How evil he seemed, with a care for no one. Yet with all watching he began to speed away before she could close the door. She was half in the car and wondering yet trusting the car wouldn’t move until she was safe. She had already taken the time to fasten her little girl in the back—the child bobbing up and down excited to go some where even if it was with this impatient boy-of-a-man as her guide. Perhaps she felt safe because she knew that her mom had some measurable power over the man driving the car. He had turned the music up to avoid having to explain his impatience but as soon as the car was rolling she turned the music off and began to stick up for herself as they all drove past my front porch.
I watched the scene unfold while finishing an Emily Dickinson poem that began:
the night was wide, and furnished scant
The sky performs its duty not out of impatience but out of love—with a broad understanding of the world below as its participants. We are everyone and we are no one—looking up to the sky admiring its space and dealing with the evil manifest in the ones who are close to us. Perhaps deal is the wrong word, because in its utterance one might think your coming out better than the other. When we deal, scold, react with a kind of defensive preservation we deal ourselves away. We are less, sold, devoid of love. The other direction, the way of love and sustainability, trusts that when we offer ourselves—broken and often carrying intentions like the other, we are no longer dealing. The endless cycle of back and forth is broken and we can open ourselves to the wide sky scantly furnished turning off the music and uttering a better way.
One of my favorite writers points out that only in utterance, can new realities be born. They exist in our imagination but only take form when we say the thing we know beneath our skin out loud with all watching. I was at the Hollywood Bowl last night with 17,000 other people singing the best of the Beatles out loud. The LA Philharmonic Orchestra played with a huge spectrum of artists as we all joined in sipping wine and dipping our snap peas in hummus. The conductor pointed out that we are still singing these songs because they have become true to so many of us. Talking with Heather as we were all walking back to the car, we reflected upon how pop music used to be so great—the utterance of hope is often a faint voice from within a culture.
But, with an ear to the pavement and with an awareness to the pulse of the human heart, this hope is unmistakable. It is a cord we can all hum to, rocking back and forth resting our arms on each others’ shoulders. Its the truth that fills the scant sky as love clouds our vision.
