the same country

i want to begin with the crows.

the actual narrow croaking of them on a cold morning, the way they move through bare branches like small pieces of punctuation on a blank page.

i hear them some mornings, loudly calling across branches and streets and feel something i can’t quite name crack me open. not quite grief. not quite wonder. some place between.

and though tears lodge in my throat, the crows do not care about my feelings. they go on making their narrow sounds. completely, unapologetically alive in the cold grey air.

and i stand there (or here) and something. something in me breaks open a little more.

grief and joy are not opposites, the crows tell me.

they are not even distant relatives. they are the same country. the same sky. the same soil humming underneath you.

grief and delight are both places where the universe sings to you of your existence.

and certain moments (the kind where you feel everything and nothing all at the same time) are the bridge between you and the universe.

moments with the afternoon light slanting through a kitchen window at four o’clock. the sound of rain hitting the windows. the particular scent of daffodils in spring. the feeling, sometimes, of a whole life vibrating in a single ordinary moment.

i think this is what the mystics were pointing at when they talked about eternity.

not a long time. not the future extending infinitely outward.

but this. the crows singing hoarsely, the wind twisting branches, grief lodged in my throat, a child tugging on my hand asking for a snack. a moment that opens and contains all the other moments simultaneously.

i am simply the vibrating cells of a fallen star taking residence in my own beating heart. every moment everything and nothing.

this world is charged. pulsing. electric.

the world is charged with the grandeur of God. (Gerald Manley Hopkins)

charged like a sky before a storm when the air changes and the light changes and everything gets very still and very alive at the same time.

grief is charged the same way. it crackles. it changes the air. it makes everything unbearably present.

and somehow in the charged air of grief the world also becomes briefly, unbearably beautiful.

you notice things. the grain of a wooden table. the way your child’s eyelashes look while he sleeps. the smell of rain. the crows and the geese and the sound of water running over dishes in the sink.

little delights do not eliminate or obscure the grief of living and loving in this world. rather, delight arrives to accompany the grief. they are the same country. the same earth beneath your feet.

this is the thing about the earth, about the soil, about the sky that has held every version of you underneath its enormous patient arms:

it all keeps going. the thaw keeps coming. the crows keep croaking in the cold grey branches. the wind keeps dancing through brown grass, the trees bud again and again every spring. the hot water pours over your tea and the grief keeps being love and the love keeps being grief and all of it — all of it — lands on you heavy and terrible and beautiful.

i do not think the goal is to alchemize grief into something more palatable. to move through it and out the other side into permanent equanimity. to become the kind of person who is no longer surprised by loss, no longer broken open by beauty, no longer stopped in her tracks by morning moonlight and birdsong.

i think the goal (if there is one at all) is to become capacious enough to hold both.

to walk through the dark as it comes with a pocket full of good things. to let the moonlight break you open and let the sound of a crow stick in your heart and feel both things fully, at the same time, without asking anything to be any less or more than they are.

somehow, despite everything, to be astonished, still.

and in the astonishment there is no separation.

the cosmic and the ordinary particulars collapse into each other the way they are always trying to.

a mud puddle is a mud puddle. a mud puddle is also the whole of creation asking you to pay attention.

a crow is a crow. a crow is also the pulse of the universe croaking in a bare branch in the cold grey air of an ordinary morning that contains everything.

you exist here. you exist here. you exist here.

in the grief and the delight and the place in-between.

in the arms of the sky that have held every version of you and are holding you still.

you are home. you are home. you are home.