Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Thy wonderful works

My paper (due tomorrow) does not have a conclusion and I still have 30 pages of basket-weaving text to read (due tomorrow) and forget even doing that Thoreau reading (due tomorrow) and I am pretty sure that I will be single til I am 38. 

And yet - I'm happy. 

Or rather, thankful so deep it runs to gladness. It's one of those times where life isn't perfect or easy (um, definitive No), but the blessings are so rich you can't help but be light. There are lots of things to say Thank You God for. 

Not the least of which is that I just titled an American Lit. paper after an Auden poem ("The More Loving One: the Pattern of Male-Female Relationships in Hawthorne's Short Stories"). But you have to be an obsessive English major to see anything happy in that. 

***
Thankful things include a wonderful winter retreat where we laughed and talked and hiked and generally bonded; going to dinner with famous poet C.D. Wright (5 minutes before she takes the podium: Dr. Johnson - Want to go to dinner with us afterward? Me - YES! Yes, I'd love to. I mean, ohmygosh, that would be GREAT), moving from casual friend to real friend level with neat people, devouring my free stack of pancakes at IHOP tonight with Deb and Joanna, and getting a very productive cane-splitting lesson with Dr. Brown (eight, count 'em, eight strips). 

Tomorrow I've planned a working lunch: picnicking on the quad and stripping cane. 

The daffodils are blooming - and what's amazing is that I care this year. A year ago Spring, everything hurt. Everything. A year ago Spring, I was trapped under a boulder of depression, a rock so big that even now I think of my life in terms of Before and After. A year ago Spring, it hurt too much to think about blue sky and resurrection and what life was like Before.

The daffodils are blooming - and I care so much, it hurts. 

 He brought me up out of the pit . . .

1 comment:

Laura said...

Your post made me weep. His faithfulness is new every morning. I love you, Anna!