Last Friday I spent a couple hours preparing the very first English class I would ever teach. This morning when it was time to set out, the sky was heavy with rain, but I couldn't face the thought of the tube, so I climbed on my bike anyway, and ignored the first drops of rain. It became progressively harder to ignore over the next hour, but it didn't really bother me until I got to the youth centre and found every door bolted. The regular instructor had remembered to find someone to take the class (me) but had not remembered to find someone to open the doors.
I waited in the rain for 20 minutes while four students accumulated. Once they were there, however, I wasn't able to communicate that I knew of another room a 5 minute walk away where we could meet instead. So they decided to go home. And I faced another hour on my bike, in what could now only be called a hard rain.
The first small goodness was that the chapel I'd been thinking of was indeed open, so I could go in and collect my thoughts and say hi to a woman I'd interviewed a few months ago. The second bigger good was that half way home I thought to stop in at the Catholic Worker's new community cafe, and I not only got some hot tea and soup in my system, but I touched base with a few people who I needed to talk to this week. The cafe is in a room that used to store junk, and it's miraculous the transformation they've wrought. It's now so cozy, I wish it were closer to home so I could go regularly. Or I wish I could finagle my job description into letting me volunteer for them!
I learned from the priest who runs the cafe that one of our partners is folding. It's a natural death, as it were, but it still makes me sad. Just when you are getting used to someone, they up and decide to put all their energy into climate change.
On the way home I belted out old classics to the empty, soaked streets. It was good for my soul, and for my biking.
I'm preparing a bit of a multi-faith service for the vigil we've organized Sunday (it's the sixth anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan. That's as long as WWII), and in the process I've been flipping through some books of poetry. Here are two to share with you:
Wild Geese
by Mary Oliver
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
DULCE ET DECORUM EST
by Wilfred Owen
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori."
