saint Mark says they mustn’t.
(I stole the goblet from the children’s playhouse.)
Here are your waters and your watering place.
Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.