Beauty. Always Beauty.

I just finished reading Vesper Stamper’s lovely book, A Cloud of Outrageous Blue. An absolutely riveting read. Set during the Great Plague of 1348 and released in 2020, this book is historical, and prophetic. It deals in fear and how it finds a host in the mob mentality. That is by far, the greatest contagion. So refreshingly non-ideological, political, or preachy, this story is a balm for the wounds of modernity. A balm of hope as we struggle to heal the wounds of CoVid panic and its collateral damage. I dare anyone to read the story and fail to find resonance in our reactions and overreactions in the CoVid years. Vesper Stamper has told a story that needs telling. A story that goes deeper than the fear that too often plagues us. It amazes me that she wrote it before the pandemic. Like Emma Donoghue and her pandemic novel, Pull of the Stars, these stories, these writers, like the comets that streak across the dark skies, herald and announce. We read them after the fact and wonder how they could have been so attuned. Writers and dreamers and poets are surely our prophets. They not only show us what is coming, they leave bread crumbs for us to follow.

Edyth is a loveable protagonist. Her gifts that oftentimes feel to her like a curse, speak profoundly to destiny and how important mentorship and even initiation is to individuation. Our young people need the space and time to discover their gifts, trustworthy mentors that affirm and guide their emergence, and a sense of responsibility to the community that marries individuation with service. Modernity lacks this so profoundly. I am calling on my generation here. Now is the time to step up.

This weekend our two grandsons visited Foxhaven. They watched movies with their grandpa, helped him build fencing around the kitchen gardens, haul fencing and dog houses where needed, learned to drive the four wheeler, and shoot rifles and shotguns. I watch my husband with his grandsons and time often collapses for a moment or two and I remember him with his boys. He is a patient, loving, and respected teacher to these boys and my heart explodes with love for them all. Grandfathers, fathers, sons, and grandsons. A lineage of masculinity that I can witness but never fully understand or participate in. I do my part. I cook. Feeding these loves from my kitchen is a joy beyond compare. Listening to their laughter and their learning and their developing personalities gives me great hope for the future. These two grandsons, these two cousins, are smart, kind, curious, and well raised. Kudos to their mothers and their fathers. They sprout in fertile soil. And while the future they will face is so utterly uncertain, of this I am certain, they are loved and healthy and these are the greatest gifts of all.

One of my cousins died this past week. Too young. I remember him as a teenager who indulged his tweenie sister and cousin (me) and let us sit together with his friend in the garage and listen to music. He was so funny. I remember that I felt so grown up. He was probably no more than 2 years older than me at the time, but to a 12 or 13 year old awkward little girl on the cusp of becoming a woman, his kindness was never forgotten. And while life was not easy for him, for any of us, some 50 years later, at his own father’s funeral, he had his cousins and his sisters laughing out loud. I pray that the echoes of that laughter and his stories sustain us as we grieve. Stories can do that. These are the silver seeds.

How does one grieve the end of a world? Notice, I did not say the end of THE world. Rather the end of A world. We are in the end times here in the West. The patterns announce “Ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars. …”. And what are we to do when a world dies? Surely not cower in fear. Surely not build enclaves against one another. Surely not keep tearing down. Surely not telling reiterative stories. We need to tell new stories. Dychronic stories. We need to gather heritage seeds. We need to celebrate the best of what we have been. We need to build an ark. We need ferry life across all the swollen rivers of despair. We need to turn to our young and mentor them. We need to build anew. Like Notre Dame. Out of the ashes She will rise again. We need to tell these redemptive stories. As if Life depended on it, because it does. In Stamper’s book, in the Scriptorium, the writers and the illustrators mock the devil by turning to beauty. This is the antidote to fear. Beauty. Always beauty.