Humility - Brian Doyle

 

You cannot control anything.
You cannot order or command everything.
You cannot fix and repair everything.
You cannot protect [people] from pain
and loss and tragedy and illness.
You cannot be sure you will always be
employed, or healthy, or relatively sane.

All you can do is face the world with quiet grace.

When we are young we build a self, a persona, a story
in which to reside, or several selves in succession, or
several at once, sometimes;  when we are older we take on
other roles and personas, other masks and duties; and you
and I both know men and women who become trapped in
the selves they worked so hard to build, so desperately
imprisoned that sometimes they smash their lives simply to
escape who they no longer wish to be;  but finally, I think, if
we are lucky, if we read the book of pain and loss with
humility, we realize that we are all broken and small and brief....
and then, perhaps, we begin to understand something deep and
true about humility.

Humility does not mean self abnegation, lassitude, detachment;
it's more a calm recognition that you must trust in that which
does not make sense, that which is unreasonable, illogical, silly
ridiculous, crazy by the measure of most of our culture.  You
must trust that you being you matters somehow...

[and that]

.....pain is part and parcel of the gift of joy...

[and]
You do your best to reach out tenderly and touch and elevate as
many people as you can reach...

You either walk toward love or away from it with every breath
you draw.  Humility is the road to love.  Humility, maybe, is
love.  That could be.  I wouldn't know; I'm a muddle and a 
conundrum shuffling slowly along the road, gaping in wonder,
trying to just see and say what is, trying to leave shreds and shards
of ego along the road like wisps of litter and chaff.

Brian Doyle

Excerpts from the chapter - "The Final Frontier"
From: One Long River Song

~

Photo from the Internet

So much held in the heart - Brian Doyle

So much held in the heart
in a lifetime.  So much held in a
heart in a day, an hour, a moment.  We
are utterly open with no one in the end -
not mother and father, not wife or husband,
not love, not child, not friend.  We open windows
to each but we live alone in the house of the heart.
Perhaps we must.  Perhaps we could not bear to be
so naked, for fear of a constantly harrowed
heart.

When young we think there will come one person who will
savor and sustain us always; when we are older we know
this is the dream of a child, that all hearts finally are
bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by
time and will, patched and force of character, yet
fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter
how ferocious the defense and how many
bricks you bring to the wall.  You can
brick up your heart as stout and
tight and hard and cold and
impregnable as you possibly
can and down it comes
in an instant, felled by
[someone's] second
glance, a child's
apple breath,
the shatter
of glass
in the
road,
the
words
 I
have something
to tell you, a cat with
a broken spine dragging
itself into the forest to die,
the brush of your mother's
hand in the thicket of your hair,
the memory of your father's voice...

Brian Doyle
Joyas Voladoras
Excerpt from - One Long River of Song:
Notes on Wonder

(Brian's words, my format)

~

A couple of memories from childhood that warm my heart:
Smelling the aroma of coffee and breakfast wafting from the
kitchen that Mom was making mid morning on vacation days
when we rented a cabin in one of the coves on the lake...

And one of our closer moments with Dad, at the same cabin,
when he took us kids out on the little pier next to the
boathouse at night to point into the night sky, as we clustered
next to him like ducklings, and pointed to the
Big Dipper.

~

Art - Mystic Meandering

 

Brian Doyle's stories/essays were, for him, a mystical project
born of both joy and desperation - embracing humanity.

"We're only here for a minute. 
We're here for a little window.
And to use that time to catch and share
shards of light and laughter and grace
seems to me the great story."

Brian Doyle