Halcyon Days

If we could turn around faster, I think we’d see them sitting there, just out of our sight, these words, crocheted from memory, whittled from time that has made them ours, made us theirs.  So it was yesterday with the words “halcyon days”. 

Norm McKendrick is a Jesuit friend who lives in memory, a man of words that he hoped would embrace us as he could not.  One evening on a trip back from a movie we had gone to see together, that phrase came to Kathy or me, and we mentioned it, mentioned that we did not know what it meant, but that it seemed to be subliminally appropriate to the peaceful setting of the film.  Norm said that in fact we were right, that the word is used to describe a peaceful time, a time when nature calms us.  Halcyon also refers to the Kingfisher, a bird immortalized by the same Gerard Manley Hopkins who wrote “Pied Beauty” that closed yesterday’s posting.  Myth suggests that the Halcyon Bird built its nest
on the sea on the Winter Solstice, calming it.  The winter solstice: sol-stice, the sun standing still; it is the point in the path of the earth’s annual orbit around the sun when the sun’s setting and rising stop moving farther north, and start moving back south again, promising the return of summer. 

The winter solstice is the time of the longest night.  Here in late summer, I find myself lately looking forward to it, the slowing that the winter brings, the hibernation of it, heart slowing, metabolism slowing, darkness calling me to wake later, retire earlier, expect less accomplishment.  The kingfisher builds its nest in this calm dark.  And so it is from that calm that new life is born, something from the bird but not of the bird, something more, and something that will outlive her. 

I am a person who lives with a contrary myth, that production comes from activity, and calls for early waking, late retiring, long days of movement and application to tasks, of accumulating mastery.  And so when I turn around so quickly and find a word waiting for me there, I think it purposely slowed its retreat behind my head so that I could catch it, so it could remind me of Norm, and that moment in the car.  I smile and consider the gift of the idea of that calm, dark sea, that nest floating on it, rising and falling on the diminishing rolling of the day’s waves.  I think of the new life growing there, silent and protected within shells that are strong enough for its forming and weak enough for its emergence.

I hear Norm suggesting now, as he did when I could see him, that I slow down, that I just sit and realize that phrases like halcyon days inhabit us in order to call us to a truth – that life emerges and is not produced by mastery, that our vocation is to build a nest in which life can grow on its own.  Hopkins writes of selving – not my selving, but the selving of all things.

34. ‘As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme’

  

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme;           

As tumbled over rim in roundy wells    

Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s          

Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;    

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:                       5

Deals out that being indoors each one dwells; 

Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,             

Crying Whát I do is me: for that I came.

Í say móre: the just man justices;            

Kéeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces;             10

Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is—       

Chríst—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,               

Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his          

To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.