Why We Stay Up Late

What do we stay up late for these days?We stay up to read about our friends on the Internet. Say what you will about Facebook, it brings you closer. There’s a woman in Colorado who once lived just five minutes from me here in New England. I knew her not at all then, except by repute as a writing tutor to the young. And I was jealous, knowing her this way. "What's wrong with ME that I'm not a writing tutor to the young?" is all I could think when I heard her name.Today she lives among those mountains. Somehow we found each other on Facebook and now almost I every day I feel her gentle spirit as she shares a thought or a photo. (And my, how she loves her dogs! If they added to the Seven Cardinal Virtues surely loving animals would be right up near the top.)So we stay up to check on one another.We stay up with sick children. Also with children having nightmares, hallucinations, irrational fears. We have them ourselves.We stay up late to watch YouTube videos like the one I recently posted of the grand swoop of that owl with his mighty thighs and his outward-reaching talons as he comes to snatch up his prey. A video like that thrills us, clear witness as it is that something is coming for us too, something fierce and strong.I stayed up so late a few nights ago I had a kind of waking dream. It was of my grandfather about whom I have never dreamed even once since his death 50 years ago.As a small child I felt so safe living in his house as we did. In my dream I didn't notice him until someone said "Hey did you see who’s here?" and there he was, working in the garden out behind the farmhouse where he passed his boyhood in the 1880s. I recognized the place because I have every picture he ever took.Also every journal he ever wrote in.I have his degrees, rescued from the attic and framed now, Also framed pictures of him both old and young. This picture below shows him inhis very first year as a lawyer, looking so proud to be sitting at a real desk with his own law library behind him and his assistant beside him, he who went barefoot most of the year and got to school only when they held school, the typical thing in those rural communities.It was so nice to see him again in this waking dream. He even called me "Blackberry Top", a name he gave me for the shiny black curls clustered tight together on my two-year-old head..At my mom’s 80th birthday party I read aloud a letter he had written her when she was a college sophomore, eating too much and flunking French and smoking her brains out with the dorm windows flung wide to the cold night air. He knew she was doing all that – other letters were filled with admonition - but this was a birthday letter and it was only loving.When I got done reading it aloud to all gathered there for her special day, she turned to her younger sister and said "Did you feel that Grace? He was HERE in the room!” Then, 20 minutes later, she closed her eyes and died.Some months later, after writing to a childhood friend about what had happened, he wrote me back: “In my faith tradition we’re taught that one who loved you in life comes for you at the end. Maybe that’s what happened with your mother: her dad came for her.”What a comforting thought! That someone comes for you, strong with beating wings, and lifts you up and carries you home.

Prey Unceasingly

Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they're not out to get you, as they say...And just because you're not watching them doesn't mean they're not watching you.This is a beautiful and amazing video of an owl caught on camera just as he’s swooping down on his prey,It stirs up many responses in me all at once:Like how much fun it must be to fly, a thought I have at least once a day every day.And also...what amazing strong legs he has;and the glory of his plumage;and the intricate workings of those talons.I'm joking with the paranoid talk. The video doesn’t really make me feel hunted by anything: not illness, or bad luck, or even death.Anyway, death isn’t like this, as far as I can tell. Death is more of a subsiding. And whatever the agent of your death, in the movie of your life it’s the loss of oxygen that makes the projector stop. (I learned that by reading physician Sherwin Neuland’s oddly comforting book How We Die.)No, this creature’s slow-motion pounce doesn’t remind me of death at all, even though his landing spelled death for his meek victim. His flight, his pounce, his grace and energy remind me of life and all life’s beauty.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LA6XSrM0V_0]