A Slender Thread

     In the beginning was the word.  A word.  Probably om, but not certainly.  The scholars all disagree.  But whatever the word was, it was couched in a tranquil and uninterrupted and renewing silence.  It was held aloft by an entire Universe of love, suspended for the gods to admire, and bless.  And as time wore on the word evolved and changed and grew until it gave birth to the many worlds.  And the worlds were woven out of one single slender thread.  Just like the one we live in.

     Sometimes you can see it.  Like yesterday.  My father came downstairs from a long and restless night, and poured himself a glass of milk, and I looked at him and thought, Who is that old man in my kitchen?  He had always been so fierce and virile and cantankerous, and here he was, pouring himself a glass of milk, and I realized he hadn’t put his teeth in.

     A slender thread.  The young father, now old.  A slender thread to mark the change, silent and almost invisible.  Almost. 

     Many years ago a remarkable rain swept through my county in the north and felled trees and toppled cars on the highway like toys, and the river grew swollen, mighty, and hungry.  It carried a great many things away.  And my friend and I thought it would be a happening event to go to the place the river poured into the sea and see the mixing of the waters, and the chaos and the waves.  But it didn’t happen that way, the way that we expected.

     Imagine our surprise when we found that lusty swollen river with all its rubble and mess sliding gracefully beneath the waves without a sound, effortless.  Pure grace.  There was no great event.  There was no clapping of waters and terrific whitewash.  Just a heavy river plunging headlong into an open sea.  A slender thread finding its way back into the weave.

     And I realized that the greatest events in human life are the same.  They are a silent passage, a moment scarcely even noticeable.  A moment when mantles are passed, and great kings are born and greater kings die, and not even the birds would know it from their branch.

     Another came in the mail tonight, on the top of the stack.  A simple exchange of words, and I set down my wineglass at the end of the night and knew something in me had changed forever.  That a little girl’s longing had dried up like a well, and in its place, a sprawling and magnificent ocean of possibility. 

     I will never marry.

     I set down the glass and knew it surely as I know my name.  I am not meant for that institution that takes a certain love and turns it into a sporting match over furniture and finance.  I knew it when I was just a child, and then I spent twenty years forgetting and undoing my knowing as though I was ever meant for something else.  It is certain I want children, and I don’t think that will ever be different, but that is a another conversation, one that sleeps on the boughs for a time outside of this one.

      It has been called the slender thread of fate.  That which weaves us together at the seams, visible in the most unexpected of moments.  How sometimes the times we think are tremendous turn out to be nothing, “The Great Non-Event” as my friend Terence used to refer to it.  And then the moments where we thought nothing was happening, love is born, and friendship is born, and great ideas are born.  All by happenstance.

Tell me, what are yours?

KVZ