Emily Dickinson – Love in the Spaces

From Seacoast to Stratosphere

Heaven had moved closer to us, for awhile.

This morning the sea rose in crystallized wraiths which spun and danced together atop much warmer waves and out to the horizon and beyond.

A more practical account of the weather phenomenon is that fiercely cooling air atop comparatively warm seawater condenses into layered fog. Legions of New England photographers rise from the sleep of the just in their toasty beds, gather their gear, and head out in inky skies to shores and harbors whenever dawn air is predicted to cool to -10 degrees or below (and sometimes, as yesterday measured atop Mt. Washington, a wind chill of more than 100 degrees below zero).

I’ve since then seen places where heaven meets the earth and sea, but it is rare to see them intermingling so freely. Not only did the White Mountains “kiss high heaven” overnight (as Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote in “Love’s Philosophy“), but we mere mortals could have accomplished the same physical feat, in the heady space far above the air we breathe.

I first captured sea smoke on New Hampshire’s small slice of seacoast. On a January Sunday I often revisit, the rising sun turned the foggy layers to stunning singular hues. Lemon yellow. Day-Glo purple. Neon orange and pink.

As I marveled at the sight and coaxed my fingers to press the wee metal camera buttons to which I feared they might somehow remain ice-soldered, I did not know that–close to the White Mountains–another much-loved soul was then in the process of slipping from beneath a nubbly sea-blue wool blanket and sailing away to heaven.

There is something magical and rare about sea smoke and the way it transfigures and animates the elements. The accompanying, almost always painful cold, makes us feel something like the opposite of what Emily Dickinson described: we become zero at the skin, rather than at the bone.

And given sea smoke’s extraordinary pull on those who love to capture and preserve its images, I have found it is the one kind of weather in which I will always have companions, and never find myself deaf stone alone.

Misty Mist and Dusky Dusk

Befitting my kindergarten position at the back of the line during kickball team picks, I recently was assigned to write no more than 200 words reflecting upon a 40th verse abandoned on a neatly-maintained list after its 39 brethren had been claimed.

If you know me at all, personally or professionally, you may be experiencing paroxysms of disbelief at the thought that I could limit myself to just 200 words about anything. (Even my text messages have voluminous sub-texts.)

That applies even when the 200 words is forty-fold the size of my assigned clause-as-sentence, which was just five words: “….may your will be done.”

After I finished my written ruminations–which, amazingly, came in at six words under the maximum–I realized that one word might have done just as well.

Acceptance.

I thought about the space between the cup of the Psalms, which overflows with blessings, and the cup of roiling wrath that provides the context for Matthew 26:42.

“And how else can it be?/ The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain./ Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter’s oven?”

At the distinct risk–and likely realization–of sacrilege, I could not get out of my mind that when we mortals face each morning we simply don’t know and can’t control from which cup we will sip. We chose, in our multi-fold ways, to partake–or not–of the day and engage in our world; in neither case can we choose what each day hands us.

When we reach out to other beings it can be glorious. It also may be disappointing, maddening, or so harrowing it reduces you to zero at the bone.

We may maintain ourselves within the reasonably safe, the manageable known unknowns: Land of the Tightly-Wound and Closely-Held Amygdala. Akin to Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates (here I hear, intoned in Jim’s smile-leavened voice, speaking to the formerly fearful me, “What’s the worst thing that could happen?“). The banal pleasant present of (spoiler alert) the Good Place, shorn of its peaks as surely as its dark vales have disappeared.

Or we can take a page from the not-so Cowardly Lion.

But reaching out–and dealing yourself in–can also be like a cross between “The Lady or the Tiger?” and Bertie Bott’s Every Flavour Beans (will it be the grass flavor or the vomit, cinnamon or cement?). Will you be handed the cup that runneth over, or the vessel of down-to-the-dregs bitterness?

Some element of choice remains ever-present from the macro to the micro within each day. I choose to get outside and contemplate the horizon even when the winter wind turns my hands to powder-blue ice and all the sea and sky I can see is rendered in simmering dusky black.

I never regret going out to greet ordinary skies. I deeply regret when I cannot take the detour.

And sometimes–say, one in forty mornings–I’ll dally at the shore upon a hint of the merest glimmer of incandescent pre-dawn light, and be there to see something like this….

We don’t get to choose the result; we do, at least sometimes, get to choose where we stand, and sometimes what we position ourselves to see.

Flying Lessons

PPbirds 084 — **Fledgling Bluejay** (c) 2015

It’s fledgling season.

Fledge, as a transitive verb, means: “(1) To rear until ready for flight or independent activity; (2) To furnish with feathers.”

Tiny birds burst out of bushes at fender level, lifting by milliseconds out of oncoming cars’ paths. Parental sentries warily scan their nests’ peripheries, screeching and swooping if a squirrel bounds too close to their young ones.

Where hatchlings cluster in the delicate days before fully testing their wings one can already see a hierarchy in place, more assertive newborns pecking at their recalcitrant siblings and even sweeping them aside as they venture toward the margins of the zone where their parents perch to guard them.

PPbirds 023 — **Perching Guard** (c) 2015

I am, technically speaking, a grownup. I assuredly am my children’s only surviving parent, and some of them occupy the chronological ground between childhood and adulthood. Yet I am taking most of the lessons. That fledgling bluejay perched indefinitely on the wooden fence ledge, glancing beseechingly back over his shoulder as if to ask whether he really is expected to let go and explore alone beyond the garden that is his home base? Really? Is this a good idea? That’s me.

While I have found comfort in returning to my original work, my children have ventured without fear into new places, figuratively and literally–from making new friendships to mapping out intricate proofs and gathering data across the globe to mathematically model the spread of infectious diseases. How proud their father would be.

Perhaps they have been furnished with that other thing with feathers– the one “[t[hat perches in the soul,” that “sings the tune without the words,/And never stops at all.”

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