Azzi: Graced by crawdads singing
Recently, as I was celebrating yet another birthday, I was reminded of Howard Thurman's observation that "The years, the months, the days, and the hours have flown by my open window. Here and there an incident, a towering moment, a naked memory, an etched countenance, a whisper in the dark, a golden glow these and much more are the woven fabric of the time I have lived."
Within the threads of that woven fabric, at the tactile, intimate intersection of warp and woof, between memories, whispers, and towering moments I consider, today, a life I could not have imagined, not because I didn't desire it but because I didn't know such a life existed.
On this birthday a loved one gave me a copy of Delia Owens' "Where the Crawdads Sing," in which Kya, a young girl learning to read, says:
“I wadn’t (sic) aware that words could hold so much. I didn’t know a sentence could be so full.”
I too knew a time when I wasn't aware that words could hold so much, wasn't aware that if I listened attentively I might be seduced by crawdads singing.
But I came to learn that if I listened closely I could hear words beneath words, hear chords between crashing of the waves and, as I learned from my 11th grade English teacher Mr. Quirk at Manchester Central, to "listen" carefully when reading, to enter into Margaret Atwood's "gaps between the stories.”
Today, in a world where words hold so much, sentences so full, we are losing our way, sliding back into an age of ignorance, an age before knowledge, where science and thought are ignored, where empathy and compassions are scorned in favor of greed and profit, in favor of reintroducing a caste system where one people is favored over another.
For far too long, too many Americans — from politicians to pundits to mainstream clergy, including the white moderates Dr. King warned us about — ignored (as marginal nuisances) racists, antisemites, birthers, 9/11 truthers, QAnon cultists, seditionists, insurrectionists, election-deniers .... Aaaaaarghhhh ... the list goes on and on ... and other conspiracy theorists who surround them who are increasingly dominating and corrupting the Public Square.
The reality is that there are two sides in conflict in America today: one that believes that all people are created equal; and one that does not, and I refuse to accept the argument that both sides have been equally corrupted by partisan arguments and social media, that there is equal goodness on both sides.
One that embraces democracy: one that embraces authoritarianism.
One side, unable to think new thoughts, refuses to relinquish its control over false narratives that continue to define American history — and policy — and another side, victimized by those narratives, struggling to resist.
One that refuses to recognize the world is no longer white, that it will never be white again; one side tired of waiting for equal agency and acknowledgement.
Between those sides I'm learning to live within a homeland I've built; a land I designed and defined in images, languages, and memories; a land where I increasingly feel I must dwell in exile, where I increasingly fear that to survive I must don earthly garments.
I longed for a life of beauty; for too long I didn't know what that meant, for too long I didn't recognize that to recognize the gift of beauty — the gift of light — one must recognize such gifts are called grace, gifts given to us without being earned with no expectation of payback.
My life has been blessed with such gifts, transformative moments of golden glow on Mediterranean beaches and Charles River pathways, by the flesh of blood oranges, the texture of sycamore bark, the weave of a Turkish kilim with an imperfection deliberately woven into it — that transcend experience and demand we follow a new path, demand we widen our hearts and embrace goodness.
Demand we seek Dar Al Salaam, an Abode of Peace — an abode made accessible through goodness.
Today, in this world we together inhabit, in a place where shadows become grey between dusk and dark — between Maghrib and Isha prayers — that time is now calling upon us to recognize, as Zadie Smith’s writes, that “progress is never permanent, will always be threatened, must be redoubled, restated and reimagined if it is to survive.”
On New Year's Day some friends wrote to me noting that "[we] hear the weariness in your writings..."
Perhaps they're right, but I think not.
I believe, as did Sylvia Plath, that “Perhaps some day I'll crawl back home, beaten, defeated. But not as long as I can make stories out of my heartbreak, beauty out of sorrow.”
But not as long as I can imagine, by my open window, making love out of lemons.
Robert Azzi, a photographer and writer who lives in Exeter, can be reached at theother.azzi@gmail.com. His columns are archived at theotherazzi.wordpress.com.
This article originally appeared on Portsmouth Herald: Azzi: Graced by crawdads singing
