Unknowability
by Chris Condon
I love the spring! After all, what’s not to love?
I open the window and the uplifting, early morning light comes streaming in. I open the door and hear the geese honking as they soar overhead, heading north. I step outside on my morning walk and, feeling the cool breeze, share the buckeye butterflies’ delight as they dance around my body, their newly born lives a surge of graceful, ecstatic movement.
Yet amidst all this glory, I find that my attention today is caught by one small, as-yet-unplanted flower – a dark burgundy-colored ranunculus, its petals still enfolded around a very small yellow pistil at the center. It sits in a small pot just outside our front door, awaiting the perfect moment to be carefully bedded into its lovingly prepared place the ground.
In part, I feel that my attention is drawn to this flower because of its “enfoldedness”, its pure potentiality – its about-to-open, not-quite-yet-unfurled feeling of magnificent possibility. Yet I also sense, along with this joyfulness, a little feeling of sadness. Much as I might wish, if only for a moment, to pause the passage of time and hold on to this open space, such beauty is ephemeral. Like the buckeye butterflies, it is transitory; it appears for a while, and then is gone.
Or seemingly so…
In “The Waking”, one of my favorite poets, Theodore Roethke, wrote, “Light takes the tree; but who can tell us how?” This question of “how?” is really quite wonderful, as it points to not only the transitory nature of our life but also to its ultimate unknowability. Is this really what we think it is? Encouragingly, he later writes, “So take the lively air,/ And, lovely, learn by going where to go.”
Yes, spring is here, and time does fly, and the geese, the buckeye butterflies, the burgundy ranunculus, and I – all of us together – learn by going where to go, each in our own time, in our own way.
