Sheltering Your Heart

I wanted to remember a sad moment; I wanted to forget it. Who is to say what writing or an image or music really are? Perhaps they're nothing but the revealing of a quietness, an absence. Music holds the silence within it, dimly aware of the beginning before the first note and even more so of the silence that remains after the last note falls back to blankness. It is not by reminders of that first place, that first time, that we are spellbound. Heaven's roots compel us not. We love ruins and all that is fragile, all that fades...

But famished field and blackened tree
Bear flowers in Eden never known.
Blossoms of grief and charity
Bloom in these darkened fields alone.
What had Eden ever to say
Of hope and faith and pity and love
Until was buried all its day
And memory found its treasure trove?
Strange blessings never in Paradise
Fall from these beclouded skies.
---Edwin Muir

No sadness or joy can be repeated, nor should they be. But we can be reminded of our forgetfulness, of loved ones we have turned our faces from or who have turned theirs from ours, of this shadowy existence riddled with light. And we find this both bitter and sweet. It fades, it soars. Look, there is nothing like it on earth or heaven. Can we bless as we sigh? If we could, we would not be that broken circle that is a reflection of your longing to be remembered. No heart is as whole as a broken heart, said the Rabbi. Then tell me, why should I complain?

I wanted to remember a sad moment. Not to hold on to it, but to keep it with me, a symbol of my lost lives...a low black flame that burns in a dark room....