Spiritual Sunday
A few weeks ago my friend Sue Schmidt alerted me to this exquisite “Autumn” poem by Jane Hirshfield. In it, she compares trees stripped of their leaves to a beloved icon that has been kissed so many times that it has darkened. In this case, however, the kiss is delivered by the wind and the gold flakes that once covered the icon are the falling leaves:
Autumn
By Jane HirshfieldAgain the wind
flakes gold-leaf from the trees
and the painting darkens—
as if a thousand penitents
kissed an icon
till it thinned
back to bare wood,
without diminishment.
I love the idea that the icon is not diminished, even though it is “thinned back to bare wood.” The reverence of those delivering the kisses render the picture even more holy. The sentiment reminds me of the central theme of Margery Williams Bianco’s The Velveteen Rabbit. In it, a stuffed toy learns what it means to become “Real”:
“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”
And:
Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.
As Hirshfield sees it, the trees are not so much stripped as taken down to their essence. Two Sundays ago I quoted Robert Frost’s “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” but what he sees as tragedy, Hirshfield regards as spiritual growth.
As I grow old (I’m 71), I see the wind as the march of time, which strips us down to our fundamentals. Though much is lost, at this age I am better able to distinguish between what is important and what is peripheral.
