Made in solemn incomprehensible earnest

Divinity is not playful. The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest. By a power that is unfathomably secret, and holy, and fleet. (Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker's Creek, p. 270)

I spent the afternoon wandering though poets. Marilyn Nelson. Marie Howe. I walked Tinker's Creek with Annie Dillard. It was like binging on an incredible box of chocolates. So rich, so many flavors, each one a grace, and all together -- too much.

...only able to endure it by being no one and so/specifically myself I thought I'd die/from being loved like that. (Marie Howe, Annunciation)

Yesterday I picked up the notes I had made when I was 50, on the 30-day retreat making Ignatius' Spiritual Exercises. I didn't find what I was looking for, quite. But maybe I have now. #4thWeek

The world is wilder than that...more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. (Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker's Creek, p. 268)

Tinker's Creek was my mother's, which I found on the shelf when we cleaned out my parent's house. There was a page marked toward the end, the back cover tucked in. So anxious was I to find the last chapter today, I unthinkingly pulled it out. Now I have no idea where the marker was left. Nor why. Was it something I would want to return to? Or just as far as she got before someone blasted in the door from school, from a wild and extravagant and bright day? My mother was 42 when Tinker's Creek was published. Would this young woman have advice for my much older self? I want to weep at my inattention.

The gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirit's one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself for the first time...The gaps in the clifts in the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God; they are the fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through, the icy narrowing fjords splitting the cliffs of mystery. Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish, too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap...and unlock a universe. This is how you spend this afternoon, and tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon. Spend the afternoon. You can't take it with you. (Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker's Creek, p. 269)

I remember bundling up on a bitter January day to sit on Brace's Rock just off the retreat house at Eastern Point, somewhere in the first week of the Exercises. Cowering from the wind in a cleft of rock, hoping to catch a glimpse of God from the outside.

I have spent the afternoon.