Do you see the waxwings gathered at the top of my neighbor's poplars?  They look like seed heads on long grass stems, a harvest of birds in midwinter.  This feathered band keeps visiting these same trees and it pleases me to look out my kitchen window and see their flash mob in the top branches.  The waxwings' high pitched twitter is constant and sometimes they rise in little clouds before settling again and sometimes they rise in little clouds and take off for points unknown, and either way they are lovely to watch.  And I do watch them, happier for the sight, better for the sight.

Yesterday, I finished reading "Great Expectations".  Strange that I had never picked it up before, it is such a pleasure.  While the plot is well-enough and several of the characters outstanding, it is Dickens virtuosic use of language that makes the book a thoroughgoing delight.  Again and again I felt completely taken by Dickens' word choice - perfect, light, funny, never striking a wrong note.  His was prodigious skill indeed and in this late novel, though his ample talent is present in every paragraph, it is rarely heavy-handed.  All day long however my heart felt vaguely encumbered as I went through my round of errands and toddler-rearing and fourth-grade spelling words and second-grade math problems until I realized I was just sad that Pip had gone out of my life: no more Pip coming to me out of the marshes on Joe's back, or watching Estella skip on crumbling casks, or smuggling his convict downriver, no more of his masterfully-narrated life embrightening mine.  Thus the pleasure and the pain of a good book.  Darn it all.

 

Tonight I began a class in the Psalms at my church.  They are ancient and abiding poetry, abiding I suppose because they showcase our best and our worst, our joy and our anguish, our belief and our unbelief, our continual warring harrowing our hopes for real peace.  This is uncensored stuff and in the midst of the cedars skipping and lambs lying down and harps being hung up and enemies being arrayed and hearts being cleaned and souls lifted up and tables being spread and stories of old being renewed, there are ancient questions that are as real today as they were when the Psalms were being compiled.  That's the good thing about being human: the true questions, the first questions of our hearts are always fresh and worthy and never tired.  Tonight, we ended the class with beginning to learn some plain chant, and though I am a poor singer in a room of novice chanters, it was quite moving.  And as luck (or Providence) would have it, we chanted Psalm 27 which has some of my favorite words in the whole Psalter:

One thing I asked of the Lord, that will I seek after; to live in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to inquire in his temple.

Who doesn't want that?

And now, I have to go to bed, because in the space of a few hours my alarm will blare at me and I will be off to the gym to sweat it out to Top 40 songs while my plyometrics instructor keeps me jumping like a flea.  So, there is life's zany complexity: chanting psalms at 8pm and doing Burpees to Ke$ha ten hours later and all the while sadly missing a fictional character and hoping the waxwings will come around again.  Selah.