Quivering Angels

After we die, we weigh twenty-one grams less. This is the weight of wakefulness, light as seven hummingbirds. Who then are these quivering angels? Certainly, care is one, and wonder is another, and our irrepressible want to be in the light, and our will to live. Then there’s our need to hold and be held. And let’s leave two unnamed, just to respect the Mystery and to honor how much we’ll never know. I like to imagine that when we’re born, we arrive weighing twenty-one grams less as well, before we learn how to speak. This difference is the weight of knowledge and voice that we accumulate along the way, that turns into wakefulness if we’re blessed, that leaves us when we die, drifting back into the well where all souls break down and merge. It’s from this well that another soul bubbles up into yet another person. And so, we carry indelible markings from other lives, inclinations and dispositions that we can’t quite name or pin down, except to say that they are intrinsic to who we are. Like my love of the sea and your love of wild grasses. Like my friend George’s love of wood and my friend Robert’s sudden need to learn fly-fishing. It’s the quiver of life that illuminates where we are connected. If you put what matters on a scale, it would weigh less than seven feathers and yet it would somehow balance the heaviness that we carry in our heart.

A Question to Walk With: Describe the smallest thing you have witnessed in life that makes a difference. How can it be your teacher?

This is from my book, Things That Join the Sea and the Sky.

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