Heading toward home

Northwest Glisan, heading toward the hills.
Driving in the rain after the Vigil Mass. 
Thirty-nine years, and "glad do I live."

Under the wide and starry sky
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me;
"Here she lies where she longed to be,
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill."  — Robert Louis Stevenson (alt.)


A note for those interested in the creative process

I am not dying, as far as I know! Except insofar as we are all dying.
But much death is coming into my life, people I love and people loved by people I love. My prayers lately have been filled with them.

I snapped this arbitrary image just to have a picture for the day. But when I put it into mono, it appeared to have a driving energy heading toward the hills (which is a metaphor for home and also for death). As I prepared the image for uploading, Stevenson's poem came to mind. 

Today is the anniversary of a spiritual illumination that utterly changed my life. I celebrate it every year. I don't look forward to dying any more than the next person, but since that event I'm not afraid of death. I view it as a homecoming to God, an agony (surely, no matter how often people say "died peacefully") that leads to a resurrection. The means of a transfiguration.

Another factor in the creation of this blip is that a dear friend and blipper used to lived just beyond these hills. As I drive toward them, I often think of her a thousand miles away. This provides a sense of reconnection, an aspect of friendship which is a kind of "heading home."

I'm saying these things in hopes of clarifying yesterday's blip, which some found "ageist." Clearly I am not, though perhaps old people have to earn their inner beauty while outer beauty is lavished extravagantly on the young. I learned from a college professor that a writer's words may have unintended consequences because of the reader's particular associations with the text. He himself shuddered at Keats's image of a maiden rising from the sea draped in seaweed, since he grew up near a beach and thought of seaweed as slimy, stinking, and covered with flies! 

Youth and age, life and death, these are complex subjects, and different facets reveal themselves. Yesterday's blip was merely one, brought forth by Ronsard's poem which popped into my mind, having known it by heart since I learned it in school. I presented it tongue in cheek, since I knew that it was essentially a clever attempt at seduction, similar in tone to Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" and John Donne's "The Flea," both of which express the carpe diem theme.