The late 1970s had some of the coldest winters ever recorded in the Midwestern part of the country where I grew up. We had days and weeks of wind-chilled temperatures, often below zero. Like my young friends, I adapted well to these conditions. We had free time to burn due to so many days of called-off school, time that we spent sled riding, building snow forts and generally sliding and skating across the frozen landscape.
Meanwhile, I kept up with my old habit of hiking alone in the woods and pastures surrounding our suburban neighborhood. One time in particular, I had my sketchbook and journal with me, as usual, in order to record thoughts and images that might occur to me. I was about 16 or 17, still in high school, and several years before I choose to join a monastery to live a contemplative life. The hike took place in the middle of an epic winter snow storm. I started a poem then which I later entitled “Burning Sun”. Burning Sun is basically about a young person seeking he “knows not what” earnestly and with a kind of abandonment which marches right into the face of an environmental calamity without concern for life or limb because the seeking itself seems so much more important.
The foolishness of this episode reminds me of the short story by Jack London, “To Build a Fire”. In London’s story, the protagonist, a new-comer to the Klondike area of Alaska during the gold rush, ultimately dies in a winter storm because he’s unable to build a fire to keep himself from freezing to death. Instead of building a fire, I was trying to build a composition in my sketchbook. As the protagonist in the short story experiences the turning of his fingers into icicles incapable of striking a match and saving his life, so I became incapable of scratching my pen across the page of my notebook. The composition had to be finished in the warmth of my family home after my hands had thawed.
Like the protagonist in the Jack London short story, I lost my battle with the cold but, unlike him, I managed to save my life in the form of a poem. I could not build a fire of meaningful verses on my own out in the raw winter elements. That task got so stiff that it nearly died in the frozen fields; but the experience of looking up from my failed attempt burned itself in me. I discovered the sun burning in the sky above me, burning not with physical warmth on that stormy day, but with transcendent beauty and understanding. It was this unexpected experience that touched and un-froze my mind and heart. What was created was an inner warmth and conviction of a burning stream of consciousness way out of proportion to my puny sense of self in the world.
Up to them, my life has been a struggle for meaning. I was frozen in my habits and in my lack of awareness of something beyond a herd-consciousness, (even if the herd I was in was friendly and agreeable most of the time.) What the burning sun seemed to indicate to me was that I would not die in such smallness. There was so much more aliveness burning in the stream -above, beyond and now in and through -me. I was given an intuition that I would never forget this moment, even if it took 40, 50 or 60 years for me to unpack it. I had been blessed to drink from a stream by the wayside and was suddenly enabled to lift up my head, forever.
Burning Sun
He will drink from a brook along the way, and so he will lift his head high.
PSALM 110:7
Well, the frost-bitten air
pressed low near the earth
while the turbulent skies
kept whipping icy wind against
the flesh of my face.
Pinching a pen with
finger joints frozen
in place,
ink – sputtering like a
defective mower
riding back and forth
across the page.
Hesitation gives way
to solitude
as the spirit of the moment
seeps in...
seeps in...
Raising my eyes
above the paper,
the burning sun
streams.
AMEN.
Enjoyed this post? Never miss out on future posts by following us»
Comments
Post a Comment