Facing Toward the Light: An Excerpt from Sky Mesa Journal

Photo courtesy of Pixabay.com

Excerpt from Sky Mesa Journal by Judith Deem Dupree. Copyright 2016, published by Wipf and Stock. Copies may be purchased from Wipf and Stock and from Amazon.  

LOCAL NOTE: An Author Talk featuring Judith discussing the genesis and publication of Sky Mesa Journal is being hosted by the Alpine Library (1752 Alpine Blvd.) this week on Thursday, October 20 from 6:00-8:00 PM. Judith will have books for sale and will be happy to sign copies. Please come support a local San Diego author and her work.   

It was not much past dawn when I slipped out the door and faced the great iron gate out back. In the slant of first light it resembled somewhat the “gates of hell”―heavy and formidable. Ah, but beyond lay Paradise! In lieu of unlocking and unwinding the heavy chain and shoving against its grudging “joints,” I climbed over the old monster. I always do―depositing whatever baggage I tote over on the other side.

Today I toted only a weight of weariness. The “world was too much with me.”

I am not an up-with-the-roosters person. I felt quite uneasy leaving my comfort zone so early―regardless of the discomfort that routed me. Testing my legs and blood sugar and ignoring the grind of an empty belly seemed like a bad answer to a bad question. Or quest. The gnaw of guts was only a mimic of the churn of thought that woke me.

But I was brought up short by the exclamatory. Earth-life stretched around me, hummed and chirped, exhaled its varied aromatic breath, each its trace of pneuma. The land was filled with freshness. I breathed vastly, enfolded in the small celebration before me.

The early light is a peach-hued wash against the umber earth. An incredible palette! This is the morning’s work within me, this facing toward the light. Too often I see the world darkly, see only the umber without the wash of ruddy gold. There are times, even in this become-sacred place, when melancholy overwhelms any sense of the mystery of nature, a denial of the spare and eloquent mastery of God. Scales creep over the spiritual retina I peer through―opaque, filmy, all the drab distortions that we know.

Probably it is much like the blindness that the Lord peeled away from Saul-become-Paul. I recognize this more often now, this clumsy and yes, futile shield―my fascia, a veneer against the callousness before me . . . and within me.

And against grief. There is a sorrow, a Welt-Schmertz, weeping up through me, a deeper grief than I can carry. Either to live without grieving or grieve without recourse bequeaths fatalism, begets tragedy. It is a betrayal of the faith we first consent to.

It is balance I need, and a robust vision. I am just beginning to face this truth: I must neither fear the darkness, nor accept it, nor shrug it off. I cannot fight the battle for earth-life unless I have fought the battle for my vision.

As a frail and sometimes fatuous human being, I balk at death’s increasingly harsh preliminaries―at the way it visits us at every turn, the ways it comes ripping through humanity, Grim Reaper that it is. It is my own creeping entropy I battle, and lose within the entropy of a world I gather up and mourn. It is attending a funeral endlessly repeated, a cortege of the helpless and the homeless.

And the heartless. That eternal death . . . 

Life today is often seen as something of a wedge between two vast intangibles―our very entity caught in a grind between the beginning and end, those eternal mysteries of being.

Nature denies such hopelessness. Every new morning, new spring, each rebirth from fire or flood or wind proclaims life’s frailty and strength, unwraps the earth from its grave-cloth . . . .

Celebrates its endurance, its stubborn resurrection.