SWEET SPOT

         Edna St. Vincent Millay was quoted, “It’s not true that life is one damn thing after another, it is one damn thing over and over.” It’s a great quote, not only because it takes the familiar axiom and turns it inside out but also her sense of irony redefines a journey most of us take for granted. Are we plunging ahead with our own muscle or being dragged along like puppies on a leash? What appears as a myriad of  vexing problems may be no more than human nature’s tendency to lose its way in the moment.

         If you live long enough you grow old, it doesn’t matter how many years it takes. You can deny and pretend but when you can no longer leap from the back of your pickup truck and hit the ground running, you know. When you accept the world as it is, broken and you're not the one that broke it, and that nobody can fix it, when you accept that you know. Still, there is an up-side. If you get lucky and things go well there is a sweet spot between Edna’s “That Damn thing” and senility. I’m in that sweet spot now. 

         I don’t go to many funerals. I know that people need closure, whatever that is, maybe just more human nature for me to push back against. We function simultaneously on two different levels. First is the shallow, self aware, “I think I think.” This is where you decide to spoon your soup up to your mouth rather than sup it through a straw or choose not to jump off the cliff even though you know someone who did, or you buy a new car, sell the old house. The other is deep, reckless, free flowing, “I feel. . .” In one mode you are the archer’s bow, in the other you are the arrow. If you mellow with age, pray that you do, the feeling of one’s own trajectory surpasses the power rush through the bow. That thoughtless moment, no longer outbound but inbound, if it’s sweet you be grateful and think less of closure. 

        I don’t know a great deal about Edna St. Vincent Millay, a Pulitzer Prize winning writer. Seventy years after her death we still find her name in print, her poetry is timeless. She was a beauty, red hair in trail, always pushing the envelope, breaking rules, wrestling with that “One damn thing.” she died at age 58. I doubt she ever got to the sweet spot. Again, I don’t know; so many things I care about but don’t know, I don’t know why but I want to put Edna St. Vincent in league with Georgia O’Keeffe, both ahead of their time, both outrageous feminists. One crafted words on a page, the other with pigment and a brush. I am more familiar with the latter, always stop to see her in museums and galleries, visited her home in Abiquiu, New Mexico a few years back. I feel confident she found the sweet spot. At 98 she was still painting, still feeling magic that dwells only in the moment. I don’t think she cared one way or the other about Edna’s, One damn thing. I began this with an Edna quote and I’ll end with Georgia. She said, “When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it's your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else. Most people in the city rush around so, they have no time to look at a flower. I want them to see it whether they want to or not.”