NO TRAIN TODAY

I remembered having this photo in my digital archives as I re-read Louise Glück's poem before writing my post on it Wednesday.

The image isn't related to the poem in any literal way, but it's one I like. I found it early in the days of my grieving, and it expressed exactly how I felt: stopped in my tracks, almost literally. The familiar grooves along which my life had run seemed to have disappeared, or at least become impassable; as for the engine, the energy that had always fueled me, it had just stopped cold. I'll stop beating the metaphor over the head now; you get the idea.

I'm glad to say that though it took a lot longer than I could have imagined, my life (and my capacity to live it with zest) are chugging along once more. Patience, as always, was the key...though as I have said before, it's not my best quality (or even my second best). It's hard to trust that curiosity, passion, and energy will come back when you can't see a glimpse of them no matter how hard you stare at the horizon. Yet eventually they do return—and suddenly you have a train expected, arriving, today, this very minute, now.

FORGOTTEN TIMES, FORGOTTEN REMNANTS

The news last week reported that archaeologists working at the Ground Zero site in New York have found a ship buried in the eighteenth century as part of the extension of the land in lower Manhattan. (Click here for the story as reported with the most historical background.)


It's not yet clear how much of the ship is intact or what its actual date and significance is, and though the details will probably be interesting I don't much care about them. What captured my imagination in the story is the layering of history of which the story reminds us. Cycles of birth and death, creation and destruction: that's always the way of things. A house witnesses births and deaths, celebrations and griefs. Land is excavated and built up, demolished and build up again. What once were roads become parks and what once were parks become roads. And a city landscape destroyed by one century's plane is found to be built on the remains of another century's ship, in a place another century's people were trying to make better use of.

There's nothing in this discovery that makes Ground Zero less stark or sad. (As a former worker there, I have to admit that I've never been able to visit the site since 9/11.) Yet it does remind us that change, of whatever kind, is part of the nature of things. We are all part of time's complicated layering, for all that we feel unique in both our accomplishments and our pain; and what we think is buried often rises again, in some other form, at some other time.