Communitas
Communitas*
(for G and
M; A and C)
Just
last week
the
world felt small as a clenched fist
the
impending winter
a
blow to the gut-
not
with beauty but with tasks
and
impending storms,
work
piled like a threat:
snowclearing
and wood-carrying,
day
after day after day.
It
all loomed, a tight squeeze.
Then,
between breaths,
unbidden,
even uninvited,
fullness
unfolded,
and
the world opened
like
lily petals
revealing
centered gold.
Light
appeared
loosening the clench
and
it was more wonderful
than
I can tell you
except
to say
that
Light was present
all
the time. Light
and
a kind of glowing comfort
made
visible in food and laughter
stories
and wonder.
The
world held us tenderly,
and
so we held each other.
II.
The
golden leaves
carpeting
the ground
are
the same leaves
that
three weeks ago
were
the forest's wallpaper.
This
laughter and these eager gifts -
books
and insight, travel and new
disturbing
questions
have
become now
a
sweet, aching silence,
time's
scrapbook
holding
a timeless collection
of
gratitude and loss.
What
is all this coming and going
except
time unfolding the world -
that
great barge, bowing and surging -
sometimes
too slow,
sometimes
too quickly,
always
towards a place
we
cannot sufficiently name:
communitas.
*"Communitas is the shared experience of
adventure in the face of something so worth living for as to be worth dying
for, the common commitment to an impossible dream, radical and revolutionary,
imaginative and indomitable, energetic and exultant, fragile, ferocious. Only communitas can seek the wind, the Spirit
who will fan the flickering flame into a roaring fire..." (Gittens, 2000)
