In winter, the whole world is a burial plot. But spring rehearses the regeneration we long for, life again, and all the many longings to which this cycle points. Its vitality is instructive, though just one part of a bigger story.

Last Sunday, we struggled to get to the communion service at our small Episcopal church in town. My son’s favourite socks—brown, with a bear’s face on the toes—were dirty, and he was distraught. We arrived flushed from a swift walk through the woods, cheeks matching the deep red of the choir’s robes. It was the fifth Sunday in Lent, two weeks before Easter. As I unbuttoned our coats, someone read the lectionary: Now a man named Lazarus was sick. My son, still tender from his eddy of feelings, sat on my lap, head heavy on my chest. I felt heavy too. More sharply aware of my need for spring, or that to which it points.

We think of Lent as a sombre time: it begins with a remembrance of our finitude, ashes on the forehead, and historically involves a form of self denial in fasting this or that. But it also testifies to the quickening that compels us, like Plath’s bees, to taste the coming spring.

Our word ‘Lent’ comes from the old English word for spring, lencten, which conflates the season with the coming light. Springtime was lenctentid: the time of lengthening. After a season of death, we welcome these longer days with a degree of desperation, grateful for their illumination. And they arrive uncoerced. What begins with an awareness of our finitude ends in abundance, regardless of us. Lent, then, rehearses this: light bending towards us in the dark. As we draw closer to Easter, we approach its bright length, which unspools in messy bedrooms and church pews, on my son’s head, making shadows on our walls.

In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard describes spring as a time of intense presence. Its fecundity is excessive. A world of Lazaruses. But she also describes its violence. Nature is both Easter and Ash Wednesday. All life, rooted in some other death—a reality that is both hopeful and bleak, depending on what you emphasize. Dillard’s book acts as a dialectic of these poles: of life and death, of nature’s grace (the mockingbird who unfurls his wings) and its horror (a small green frog, paralyzed by a giant bug who slurps its insides like a child sucks juice from a straw). Here, the natural world provides an imaginative scaffolding on which the book’s central theological tension can hang: what to do with simultaneously revealed yet still hidden, how to inhabit the space between this seeming presence and absence.

In spring, Dillard feels this absence less. But she’s no romantic. She knows that, in Simone Weil’s terms, God is both “outside the universe”—supersensible, seemingly distant, beyond us—and at its very centre, omnipresent, sustaining all.1 Dillard is interested in the inherent tension this creates: how to navigate these twin realities, how to reconcile the felt absence of a God who’s present enough to be sensed, though we will always ache for more. In this, as my supervisor put it recently, “absence itself can have the consolation of its fulfillment.”2 Within the felt absence, something calls to us. It is a presence we desire.

Always the gap between our longings and their realizations. The right socks, a better job, the ones we love to come back to us. The perpetual yearning to be healed, to be made whole, to seamlessly fit into the world and our experience of it. (‘I want to be well,’ sings Sufjan, standing in the place of the man at Bethesda.) Rarely do the objects of our longing make us unwaveringly happy, so acutely they point to something bigger. Longing, therefore, is the perennial human condition. But it’s also a prolific feeling to embrace.

Dillard instructs her reader to lean into the gaps—the space between longing and its fulfillment, the fissure between presence and absence, grace and pain: “The gaps are the thing,” she writes, exhorting us to “stalk the gaps.”3 They are “the cliffs in the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God.”4 They are the “cells the wind lances through, the icy narrowing fjords splitting the cliffs of mystery.”5 Go up into the gaps, she says. It’s where the spirit is, threading two seemingly distant poles to be paradoxically close. But even when we “find them; they shift and vanish too,” always beckoning us on. Desire them.

When I was 25, my friend was hit by a car. He was on his motorbike, 27 years old, crossing the Lion’s Gate bridge in Vancouver. An only child, his dad nearby. His death was fast. His body—those beloved broad shoulders—cremated. Now dust and soot and bits of bone, he returned as a bright red tree, a Japanese Maple planted in memory beside a brass plaque that bears his name. It is insufficient.

