The Answer Isn’t So Simple

Precisely at five a.m. this morning, the birds begin to sing. Lying in the dark I hear them clearly though the windows are shut. I smile as I remember other mornings of other springs and I wonder what is on my mind this spring morning. It seems a simple inquiry, but it always takes me a while to come up with an answer beyond, ‘Not very much’. Fog and murkiness are a regular feature of my life.

I have a close friend who is irritated when they ask me a question and my response is silence. I try to explain that my quietness is actually a good-faith attempt to find an answer rather than an evasion or a dismissal. I love the British TV shows where the leading characters always say they are fine even when the suspected murderer has just held them hostage, blindfolded and tied to a chair for four days without food and water. A hoarse and weary, ‘I’m fine,’ accompanied by a faint smile is always their response to the question ‘How are you doing?’

Their thoroughly British friend immediately decodes the nuance of the answer, taking into account their recent near-death experience and noticing the trembling of the upper lip and the red-rimmed eyes. The good friend does not disagree with the statement that is clearly false, but rather offers a cup of tea and responds directly to the human truth of the situation as opposed to the verbal construction.

The fullness of any situation is far beyond whatever words we say. I used to think it was important to ‘talk things out’ and ‘get to the bottom’ of issues. I still believe in the power and necessity of words to help us go beyond our limited perspectives, but being close and being in relationship now appears to be a more mysterious and imprecise adventure than I had thought.

So I ask myself again, ‘How is it with you this morning?’ I now accept my slow response as information. All night I have been dreaming, both asleep and awake, of the satisfying solidity of the rectangular granite blocks I was working with yesterday. The terrace walls I am constructing to contain a new garden linger sweetly in my mind with their comforting repetition and variation of simple shape and muted color. Each roughly rectangular stone weighs between five to twenty pounds and I remember the satisfying thud each one makes as I drop it on the bare earth when I move it from place to place.

I once read that in making a wall, you should never pick up a stone twice. This may work for other longer walls with more skilled wall-makers, but I seem to be doing a lot of moving of rocks that don’t yet find their place in the wall. So I try to enjoy each stone I pick up as well as appreciate the warmth of the afternoon sun on my shoulders. I move granite blocks from place to place, finding the precise length and height and width for the next piece of wall. I am delighted by the heft and ancient provenance of these sparkling gray companions.

I make some neighborly ‘beautiful-afternoon-to-be-outside’ talk with a visitor in my neighbor’s backyard and he responds by telling me these granite blocks are cobblestones. That hadn’t occurred to me, but it seems likely enough. He claims to work for the largest distributor of these stones in New England and tells me they are imported from India where they have been cut by hand. With so much granite here in New England, I secretly hope this is not true. I don’t like the idea of their carbon footprint being so much larger than the stones themselves. But since I am repurposing them from former uses around the property, I am somewhat soothed.

Now I notice that I have successfully evaded my own question. Or perhaps the true answer to how I am this morning is: ‘Dreaming of the solidity of granite blocks.’ This morning they appear as the kindly mooring of my soul—a life-line to keep me happily tethered to this earthy world of dirt and rocks, of flowers and trees, of bird-songs and mental images. Each thing itself goes beyond murkiness and words to present the fullness of life as just this.