Landslides & Hairline Fractures

[The Pilgrim -- an otherwise fairly resolute woman -- has given shockingly little thought to New Year's resolutions. Writing more, more frequently and -- by Jove! -- more interestingly, however, is on the top of the short, short list.]

A giant ice shelf the size of 11,000 football fields has snapped free from Canada's Arctic. For three-thousand years, the shoal was part of part of a continent; today, it merely suffers the ignomy of man-made comparisons, measured by those whose arrival in these parts long post-dated its existence.

The Pilgrim has reached an age where for the first time the lives of her peers are characterized by loss. For the first three decades of a person's existence, it seems, personal gains accumulate and shape an individual's existence like successive layers of sediment. His realm expands; her sphere of influence grows. The individual acquires increasing levels of legal rights, buying power, personal autonomy, and, most importantly, relational connections. She adds a spouse, he acquires an off-spring -- their community expands.

True, throughout those years, token smidgens of loss -- mere seedlings of the losses to come -- keep the thermodynamic balance of enrichment and deprivation in a person's life in balance. Thus, for example, what the adolescent gains in freedom, he loses in familial closeness. For the average individual, however, the exuberant upward spiral of bigger-better-faster-more effectively conceals these minor bereavements, these small casualties from view.

By the time a person reaches her thirties or forties, however, the scales begin to tip, the thin trickle of losses picks up speed until it becomes a landslide that tears lives asunder: A marriage ends in divorce, a child leaves the roost, a parent dies, a spouse is afflicted by grave illness. The hairline fractures that existed from the very beginning between one's life and the lives of those apparently integral of one's existence expand until plate is torn from plate, life from life, limb from limb -- and we are diminished.

These floes drift. The surrounding waters scrape the ragged edges. With time and distance, the breakages will soften, the sharp lines wash out. Gingerly, the woman traces fingertips over the new contours of her life. Gradually, the amputee makes peace with his stump. Naked do we come from our mothers' wombs, naked do we return: "What are the chances that God finds our failed impersonations of human dignity adorable? Or is he fooled?*"


--
* Annie Dillard, An Expedition to the Pole.

The Pilgrim at Thirty

[The Pilgrim has received a number of very meaningful tokens of appreciation on the occasion of her thirtieth birthday -- the most profound of which have tended to come in the form of time invested in her, hugs and kind words. The following, however, is the hard-to-beat ode presented to the Pilgrim by a friend.]

A Lady thinks She is Thirty

Unwillingly Miranda wakes,
Feels the sun with terror,
One unwilling step she takes,
Shuddering to the mirror.

Miranda in Miranda's sight
Is old and gray and dirty;
Twenty-nine she was last night;
This morning she is thirty.

Shining like the morning star,
Like the twilight shining,
Haunted by a calendar,
Miranda sits a-pining.

Silly girl, silver girl,
Draw the mirror toward you;
Time who makes the years to whirl
Adorned as he adorned you.

Time is timelessness for you;
Calendars for the human;
What's a year, or thirty, to
Loveliness made woman?

Oh, Night will not see thirty again,
Yet soft her wing, Miranda;
Pick up your glass and tell me, then --
How old is Spring, Miranda?

- Ogden Nash