NEW BLOG ADDRESS

TO MY READERS:
I wanted you to know that I have exported my blog of the last few years into an earlier blog, dating back to 2005, in order to combine them into a single blog. Here is the link to the new, larger blog. Stop by when you have a chance, and I hope you enjoy it. 

Hamilton E. Salsich II
http://www.hesalsich2.com

ABANDONMENT

"Morning Star", oil, by V...Vaughn

         It’s interesting that the word “abandon” originally meant simply giving up trying to control a situation or a person, a definition that doesn’t necessarily give the gloomy feeling the word usually brings these days. For instance, I could easily take pleasure in abandoning myself now and then, just giving myself up to the whims that waft through my life moment by moment. I’m so accustomed to keeping complete control of my life that it would be wonderful, now and again, to get free of self-imposed restraints and just loosen up and let go. I wish my friends could occasionally say, “Ham’s so fortunate to be able to abandon himself and be free now and then!” Surely the small, spindly, defenseless, and always anxious “self” I have been bravely protecting all these 71 years deserves to be abandoned, just as I would abandon a ship with no sails and lots of leaks. This strange sense that I am a separate, struggling entity in a world of separate, struggling entities needs to be renounced, disavowed, and discarded – abandoned as fast as I would walk out on a project that promised nothing but disappointment. I need to live with a little (perhaps a lot ) more abandon, just trusting this single, startling universe to take me where it will. Stars shine in limitless and always surprising ways, and I should allow myself to do the same.  

DEAREST FRESHNESS

"Grand Canyon",  oil,  by Karen Winters

“There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.”      
-- Gerard Manley Hopkins, “God’s Grandeur”

     Sometimes my small world seems even smaller than usual, with almost none of the freshness Hopkins speaks of, and yet his words were an opening, this morning, to the fact that far down inside all things is freshness so plentiful it’s always overflowing. I find it so easy to be bored by my life – to let commonplace things pass by me like so much tiresome, insignificant stuff – and yet I know beyond a doubt that even the dust on the dashboard of my car is something special – that it has atoms inside it that were made billions of years ago, makes designs on the dashboard that have never been made just that way before, and lets sunlight shine across it in entirely fresh ways. I rarely even notice the dust that’s always all around us, which -- because dust, in its own way, is as stunning as any canyon -- is like living beside the Grand Canyon but never noticing it. Freshness like dust’s overflows around me, moment by moment – in smiles I see in the supermarket, in singular patterns of shadows spreading for the first time across roads, in streetlights whose shine seems ever so slightly different today from any earlier day. Even the keyboard I’m typing on has taken on fresh dust and dirt since yesterday, new specks here and there that create, in a way, a new, unused keyboard for my morning fun.

GOOD GIFTS

"Morning Sky", oil. by Laurel Daniel

Every good gift and every perfect (free, large, full) gift is from above; it comes down from the Father of all [that gives] light, in [the shining of] Whom there can be no variation [rising or setting] or shadow cast by His turning [as in an eclipse].

-- James 1: 17, Amplified Bible

My life has been loaded with good gifts, all springing upon me by surprise and all from secret beginnings, so I can easily relate to what James says in this sentence. My life, moment after moment, is as free and full as the sea my wife and I sometimes stroll beside. My thoughts are thoroughly full of possibilities, and each one seems as large as the light-filled sky I see outside my window this morning. As James suggests, there’s a shining quality in the moments of my life – all of them – as though something like suns or stars are inside every one. I don’t mean to suggest that I believe these glowing moments, these steady and splendid gifts, come from the God I grew up believing in, and that James perhaps believed in -- the human-like super-being who could be as cruel as he was kind. No, I’ve come to see these gifts as being the spontaneous and easy-going cascade that pours down on all of us simply because we’re alive.  Most of us, for countless different reasons, don’t always notice these gifts, but I’ve come to see that they’re always with us, like the sunlight is with us even on the cloudiest days, or like breathing is bringing us new life even when our world seems to have broken into pieces. Just now, a thought of one of my brave and gentle sons came to me from somewhere, and, in an unrestricted and effortless way, I can soar on that thought and feel its light lifting me. Amazingly, any thought has that power, any of the tens of thousands of these good gifts that flood over me each day.

