At the end of my words

What other writing prompt would a person need besides a pale blue sky, six minutes before sunrise on a January morning? Icicles on the gutter outside the window are bumpy, knobby from freeze and thaw. Thin clouds over the houses on the east side of the street brighten slowly, warm white at their centers, with lavender edges. Scan the lacy black trees and you see clumpy old nests holding memories of last summer, waiting, maybe, for inhabitants' return.

I've been awake since shortly after five. Read the New York Times in my bed cave, under flannel sheets and warm comforter. I flipped through this: an art lesson on collage, cubism and the early 20th century, presented online, mobile-friendly, as an immersive experience. Close-ups to draw your attention to this and that in the image under study. And pulling back into the world around and beyond the object to talk about information overload in Paris pre-World War I.

Oh, art. 

People explaining paintings can capture my attention, but only to the point where they don't explain too much. Tell me what the artist is doing. Where's the break with reality? Where's the window into more reality? Don't try to tie it all up in a box with Meaning printed on the wrapping paper.

Because there are too many words in the world right now. Maybe that's because, confined to our homes, we experience one another through screens. Through recordings and Zooms and national media, Facebook posts, tweets, verbal battles in virtual worlds, crafted selves (like this one, in this blog). Words fail us when we look for something more real. Or at least they're failing me. 

What nonsense she's writing this morning! 

The nitty-gritty of life in an America pandemic, circa 2021: the dreary hunt for vaccination appointments, which requires keeping track of passwords for this or that app, this or that website. Words in headlines tempting you to click, to read repetitively about the tiny advances made over yesterday's mess. Words in thought pieces trying to make sense of the same things I'm trying to make sense of. Words that make a shell that few words, if any, can pierce. 

Blue sky, clear today, snow tomorrow. There's a crazy patch of light on a pile of snow across the street. Crazy -- I looked to see what strange spotlight or headlight could make that glow at that angle. I don't understand it, but it must be, somehow, the sun, which I can't quite see yet. Forty minutes past sunrise it's still hidden behind the houses on the east side of the street. But it's there, making that crazy patch of light, moving now across the sidewalk to the street. 

With the sky, it's enough. I'll use no words to wrap it up, no words to hold it in.

Repair

I watched the live feed of the inauguration on Wednesday on my laptop and the nighttime inaugural festivities on TV. Calm crept over me, an unfamiliar feeling. There was nothing to be incensed over, no horrifying selfish incompetence. But a last quick scroll through Facebook at the end of the evening showed a post from a distant acquaintance expressing concern over what the change in administrations in Washington would mean. The comments below echoed and amplified the fear.

Deeply crazy, I thought -- a phrase which was not so much about degrees of crazy but about degrees of deep. How could anyone fear the election of 78-year-old Joe Biden, a flawed (as we all are) but decent man, a man of humility and faith? Someone focused on returning competence to our federal government. 

But there it was. 

I've tried to imagine my way into that fear. Was it fear of "crazy socialists" and the associated atheism? Fear of a world with too many choices? Fear that the sure foundations of your faith might shift and slip sideways in a pluralistic culture? 

We label others as racist, phobic, selfish, godless, but very few of us think of ourselves as deeply crazy or  prejudiced or amoral. Things are what they are and naming them privately and publicly is the first step to fixing them. But you can't just dismiss what a person's emotions, actions and judgments mean to them. 

So I'm back to imagining the inside of someone else's head. What I see is fear of a terrifically complicated uncertain world. One where logic says giving something to one group of people means taking it away from another group. Where gender, morality, Christian doctrine are immutable. Where seeing things as relative or shifting undermines everything. Where truth has to be -- what? a certainty through the ages.

My very insistence on the existence of multiple worldviews is a belief in itself. My acceptance of different views of morality, even the possibility of different views on the faith and ethics of Jesus, identifies me as one sort of Christian (or hardly a Christian to some people). 

I believe that the kingdom of God — the coming kingdom, the kingdom coming into being, the kingdom potentially present in each moment of our lives infused with God's breath and Spirit — is bigger than any one of us can know. That it is all the things in Amanda Gorman's inaugural poem. And that this vision is very much a gift of the Black church.

We've had three Wednesdays in January: insurrection, impeachment, inauguration in succession. We're working toward a new world, at least I hope so. The repair work begins. It will be slow and hard. 

And I pray it brings us together.

Back in time

 I've been working from home since mid-March. I brought my work computer home to the big corner desk in the back room that has served as my work space since we bought this house 35 years ago. 

It was a last-minute decision on that last day before the church building closed and all of us -- school students, teachers, staff -- retreated to homes and screens and Zoom. It was drizzling, so I pulled my car up to the church door and wrapped the iMac in my fleece jacket before carrying it out the door and laying it on the back seat. 

At home it took the place of an older Mac, one whose operating system had been regularly updated, most recently past the point where it could handle all it was being asked to do with practical speed. And I settled into the work-at-home space where I had spent many, many late-night hours a couple decades ago,  dog sleeping under the desk, humans asleep in bedrooms nearby.

I shopped for that desk, a big one designed for a corner, for months, and brought it home and assembled it all by myself. It's veneer on particleboard with a wide and very sturdy keyboard shelf. The box must have been a heavy lift up the back steps. 

The desk faces into a corner with windows to the right and book shelves on the wall above. The chair came from a garage sale  -- a heavy office chair with shiny squared-off metal arms and a brown seat. After a couple tries I got the height just where I wanted it and added a flat pillow (also from a garage sale) that shortens up the seat. The chair is worn and lumpy and mine. I sprawl this way and that across it at least as much as I sit up the way you're supposed to.

All this is nothing but a lead up to writing about going back into my office at church the other day (Wednesday, to be exact, the day the mob invaded the Capitol).  It's always strange to be there, like walking into a museum exhibit of my past, frozen in time. Last spring's choir music is still in a folder on my desk. The bulletin board holds bits and pieces of life through last winter -- but nothing newer. There's still a box of odds and ends that I'm not sure what to do with and another odd collection of clippings and things I mean to bring home. 

Back at my house, in the morning sun, I can see dust -- on the floor under the dining room table, on the piano, on the lower shelf of the old washstand that serves as an end table. There's a Miss Fabersham quality to parts of the house -- things that have stayed frozen in time since last March -- just as there is to my office at church. 

Waiting for a new era.