Our Inner Exultation
There are themes and sages I refer to and write about shamelessly over and over again, as any regular reader of these posts is aware. Dag Hammarskjöld, Thoreau, Mary Oliver, Joseph Campbell, among many others. Beethoven’s ballet Creatures of Prometheus was never published in his lifetime and remains one of his least-known orchestral works. But the composer was satisfied enough with one of his themes that he used it at least twice more. Once in the finale of his Eroica and again in a set of 15 Variations for Solo Piano. If Beethoven can reuse themes, I feel justified in doing so. Certain ideas just bear constant repeating.
Great books like Walden can be read many times without exhaustion. Books don’t change, but the reader does, the circumstances do. Someone once advised that to see something different you should take the same path. Heraclitus taught us how impossible it is to step into the same river twice. The river isn’t much different, but the wader is.
So it is with Henry Beston, who wrote, in The Outermost House, that the world was “sick to its thin blood for lack of elemental things, for fire before the hands, for water welling from the earth, for air, for the dear earth itself underfoot.” I have returned to the book often, and alluded to it here, for timeless wisdom. That was written in 1928, so I’m wondering how much thinner our blood is now, 92 years later. We’re all weary, we’re all wondering how long this will go on and how we can endure.
Yet, the night time antiphonal cricket concerts have started anyway, pandemic or not. I can still hear them this morning with the first smear of pink in the eastern sky. It’s a deep sound and a primitive one, like peepers in the spring, a high wire thrumming. Unlike the spark of fireflies, you don’t see the source. Even that source is a mystery, a deep dark mystery. Two mysteries bracket the summer days. Peepers and crickets.
It’s the males, apparently, rubbing their wings (not legs as I thought), seeking mates and doing it at night because most predators are active during the day. Here is a classic example of making meaning. There’s a scientific explanation and lyrical poetic one. We know how to explain it, sure, but what about the haunting primal response called from us, whether we can explain it or not? We forget, until the peepers in the spring darkness and the crickets bringing us up to the threshold of autumn, the surround sound and how grateful we are to be alive and able to hear.
I can now just make out the road, the telephone pole, some green across the street as light slowly returns to this longitude. I just reheated my coffee and am grateful for a microwave. It’s a humble everyday item, usually taken for granted, like a great relationship or a rewarding job or plenty of food. You’ve grown to depend on it, and, in that sense, have taken it for granted. So it’s good to speak it out loud or write it, which is a lot of what this writing discipline is for. To foreground my blessings as often as I can, no matter what else is going on
Albert Schweitzer wrote “There is within each of us a modulation, an inner exaltation, which lifts us above the buffetings with which events assail us. Likewise, it lifts us above dependence upon the gifts of events for our joy.” Events are assailing us right now. May we each get to our inner exultation.
