Point Vierge
On reading Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, by Thomas Merton
The first chirps of the waking day birds mark the “point vierge” of a sky as yet without real light… They begin to speak to Him, not with fluent song but with an awaking question that is their dawn state… Their condition asks if it is time for them to “be.” He answers “yes.”
Then one by one they wake up and become birds. They manifest themselves as birds, beginning to sing. Presently they will be fully themselves and even fly.
~ Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, Thomas Merton
The moment after sleep, and before waking as its own transformative moment when we are not yet ourselves, we have not fully returned to our bodies, our personalities, our schedules and our calendars. We are temporarily un-robed, before we clothe ourselves in the heavy robes of identity and ego function.
What would it mean to recognize this space and the transition that takes place there as a sacred moment? To notice that we have been given another day to slip into our personality costumes, our identity uniforms and explore an extraordinary and complex creation?
What would it mean to ask permission before returning to ourselves:
Is it time to be again?
Should I pause a moment before inhabiting myself again? Should I take one deep breath before re-incarnating into a new day, to simply notice the act of reinvesting in myself? Am I entitled to warm and rouse myself, like so many life-forms do, into the light of the returning sun?
We think we are too important, too essential to bother with such questions. Life is urgent, and we often pretend that we must grab hold of ourselves and the day ahead.
Who has never lost control of the day? Or of themselves? The new day is always more powerful than we are, no matter how we break it down into days, hours and minutes.
Do we wake and assume the day will unfold according to our plans and expectations? Who has never stepped into a perfectly ordinary day, all tidily scheduled in advance – that flew entirely off of the rails? That overpowered will completely, a reminder of how silly all our costumes, reminders and our calendars are?
A day that brings a miracle, or a horror, an act of fate, of history-changing destiny that we didn’t hear barreling down like a freight train ?
A flash flood.
A mother who can babysit your kid who is home sick, when one or the other of them falls and breaks a wrist.
An email out of the blue that makes a long-held dream come true.
A windfall.
A sudden death.
A disaster.
A fender-bender, a car accident, a sudden high fever.
A laptop that malfunctions and won’t let you back up a project you’ve spent hours on.
An unexpected kindness or cruelty, a life changing piece of news.
An emergency vet appointment. A call from the principal.
A military coup, an act of war.
The new day is not ours. We don’t control it.
Each new day, each night, each dawn transcends our intentions.
It is up to the convergence of millions of variables if our puny will and desires will be allowed to unfold undisturbed.
How have we not surrendered to this reality yet?
How do we not start each new day with explicit gratitude and humility, remembering how regularly we are overpowered?
When will we get it through our thick heads that we must all be granted permission by an infinite number of natural, and perhaps supernatural forces – all incomprehensibly more powerful than the to-do list with check boxes we have been avoiding for days but plan to get to this day?
How dare we imagine we can plan a single day, a week, a life without asking the entire world, life-itself for permission. We cannot make time meet our requirements, we are lucky, blessed by fortune when it does.
Should we sing out our appreciation and gratitude even for the many boring, ordinary days we have been permitted?
This coming into being in an act of praise
There are mornings when I remember to be grateful, for waking up in a bed with a kind partner, for knowing that my kids are doing well enough considering the converging crises that surround them.
But too often waking up feels like being yanked from floating on a warm cloud and tossed into the deep end of an ice-cold pool. Tripping lightly through magic dreamscapes, transformed in a flash into a sentient bag of wet concrete with a terrible taste in its mouth.
Too often we have no awareness at all of the dawn or the birds, only the day itself looming, an odious assignment: dishes to clean, laundry to wash, appointments to make, meetings to negotiate, teeth to floss, mouths to feed, bills to pay, terrors to face.
The night’s sleep a fleeting respite from the demands of overpowering days – that never ask for our permission or preferences before they unfold. Days that are a barrage of lies and requirements, uphill battles and grotesque cruelties.
Another day of flailing impotence, hollering into a void, working ourselves to the bone, fretting about money, the safety of loved ones, and the capricious annihilation of lives and hopes as communities and cities and whole peoples are pillaged, starved and destroyed.
While we cross the liminal space between sleep (if we were able to sleep at all) and waking - the day too often presents itself as slap that calls us back into a world of trauma and precarity.
Here is an unspeakable secret: paradise is all around us and we do not understand.
This is an utter failure of the systems that colonization and imperialism have erected and imposed, ever spreading rings of hoarding, carcerality and extraction. The dawning sky turns dreadful, as the sunlight intersects with industrial emissions, baking and broiling an exhausted, drained planet.
We try to take the weight of the world on our lonely shoulders.
Or we don’t and choose to preserve ourselves by ignoring all we can.
Or we pass from trauma dreams into a waking nightmare.
Still, I choose days, these hard and tragic, horrifying and heartbreaking times over no days at all. Even days like these offer a million imperceptible opportunities for unexpected kindness, for consolation, for small and large gestures of solidarity and love along the invisible net of creation that holds all things.
For justice, sudden or slow.
An individual’s jubilation travels only so far alone.
Here lies the lost paradise. The forbidden garden, the pink, gentle sun that rises each day hidden from our gaze, politically, economically irrelevant.
What would it be like to honor this point vierge as the moment of transformation, as we glance back over our shoulders at Everything and say goodbye as we return the weight of our morning identity and our labors in the world?
Might we still sing? Even if it is a dirge or a lamentation?
Might we start the day dancing, even painful feet on sharp stones, with innumerable possibilities swirling all around us?
Might coming into being, coming back to ourselves, whenever the day affords us, be worthy of praise?
Or perhaps this point vierge simply is an act of praise in itself
whether our waking egos can participate or not.
No matter how overwhelming the day.
Here is the truth, and here is the sacred remembering that we always forget:
It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
This is not life on earth operating optimally, at all.
We have imposed all this excessive noise, isolation, and injustice upon a world that evolved, unfolding in a general oscillating, churning state of balance and imbalance, and knocked things off their pins nearly as profoundly as a Jurassic asteroid.
But the days we have constructed are an abusive extractive illusion, and the daily re-entry into the world we were born to have still lives,
preserved, in birdsong.
If only we would listen and remember.
Can we sing through it all?
Through the terror, cruelty and death, through the pain of it all, even as we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, for even then the substance of a miraculous universe faithfully includes us.
We are participants in an extraordinary dance, singers in a grand universal chorus.
We were born to live together and care for each other
All things of the earth, sky and fiery firmament - coming into being -
an act of praise.
