Wednesday, December 11, 2013

She's Dancing a Polka



12/6

Did they watch the sun set and think
there was any beauty in the fire of His light?
Or can light only be seen by those
with light remaining?

About Auschwitz. When we were there, the sun set in the most dazzling of colors. They must have seen the same thing I did. I wish I knew what they had felt.
 
12/3 Flight from Krakow to Paris



The mountains of Poland are cloud-covered, dark stone peaks emerging from constancy. I am only now realizing how far I am from home.
“The world is so magnificent, humans have ingeniously created so much – why do we need God? When we have this paradise we’ve been a part of making, why do we need to give a false figurehead to it all?”
Yet. There is beauty beneath, within the core of those massive beings rising through rings of creamy smoke. I admire the opinions of an atheist, even though believing in nothing is the scariest life to live. Wicked fear in contrast to perhaps an ignorant enlightenment, a manhandled concept of simply doing good – and of trying to grasp what is always farthest from our reach.
I felt her. Walking through the Christmas market, the Polish carolers swaying with bells from their elaborate shawls jingling along to the call of the trumpeter. In the smell of smoked sausage and stewed cabbage and hot wine and loaves of bread covered with onions and vegetables and mugs of cider and a guitarist in a corner and the feeling that I was tapping into a spirit of who I am, my heritage, my true origin. It might all be false. But to grasp my nana’s chain sitting in a mass listening to the Germanic Czech r’s and sh’s of Polish, looking at children on little bikes in the nearby park, to walk over and along the river… I felt her, I felt it, I felt so alive.
 
To arrive with no language on my side, to walk by fields and small dedications to Mary along the road, to sit on the bus and eat a jelly pastry. To see old synagogues and squares and feel the brisk air of this new land. To walk through what the Jews of the ghetto had, to cry at the paths of stone, at the thought of Germans breaking into a café of musicians, a meeting place of light and culture and friendship, tearing them away from making beauty.
Actively seeking to end the virtuosity of hands, of lips, of souls that awoke to the sounds of Chopin or Bach. Destroying the ultimate escape from the terrors of our days. Not only that, but the classroom where students were taken. Students, professors. Some captured from their secret schools where all they sought was to never let knowledge die with the hope of a nation.

When books and music are taken away, we have nothing.

I ate pierogis in a Christmas market in Krakow. Potato pancakes and chocolate pastries and apple pie hot cocoa and sausage and sweet coffee always warm, always comforting. Churches of wood carvings, gilded everything, statues and photos of Mary and her babe in gold or black or brown. All ages coming in, and after their first step, they fall to their knees on cold marble and pray in the isles, walkways, corners. They had the old style of receiving communion, where I feel too humble in place to make eye contact with the priest.
Conversations never cease here, especially with one’s family. The people have an inner defiance to them, a confidence in their happiness.
I’ve met young people from Australia, New Zealand, Montreal and London. All gathered around a table, laughing and drinking and sharing stories and dancing to a connecting pulse until our tired feet maneuvered back to our beds as the sun rose above the church peaks and red bricked roofs. The connection of travel, of vibrant spontaneity, of simply smiling and looking at each other and knowing we are but a flash in each other’s lives, but it is one of the best flashes we have seen. I will not forget them or their kindness.
Returning. My heart is still in its right place in the labyrinth.
The plane sets down over shimmering sparkles of blue, grey outlines of hills reaching above the clouds again. The beauty of life is an intricacy I can never unweave.

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