Saturday, April 6, 2013

An Easter Invocation


This April is a month of anniversaries. A good friend, a loyal dog, and my mother all died in April. Last year I crashed hard coming down Mount Lemmon; I am still stiff and sore and feel the old man from that one. I have often wondered why T. S. Eliot called April the cruelest month, but now agree, even if only by coincidence.

The leaves are opening here in the desert. Ground squirrels, desert spiny lizards, rattlesnakes, and bees are all more active as the days heat up. The semester has hit its crunch time before summer break.

You could call April the month of growth and remembrance, a month of paradox. I like that because I don't think I can have one without the other.  Dying and opening.

The hard aspects of my life -- having had to work menial jobs to get through college while my peers ran off to basketball games, feeling the pacifist misfit in a culture gone mad with violence -- have given me eyes to see those who are normally off the media radar. I know what it is like to sell newspapers standing on a median to indifferent and comfortable drivers in their air conditioned cars. I know what it's like to work all day and then have to write a paper on a hoity toity poem. I know what it is like to feel invisible, even if that invisibility has been white and male.

I know it and now need to remember it. Lately I have to confess, I want to give up, withdraw, fade away. I feel tired and discouraged.

Yet, when I step past that ennui, and fill the hummingbird feeder, clean out the fountain, listen to the voices in my students' papers, I find a flicker of will to go on.

When I look for it, I find the elusive, fragile, enduring memory of needing help, help only someone in my position could offer.

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