Dora keeping watch on the patio this morning.
A week till Good Friday. Good Friday: one week from today. What has happened to Lent --- not that I'll be that sad to kiss it goodbye. It's felt very neither-here-nor-there as Lents go, but then I think I feel this way every year. I expect Lent to be a season of tangible spiritual development, and somehow it never is. That doesn't mean that intangible spiritual development doesn't go on, or that I won't see it later, in hindsight, but in the moment, every year, it just feels like plod-plod-plod. I could be doing more, but I don't. What I do seems so paltry. Does it make me better? Does it set me more firmly on the path to holiness? Do I grow closer to Christ? I really can't ever say. I know I want those things, but I don't know that I ever want them enough actually to do them.
Recently a friend whose wife has been suffering from cancer for the last five years remarked to me that another friend had told him that he had been praying for the wife, every day, since he had first heard of her diagnosis five years ago. My friend remarked that this revelation had made him tear up --- who would not tear up, confronted with that kind of diligent charity? And I thought, I have known about this woman's cancer for the same amount of time, and it's not that I haven't prayed for her, and them, because I have --- but could I say I'd done it every day? Every day for five years? Without fail?
Answer: I could not. I'm great at praying in the moment. On social media, intentions cross my path, and I pray for them, every single one I see, right there and then. It's one of the reasons I stay on social media, even in Lent. But then . . . what? Do I ever remember those people and their prayer intentions? The best I can do, generally, is to say to God, on my way to Mass, that I know I've been aware of a lot of people who need prayers, and that I hope He remembers who they are.
Somehow this sums up how Lent always goes for me, I guess because it sums up how pretty much everything goes for me, all the time. I hope You remember who they are, Lord, because I sure don't.
Anyway, it's been an all-too-brief season of precisely that, plus purple, sonnets, general austerity, and not buying Ngaio Marsh novels. And now it's almost over. I feel whatever the opposite of survivor's guilt is, but also a measure of relief. However lamely I flail around, the Resurrection is for me, too. In fact, He came to make the lame walk, and this is my great hope for myself and everyone else whom He holds in his gaze.
Meanwhile, I am wearing today, on this last Friday before Holy Week:
Trousers for a change, these very old charcoal-gray ponte-knit skinny jeans, and this secondhand gray bamboo tunic that I haven't worn, so the wardrobe tracker tells me, since February 24. I really like this piece, one of the last things I bought in 2021; I think I wear it less often because I'm afraid of staining it. Things do show up on this silvery fabric. And it feels kind of fragile, though I don't think it's any more so than the bamboo swing dresses I wear all the time. Anyway, I was in the mood for something kind of flowy over narrow pants, so here we are. Grape merino Ibex v-neck tee, also secondhand, underneath for warmth, plus purple Xero Oswegos. I will add my usual necklace and earrings anon, and that will be that. It's coolish out today after yesterday's rain, so I might layer on a gray drape cardigan when I go out to walk the dog.
At the Sun in Holy Week we're featuring living poets for our Poem of the Day, with poems keyed to the liturgical season and with audio clips of the poets reading their poems. My esteemed colleague and I each will have a poem up; the others are Robert Crawford, Marly Youmans, and Maryann Corbett. If you subscribe to their email list you get four free articles a month, so that would give you most of the poems for next week.
And I'm up to thirty-six sonnets in my Lenten cycle. It's actually three distinct cycles: one on guardian angels, one with a "proclamation of the Gospel" theme, one on Holy Saturday, because that always has a stranglehold on my imagination. They are sort of connected as a series of sonnet crowns, but not so interwoven that I can't consider them completely separately. In fact, I don't think they work as a whole interconnected crown, but that's okay. It's been a good exercise, and especially an exercise in both metrical control, which I've really worked on, and variations in the sonnet form. Currently I've been writing what I think of as 7-&-7s, each 7-line section (I don't have them separated into stanzas) with a rhyme scheme of something like abacbdc, and bonus points if the d rhyme begins the second seven lines, so that the two halves of the poem interlock. In the one I've just done, the rhymes are very close, like stone/rain/mourn/again, so that really the third line could be a c rhyme, not a. Whatever. A lot of rhymes, with some intricacy as the limited space of fourteen lines allows, and some interweaving from one section to the next. That, plus trying to write either pure iambic lines or pure trochaic lines, has been the kind of challenge I've set myself, though the meter has gotten a little looser here and there, with some anapests or dactyls creeping in. AND if I write a trochaic line, I most often cut the toes off the final foot, so that the line both begins and ends on a stressed syllable, which I think delivers a kind of punch.
Anyway. Back to it all.
LATER: Another pretty plate situation for the end of Lent.
This plate came from Goodwill. Napkin was a set my younger daughter gave me for Christmas last year.