Category Archives: Emily Every Day

Good morning. A gray, wet day. Took Lance and Leo for our walk, and they both came home covered with mud and joy. Leo is staying with us again, and the all-day wrestling match continues. Here is Emily’s contribution.

#1201, c. 1865

Far from Love the Heavenly Father
Leads the Chosen Child,
Oftener through Realm of Briar
Then the Meadow mild.

Oftener by the Claw of Dragon
Than the Hand of Friend
Guides the Little One predestined
To the Native Land.

So why do some of us get easier and more pleasant lives, and some of us get the Realm of Briar? It’s the question that just about everyone asks at some point. No one thinks of himself as the one with the Charmed Life. I’ve never heard anyone say, “Gosh, my life has been easy so far. I expect that to continue for the rest of my days.” Everyone thinks his troubles are the worst.

Yes, some of us learning to practice Gratitude. That is the habit of thought that moves one toward recognizing and emphasizing the things that work in your life, rather than the things that don’t work. There is surely some of both in the vast web of circumstances that surrounds any one life. So the quality of that life is a matter of emphasis or choice. Pull the background to foreground. It’s all there, the dross and the gold. It will always be there as an undifferentiated flow of stuff. The degree to which you are satisfied with your own life depends on your ability or willingness to notice the gold and pull it to the foreground of your thoughts. There will always be another Realm of Briar. That doesn’t prevent you from dwelling on the Meadow mild.

Emily’s idea about a Chosen Child intrigues me. The chosen one is not the good child or the deserving child. It is the child who has strayed far from God’s love. The one who is in the most trouble is the one Heavenly Father chooses for glory. Or in this case Native Land, which is really just a sense of home and safety, not glory.

Emily sees the whole thing as being orchestrated by Heavenly Father. He leads the chosen child into the briar. God only knows why. I have a different idea, splintering off Emily’s. (Sorry, Em but here I go.) The experience of being a chosen child is a collaboration between the one who has strayed and Heavenly Father. The child is, not only chosen by God, but chosen by himself as well. The child chooses to stray far from love. That choice makes him the ideal candidate for whatever God has in store. The Heavenly Father is looking for children like that. The wayward ones are the strong ones who can bear the briar and the Dragon’s Claw. These children would love strong and wide because they have stretched themselves by their own choice.

The complicated, headstrong, self-directed children choose the most difficult path and therefore most deserve that arrival. Because they come to it with all their doubts and rebellion, and knowing themselves and their own nature first. Hard to write about this without sounding condescending, but I think Emily would share my view that the hard-fought, hard-won victories over despair are the most precious. The Realm of Briar, the dark night of the soul, all these experiences open up the blood vessels and scour down to the roots of self. You have to go the most horrible places within yourself and see these for what they are before moving into what Emily calls love of the Heavenly Father. Or Native Land. (You can call it something else, if you like. Peace of mind, perhaps? For now, I’m using Emily’s language, since this is her poem.)

Only when you are no longer a mystery to yourself can you accept the larger mystery.

Maybe.

This morning I woke from a dream that I shot a man in the throat. I was the assassin assigned to the job. I don’t know why this guy had to die, but there were other conspirators demanding it. The man was a doctor and had a dark face, elegant and refined. I held the pistol to the base of his throat (right at the fifth chakra where we speak our truth) and tried to pull the trigger. It was difficult because the gun was old and rusty. I used both hands and shot him. He looked mildly surprised but not afraid. The bullet opened a neat, round hole in his throat, and I could see the fluid of life inside. His eyes flickered as the life escaped him. I ran away and hid, utterly consumed with shame. As I pulled myself to the surface, out of this dream, the thought came across: “Boy, it’s not easy to kill someone. You have to watch them die.”

Coming down the slope from that solar eclipse and heading toward yet another lunar eclipse. That’s three eclipses in four weeks. Stay awake. Don’t want to miss anything.

#1278, c. 1873

The Mountains stood in Haze —
The Valleys stopped below
And went or waited as they liked
The River and the Sky.

