Excerpt from High Tide in Tucson
“Every
one of us is called upon, probably many times, to start a new life. A
frightening diagnosis, a marriage, a move, loss of a job or a limb or a loved
one, a graduation, bringing a new baby home: it’s impossible to think at first
how this all will be possible. Eventually, what moves it all forward is the
subterranean ebb and flow of being alive among the living.
In
my own worst seasons, I’ve come back from the colorless world of despair by
forcing myself to look hard, for a long time at a single glorious thing: a
flame of red geranium outside my bedroom window. And then another: my daughter
in a yellow dress. And another: the perfect outline of a full, dark sphere
behind the crescent moon. Until I learned to be in love with my life again.
Like a stroke victim retraining new parts of the brain to grasp lost skills, I
have taught myself joy, over and over again.
It’s
not such a wide gulf to cross, then, from survival to poetry. We hold fast to
the passions of endurance that buckle and creak beneath us, dovetailed, tight
as a good wooden boat to carry us onward. And onward full tilt we go, pitched
and wrecked and absurdly resolute, driven in spite of everything to make good
on a new shore. To be hopeful, to embrace one possibility after another—that is
surely the basic instinct. Baser even than hate, the thing with teeth, which can
be stilled with a tone of voice or stunned by beauty. If the whole world of the
living has to turn on the single point of remaining alive, that pointed
endurance is the poetry of hope. The thing with feathers.”
Barbara Kingsolver from High
Tide in Tucson, Essays from Now or Never
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