November 28: Negative Capability, Joy Harjo, "Grace"

I have no updates on my friend's daughter.  You may think this strange, but I don't want to call my friend.  She is dealing with enough at the moment.  She doesn't need me telephoning to pry details out of her.  I will simply exist in a state of Negative Capability right now, not needing all the answers.

Because of this, I have been thinking about grace in its many forms.  Some people, after my sister died of lymphoma of the brain, said to me, "Well, she's out of pain.  That's a blessing."  At the time, I didn't feel like it was a blessing.  It wasn't grace.  It simply sucked ass.

However, I am not one to question how grace works in my life or other people's lives.  I simply wait for grace to come my way.  Then I take it, cook it with eggs and bacon, and eat it with a glass of wine.

Saint Marty sends some grace to his friend this evening.

Grace

by:  Joy Harjo

I think of Wind and her wild ways the year we had nothing to lose and lost it anyway in the cursed country of the fox. We still talk about that winter, how the cold froze imaginary buffalo on the stuffed horizon of snowbanks. The haunting voices of the starved and mutilated broke fences, crashed our thermostat dreams, and we couldn’t stand it one more time. So once again we lost a winter in stubborn memory, walked through cheap apartment walls, skated through fields of ghosts into a town that never wanted us, in the epic search for grace.

Like Coyote, like Rabbit, we could not contain our terror and clowned our way through a season of false midnights. We had to swallow that town with laughter, so it would go down easy as honey. And one morning as the sun struggled to break ice, and our dreams had found us with coffee and pancakes in a truck stop along Highway 80, we found grace.

  
I could say grace was a woman with time on her hands, or a white buffalo escaped from memory. But in that dingy light it was a promise of balance. We once again understood the talk of animals, and spring was lean and hungry with the hope of children and corn.

  
I would like to say, with grace, we picked ourselves up and walked into the spring thaw. We didn’t; the next season was worse. You went home to Leech Lake to work with the tribe and I went south. And, Wind, I am still crazy. I know there is something larger than the memory of a dispossessed people. We have seen it.