March 2006I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hopeFor hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without loveFor love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faithBut the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.(From "East Coker" by T.S. Elliot)A friend sent me that quote some weeks ago, and I’ve taped it to my printer. I see it every time I sit down to work or to communicate with the wide community of people who—like this friend—hold me and my son, Peter, even if they have not met him, in their hearts.I have never been especially good at stillness, at waiting. From time to time I’ve tried meditation, but sooner or later I come springing out of it like a jack released from its box. I’m better at working, at doing, sometimes at fretting.But now there is only the waiting . . . nothing more to be done. Peter can’t be fixed, though he tries, valiantly, to fix himself. The limitations LBD have imposed on his mind make him unable to understand what is happening to him. Is his lack of understanding a blessing or a curse? I haven’t the wisdom to know. Yesterday when his wife, Katy, visited he carefully demonstrated to her how hard he is working on physical therapy, how much better he can move now. “So I can come home,” he said.And then he was off to something else, some bit of paranoia or some other kind of odd connection his wandering mind takes him to.Which is why, of course, he will never come home.Here in Minnesota we are waiting for spring. It has been an unusually warm winter, too little snow, too little of the crisp, white cold that I love, but spring will be welcome nonetheless. Skeins of geese have been flying over for weeks, settling flat footed on the frozen lakes, complaining loudly to one another. On an early-morning walk just a couple of days ago I came upon a robin festival in a neighbor’s grass.

Today we have snow . . . deep, lush, wet snow clinging to every twig, pasting the stop signs blank.And so we wait, all of us, in the white stillness.Spring will come. Few pronouncements are more certain, even more trite than that one. And yet the knowledge that it is certain lifts my heart with sudden gratitude. Even in the waiting.Death will come, too. That is equally certain. In this place beyond hope, beyond love, beyond faith where I wait in the darkness shall I learn gratitude even for death?