LIGHTNING AND LOVE

"Spring on the Hudson", watercolor and gouache,
by Gretchen Kelly

“Thou art lightning and love, I found it, a winter and warm.”
        -- Gerard Manley Hopkins, “The Wreck of the Deutschland”

   The 19th century British poet Gerard Manley Hopkins always wrote with a distinctive oddness, but some of his lines leap up to me, like this one this morning, making me think, once more, about the seemingly self-contradictory aspects of life. There is, indeed, a lot of lightning in any experience of love -- a lot of flashing and flare-ups and apparent possibilities of destruction. In fact, there are flashes of possible danger in the distance of any enjoyable experience. There’s always tails on the opposite side of heads, always bitterness in the last residue of a choice cup of coffee, always darkness after the best of days. This, though, is not discouraging to me, for it simply shows the mystery and bottomlessness of genuine pleasure. While delighting in a gentle day in March, for instance, I must also see the blessings in subsequent cold spells. When walking with high spirits with my wife, I must, in the back of my mind, be ready to praise those possible future days when walking will be less like sauntering and more like tottering. There’s something special and precious in every experience, if I can only keep my eyes searching for the secret flawlessness. Even on a dusky and frozen day in February, I can, as Hopkins says, find “a winter and warm”.

DUSTINGS

Snow-dusted Field", watercolor and pastel,
by Carol Engels

This morning we woke to a slight dusting of snow – just a brushing of whiteness on streets and stone walls and roofs – and it brought to my mind other kinds of dustings. Thoughts, for instance, seem to dust themselves across my life almost constantly. Falling as if from nowhere, thoughts of gladness, glory, sorrow, or purposelessness  sprinkle themselves around me moment by moment. It’s as if every passing second sees a new assortment of thoughts coming down to settle inside me like the thin sheet of snow across our yard this morning.  It occurs to me that I should be as happy to see all these various thoughts as I am to see this dusting of snow. I didn’t dash out to sweep away the inch or so of snow, and I shouldn’t wish the flurries of thoughts inside me to stop. This morning I sighed with pleasure and smiled to see the new-fallen snow, and I should sit back and do the same as I feel the fresh thoughts descending upon me each moment. After all, my thoughts are as harmless – and yes, as lovely – as the snow. Even thoughts of anger and fear can foster an unflustered sense of astonishment – like, Where in the world did these foolish but fascinating thoughts come from? If I can loosen up and understand their inoffensiveness and charisma, the steady descent of thoughts across my days can be a dance worth watching.

FRESH AND ASTONISHING FIRES

"Every poet, I thought, must be original and originality a condition of poetic genius; so that each poet is like a species in nature […] and can never recur.”

     -- Gerard Manley Hopkins, in a letter to Robert Bridges

"Campfire below the Dunes", oil, by Roxanne Steed

     I agree with Hopkins, but I would take it further and say that, not just each poet, but each person is “a species in nature”, a totally original and irreplaceable part of the universe, a miracle that will never be made again. We make all too little of the significance and uniqueness of each of us. All the people I pass on the street are inimitable marvels, never before seen on earth and never to be replicated. Somehow this mysterious universe sent them into existence, to spread their special sparks here and there for a few years and then to disappear back into the universe that owns them. All of us are mysteries forever, mostly because we are made by a cosmos that simply can’t be explained. The stars stretch out for measureless distances, and so do the inner lives of each us, even the lowest-paid employee, even the poorest lost person on the street. None of us will ever recur; the miracles we are made of will never be known again. We are fresh and astonishing fires that flame up for a few years and then perish as additional unparalleled fires start up and bring a new brightness to the world.

A GRAND EXISTENCE

“But Lydgate’s discontent was much harder to bear; it was the sense that there was a grand existence in thought and effective action lying around him, while his self was being narrowed into the miserable isolation of egoistic fears, and vulgar anxieties for events that might allay such fears.”

-- George Eliot, Middlemarch

"St. Augustine Gate", watercolor, by Chris Ousley

I’ve often had the feeling Eliot describes here, the feeling that something sprawling and powerful stretches out from me on all sides, something as full of force and grandeur as the gatherings of stars above us. It feels sometimes like I’m living at the center of an infinite field full of life, and the fullness is all mine to love and enjoy. This is “the grand existence” that Eliot speaks of, and that I so often miss in my life, although it’s always there, around and beside and inside me. I miss it because I’m usually making such a fuss over my so-called “personal” issues, trying so hard to be helpful to my little disadvantaged self, that I snub the spectacle surrounding me. In taking such good care of Hamilton Salsich, I thoughtlessly brush off the splendor that lives in all things, from the lighthearted sparrows in the bushes beside our house, to the stones in fields I sometimes pass, to the gangs of stars roving above us.