a song to keep us unafraid

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This summer has been fast and uneventful, a waiting time between graduation and graduate school, mainly spent tending to the same place I've lived in for the past four years. But last weekend a few of us packed in a car and drove to Michigan for a quick trip and it was everything I needed. Royal Oak and Ann Arbor, I want to come back soon.

Now I am home again for another quick period before moving to North Carolina. Somehow I am twenty-two and sitting in the same room I sat in at thirteen, when I knew loneliness so well and used a typewriter to hash out all my anger. It is always surprising to come home because I remember a part of myself I had forgotten, perhaps the part of myself I most want to forget.

I read A Timbered Choir on the long drive home, and these words keep coming back to me:

"When field and woods agree, they make a rhyme
That stirs in distant memory the whole
First Sabbath's song that no largess of time
Or hope or sorrow wholly can recall.

But harmony of earth is Heaven-made,
Heaven-making, is promise and is prayer,
A little song to keep us unafraid,
An earthly music magnified in air."

[Wendell Berry]

[holga film, heather in royal oak + cantaloupe rinds]
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