Wheat Fields near Auvers
If I had grown in some generous place—
if my hours had opened in ease—
I would make You a lavish banquet.
My hands wouldn't clutch at You like this,
so needy and tight.
From The Book of Hours I, 21
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So true. If a person begins as a well watered garden, then what is there is offered freely.
ReplyDeletei was going to comment, i was born of a generous place. but yet at five my father was swallowed up by the earth and what we knew was torn apart. and so suddenly i know my genesis more clearly, for while it unmade us, it most certainly made us. i was born at the crux of this. none of us is any great mystery, i guess. nor do we get much further along, really.
ReplyDeletebut if i were to consider not being born of this generous place - my god, by what hope? and so i remind myself how i should be patient with those who come from differently seeded, more tumultuous, less generous fields.
xo
erin
What is "needy and tight?" His hands? If so, I agree that it is hard to be generous when one feels constricted. How does one come to feeling that life is abundant, notwithstanding one's circumstances?
ReplyDeletethe flowering of people through the course of their lives is something i've experienced and treasure especially in my memories of the arc of my father's life. in the way that a stone skips across a pond, my own becoming self carries the journey he began into my own life. my children are revealing much of that process in their own emerging selves. the pieces that he didn't deal with or complete, i perceive in some of my own work and then also in my children. affirmation. care. affection. steven
ReplyDeletei'm reading this completely different than the others, save you, Ruth.
ReplyDeletei read this as entirely in the relationship he is now so needy of, not of what came before it.
and if wrongly i read it-then gladly so.
for in this i found a sad comfort.
LW
i've read this again. it touches me.
ReplyDeletei would prefer the clutch and need
to the lavish banquet
i wish to believe, so did she answer