At leisure was the Sun —
His interests of Fire
A little from remark withdrawn —
The Twilight spoke the Spire,

So soft upon the Scene
The Act of evening fell
We felt how neighborly a Thing
Was the Invisible.

Last night Lance and I went out to the lake for a walk. We saw a tiny sliver of moon. Funny how the moon appears different sizes all the time depending on where she is in her cycle. Sometimes she is a small, white marble, distant and cool. Sometimes, like last night, the moon hangs so low, fat and heavy in the sky that we might brush our fingers against the soft, gold fuzz. So close to our plane, you can almost taste it. Last night the moon tasted lemony with a dusting of sugar.

Speaking of tasting . . . while we were wandering around the lake shore in near complete darkness, I turned Lance off the leash. He found something to eat that was so utterly foul, I can’t even tell you about it. If I used the right words to describe it, my computer would melt with disgust. His breath still stinks. I won’t go near him, nor will I kiss him. Lance has this marvelous ability to undercut the romance every time.

Back to last night and the beautiful moon. Our shadow, the earth’s shadow obscured most of the moon. A black blot against the gold glow, allowing a trace of light to show around the edges. So we can see both an image of the earth and the moon at once. Then it all disappeared. I turned my back on the moon for a moment and couldn’t find it again. Only the empty sky.

Lance and I sat on the concrete bulkhead at the edge of the lake and watched the water push itself against the low mossy step. The lake was as flat as a mirror. No breeze in the air. Then some movement in the surface of the water would come to us. A raised line made a wide, swelling pattern that rolled in silence to the edge, bumped against the step and turned on itself, moving in the opposite direction, back to its source. It came from far away, deep in the midnight blue horizon.

Something that I could not see had set the surface of the water in motion. The evidence of that thing, that precipitating event, whatever it was . . . a boat? Maybe, but the lake was empty and silent. A leaping fish more likely or something else. I’ll never know because it was not visible to me. I can only speculate about what brought this ripple in the water here. That evidence of its existence came all the way across the lake in the form of this gentle wave pattern in the water.

“We felt how neighborly a Thing/ Was the Invisible.” Emily says it is all around us. We may see evidence of it in the physical material of our world, not the thing itself, but all of us responding to the thing. That thing, that Invisible, is right here among us each moment. Our neighbor, close upon us.

Of course, it’s easy to say what Emily meant by Invisible. My sense of it is not so easy. I imagine it as something like the moon and her cycles. Sometimes dropping on us like a glob of lemon curd. Other times withdrawing from us and showing only a hard, cold face, far beyond our senses. She goes unfelt on those nights.

That Invisible comes and goes in my life. There are portions of time when I sense I am moving through a web of intention. That the air breathes with me. That I am part of something alive. I don’t have name for it. And it is invisible. To the degree that I am willing and able to acknowledge the existence of something I can’t see or completely grasp with my mind, I move in concert with the Invisible.

Despair is losing the step in the dance. Losing sight of the moon. Sometimes I reach for it, and it’s not there. Other times the Invisible comes upon me with such unexpected power that I am shamed by my arrogance, my failure to allow for what I cannot see.

Emily says: Walk gently with palms outstretched. Welcome the Invisible. It is closer than you know.

This is just what I needed to hear today. A message from Emily that is not exactly reassuring. But it is true.

#1106, c. 1867

We do not know the time we lose —
The awful moment is
And takes its fundamental place
Among the certainties —

A firm appearance still inflates
The card — the chance — the friend —
The spectre of solidities
Whose substances are sand —

The best among us, and Emily is the best, are the ones who are most likely to place confidence in an appearance of clarity, faithfulness, strength. A sterling person assumes the best of others. What else does she or I or you have to go on? If you are at all disposed to be transparent and genuine and substantial yourself, you’ll assume others are as well. That’s the truth you walk in. Imaginative, trusting Emily says, she will be gulled by an inflated appearance. Her willingness to believe what she sees will leach away that valuable thing, time. She warns: Do not be gulled by what appears to be a serious obstacle or a serious friend. These are insubstantial. Mistaking them for something more solid, robs us of our only real asset. That is the precious life.

Inflated troubles, inflated friends. These are all the same. Hot air.