When he died, I was travelling. I spent a week beside the Seine, melodramatically chainsmoking, aching to go home. Early one morning, unconsoled, I sought the story of Lazarus. It comforted me: how Mary’s pain troubles Christ; how he, once more deeply moved, comes to the tomb. In this, a quiet presence accompanied my own longing for a death to be undone. I think of my friend every spring, when the world rises once again without him. These thoughts both sting and console; in them, a gap I stalk. In their darkness, a longing and a call.

C.S. Lewis says that the world “constantly suggest[s]” the object of our desire.6 Spring flourishes, its vitality gestures, but even its abundance doesn’t fully satisfy. Our desire, says Lewis, is “wandering and uncertain of its object.”7 We are fickle, and restless. Or at least I am. The things of experience—books, symphonies, a child’s head heavy on our chest, golden daffodils, nature’s beauty writ large—offer “intelligible descriptions” of our desire, but they are not the desired thing itself, which goes unnamed but is everywhere insinuated.8

We don’t just want to see nature’s beauty, but rather, says Lewis, “want something else which can hardly be put into words—to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.”9 Weil, too: we want to “get behind it” and “feed on” it.10 This, says Lewis, is why the poets “talk as if the west wind could really sweep into a human soul.”11 But it can’t, he says, “or not yet.”12 To believe it can (in full) is to hurry the things to come, the advent of life to which spring points and bodies forth, in part but not in whole, for winter always comes again. So in spring, and at Easter—the culmination of Lent—we rehearse two realities: that resurrection is here, that it will come in full. For now, we chase the gap.

There are the spring days when everything feels aligned. I garden with my son, plant ranunculus bulbs as he fills his toy green wheelbarrow with dandelion weeds. Or when we walk along the Kinnessburn, the increasingly late dusk hour filtering through the canopy of oak, maple, and horse chestnut. We find a sandy spot on which to rest and watch the light flickering on the muddy bank, opposite. My daughter names it the “fairy glen” and for a moment we see more clearly, rest in the contentment of being here at all. On these days, it is easy to imagine a world that participates in the life of God.

And there are the days when we walk past a pigeon being gorged by a hawk. When my daughter asks about war, and the children dying in it. When wasps lay eggs in another insect’s body, kept alive so the larvae can feast. When everything—our paycheques, our patience, a presence we crave—feels scarce. On these days, I must remember that the life of God includes the cross.

Yet in these moments, longing itself, says Marilynne Robinson, can be a site for resurrection, or at least a glimpse of it:

“For need can blossom into all the compensations it requires. To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing—the world will be made whole.”13

It is in our many and cacophonous longings that we feel life acutely, or so she suggests, saying that “whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again.”14 This seems another way to say that the felt absences in this life—even amidst a world that teems—offers a path to communion with that which eludes us, however darkly the path is lit. It is the gap that invites.

Towards the end of Tinker Creek, Dillard stands in a quarry and shouts: “Habeas corpus! Deus absconditus! Veni!”15 (“You have the body! Hidden God! Come!”) Similarly, at the end of the essay quoted above, Lewis attests to Christ vere latitat (“truly hidden”).16 Dillard blends legal language (habeas corpus) with a theological imperative to beg for proof of that which is hidden or felt absent, while Lewis subtly references Aquinas’s hymn Adoro Te Devote, the latter of which claims that God is “truly hidden” beneath the appearances, behind the intelligible expressions of reality.

In Lent, we attest to both: the intelligibility of revelation, a presence—that grace happens “whether or not we will or sense [it],” as Dillard says—and the unintelligibility of the grave.17 We live in the space between, aware of a hidden life all around us, yet one whose full presence we still desire. At Easter, the culmination of Lent, we will attest to the reality of the world to come, world without end. We will rehearse our longing for resurrection, all things made Easter new.18 And in this, we might discern a real presence that speaks into the gap. Veni.

Art, Lately

1. Speaking of Lazarus, we recently rewatched Happy as Lazzaro, a film by one of my favourite living filmmakers, Alice Rohrwacher. Her particular brand of magical social realism is perhaps my favourite genre, weaving an interest in the ineffable alongside her material interest in Italy’s precariat.

2. I’m in the middle of Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume trilogy and keep wondering when this Groundhog Day plot device will tire, but it hasn’t yet.

3. I share an office with eight people, and have a stronger than average response to the sounds of chewing. Most days, I need to work with music to drown the symphony of desk lunches. Too many lyrics, however, distract me from my work. The Westerlies 2025 album, Paradise, has been saving my life.

