A well-aged Christmas present

James got me this book for Christmas, and I just unearthed it from a pile by my bed last week:  For the Time Being, by Annie Dillard.  I thought I'd already read it but was happily surprised to find that I hadn't yet—I was in need of fresh reading material and Annie Dillard was just the ticket!  She's one of my favorite writers who writes about exactly the sorts of things I would write about if I dedicated myself to writing.  My all-time favorite of her books is Teaching a Stone to Talk, with Holy the Firm running a close second, and For the Time Being explores similar territory—the earthy reality of human life in the natural world, in all its wondrous, mystical, spiritual glory.


A couple of my favorite passages from this book: 

"Spiritual path" is the hilarious popular term for those night-blind mesas and flayed hills in which people grope, for decades on end, with the goal of knowing the absolute.  They discover others spread under the stars and encamped here and there by watch fires, in groups or alone, in the open landscape; they stop for a sleep, or for several years, and move along without knowing toward what or why.  They leave whatever they find, picking up each stone, carrying it awhile, and dropping it gratefully and without regret, for it is not the absolute, though they cannot say what is.  Their life's fine, impossible goal justifies the term "spiritual."  Nothing, however can justify the term "path" for this bewildered and empty stumbling, this blackened vagabondage—except one thing:  They don't quit.  They stick with it.  Year after year they put one foot in front of the other, though they fare nowhere.  Year after year they find themselves still feeling with their fingers for lumps in the dark. 
       The planet turns under their steps like a water wheel rolling; constellations shift without anyone's gaining ground.  They are presenting themselves to the unseen gaze of emptiness.  Why do they want to do this?  They hope to learn how to be useful.

and—

We live in all we seek.  The hidden shows up in too-plain sight.  It lives captive on the face of the obvious—the people, events, and things of the day—to which we as sophisticated children have long since become oblivious.  What a hideout:  Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color.

Exactly.