Clematis
April’s final day promises to be glorious with a Natality that always surprises and inspires. Having witnessed the emergence of vegetation in springtime year by year, I feel delight once again at the onrush of life. New life rises up from a brown and gray debris strewn ground. Never ending life is concealed from us over the cold winter months. Life has a seasonal dimension. There’s maturity, and there’s inevitable decline, and death. Death is a backdrop, like the black backing of a mirror, essential if the mirror is to reflect anything. Death, a hard limit is an offer of perspective.
The header image is of clematis flowers. I planted clematis because these lines from T. S. Eliot’s Burnt Norton poem echoed in my mind.
Time and the bell have buried the day,
The black cloud carries the sun away.
Will the sunflower turn to us, will the clematis
Stray down, bend to us; tendril and spray
Clutch and cling?Chill
Fingers of yew be curled
Down on us? After the kingfisher’s wing
Has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still
At the still point of the turning world.
Eliot considered his Four Quartets poems his very best poetry. These verses touch upon the paradox of life. Time haunts the living with an unknowable expiration date. Death just is, a mystery. There are dimensions of existence impervious to our will, our powers of technical intervention. The yew is a symbol of death and mortality, “chill fingers”. BUT, there’s the magnificent flight of the kingfisher, flashing as light, skimming over water’s surface.
The world seems to stand still, at attention for us when we glimpse such a sight!
There’s that “still point” of the turning world…
This tune might seem incongruous. It isn’t. Life is a wild ride, a helping of darkness to make us uncomfortable, to spur us ahead… Bang A Gong by T. Rex.
