In the Ashes

“The Expulsion from Paradise is eternal in its principal aspect: this makes it irrevocable, and our living in this world inevitable, but the eternal nature of the process has the effect that not only could we remain forever in Paradise, but that we are currently there, whether we know it or not.”  -Kafka

Damn the days when the meetings at work go badly, when a family member gets some not-so-good medical news, when arriving homes turns into a big three-way fight, when your first shot at teaching Zumba ends with a sweat stain in a painfully embarrassing place.  Damn the days when you wish you were someone else, when you realize you are no longer young, when perhaps you are not even any longer sexy, when all of your confidence melts away and you are left with a longing for the old days, for nights at the old coffee shop where you and your old pal Ramon served up lattes while dancing on the counters, both of your heads covered in the soap suds from the sink full in the back, when you laughed good guttural laughs a dozen times a day, when last-minute road trips lasted 72 hours and swept nearly the whole of the east coast, when almost every night was spent out on the wrap-around porch, Camel Light and Cabernet to the right, laptop on the lap, the words coming out of you faster than you could type them. 

Now I type 75 words per minute, mostly on student work.  I still laugh but mostly at myself.  Things have changed. Starkly.

But, as my friends reminded me yesterday after one of these bad days, today is a new day, and as an old hero of mine used to say: “It’s fresh with no mistakes in it.  Yet.”

Here’s when I should write about the phoenix, about rising up from the ashes, about the glory of trying and trying again. 

But instead, I’ll write about my robins again, harbingers of new beginnings, of the rebirth of ideas and spirit.   My sweet robins, who I wake to every morning now, who wait for me on both porches, almost seem to watch me out of the corner of their eyes, wondering about me.  They have spirit.  They have joy.  They have kinship.  I know because I watch them as they protect one another, as they dance with each other in the air, as they sing in the mornings and dart high and low into the evenings.  They do not fly as high as the hawks, as the vultures, as the geese and ducks.  They are not as majestic as the eagles.  They stay close.  They need no escape. 

Last year, I watched one of them die.  I held her as the life slowly drained out of her, and I spoke soft words to her, telling her I was with her.  More tired than afraid, she stared carefully at me as I ran my finger over her wing then laid her down.  I was with her as her body seized suddenly, and I watched helplessly as her open eye went dark and her little body folded in on itself.  I cried a few silent tears over her for a while then buried her in the corner of my backyard. 

I wondered, like I so often do, what I could learn from the robin, from her quiet death on my back porch, from the way she waded patiently through those last labored breaths.   And what comes to me is that more important than rising from the ashes is, for me anyway, staying with them, accepting the ashes as ashes, the moments when I’m knee-deep in ashes and there doesn’t seem to be any way out of them, no way to rise, no wings to carry me.  In these broken-winged moments, I must learn to turn my eyes away from the sky and face the moment with the patience of the robin—the bird who has spent her joyful little life darting through the air and singing the mornings into their light.

Sometimes in the evenings, after a broken-winged day, I want to run away, to fly away, to be something else, someone else, somewhere else.  I fear the slow dark days.  I fear the bad news, the sad realizations, the growing old and tired.  Perhaps part of me believes that I can go back to where I have been, that it’s even possible, that ashes can be built back into clean, untouched joy.   But just now, a robin lands on my fence, just outside my back door, and she reminds me that this is the only moment that exists.  And it is mine. 

She flies away as fast as she arrived, but she doesn’t go far.  I step outside after her, to stand in the evening air.  A storm has just passed, and the ground is still wet.  And because there is nowhere else to be, I stand in the dusk alone, forgetting for a second about the new day that will be tomorrow.