Sunday Morning

After Great Pain

After great pain, a formal feeling comes--
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs--
The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore,
And Yesterday, or Centuries before?
The Feet, mechanical, go round--
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought--
A Wooden way
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone--
This is the Hour of Lead--
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons recollect the Snow--
First - Chill - then Stupor - then the letting go--

Sunday morning:  Before I get out of bed, I feel the weight of frustration wrap around me.  It's a dirty gray bathrobe.  I shuffle out of bed.  My feet wear imaginary bunny slippers, filthy bunny slippers. Sadness mats their dirty pink fur.   I shuffle down the hallway to the kitchen.  Making coffee requires an unusual amount of concentration.  My mind wanders away like a naughty child.  It create lists of all the things I need to do.  Wadding the lists into balls of paper, I shove them into my ratty pockets.  I try to forget about them.  Noisy children scamper by.  Their energy taps into my anger.  How can they be my children on this grumpy Sunday morning?   I growl at them to stop.  The day is already too long. 

The rain is at fault, tapping into my sour mood with its muggy torrents of yesterday.  I grieve the death of summer.  Breakfast sits in my stomach like a stone.  I know what I must do.  Walk.  I want to run from myself this morning.  In my head, I hear "the only way out is through."  I hear this often.  I can not argue.  Truth is often quite simple.  If only I could be so simple.  Another thing to mourn on a Sunday morning.

Leaving the house, I suddenly look up.  Emily Dickinson walks beside me.  She looks me in the eye and says, "First -- chill, then stupor--then the letting go."  You are right, Emily.  I start walking.  Quietly, inside my head I say, "Let go, let go, let go, let go".  It's my walking mantra.  I lose the robe and slippers.  Adorned in comfortable clothes, I enter my day.  This day is new.  The fact that I  don't feel like welcoming it begins to make it even more valuable.  I tumble this idea over and over in my head.  It fits neatly into the spaces between the words, "let go, let go, let go."  Inside I hear the knell of the funeral bell.  It tolls for expectations.
Expectations cut into the heart of contentment.  They make the letting go impossible.  I drop them.  They spill into an oily pile alongside the trail.

Crossing the intersection, I look up and see a familiar stranger, my puppy dog man.  He smiles eagerly and although he stands still to wait for me, he vibrates with energy.  Looking into his eyes, I see the happy elves dance between his ears.  I whisper to myself.  "I bet he's had a traumatic brain injury."  He greets me as he always does.  "How many miles are you up to?"  I do not know.  I know my answer matters not.  This is his way of opening the door to announce his own mileage conquests.  He grips a bright neon tennis ball.  His fingers work the surface of the ball as his words spill out.  He smiles broadly.  Happy dancing elves twirl wildly behind his blue eyes.  I coo politely and complement his stamina while denigrating my own.  He screams happy.  Is he too happy? May be.

This chance meeting awakens a sleepy happy elf inside my own head.  It lunges onto the dance floor and begins a lazy waltz.  Branches of wild berry bushes reach for me beside the trail.  I alter my course ever so slightly, taking in the sweet, wild smell of wet ripe berries.  Suddenly, directly in front of my face, an orange and black-striped spider hangs on a silken thread.  He almost became a quick morning snack.  I veer off course again giving him the room to be a spider on a damp Sunday morning.  I let him be.

This awareness fills me with a hopeful satisfaction.  I know that when I get back to the house, I won't put on the ratty bathrobe of depression.  I won't shuffle through my day in old  bunny slippers.  In letting things be, I've allowed myself the sadness while still allowing myself the freedom to move on, freedom to enjoy happy, grinning strangers, the freedom to allow spiders to hang in my path without batting them aside.  I have learned to go around.  I am letting go.

On the way home, I call again to Emily Dickinson.   "Please walk beside me again.  I want to thank you." Today, her poem took on another meaning for me, a more hopeful one.  I, who in the past had often used poem 341 as an anthem for a black mood, realized that underneath it, hope lies waiting.  Death to self, to a finite way of thinking or being is a letting go that can open the door to something else.  Pain isn't an end, especially not a dead one.  It can give birth to new meaning, if I only learn to let it be, to let go.

I bring Emily into the house with me.  I pull out a chair for her next to my keyboard.  I search through the first lines of Emily's poems trying to find the poem, poem 341.   I once thought I knew it so well.  As I scan the list of first lines, her wisdom leaps from the list and into my heart.  She was a depressive jewel.  She knew darkness and isolation well.  She also walked with God in hope.  She gave me hope on a muggy Sunday morning.  I hope she'll walk with me again.