Flock

This is one of those circling, waiting times. I sit mentally on a park bench, on a breezeless evening, but warm. Summer twilight. The sun has dropped behind the mountains to the west, and deep blue gathers in the sky. Bird and bat swooping time, when the air grows thick with insects and flocks turn and feed together in the air.

I see this motion all around me as I sit, and I want to catch it all. My eye flows this way and then another, bits of black action fluttering out of the corner of my eye but gone by the time I turn to look. Soon streetlights come on, pools of illumination. Birds dart across them.

I can't help thinking of the Yeats poem "The Second Coming," where chaos is descending upon the world. The imagery of the falcon flying its widening circling, moving further and further away from the falconer, no longer attendant to its master's voice. When I got up this morning, my thoughts, too, seemed scattered and lost in the gathering gloom; I could only catch glimpses of them.

At first I felt anxious. I didn't know what to write or whether I could. I walked around the house, opened my journal and browsed through the pages. But gradually, it occurred to me that the loss of control didn't mean the loss of something to say. I retired my mind to the park bench and waited. Slowly, in the silence, the words began to accummulate, individuals, in small clatches. They gathered as they do when I don't startle them. They clumped and grouped and formed themselves.

I don't believe that things can fall apart. If it seems that the center cannot hold, maybe we were looking to the wrong center.

The essence of things, the heart of them, exists beyond my ability to turn or call or shape them. I can live in that essence or not, look at the world through its eyes or not. But it waits below the surface of my knowing. It gathers in the shadows of our busy-ness. I wait, let my eyes slowly adjust to the light, and I can see them in the dark.