The other morning I called my 94-year-old neighbour. I knew he would be hunched over his lttle glass kitchen table, slicing open the day’s mail with a pair of scissors and writing indecipherable notations to himself in a red leather journal. He picked up the phone and reported that the sky was blue, the horizon perfectly clear and the water calm.
“How is business?” he asked. I paused. Then I answered, “The whole earth is holding its breath.” “Well,” he replied, “the sun is shining and the trees are not moving.”
A few minutes later I stepped outside to run with the dog. The sky was the colour of milk, the horizon was obscured by a thick swath of pearlescent haze and the ocean was a mournful steel grey frothed with white caps. Heading downhill was like rushing straight into the fierce, relentless current of a raging river. The stiff, cold wind roared and bit at my ears. It plastered and parted Rena’s fur into tiny pinwheels that revealed minuscule circles of pale skin all along her body. Above us, the tall pines swayed in ominous unison.
quidquid recipitur ad modum recipientis recipitur
In the Summa Theologiae, Saint Thomas Aquinas presents the philosophical principle that “what is received is received according to the mode of the receiver.” My neighbour’s mind, once knitted tightly together with facts, figures, data and memories has dropped more than a few stitches in the past couple of years. I wondered if his observations of that day were disordered, delusional or simply a product of his largely optimistic disposition.
When we reached the top of the hill, Rena and I stood side by side and caught our collective breath. Our hearts beat quickly. I squinted out toward the Pacific.
Somewhere above the clouds shone the azure dome of the sky. Somewhere beyond the haze ran the razor sharp edge of the horizon. Somewhere beneath the waves lay the deep, dark silence of the sea. And somewhere inside the wind hid the hushed tranquility of stillness.
In these last days, weeks and months, life seems to have been torn out of context, like an errant page from an unfinished journal. Each of us, in his or her own way, has been left stranded and caught between the lines. And each of us, in his or her own handwriting, will script the paragraphs to follow.
It will be within the quiet of our ceaseless activity that the next chapters will be written.