4. I am re-reading Simone Weil’s Waiting for God, which actually has a lot to say about all of the above.

As we prepared to move last summer, I read The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard and thought about the many spaces my children have inhabited. First, the 500-square-foot unit with tall glass windows, the one where they were born. Then the big blue house that perched on an edge of ravine, under big Alberta skies. Next the Scottish rowhouse by sea and farmland, and now, the old converted school house by the woods.

Bachelard says our childhood home is our “first world.”1 Forever imprinted on our bodies, gestures, and psyche, this miniature world shapes how we inhabit the wider world as we grow up. As I watched my children move into their fourth home, I wondered if all of these spaces count as “first worlds” or if some are more impressed upon their minds than others, and which.

My parents still live in the house I grew up in—a blue-then-green bungalow in the city, where I lived for 23-ish years. This home still shapes my picture of belonging in the world: its chipped navy blue door, the circular loop of hallway, the two french doors that open onto the living room. I can still close my eyes and see my bedroom: its painted sky ceiling, my old pine bed, piebald shadows on the wall. If our first house is a cradle, as Bachelard claims it is, then I grew up cradled by anemones, their chorus of petals flung up against our living room windows. Outside, ravels of rosemary and lavender, laurel and ceanothus, raspberry, and two plump rhododendrons. These too, a kind of home for my imagination. All “really inhabited space” is, says Bachelard.2

My children, on the other hand, have grown up cradled by change. My daughter has forgotten that first small apartment—the one she learned to crawl then walk in, more intimate with its nooks and crannies than I ever was. Yet “thanks to the house,” says Bachelard, “a great many of our memories are housed.”3 In this, Bachelard charges the house with an active role in the production and storage of memory. He recognizes that physical space helps unearth what’s buried in the dusty corners of our minds. The space where a memory is first made—a home, a room—can sometimes take us gently by the hand, give memory back to us.

When we visit the building my daughter was born in, she steps out of the elevator and proclaims: “R and I played sleeping bunnies here!” (It’s true, they did, for hours, on this very patch of grey-blue carpet.) I watch her recall this and imagine our old building as a well-worn friend, returning a forgotten treasure. I witness her delight at finding it—at inhabiting this memory as it floods her senses—which, in turn, is my delight too.

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Modern alienation is often defined as a sense of homelessness, of “not being at home in the anonymous, mechanized world of late modernity.”4 Jane Bennet says we are “homesick” creatures looking for “a place of meaning in a meaningful universe.”5 Therefore anything that helps engender a sense of home is a balm.

For Bachelard, there is a connection between how we imagine our homescapes and how we inhabit the world, how we “abide within ourselves.”6 Richard Kearney expands this idea in an interview on Bachelard’s legacy, saying:

“Our soul is a house in which we dwell, and the world is also a house in which we dwell. And the soul and the world meet in the house, whether it be a lived real house—my house, your house—or…an imaginary house.”7

Here we come to a critical character in the construction of our many homes: our imaginations.

We may be homesick creatures, but we are also homemaking ones. Our impulse is to dwell in the world, to mitigate any sense of alienation in it. We construct ways to do so as effectively as possible, given whatever we’ve got: a room, a tent, a story, an acreage. Whether physical or imaginative—or, more likely, both—these acts of homemaking help us inhabit the world “in spite of the world.”8

Theologically, the world as we experience it at present is not home, not yet in full. But it is a sign—in the richest sense—which already contains the world to come. And what if these imaginative acts of homemaking tend our many complex desires for home? Can they speak to our perennial sense of longing for some home that is not yet reached, helping us better inhabit the world’s hidden depths—those realities we ache to dwell in more fully?

