Damage and Recovery

Post 91

Now is iris,

And the first few roses

I look forward to seeing what the arc of the roses is going to look like. In late March, when I pruned them, there was much more dead wood than usual. The poor Rugosa was mostly dead  yet it is still the first bloomer. I do know that it has been a good spring for iris, which have bloomed copiously, colorfully and long.

 

 The water table is full and the mix of rain and sun has been just right. But it is the coolness that has really let what is blooming last. I have seen the Lady Jane tulips fall apart in days due to heat. This year they set a record of three weeks in bloom.

 This brisk Spring has felt glorious. But is that a fluke or because of the contrast with the hard winter, or just because we like to tell ourselves that good often comes out of what had been bad?

 There is a name for this last idea in Christian Theology--the Fortunate Fall ( if Christian theology is not your cuppa, please be not  displeased. I'm really talking about a human tendency to think a certain way.)

The Fortunate Fall is the concept that though humans messed up in some way, allowing evil into the world, their end state will be better than if they had never messed up. It shows up in a lot of English Literature, which is where I was first introduced to it, long before I had any use for religion.

It seems to reflect an aspect of human ratiocination, the part of us that often forgets, ignores or hides suffering by drawing attention to better things. I do this because it helps me from dwelling on the bad stuff, which I can do and which then creates more suffering. It seems to help many deal with adversity.The downside is, of course, that it can decrease our ability to see and relieve suffering.

Recently, I was talking to a coworker whose parents have had some money issues and who have moved in with her and her son. One consolation is that this allows her to do more things outside the house. She has been working out and blooming with good health. But this is only a small consolation compared to the greater difficulties at issue. Do we see the small goods that difficulties create as consolations sent by grace, karma or human love and ingenuity, or as the direct results of the difficulties?

C.S. Lewis took the first view(see Perelandra,) although many Christians assume that the idea of the Fortunate Fall is manditory. It is not.

In the garden, a milder winter might well have brought an even more splendiferous Spring. We will never know.This is the Spring we have.

Might spiritual maturity mean not indulging in to the human need to always, not just explain or  understand the reality we experience, but to justify it?

This Spring is beautiful and I am enjoying it in the garden. The difficulties of last winter do not increase or decrease this. I'm even a tad inspired and writing poetry. I will be ending this post with a poem in progress. In poetry, blogs or lived life, I'm happy to celebrate what functionally and gently deepens my experience of reality. Gardening makes me pay attention to Nature's cycles, loss and delivery, effort and reward. What has been lost does not make what remains more beautiful, nor does it take away from the present beauty.

BALANCE

Flying? ... what if I tilt or go backwards?

My Dad in college bought a roadster that only
Drove in reverse. Into the Great Smokies

He'd venture, backwards bravadoing towards
Sweet moonshine and misplaced wishing.

So, What is the chance that dyslexic me
Could navigate as well as that thirsty

Ranker, busting his way through Prohabition?

What're my Great Smokies..? A licit island,
With springs and creeks, waves gurgling through seagrass,

Beaches, salt winds, salt waves, sky wide-fashioned,
Woods, meadows, bays, a garden village. Its sands

My time, its tides inhaling and exhaling through my sails
As I stand, weightlessly, on its unseen scale.

 

When Pleasure is a Duty

Post 90

If May were yet to burn away
In flower flame, both fain and fill,
I would stand here still and say,
--It stood a day. And what a day.

May it almost scary in its beauty. Sometimes it feels as if its beauty could overrun my capacity to bear it. I guess that is somewhat what Edmund Burke meant when he referred to the sublime. Some people take the sublime to mean scary as in creepy; I think it has more to do with, not scary exactly, but awesome, amazing, rapturous.

 The garden took some hits this winter that have lessened its spring blooms and will cost it this summer. Yet  it still contains more than enough plenitude to dazzle my senses, and I find I'm not really morning the loss of wallflower, yarrow, verbascum and hydrangea bloom. What is, is enough.

Leigh Hunt wrote some light verse about May where he refers to it as the "month when pleasure is a duty."

"May's the blooming Hawthorne bough;
May's the month that's blooming now
I no sooner write the word,
That it seems as if it heard,
And looks up, and laughs at me."

"There is May in books for ever;
May will part with Spenser never;
May's in Milton, May's in Prior,
May's in Chaucer, Thomson, Dyer:"

"May's in all the Italian books;
She has old and modern nooks,
Where she sleeps with nymphs and elves
In happy places they call shelves,"

"And will rise , and dress your rooms
With a drapery thick with blooms."

"Come ye rains then, if you will,
May's at home and with me still:
But come rather, thou, good weather
And find us in the fields together."

It can be hard to write of beauty without lapsing into petty prettiness, hence Hunt's wisdom in keeping his tone whimsical. The sweet sublime may be one of the hardest things to put into words or images. And to top it all off, May is not just a month of beauteous views, it is also the month of fascinating smells: lily of the valley, lilacs, tree peony. Smells that deliver the sweet sublime in elusive packets that fade as they radiate, intensify as they recede..

.I doubt I am the only one who finds great beauty a little scary, a little other, a disruption of the ordinary even though there are few things more ordinary than spring.

Is this why, by the Church Year, this is not Ordinary Time? I doubt it with my understanding, but it makes sense to the rest of me.