the light in your eyes.

I'm writing to you from the lovely, lovely Lake Keowee, SC.

We're in the Cliffs, a luxury home community in which our gracious friends the McEntees have a house. It's beautiful here. This is where we went yesterday,



Pictures of me actually on the falls will be up eventually. :)

So, I'm trying to write an admissions essay and I don't think it has ever been such a thought-provoking task. So many admissions essays are based on trivial questions about life experiences that give you a chance to make yourself sound complex and intelligent. It seems to me, however, that I only ever get the really good questions that really mess with your writing bone.

Actually, the questions aren't what makes it good.
It's just that I can't seem to write a dumb-it-down answer.
If an essay doesn't have a real spine, I am likely to fail atrociously at attempting to make it sound convincing.

So, instead, I write deeply, if I can.

This time, I am writing about my favorite poem, Dirge without Music, by Edna St. Vincent-Millay. I only read this poem every now and then, but every time I do, it surprises me with how deeply it resonates in my heart. In trying to put three points and a thesis to why this poem has affected me profoundly, I have had to actually put a formula to the feeling I get every time I read it. And, strangely, the more I read it, the deeper I feel it, and the stronger I am pulled back to the places of grief in my heart.

Dirge Without Music
by Edna St. Vincent-Millay

"I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.
Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains, --- but the best is lost.

The answers quick & keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,
They are gone. They have gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned."

I have felt this anger. I have felt this pain.


When my mom miscarried in October of 2005, everything that was stable in my life began to feel unsteady. As she spiraled emotionally downward into post-partum depression, and physically into a series of undiagnosed illnesses, I fell deeply into my own hurt. Anyone who has ever been hurt by the tragedies of this earth will tell you that one of the greatest pains of loss is that the world keeps moving. You feel as though the wind has been knocked out of you, and you just can't walk anymore, but the world keeps breathing, keeps moving, keeps stumbling forward. The sun shines. The days come and go. And so when I felt my world falling apart, I chose to just keep moving. I cried. I hurt. But I shut the windows in my heart, and walked forward unblinkingly. Not until now have I realized that I closed the windows too soon.

But how do you come to terms with the tragedies that don't make sense? How do you reconile the things that no one can explain? How do you keep asking questions when you do not think you will be answered? How do you turn to God when you feel abandoned?

It was a baby. He never even got to breathe. His loss threw my mother into anxiety, chaos, and deep, deep darkness.

"God has a plan. Everything will be okay."

I know. But I do not approve.

I feel so in-between these days. I didn't know I still felt this old pain. I didn't know my heart was still not opened up all the way. So. As new beauty enters my life, maybe I am learning to open the windows inside of me so that the old pain can find its way out.

Anyway.
I sincerely recommend walking through your heart-cemetary with that poem in mind. There is some thing to be mourned in every life.

Open up your heart windows and let us see you again.



On the to-do list for the rest of vacation:

1. Sleep. Until I feel rested in every bone.

2. Eat. With happiness and laughter, and with room for dessert.

3. Write. Because it's how I remember who I am. And because I want to go to Oglethorpe in the Fall.

4. Play. In the water. In the sun. In the kitchen, with my family. To my heart's content.

5. Get LOST. It's family time! We all hunker down in the basement and become completely absorbed in the story. This is probably the only show ever to get me actually talking, yelling, whispering to the TV screen. Screaming, too. Yeah, it's that good.


Anyway. Thoughts for today are a little heavier than usual perhaps. Comment anyway.

And, thank you for reading.
You get ten points just for that.