Sweet November

I don’t know what it is about November but I have always loved it. It is a quiet, sweet month for me. I love summer and September and October are beautiful and bright. December has always been so dominated by The Holidays that I have mixed feelings about it. By the time winter comes I’m just in survival mode but November is quiet and clear and crisp. A time for contemplation.

The weeks between All Saint’s Day and Thanksgiving are always a time of preparation for me - not for the holidays but for winter. I stock up on books, get out the quilts and comforters, check the pantry for soup-making supplies. This year I’ve treated myself to some new, luxurious bedding and have made a couple trips to Trade Joe’s (the only reason to go across the bridge, in my opinion) to lay in provisions. But mostly I have been spending quiet evenings reading and knitting and writing.

Yesterday Mark asked where I have been for the last couple weeks. “Home,” I say. “Working.” He is writing, too. That is good. We met out on the back shore, the waves have been high and seaspray spatters the rocks and the people sitting on them. What leaves remain are brilliantly gold and that is another thing I love. Much as I love trees, when the leaves are down you can see so much more of the sky. Sun reflecting off the carpets of gold leaves makes everything so bright. We live in a beautiful world. Sometimes that’s all I need.

When I was younger I expected a lot from life. I’ve never been a person who needed a lot to make her happy but I thought that was how life was supposed to be. In all honesty, for much of my life I felt a little ashamed of the fact that I wasn’t particularly interested in acquisition. I’ve gotten over that now - most days anyway. I’ve been thinking a lot about what people expect for their lives.

It’s all this immediate gratification stuff that has screwed us up. I saw a T-shirt that said, “If it’s not immediate, it’s not gratification.” How sad. A lot of what makes a life happy is finding joy in private pleasures. Whether it is reading or cooking or building a book shelf, playing the piano, or hiking a woodland trail, the ability to do those things on your own and revel in the doing of them is gratification on a whole new level.

There’s a lot of complaining going on these days. Everybody likes to point fingers–-it’s “their” fault whoever “they” are. When all else fails there is always God to blame. “How could a God let this happen?” Especially these days after the devastation of Katrina, Rita and Wilma, earthquakes in the Far East and tornados in the midwest, what kind of God lets his people suffer so? That’s one of the oldest complaints on earth.

Writing about The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell in yesterday’s blog I started thinking about my favorite part of the book–-the part that literally changed my life. After enduring horrendous abuse at the hands of his captors and seeing the death of his fellow team members, Sandoz is returned to the Jesuit monastery in Rome only to discover his mission has been totally misunderstood and he is now th object of scorn and hatred. As he is recovering he has an interview with the Father General of the Jesuits in which Sandoz confesses that his pain is compounded by the fact that immediately prior to his capture he had finally found Faith after years of doubting. He questions how God could have done such a thing to him. The Father General tries to reassure him that through all his torments, God was with him and he quotes the passage from the Bible where Jesus says that “not a sparrow falls that your Father does not mark its passing.”

Sandoz thinks about this and then says, “But the sparrow still falls.” Yes, the Father General tells him, the sparrow still falls.

At the time I read that my beloved brother had just died of cancer and I was furious with God about it. Reading those lines I realized that all sparrows fall. It is inevitable from the moment a sparrow is born that it will eventually fall out of the sky and be gone. But does knowing that make the flight any less sweet? November is a good month for thinking about that.

Thanks for reading.