Spiritual Sunday
My dear friend Sue Schmidt alerted me to a Jane Hirshfield poem that captures how deep meaning hovers around us at all times, even though we are generally oblivious to it.
In Hirshfield’s account, although each moment of our lives offers us gates to heaven or to hell, generally we “go through neither.” Yet we sense these two possibilities in the same way that we pick up on the sound of distant bees. Our life may seem humdrum (following routines, nodding to neighbors, scanning the daily news), but these possibilities make of our lives a “thick honey.”
The poem reminds me of T. S. Eliot’s “Hollow Men,” only it’s more positive. As Eliot sees it, we are hollow men who don’t have the courage to be strong and assertive, whether for good or for bad. We dare not look into the eyes of those who have gone on to heaven or hell. Instead, stuck with broken images, we glimpse only their reflected sunlight, their distant voices:
Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death's dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind's singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.
Eliot appears to glamorize evil at a time (1925) when both Benito Mussolini and Adolph Hitler were on the rise. I’ll take a wishy-washy hollow man any day over either of them. But it’s true that they produce more meaningful dramas, which may be Hirshfield’s point. The two gates are the polarities against which we measure our lives.
Bees
By Jane Hirshfield
In every instant, two gates.
One opens to fragrant paradise, one to hell.
Mostly we go through neither.
Mostly we nod to our neighbor,
lean down to pick up the paper,
go back into the house.
But the faint cries—ecstasy? horror?
Or did you think it the sound
of distant bees,
making only the thick honey of this good life?
When my oldest son died, I grasped in a foundational way the two options before me. I could become bitter and closed down—my definition of a living hell—or I could dedicate my life to making better the lives around me. The following year I lived with an unaccustomed intensity.
Life became more subdued after that. We can’t always be gazing into the flames. Sometimes it’s okay to settle for the sound of distant bees.