Ibulliance: Summer’s Dark Light
Before leaving town, I saw my friend one last time, his body shrunk to half his radiant health, his poet's mind already orbiting another light. Days later, he lifted—out of the arms of his beloved—and wound his way into that light.
Two I love deeply sent their 18 year old, with graduation tassels still swinging, to a promising gap year working on Broadway. On her first night in the big city, an unexpected lacing of fentanyl took her life.
Summer, in its blossoming, can be devastating.
I walk through the booths of the Santa Fe International Folk Art Market looking for a friend and artisan partner of ten years, and learn she is at home in India in the throes of chemo. We note the pace of life accelerating these days, but so, it seems, does the pace of loss.
I go to the Farmer's Market and fill my canvas bag with beet greens and turnips, peaches and herbs, zinnias and cosmos spilling out in the bright enthusiasms of summer, leaving behind a whole chorus of sunflowers singing gold and glad.
A team member misses a meeting because she is shepherding a cadre of family children on vacation while her four-year-old niece is watched in the hospital, bitten by a copperhead while walking to dinner. Loss can be as slow as summer's ripening, and sometimes as quick as lightning. Or a copperhead. A gunshot. Fentanyl. Cancer.
I take off for an evening walk in the high desert light of Santa Fe, enraptured by the luminous gold on tree tops, when an ominous cloud bursts overhead letting loose bulbous rain drops of the monsoon kind. When it persists, I reluctantly turn around, and with a slow jog, keep pace with the pelting. Just as I near home, drenched and laughing, a young man pulls up in his Subaru, rolls down his window, and says, as though afraid I might miss the whole point of my dousing, There's a rainbow behind you.
I sit in the grace of my friends' garden dining on squash and tomatoes, nasturtiums and greens and blackberry pie—summer's bounty. A conversation among strangers somehow touches every part of me, and I think perhaps this is how we shore ourselves up between the crevices of loss—with the mortar of quiet affection. This morning, I listen to the celebration of my young friend's brief, brilliant life, and feel at one with the other 400 hearts there—opening, breaking, and holding the broken pieces in our cupped hands, together. Through that brokenness, light steals through—not like bright sunflowers singing, no; but like the dim rainbow I turned around and glimpsed in the pouring rain.
I wonder—I can't help but wonder—if it could ever be possible that the world of us, together, might confess our brokenness, for surely our togetherness is broken; and then, as one, bound in this pelting storm, could hold the broken pieces—just enough, so that light might slip through. Just enough to bind the wounds that are, after all, what actually hold us all together. Just enough to let us hear, in one another, the poetry of this life before it is gone.
All the Best,
SHW
