Waiting
Over at Squirrely Jedi’s this morning, I mused about waiting. I found I wanted the comment preserved here, as a post. I collect oddments in this space as if I’m creating something to last, like a collection of seashells the tides have offered up, though this is an ephemeral medium and though I’m already guessing that I may be hard put to justify the expense of renewing this domain next summer, on its second anniversary. That’s another matter though, and one that can wait until May, when I can print posts out and put them in a notebook if I have to. As child support ends with each child’s eighteenth birthday, we bridge financial transitions. Two years hence, when my daughter graduates and leaves for college, I do not know where I will be - perhaps not in this house. It may be other people who watch my garden grow - again - or tear neglected roses out and pave the kitchen garden over with sod for the sake of convenience. But better to have made a garden than not, for there is good in the doing. I will plant and tend this spring as if I will live to be 100 right here in this place. I will finish the stone path.
I’ve ventured from from the original purpose for this post, which was to capture thoughts on a different matter altogether. Mind you, I never promised to refrain from meandering 
.
When you have waited for a very long time and the one you are waiting for does not come, you gather up tattered grief into a bundle the better to carry it, for it is yours, and you tuck hope back away into your pocket, where it remains softly alive much longer than reason says it should.
You cease waiting then, chart your course according to your best lights, and undertake your life.
No doubt, you still listen for the voice of one you’ve waited for, and you know you would stop and turn should you hear it. But life is too precious to spend waiting for one who does not choose to come - or cannot.
cyrano wrote:
I don’t want to be right if it makes you wrong, or accept a boon from the universe if denying it would place it in your hands.
I’m afraid to change you at all (even in your opinion expressed here), because there’s no way to improve on the glistening rainbow of a butterflies’ wing, or the color of water falling from an eagle’s claws as she rises with a lurching trout from a mirror-still pond in Alaska, or the tinkling-chimes sound of a child laughing in the summer sun by the sea, or the magic alchemical taste of an endless kiss beneath an unblinking moon on a sultry night.
But it simply isn’t credible that anyone who has met you would not long to be with you. And I know that any man who reads your words here would wish these thoughts were about him.
Life as a human among others (as opposed to simply being by oneself) is profoundly difficult and confusing, in good part because words are incomplete even at their best, and often utterly confounding when not spoken personally, directly, and clearly. Does this person know you feel this way? If so, and we can’t doubt you (for you write with greater fidelity and deeper thought than anyone I know), then I am certain this absence from you has nothing to do with a lack of affection for you, and everything to do with the mountains and rivers of life between you.
Any honest man who meets you would worry that he had far to little to offer, and would take very literally any suggestion you might have offered that he was to be just a friend. That itself would be a great boon and he would clutch that to his heart as sufficient treasure. You are, after all and in certainty, unnervingly well-educated, impossibly well-read, heart-breakingly beautiful, far too good a thinker and a writer for any but a limited few to think they could ever be your equal, and simply such an incarnation of basic goodness and goodwill as to be a challenge for human approach. I doubt you’re an angel, but for a woman with so much light you cast remarkably little shadow.
I really don’t think you’re writing about me. But I couldn’t pass up this opportunity to compliment you. Some of us here worship the ground you walk on.
Posted on 11-Feb-07 at 8:15 pm | Permalink
mindspin wrote:
This was generously spoken, doubtless too generously, but greatly appreciated.
Posted on 13-Feb-07 at 11:23 pm | Permalink