We celebrated our wedding anniversary last week. Fourteen years. So, I gave the Spouse a box of magnets. It was just a jumbled collection of magnetic poetry that I found in a local second-hand store – some English, some French, some words pretty worn and peeling and some never used and needing to be snipped from their sibling words. A good and useful muddle and, as a gift for the Spouse, it was a bit of a winner. He loves this kind of thing. He may be a new academic, strutting his sociological stuff, but at heart, he’s a poet. (That’s his poem at the top. See?)
During his undergraduate years, the Spouse shared an apartment with a math student who, like him, was also a dedicated, eccentric folk musician. They lived on Bronson Avenue right above Rasputin’s cafe, folk music central in downtown Ottawa. Every Thursday, they were regulars at the famed open stage, and even when they responsibly stayed home to study, eaves-dropping was as easy as opening a window and letting the music drift in. Those two wrote and played a lot of music together, and I did a lot of listening, perched on the sofa, feeling lucky. And on the walls, there was poetry. They had four magnet boards, plus the fridge door, covered in those tiny magnetised words. There was always something new and interesting to read when I came to visit.
I’m not suggesting that magnetic poetry is the perfect vehicle for high art. It might be more akin to crossword puzzles than enduring literature, but the practise is a useful and beautiful one. There’s something contemplative about focussing on what’s right in front of you until you catch a glimpse of poetry.
You might say that it’s what we do every day. We use old words and others’ stories to make new meaning and maybe find new beauty or truth.
Of course, it starts when we are little. As children, we are filled up with other people’s words. We’re told their meanings, and praised when we use them correctly. Nouns are easy, especially when they refer to things around the house. Teapot is a pot for tea. We are at this stage with our Plum and it’s a delight to hear him play with language.
But as we get older, we start to experience different things. Harder things that don’t have easy tangible noun names. Beauty. Loneliness. Fairness. Fear. These are harder ideas to hold in language. These are harder feelings to hold in our hearts.
You might have heard that things are a little rocky on the small, rainy island where I’m living right now. We’ve had a whole decade’s worth of history in just a handful of days, and I’m not feeling very resilient. Grief and fear are loud, and the air feels thick with difficult exaggerations and too many unanswerable questions about the future. Some folk have been doing ugly things, and the twitchy media-rich culture that shares every hateful action far and wide makes all this feel close to home.
So I need words now. I need the practise of looking at words and for words, trying to make sense of things. I need old texts I can rummage through, old stories that will take the weight of all the fear and grief, and new ways of looking at all our old brokenness. I need the Spirit, who helps us in our weakness when we do not know what we ought to pray. I need the reassurance of the Spirit bringing comfort and joy even in the midst of uncertainty. All this and more I need because I can’t say I’ve yet found words I want to piece together to express what I’m feeling about all this upheaval, but I know that the act of looking is itself a path of prayer. And on the path, the Word walks with us. Which makes all the difference in the world.