As my children and I build worlds out of blankets—complex forts to shelter our play, with several sheets and as many clothespins as I can source—or enact long plots involving fairies and garbage trucks, we are constructing a place to inhabit. Each imaginative act is akin to a story we tell ourselves about the world and our place in it. And as Byung-Chul Han says, a good narrative is what transforms “being-in-the-world” into “being-at-home” in the world.9 Though we will never achieve the latter in full, these storied acts help us live with what Lewis called our “longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we now feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door which we have always seen from the outside.”10

Lately, I’ve been pretending our house is an enchanted home.11 And this—hear me out—is actually a totally plausible thing to imagine, depending on our definition of “enchanted.” Here, I think of the oft-quoted Max Weber, who argued that we live in a “disenchanted” world due to the rampant “intellectualization and rationalization” of modern Western society.12 This, said Weber, incited the Entzauberung der Welt: literally the “de-magic-ation” of the world, often translated as its “disenchantment.” It’s a popular metaphor that describes both a shift in social imaginaries and our affective experience of reality, just another way of saying that, broadly speaking, our perception of the world has altered (and with mixed results).

Once, so the story goes, we saw immaterial realities as an integral part of the cosmos, folded into our everyday material life. But in modernity, we have separated the supernatural from what we deem “natural”—the latter of which can be measured, known, taxonomized, and, in effect, mastered. While modern science is full of goodness (e.g. I am grateful to have lived through childbirth) and wonder (dark matter!), this separation incited the loss of an imaginative relationship with the world’s “mysterious” or “unpredictable” forces.13 This, says Hartmut Rosa, made the world into “something to be known, exploited, attained, appropriated” so that all “segments of world” can be rendered “less resistant, more reliably controllable.”14 There is great irony in the fact that, in becoming the “masters of nature” we have ushered in our alienation from it.15 I guess mastery is lonely.

When I imagine my family living in an enchanted home, I mean that I see us living in a place that eludes us and yet also beckons us with its strangeness, drawing us into depths we can only imagine. As I enter my children’s games—themselves an act of homemaking—I see their fictitious worlds as not mere fantasy but revelation, a finger pointing at something unseen. What I call a couch, they name a wizard’s boat. The carpet, a sea of krakens. Playing with them, I behold my home—this house, our microcosm of the world—in wonderfully new ways. Yes, their games are just a story, but the best stories “defamiliarize” our “habitual” perception, making the world strange so that our vision of what’s ordinary can recalibrate, accordingly.16

If the so-called disenchanted world is, as Charles Taylor describes it, an “excarnated” world—one shorn of “charged” objects, he says—then in resistance, I’ll be pretending every toy is a portal, all our sunlit books a way in.17 What room might fray into a newly apparated forest? What concealed space might materialize in our kitchen? Of course, these fantasy tropes are just ways to index the world’s excess—fictitious ways to represent the real.18 But in order to shelter myself from the alienating effects of modern life—which truncate any supernatural presence from the material world—I need to believe that I am surrounded by the fantastic. This fiction helps me perceive something true about my surroundings, aligning with a theological vision of reality: that right now, we are trying our best to inhabit the material home of our world, waiting to perceive its immaterial realities in full.

If our first homes are our first worlds, of course I want my children’s to be an enchanted one. This, in turn, might shape the way they perceive the wider world they’ll grow into, more able to behold its hidden depths. On this side of things, I’m not sure we’ll see the latter with crystal clarity, but one day we might be made new and our eyes might transfigure and we might see reality face-to-face. Till then, I’ll be trying to make our little world strange so that I can see it more clearly, living in ways that make space for its mysterious qualities—that luminous nature which is folded into its very foundation, enlivening all things.

In the Gospel of Luke, Christ tells people to look for signs of the end, to watch for tossing seas and shaking skies. People will faint in fear but are to “stand up and lift up [their] heads, because [their] redemption is drawing near.”1 I read this passage with difficulty. I struggle to imagine myself standing tall at the passing of the age. Won’t I run frantic, like a mother gathering photo albums in a burning home?

I look at the objects around me, in a dining area littered with ephemera. Books tucked messily into shelves. A kid’s backpack in primary colours, plastic dinosaur graphics. Two canvasses smeared with navy paint bearing traces of my children’s fingers. The early morning light is slanting through the trees, creating a dappled pattern on the wall. These shadows move like bacteria in a petri dish, amoeba-like. I cherish these things, and all that they signify.

It is July, and I am looking forward to a summer of cherishing this world. Of riding bikes to beaches, where we will dip in the cold salty sea while my kids jump over waves. Behind our house is an endless tangle of blackberry, and we are anticipating the fulfillment of its pale white blossoms, which have started opening on the scrambling vine. We will pick its fruit and make pies, crumbles, compotes, jam. Last week my son and I discovered a patch of wild strawberries in our churchyard. On Sunday, we will return to this patch, and look for more beneath the stained-glass windows that are fixed above.

