Notes and Confessions

 Ash Wednesday, 2022

Last Thursday, I was driving into work, listening to NPR and stories of the invasion by Russia into Ukraine. On the road up ahead, I saw a squirrel thrashing about, hit, dying. Just before passing by helplessly, I saw that there a piece of the squirrel a few inches from the majority of the body. I burst into tears. 

When I got to work, as I walked from the parking lot, I came across a mother duck with ten tiny ducklings. These waddling fuzzballs could not have been too long out of the eggs. I took a few seconds of video and a couple of pictures. I teared up. It was beauty in stark contrast to the radio and dying squirrel. 

 

 

Later that day, at my desk, I looked over to Facebook and someone had posted a short video In the foreground was a hand and you could hear a human whistle. Suddenly, from trees on the horizon, flew half a dozen or more small birds, vibrantly bright yellow with orange heads. The video had Chinese writing on it, so I'm left to assume these are birds in China. Because I was in my office, I didn't burst into tears, but I nearly did. It was as if it was too much beauty.

I was feeling fragile.

It's been a hard couple of years and, for me, it's been harder coming out of quarantine than going in, so the last nine months or so have been the hardest of all for me. Pay attention to the news and the maneuverings of people with more power than sense, and it quickly becomes overwhelming. 

If it's the kind of overwhelm that doesn't break me---as I do not feel in danger of actually being broken---it is an overwhelm that makes me susceptible to being broken by beauty. By hope. It's the kind of overwhelm that can't quite take beauty and hope. It would be easier to not let the beauty in. 

I hold onto the possibility that it is a beauty that will not break so much as break open. The overwhelm threatens to encrust me with a hardness that leaves no response to beauty, that doesn't allow for hope. 

There's where I begin this lent. 

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I gave up blogging a couple of years ago, for a few reasons, which I may or may not address in the days ahead. For a good while, I had trouble writing at all. That's been turning around the last couple of months and as I've long known that the more I write, the more I write. I've found the urge to blog again. 

What better time than lent? 

"Notes and Confessions" is the title I'm giving this series of lenten posts. I don't promise to post daily, but I have things bubbling up that are maybe not fully formed enough to but anywhere else, and yet they feel like they belong in a public exercise. They're likely to be mostly questions, anyway.

Maybe I'm just feeling some exhibitionist tendencies, but the discipline I'm choosing this year is a public fragility.

Whether you look on or avert your eyes is your business.