Floating Upstream: hump day nuggets, 02/15/12: with a buck and wing

Left on a lonely island with one book only, and given the opportunity to prepare in advance, I'd take Annie Dillard's Teaching a Stone to Talk without a speck of hesitation. This book sits on my nightstand year round, the way some people keep their Bibles or their iPhones handy, and sometimes weeks go by without my opening it, and sometimes I don't read anything else for days on end.

Seal Point Harbor with a view of San Mateo Bridge

Two days ago I read out loud "Sojourner" in class, expecting that my fifteen-year old students would balk both at the dense language and at the guiding metaphor of this short, brilliant essay. As frequently happens, the good among them surprised me with their insight and appreciation, which in turn left me feeling both gratified and grateful.

I think and write about gratitude frequently, but this week the tilt of that gratitude felt a bit different than usual. As I read and reread Dillard's "Living Like Weasels," I came back repeatedly to a passage which I've always recognized, through a glass darkly, as profound; I think I am finally starting to see it as other than just beautifully worded (but oh, the cadence of her words):

We could, you know. We can live any way we want. People take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience--even of silence--by choice. The thing is to stalk your calling in a certain skilled and supple way, to locate the most tender and live spot and plug into that pulse. This is yielding, not fighting. A weasel doesn't "attack" anything; a weasel lives as he's meant to, yielding at every moment to the perfect freedom of single necessity.

I am grateful to have arrived at a place where I no longer seek but "stalk" my calling and where the goodness of days is measured by a growing capacity to accept and celebrate the "perfect freedom of single necessity." Whether that necessity be a kid who just won't eat breakfast in time for school or a class whose mix of personalities requires that I change my teaching philosophy every two days or so, I am thankful to feel steadily anchored in mucky details rather than struggling, as I did throughout my twenties, to find meaning in the big picture.

Because, as Dillard points out in "Sojourner," the big picture likely has no meaning other than fierce, unrelenting beauty:

Whether these thoughts are true or not I find less interesting than the possibilities for beauty they may hold. We are down here in time, where beauty grows. Even if things are as bad as they could possibly be, and as meaningless, then matters of truth are themselves indifferent; we may as well please our sensibilities and, with as much spirit as we can muster, go out with a buck and wing.

(If any of you, wise readers, know what "buck and wing" refers to, please let me know; I've been mystified by this image for quite some time.)

Since the birth of kids, I have grown more interested in seizing "the possibilities for beauty" than in sorting out "matters of truth," and I find that simplifying our lives--limiting choices, then choosing "the given" with a "fierce and pointed will"--often leads to a general sense of well-being and (more-or-less) inner peace.

watching airplanes landing at San Francisco International Airport

Instead of agonizing about what I "want to become," I glory in the freedom of stalking my calling in a "skilled and supple way." Instead of wondering what life with little children is like, I taste their warm breath and soft skin every morning, trying not to forget that before long, the tender beauty of their childhood will be gone.

If we were not here, material events like the passage of seasons would lack even the meager meanings we are able to muster for them. The show would play to an empty house, as do all those falling stars which fall in the daytime. That is why I take walks: to keep an eye on things.