These days, I find myself identifying less with Milosz’s speaker and increasingly more with the protagonist John Ames in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead. Writing letters to his child, this 77-year-old narrator tells his son: “I want your dear perishable self to live long and to love this poor perishable world, which I somehow cannot imagine not missing bitterly.”2 I think I had that quote taped somewhere on some wall once, too. I like to imagine it hanging next to Milosz’s poem, bringing balance. Together, they bear witness to the range of human experience, its struggle and its enlivened beauty, and the mix of feelings we have about living with both.

Loving This Poor Perishable World

For the past few years, I’ve welcomed the first day of summer with a late night swim. On last year’s solstice, I went to the North Saskatchewan River with a friend. This river winds through the Rocky Mountains to the prairies, slicing through the city I lived in at the time. It was 9 p.m., the drawn out light skittering on the water’s surface, tensile and bending toward us. We perched on some river rocks, drank a beer, felt the sun warm on our arms. We slipped into the river to bob in its shallow pools: two bodies in stasis, legs tucked up, surrounded by the risk of current.

I’ve known this friend for sixteen years. We met at camp, wrote letters back and forth to establish our shared loves, which were many. We travelled together, went to concerts, took a volley of planes to each other’s cities. When we talk now, our past selves join us—those sweet uncanny apparitions. As these young versions of us appear, I feel the compression of time: how its plodding, continuous nature is gathered up when we are together. I think of Eliot, who wrote that “time present and time past / are both perhaps present in time future, / and time future contained in time past."

This friend visited me last month in Scotland, and we swam in the North Sea. It is hard to imagine some aspect of our many selves, the things we have loved, the bodies of water we’ve swam in, not continuing. I know some people find comfort in the finitude of things—there is a certain grace in its fleetingness, the luck of being here at all—but I’ve always imagined my own insatiable longing for the world as indicative, as indexical.

I want the things I love about this world to continue, at least in some aspect. I don’t mean that my children’s paintings will extend their life, nor the dog-eared books that line my shelves, nor the literal North Saskatchewan which, like us, is always changing. Rather, that some real quality I admire in those works of art and in the river itself—the narratives gathered, their meaning, some inherent crystalline beauty—will somehow transcend their time-bound lives. That whatever is truly good about them will withstand the threshold of their finitude, lifting their heads where I can’t, anticipating the fulfillment of their contents in some hoped-for redemption that includes all things. And perhaps this is because of how they already reveal things about some unbounded glory, in their very nature of being stitched to it.

If the World Is a Sign, the Signified Is Woven Into It

In his essay “Transposition,” C.S. Lewis writes on the “continuity between things” natural and supernatural, between things material and spiritual.3 The key, he suggests, is not to see the world as “symbolic” of some wider reality—where the symbol is a mere stepping stone to be forgotten once your destination is reached—but to see it as “sacramental.”4 World is “a sign,” he writes, but also “more than a sign, because in it the thing signified is really in a certain mode present.”5

Here, the “higher”—by which Lewis means the spiritual, supernatural, or eschatological world—“reproduces itself in the lower.”6 It is not a one-to-one correspondence, he clarifies, where some single transcendent thing is compressed into an individual “lower” thing. Rather, it’s that something infinitely rich, something that exceeds signification, is transposed into the world of signs. In other words, the transcendent is folded into the material, which is alive with meaning.

It’s a hermeneutic circle: we need the whole to understand the parts, but the parts illuminate the whole, too. We inhabit the world of parts, but one that’s stitched to a wider reality that contains us, yet also exceeds us—and wildly so.

Lewis explains this with a kind of rewritten allegory of the cave. A woman is thrown into a dungeon, where she has a son. As he grows up, she wants to show him what the world is like. So she draws it. The child loves these images and can’t imagine a world without pencil marks, a world that is anything but drawn. If the mother were to clarify that her lines merely transpose that which exceeds the limits of graphite—translating the “waving treetops, the light dancing on the weir”—he would not understand.7 He’d get stuck in the lines.

