Saturday morning, I was beginning to dream a rather unpleasant series of visions of the up-and-coming 2nd impeachment trial of former President Trump.  Sufficiently conscious to recognize that sleeping-in would probably mean additional images from the cellar of my consciousness, I got up.

Today is sunny, still, and quite cold, 5 degrees in fact.  There are many rabbit tracks in the snow but nothing moves other than traffic on Western Avenue.  Machines always move about.  There is no season to the rhythm of human artifice.

Drawn still to Little Gidding by T. S. Eliot I read the poem once again.

This from the first stanza:

When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire,
The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches,
In windless cold that is the heart’s heat,
Reflecting in a watery mirror
A glare that is blindness in the early afternoon.

Blindness in the early afternoon indeed!  I think that humankind is indeed blind with negligible self-awareness.  Our individual default is to assume that “I” am the center of the universe.  Such an assumption would be silly, except when it isn’t.  A second impeachment trial for a former president approaches.  Though obvious to anyone who has watched his video speechifying performance directing his devotees to storm the Capitol building, — his many defenders will insist there was no link between his words, and the actions of thousands milling around the Capitol,  the scores who entered shattered entryways to the halls of congress.

Under the aegis of “I” as the world’s center,  there’s no alternative point of view to the one which I insist upon.  Blind. We close our eyes.

In the dark time of the year. Between melting and freezing
The soul’s sap quivers. There is no earth smell
Or smell of living thing.

The language strikes a chord with me.  Conditions at this time of year conduce to reflection, a timely inward gaze, unlike the warm months when scented fecundity of the soil ascends to awareness   Then as always, I busy myself with preparations for growing the garden.  Now, as if time is standing still, a quiet has descended.     In the dark time of the year.

The question is obvious:  So what?  You’ve said what you have said, but what’s the relevance?  Why should I care?  Just these words from the poet’s pen:

If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

To read the entire poem, Little Gidding by T. S. Eliot, CLICK HERE.