A rock, a river, and rapid agonies
I was going to write to you this week about going home by shutting my damn mouth for once. About the few minutes I’ve found at the dawn of each day to slip into the River Dart and let it snatch my breath out to sea. About the new meaning of home I’m finding in those silent moments when I’m just an animal, in love with a river and the rising sun, worshipping them with the attention of my whole body.
Then the sense of “home” shattered again, for thousands of people in the UK. With mortgages being pulled as I speak, the economy in freefall, and the ground under people’s feet and the roofs over their heads starting to shake. Many people I love are terrified today.
Can I write to you about a river today? With all this going on?
Can I not write to you about a river?
It’s a horror, to try to hold your roof on with sheer will. It’s a terror, to remember that money can evaporate. And in moments of this horror and terror, when the machine’s cogs stop turning and crash onto our heads, a river or a rock or a tree might be the safest places of all.
If you’re scared today, know that I’m thinking of you, and that there’s a deep, true home for you on this earth. There’s a river waiting to be your mother, a tree waiting to shelter you, a mountain that’s seen it all and will never crumble.
I can’t stand with Robinson Jeffers on everything, but there’s no arguing with this poem, which I’d like to offer today.
Love,
Ellie xx
Oh, Lovely Rock
We stayed the night in the pathless gorge of Ventana Creek, up the east fork.
The rock walls and the mountain ridges hung forest on forest above our heads, maple and redwood,
Laurel, oak, madrone, up to the high and slender Santa Lucian firs that stare up the cataracts
Of slide-rock to the star-color precipices.
We lay on gravel and kept a little camp-fire for warmth.
Past midnight only two or three coals glowed red in the cooling darkness; I laid a clutch of dead bay-leaves
On the ember ends and felted dry sticks across them and lay down again. The revived flame
Lighted my sleeping son’s face and his companion’s, and the vertical face of the great gorge-wall
Across the stream. Light leaves overhead danced in the fire’s breath, tree-trunks were seen: it was the rock wall
That fascinated my eyes and mind. Nothing strange: light-gray diorite with two or three slanting seams in it,
Smooth-polished by the endless attrition of slides and floods; no fern nor lichen, pure naked rock…as if I were
Seeing rock for the first time. As if I were seeing through the flame-lit surface into the real and bodily
And living rock. Nothing strange…I cannot
Tell you how strange: the silent passion, the deep nobility and childlike loveliness: this fate going on
Outside our fates. It is here in the mountain like a grave smiling child. I shall die, and my boys
Will live and die, our world will go on through its rapid agonies of change and discovery; this age will die,
And wolves have howled in the snow around a new Bethlehem: this rock will be here, grave, earnest, not passive: the energies
That are its atoms will still be bearing the whole mountain above: and I, many packed centuries ago,
Felt its intense reality with love and wonder, this lonely rock.