For the boy, his world stops at the line’s edge. But those who’ve lived above, like his good mother, know these lines are infinitely richer when seen from above, as it were, with the three-dimensional world in mind. We truncate, flatten, and reduce her drawings when we cut them off from the riches they signify. So too the world.

Do we live among drawn things, then? I find this phrase troubling, for it makes this world feel erasable. But, says Lewis, if the proverbial pencil lines dissolve, they only do so in the way that lines “vanish from the real landscape” once it is beheld: not gone, but more themselves, in manifold colour and texture.8 As Lewis writes, it is “not that pictures will one day sprout into real trees and grass” but rather, that “real landscapes enter into pictures” here and now.9 Something of the world’s telos chimes in its present state.

Viewed through this logic, we can see our own world—a world of “sign[s]” that refer to something radiant—as containing that radiance in rivers and oceans, in music and art. Put otherwise: the world’s great beauty is tethered to an even greater beauty, the latter folded into flesh and blood.

And we can see this now. In any great work of art, writes Lewis, the “patch of white paper will, in some curious way, be very like blazing sunshine” as if the referent (the real sunlight) is in the reference (the artwork) itself. It is and it isn’t, of course. Yes, it shines using the same principles of light, reproducing it in a way, but lacks other qualities of sunshine, such as warmth or UV rays. Yet Lewis offers this analogy to illustrate that, in the case of our world, perhaps the radiance signified is very present indeed. A world ablaze.

I think back to my love of rivers. Does a river-swim in late June—and the deep longing I have to bob in water—contain some quality of a world restored? Is the river, like the mother’s line drawings, both a conduit and container of its source? And what of my longing for it? Perhaps the river is “drawn into the higher [reality] and becomes part of it.” Or, rather, it’s the other way around: the transcendent reality plunges into the river, enlivening its very depths.

Because of this, I imagine the North Saskatchewan as a tributary that flows both towards the sea in Hudson Bay and the “New Jerusalem”—itself a metaphor, but that’s what we’ve got. It loudly rivers its way into the “river of the water of life.” This image takes up something true about rivers (and cities and currents) and suggests there is something transposed about this world, that its end will be redemptive, revealing the things we’ve loved in their fullest, most radiant form.

Rilke’s category of things is broad, as I interpret it, and somewhat abstract: nature’s “small things” which “can so suddenly become huge, immeasurable.”2 A rock, perhaps, is a thing, as is a loop of yarn, a plastic bead, or an intimation in the wind. A “thing” is any part of the world—which is to say, all parts—that enlarge when given our attention.

I understand Rilke’s advice, darkly, even the more unsayable part of its abstractions, or I am drawn to it in the very least. I make notes in my margins throughout, shorthands that make sense at the time: the thing itself, the given world, my child’s assemblages. I underline the phrase “take part” twice, scrawl next to it: In what? The world’s vitality? The next sentence brings to mind a familiar verse, so I scribble a paraphrase: “Truly I tell you, change and become like a child.”

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I am trying to become like a child—my own child, in fact, who imbues all things in our house with meaning, enlivening items and stretching their definitions. A spatula is a wand. An upended coffee table is a boat. She moves through our home like a tilt-a-whirl, gathering disparate parts to form new wholes. Later, I discover them. Behind our rubber fig plant, three pieces of string purposefully encircle a wooden star. On our living room floor, a basket made of craft paper that holds one pink pony, two wooden dolls, several loose pearls, and three smooth rocks. Elsewhere, I find trucks tucked under “blankets” (tea towels), an empty jam jar filled with “magic” (sparkly things), a suitcase of small wooden fruits, an old gift bag lined with sticks. Her arrangements hit me like a found poem: she repositions the things that shape her world to make new meanings, highlighting some sense I might otherwise miss. Hers is a world of things “filled with happening.”

Rilke, writing in German, uses the word Dinge for things—a common word, yet one that reminds me of Kant’s idea of the “thing in itself” (Ding an sich), the hidden life of any thing, that which lies beyond our perception. Rilke’s translator, perhaps sensing the reverence which Rilke holds for the world of objects—that he perceives a depth in things, a numinous quality folded in—chose to capitalize “Things” throughout Letters to a Young Poet in English.3 (It is capitalized in German, as all nouns are.) In preserving the capitalization of “Things” in English, the translator calls attention to the depth of meaning that “Things” hold for Rilke. This is decidedly childlike—not in the petulant sense, of course. Rather, in the sense of amazement at the world and its many vital parts.

