Conversation Time With Jordan

Yesterday, I had a tutoring session with a girl who was working on a paper about Wordsworth and Shelley, and just reading it made me want to revisit this poem. I read it to Chase this morning, over coffee and a bottle of formula. My heart just can't let go of these few lines:

"These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind,
With tranquil restoration:-feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure: such perhaps,
As have no slight or trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man's life,
His little, nameless, unremembered acts
Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust,
To them I may have owed another gift,
Of aspect more sublime, that blessed mood,
In which the burden of the mystery,
In which the heavy and weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened:-that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on,-
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things."

Okay, okay..so maybe that was a little more than a few lines, but I won't apologize.

This time of year especially I feel the tug of my earthen roots. This spring, and every spring, is made fresh and alive and full of hope by my past experiences of the season. One breathfull of the wet green April air transports me. I am here, on my backporch, listening to my baby giggle. I am fifteen again and falling in love in a hammock under a blooming dogwood, and George Straight is serenading us through the rolled down windows of an old S10. I am eight and barefoot in a ditch, trying to catch a tadpole the size of a golfball with a paint bucket and my best friend. I am twenty, sitting around a campfire in the depths of Canyon De Chelley, singing Bob Dylan songs with teachers and friends and a Navajo family.

I associate these moments with that other "gift of aspect more sublime, that blessed mood." It is in these moments that the world we've created comes unhinged and dissipates under the pure power of the earth...when nothing else matters but the air I'm breathing and the blood pumping through my veins...when I realize that I am nothing but a part of it all..when I realize that I am everything.