Penumbra
Penumbra
June days—with how long that old star hangs, the one that lets things go and brings them startlingly back, high above, at a striking stroke— we haven’t seen a shadow for some time. When we do, it’s the long gasp of evening or that wisp of morning. Do you think they feel slighted? Removed? So used to something being between them and the light. Do they, too, have a name for obstruction: parent, fear, constellation? In deciduous woods, it is easy to mistake branch, crack, and light for a writhing, living thing. Leaves mistake themselves for bells, chittering, each trying to be seen. Bells, deep in the hills of Gethsemane, Kentucky. Inside, I know there to be monk after monk spinning like the weathervane of tradition. Their forest filled with small totems the way each child brings their own mementos to nap time —the company of a pharaoh’s death parade. In the prominence of evergreens, you feel a presence before you see it. The shade is old and deep. The ground is soft from kneeling. Have you ever felt life too full to hold another answer—so you keep questions close like a skin against the wind?
Last weekend we went on our first backpacking trip of the year—short, sweet, and always at risk of not having what we need. While trying to fall asleep (and failing) by an alpine lake, the barred owls in the forest began their strange cackling. At that point, it was easy to believe that “the owls were not what they seemed.” We’ve been re-watching Twin Peaks with some friends, so that quote is always top of mind. David Lynch’s vision of the Pacific Northwest is such an apt portrait of this place’s sublime qualities.
In “A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful” (1757) the political theorist and philosopher Edmund Burke said the following about the sublime:
The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully is Astonishment, and astonishment is that state of the soul in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror … No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear. For fear, being an apprehension of pain or death, operates in a manner that resembles actual pain. Whatever therefore is terrible, with regard to sight, is sublime too … Indeed terror is in all cases whatsoever, either more openly or latently, the ruling principle of the sublime.
When D and I lived in Nashville, we drove up to the Abbey of Gethsemane in Kentucky, the abbey where Thomas Merton lived. There was a trail leading from the monastery into the woods, filled with shrines, trinkets and thick southern air. It’s a strange feeling to enter a forest that feels “lived in” in a way that’s familiar. I think I also bought a Rilke collection in the gift shop.
I forgot to include one of these little poems last week! Back on it now :)
Where is Mason Pashia?
The shape of and shaped by a hammock.
Tongue out, slight, despite being told
once, as a child, it’s dangerous. For who
could let the world go by
untasted?
With gratitude,
Mason
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So much good stuff in the poem and commentary! Love “that old star hangs” as a synonym for the sun.
Fantastic use of spacing to create a sense of shadow from the words. Really enjoyed that! As I stared at the words and then the in-between spaces, my mind Eric Carle’d an inverted version of each word, which felt like a new kind of shadow.
I too was told holding my tongue out was dangerous, but I hadn’t thought about that in a long time. At least, not consciously. It was a fantastic time-bend, and that little twist from there to tasting the world as essential was really lovely.