The Dream of a Resting Fulcrum
My life, as I’ve known it thus far, has been marked with an incessant restlessness. I’ve always pushed beyond my limits. The methods have changed over the years: push relationships to exhaustion. Push exercise until exhaustion. Push academics until I’m worn thin. The reason is always the same: with bone tired comes a slight feeling of rest.
I have dreamed of rest. I had hoped that age would mellow me, but it has not. I'm here at the top of an academic realm, but have found so little peace. So I’ve asked for change.
I know, clearer and clearer, what I want: I want a farm where the mist sets on the meadows in the morning. I want to hear tree frogs through the limitless darkness; I want to smell cold fields and rusty granite creekwater as I fall asleep. I want to wake early and sit, bundled against the chill, to watch the light change. Sitting there, I would be the resting fulcrum, knowing that nothing around me would move, that the changing of the seasons would cycle through, year after year beneath the mountains, soft and foggy and achingly old.
I want, day after day, to pull out flaring skeins of words and set them down on paper and then fit them to each other, line after difficult line. Because if I continued to do this, I might be able to bring forth something that spoke to the edged glory of my life and its gifts. I dream a book that is aletheia embodied; a surging of grief that tears into you years later, and the icy contraction of loneliness, and the soft touch of a man’s hand on the small of your back, and the faint sharp smell of iceberg lettuce, and the slight trembling of a tectonic shift when you realize you’re in love with someone, and joy like springtime always flowing forth.
I want someone there inside that farmhouse. Though I can’t see him well, I feel his quiet presence. I can’t tell much more than that; the country of marriage is strange territory. But whatever it brings, I want to set two fulcrums beneath the changing night skies.
This, all of this, would be rest. It would lengthen the spine of my life and bathe my disquiet in penetrating summer heat. I would sleep peacefully and wake without this trailing note of sorrow. I would be free from this painful arc of force. I could stand at the doorway of my life and feel replete in the smell of wood smoke and the blazing leaves of fall. It would be peace, and I hope for it.
I have dreamed of rest. I had hoped that age would mellow me, but it has not. I'm here at the top of an academic realm, but have found so little peace. So I’ve asked for change.
I know, clearer and clearer, what I want: I want a farm where the mist sets on the meadows in the morning. I want to hear tree frogs through the limitless darkness; I want to smell cold fields and rusty granite creekwater as I fall asleep. I want to wake early and sit, bundled against the chill, to watch the light change. Sitting there, I would be the resting fulcrum, knowing that nothing around me would move, that the changing of the seasons would cycle through, year after year beneath the mountains, soft and foggy and achingly old.
I want, day after day, to pull out flaring skeins of words and set them down on paper and then fit them to each other, line after difficult line. Because if I continued to do this, I might be able to bring forth something that spoke to the edged glory of my life and its gifts. I dream a book that is aletheia embodied; a surging of grief that tears into you years later, and the icy contraction of loneliness, and the soft touch of a man’s hand on the small of your back, and the faint sharp smell of iceberg lettuce, and the slight trembling of a tectonic shift when you realize you’re in love with someone, and joy like springtime always flowing forth.
I want someone there inside that farmhouse. Though I can’t see him well, I feel his quiet presence. I can’t tell much more than that; the country of marriage is strange territory. But whatever it brings, I want to set two fulcrums beneath the changing night skies.
This, all of this, would be rest. It would lengthen the spine of my life and bathe my disquiet in penetrating summer heat. I would sleep peacefully and wake without this trailing note of sorrow. I would be free from this painful arc of force. I could stand at the doorway of my life and feel replete in the smell of wood smoke and the blazing leaves of fall. It would be peace, and I hope for it.