I have not done any formal writing in a long time and I am starting to feel the weight of the absence of the practice. I have read to be sure and amassed a small fortune of scraps of paper, receipt backs and tiny notebooks attesting to the fact that my brain hasn't slowed nearly as much as I assumed it would.
"If the landscape reveals one certainty, it is that the extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation. After the one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with ever-fresh vigor. The whole show has been on fire from the word go. I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn't flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames."
Excerpt from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard pp. 16-17
And that is why I am writing this instant. I closed my eyes but the light from the blaze colored the darkness I sought all yellow and orange and left me without peace. The past couple months have seemed too much to chronicle with accuracy yet I was catching fire over the Holidays and I do not wish to be so passive and above-it-all that I doze while it all goes up in smoke.
Not that the last couple months have been anything truly Earth shattering but in my tiny part of the land they have greatly distruptive.
God save Haiti from the ground that seems to seek to devour her. The Voodoo teachings that are prevelant in Haiti say that the nation is a mother. May her own children and the neighborhood kids do everything to heal her. I heard it will most likely take till the end of this century before there is a sense of how things used to be in Haiti before the earthquake. If that is the timeline to get back to that then there is far more than mere restoration that needs to take place. Hopefully Haiti will spring up brand new and hardly be recognizable. No more misery and no more fear.
