Wonderings/Reflections
It
was McGovern who first spoke to me about his sense that
we had within us the power or the chance, maybe the need,
to make of something ordinary, something sacred. This
notion has a history old enough so that he used the Latin
phrase,
'consecratio mundi', the world consecrated, the potential
to create, to make of something out of nothing
or not much, to shape harmonies from the noise all about
.Father
John McNamee, Robert McGovern, Aileen McGovern, myself
and other friends had been getting together at the McGovern
home, looking at his works in progress, reading some
of McNamee's poems in progress, tending to one another,
paying
attention to each other's work and lives; a circle of
friends repairing ourselves in one another's company
My earliest memory of the idea of hospitality was that
it was a foreign notion. Care of the stranger had no
high place in any list of virtues that us Ferrys were supposed
to develop. Trouble enough, those times, in looking after one's
own.My world was one of clannishness, boundaries,
kith and kin,the taxonomy of in and out. The home my parents made was
always full of people - strange some of them, stranger to me
often enough that one would think that our home might qualify
as a hospitable place But not strangers to my parents
This past month I have been re-shingling the
roof of the house and garage. After work, these long days
of early summer, I
am up on the roof hammering away until light goes. I started
on the garage roof. Years ago I watched some roofers for an
hour, asked some questions, and then shingled the roof of the
mountain cabin I had built. I'll make my mistakes on the garage
roof, hopefully learn from them and then go at the house roof...
There are two prayers that I hear
myself praying. They are like a bit of music that plays itself
in the nether
part of one’s mind, noticed once in a while but not often concentrated
on. One, my mother taught me. I have a memory of her at bedside
of little me and my younger sister, Eileen. We weren't’t yet
schoolchildren. The bed may have been my parent’s bed. Eileen
and I slept in different rooms, but mom would let us fall asleep
in her and Dad’s bedroom and leave the hallway light burning
to keep us from dark fears and worries...
This evening, September 21, 1993,
as Danny and I were leaving the house, he noticed a small
thrush on the
pavement beside the garage. The bird did not fly off at our
approach but slowly hopped away from us onto the grass and
then into the flower bed. Without much resistance from the
little thing we picked it up . It was a bird we had never seen
before. We got out the books...
Purple, color of the sky after
sundown, and so the river also, but a shade darker. Some
wind tailing me upriver, then against
me home. I rowed up as far as the top of Peters Island. As
I came around the turning point the Great Blue Heron glided
over me, not more than twenty feet off. I heard his wings pushing
the night air.Last year at this time
there had been much in newspapers and TV about this 50th anniversary
of the attack on Pearl Harbor
by the Japanese...
Three Black Vultures roost in a wet tree, a
dead wet tree, with the north wind blowing at them twenty-five
miles. I sit nearby in the cabin of a small sailboat in Turner
Creek, a quiet tributary of the Sassafras River, which flows
into the Chesapeake Bay. I am at anchor....
Consecratio Mundi
Hospitality
Roofing Paper
Black
Vultures at Turner Creek