quotations and poetry

I can remember only one of its exhibits, which I loved: a large wall of little doors, arrayed from floor to ceiling, each with a tiny handle. Some I could reach for myself, while my father would have to lift me to others. I must have worn him out with my desire to open and then close every single one of them. What was behind each door was a pane of glass, a window which gave onto a great – real? – tree, and each aperture revealed some different aspect of its life: nests, squirrels, spiders, stuffed birds whose glass eyes looked back with gleaming veracity. There was no way to ever see the entire tree at once, on the hundreds – were there? – of alternative perspectives the doors opened. This great curio cabinet, this museum of viewpoints, serves in my memory as a metaphor that resonates in many directions. The past itself seems to me like that tree, unseeable in its entirety, knowable only in its parts, each viewpoint yielding a different version of the story about what the whole might be. What is the world but a tree too huge to see at once, known only through the shaping character of the particular aperture through which we see?

– Mark Doty, Heaven’s Coast

In every important way we are such secrets from one another, and I do believe that there is a separate language in each of us, also a separate aesthetics and a separate jurisprudence. Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable – which, I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live. We take fortuitous resemblances among us to be actual likeness, because those around us have also fallen heir to the same customs, trade in the same coin, acknowledge, more or less, the same notions of decency and sanity. But all that really just allows us to coexist with the inviolable, intraversable, and utterly vast spaces between us.

― Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

Astonishing material and revelation appear in our lives all the time.
Let it be.
Unto us, so much is given.
We just have to be open for business.
~Anne Lamott,  Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers

I’ve read Help Thanks Wow, and loved it (I’ve read all of Anne Lamott’s non-fiction, and none of her fiction – should I?) but I thank my friend Emily, whose glorious blog Barnstorming reminded me of these lines.

But isn’t transformation, the spirit’s education, most often effected by what is out of our hands, the sweeping forces – time, love, mortality – which shape us? The deepening of the heart, the work of soul-making goes on, I think, as the world hammers us, as we forge ourselves in response to its heats and powers The whirlwind pours over and through us, above and beyond human purpose; death’s deep in the structure of things, and we didn’t put it there.

– Mark Doty, Heaven’s Coast

The storyteller’s claim, I believe, is that life has meaning – that the things that happen to people happen not just by accident like leaves being blown off a tree by the wind but that there is order and purpose deep down behind them or inside them and that they are leading us not just anywhere but somewhere.

The power of stories is that they are telling us that life adds up somehow, that life itself is like a story… it makes us listen to the storyteller with great intensity because in this way all his stories are about us and because it is always possible that he may give us some clue as to what the meaning of our lives is.

~ Frederick Buechner

Yet another beautiful passage I found for the first time on First Sip.