Just finished Updike’s Rabbit, Run–I’ll post a final on it in a bit. It has me thinking.
Last night a thought: You’re all that I have left. It hit me then, the space that we’re alloted is a constant shifting of limits, changes made by lives, by death, by someone else’s say-so. Extensions made as permits to temporarily step into another’s space; elsewise we can trespass, take our chances. A school, a company, a reason gives us rights: a class, a job, an invitation. Just as easily withdrawn. Someone gone is no more gone if living out of touch than dead.
Stretching borders, moving space, sharing, fences once with gates now locked. The constant change of perimeters even as we reach across the thousand miles of sea and mountain, desert, towns and farms, we find our inner sanctums closing in, doors shut, new doors open…for a while, as if on timers. Locks and keys get rusty, passwords change.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology
Nice piece of writing Susan….
The Quakers have a saying, “The Way opens,” which sometimes seems just right to me and sometimes just pisses me off.
Thanks, Owen. I can well see why this adage can go either way. Do we stand and wait, hoping we’ll see it or do we hack our own opening through? If the way doesn’t open by itself or show itself, do we assume it’s closed to us? Gee, things are simple yet complicated, no?