Walk up to anybody who went to junior high school where I did between the years 1970 and 1985 and say this, “QUICK! What’s the hardness scale! Go!” Dollars to donuts that person will immediately rattle off this list:
Talc, gypsum, calcite, apatite, fluorite, orthoclase, quartz, topaz, corundum, diamond.
And fast.
For some reason, still mysterious to me and I’ve been studying education for nigh on 20 years now, we were all required to memorize the Mohs scale of mineral hardness AND compete to see who could recite it, in pairs (my partner frequently spent class throwing our mineral samples at my head), for points that counted towards our grade. I’m assuming this isn’t what they mean when they talk about the good old days of American Education.
These days I worry that my heart is becoming as hard as corundum. Maybe even diamond. I like to think that I am generally a pretty soft-hearted person, a talc-hearted person. Not that I crumble easily, but that I am capable of opening my heart to others easily, and ok, yeah, I might crumble more readily than others, but that’s an acceptable price to pay for openness and generosity. I can live with that. I find myself lately feeling the poky edges of something cold and flinty in my chest, though. I can’t point to any one cause for coronary petrification other than Ben and Jerry’s , I certainly do not feel especially wronged by anyone, other than Volkswagen of America whom I hate with the white hot intensity of a thousand suns and notice no overstrike there, so maybe I’m just getting old and cynical? I’m sort of over it? That would be awful. I’d be a casualty of age and time. What did Jill Sobule say? I don’t want to get bitter, I don’t want to get jaded, petrified and weighted. But I fear it’s happening.
Fortunately, spring brings lots of magic. Yesterday was pretty awful. My hard and unsympathetic heart was all rough edges and jabby corners and was poking me in all the wrong places, probably poking other people in all the wrong places, too. I saw insult at every turn. I was stomping through my day, narrowed eyes doing their best to deepen the wrinkle between them into a scowling crevasse. Even my lunch offended me. And then I walked around a corner, a literal corner, and a kindness came from an utterly unexpected place. The last place, in fact, I would have looked for it. Unbidden, a hand extended. “Here,” it said. “I have something for you. Something you need and something that will help you. I’m asking nothing in return. It’s just for you because you deserve it.”
This small moment of grace did something that my 8th grade Earth Sciences teacher forget to tell us about. He forget to tell us about the alchemy that turns corundum back to talc.
The Weed
I dreamed that dead, and meditating,
I lay upon a grave, or bed,
(at least, some cold and close-built bower).
In the cold heart, its final thought
stood frozen, drawn immense and clear,
stiff and idle as I was there;
and we remained unchanged together
for a year, a minute, an hour.
Suddenly there was a motion,
as startling, there, to every sense
as an explosion. Then it dropped
to insistent, cautious creeping
in the region of the heart,
prodding me from desperate sleep.
I raised my head. A slight young weed
had pushed up through the heart and its
green head was nodding on the breast.
(All this was in the dark.)
It grew an inch like a blade of grass;
next, one leaf shot out of its side
a twisting, waving flag, and then
two leaves moved like a semaphore.
The stem grew thick. The nervous roots
reached to each side; the graceful head
changed its position mysteriously,
since there was neither sun nor moon
to catch its young attention.
The rooted heart began to change
(not beat) and then it split apart
and from it broke a flood of water.
Two rivers glanced off from the sides,
one to the right, one to the left,
two rushing, half-clear streams,
(the ribs made of them two cascades)
which assuredly, smooth as glass,
went off through the fine black grains of earth.
The weed was almost swept away;
it struggled with its leaves,
lifting them fringed with heavy drops.
A few drops fell upon my face
and in my eyes, so I could see
(or, in that black place, thought I saw)
that each drop contained a light,
a small, illuminated scene;
the weed-deflected stream was made
itself of racing images.
(As if a river should carry all
the scenes that it had once reflected
shut in its waters, and not floating
on momentary surfaces.)
The weed stood in the severed heart.
“What are you doing there?” I asked.
It lifted its head all dripping wet
(with my own thoughts?)
and answered then: “I grow,” it said,
“but to divide your heart again.”
I lay upon a grave, or bed,
(at least, some cold and close-built bower).
In the cold heart, its final thought
stood frozen, drawn immense and clear,
stiff and idle as I was there;
and we remained unchanged together
for a year, a minute, an hour.
Suddenly there was a motion,
as startling, there, to every sense
as an explosion. Then it dropped
to insistent, cautious creeping
in the region of the heart,
prodding me from desperate sleep.
I raised my head. A slight young weed
had pushed up through the heart and its
green head was nodding on the breast.
(All this was in the dark.)
It grew an inch like a blade of grass;
next, one leaf shot out of its side
a twisting, waving flag, and then
two leaves moved like a semaphore.
The stem grew thick. The nervous roots
reached to each side; the graceful head
changed its position mysteriously,
since there was neither sun nor moon
to catch its young attention.
The rooted heart began to change
(not beat) and then it split apart
and from it broke a flood of water.
Two rivers glanced off from the sides,
one to the right, one to the left,
two rushing, half-clear streams,
(the ribs made of them two cascades)
which assuredly, smooth as glass,
went off through the fine black grains of earth.
The weed was almost swept away;
it struggled with its leaves,
lifting them fringed with heavy drops.
A few drops fell upon my face
and in my eyes, so I could see
(or, in that black place, thought I saw)
that each drop contained a light,
a small, illuminated scene;
the weed-deflected stream was made
itself of racing images.
(As if a river should carry all
the scenes that it had once reflected
shut in its waters, and not floating
on momentary surfaces.)
The weed stood in the severed heart.
“What are you doing there?” I asked.
It lifted its head all dripping wet
(with my own thoughts?)
and answered then: “I grow,” it said,
“but to divide your heart again.”
–Elizabeth Bishop
