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The lines above are from Robert Lax’s poem One Island. When I came across them in Love Had a Compass on this day that would have been his 105th birthday, I paused because it seems we are moving through a dark season and I wondered what he would have said about it. My first thought was that he would have observed the times for what they are and would have written what he observed in the simplest words, the purest combination of sound and silence. Without judgment.
My second thought was that the lines are an apt expression of our collective experiences this past year. Our strange reality. The first descending of the virus was the coming of dark. Its first receding was the coming of light. The recent surge has been the second coming of dark. And now, the promise of a vaccine allows the lines to end on the coming of light.
But when I went looking for a photograph to pair with these lines and chose the one I’ve used here, I realized the poem could be interpreted another way: as images not of the ebb and flow of reality but rather the ebb and flow of our moods. The sun in the photograph is not clearly morning sun or evening sun, so we don’t know if dark or light is coming. We feel what we feel when we look at it based on the expectations it evokes in us–on our propensity for hope or fear.
Vaclav Havel, a playwright who went from prisoner to president of Czechoslovakia, once wrote: “. . . [T]he kind of hope I often think about (especially in situations that are particularly hopeless, such as prison) I understand above all as a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope within us, or we don’t. . . . Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart. It transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons. . . .”
When I combine the poem, the photograph, and the quote, I think I know what Lax would be thinking and saying right now. He would encourage us to orient our spirit and our heart toward hope while also accepting that life is made of light and dark.
As Ecclesiastes 3 says, there is a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance. To paraphrase St. Francis, it is in weeping fully in the time of weeping that we learn what it means to laugh and in mourning with those around us who mourn that we earn the right to take their hand in the coming dance.
I hope with people around the world that the time of dancing comes soon, but while it is yet dark and the sound of mourning is in our ears, let us listen and feel and love and learn. Let us remind each other, in word and deed, what it means to be part of a hopeful but also compassionate community.