My daughter was loaned an instant camera recently. She mostly photographed objects: her brother’s bike; a paper doll chain; an imaginary birthday party, replete with plastic plates and wooden cupcakes for a table of invisible guests. I found this funny, and then moving. Hers is a world of ephemera. She documented what’s meaningful to her, revealing the way her play extends the shortened life of gathered objects. This is not an extension in duration—at some point, all items will break down, regardless of our attention—but in elevation.

Of course, this is just the stuff of childhood. Every parent knows this essay well—the messy room of things to tidy, the surprises unearthed when examined, how chaos looks from another angle. Is this form dried out? Maybe, but it’s the life I inhabit, and I am trying to pay attention to its happening. I am trying to see the “holy thisness” in and among the phenomena that surround me.4 To connect the abstract ideas in Rilke to the “flesh and blood existence” of my every day.5

Most evenings, the sun bends low into our living room, and a scintillating light fills these walls and their contents. At this time of day, one of us grown ups will be cooking dinner, while the other plays with our two kids, or perhaps finishes up the day’s last scraps of work as the children entertain themselves. On clearer days, the long arms of light illuminate the children’s mess, making it feel revelatory. On a good day, I will draw close to the things of this scene, sensing the way it gestures at a depth around me—not something shining from above, but something that enlivens from within. The stapled paper basket—made of craft paper, dandelion yellow—was once opaque, yet now seems translucent. Its mostly plastic contents, less tacky. The pink pony’s shadow, pulled like taffy on the carpet, is a sign not pointing to some beyond, but one worth attending in the here and now. Perhaps the hour before dusk makes me sentimental. Or maybe it discloses something.

Elsewhere in these Letters, Rilke says that “things aren't all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe.”6 The majority of “experience” is “unsayable,” he clarifies, saying that it “happen[s] in a space that no word has ever entered.”7 He urges the young poet to trust in “Nature” (the only other English noun that’s capitalized) and “love what is humble” in it so that everything becomes “coherent.”8 You might not grasp it all, he advises—indeed, “your conscious mind [might] stay behind, astonished”—but something in your “innermost awareness” will “awaken,” comprehending.9 (Being awake to the world, I scribble next to this—a simple phrase of Husserl’s that has always captured my imagination.) Rilke is describing an awareness that does not seek to grasp everything, but to encounter its more ineffable dimensions, at least in part.

Is there something ineffable about the plastic matter of the toys we’ve collected from charity shops—toys reassembled throughout our home? Is there something numinous or charged in the contents strewn across our messy floor? I confess that I struggle with this one, even in the early evening sun. I cringe at my daughter’s taste for the garish and artificial—the more processed silica, the better—and not just because of its use of crude oils. I am principled but also vain and her choice of toy generally offends my aesthetic sensibilities. If it was possible to bejewel one’s whole life, hers would be. She seeks out kitsch. I would choose the wooden farm animal over a sequinned Barbie any day, yet here we are, in a room of mixed materials, some of which glimmer more easily than others, all of which gather in curious piles.

Rilke, again: “If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for to the creator there is no poverty and no poor or unimportant place.” Watching my daughter interact with all objects—both synthetic and organic—is a heuristic for my own poetic attention, helping me see a theory that I hold true in my “innermost awareness” come to life: that the world of ordinary objects which comprise our home is just as charged with meaning as the forest that surrounds it. My poet-child sees the contents of her toy box in the way I see the sea, or better yet, the way I see the horizon suspended above it.

And of course, she sees the sea this way too. At the beach, she gathers shells and seaglass and marvels over the sea anemone’s tentacular arms. This organic matter, too, is “filled with happening”—a happening that she “take[s] part in.” In watching her interact with her world, I am reoriented to see its minutiae as smaller interconnected parts—each an ordinary phoneme in a stunning phrase. Taken on their own, they mean less than when apprehended as smaller pieces that comprise this greater whole in which we “take part.” Her pony, this shell: in isolation they would mean very little. But nothing signifies in isolation—that’s not how any meaning-making works. And so we observe the particulars in order to grasp the universal. We study the images so that we might better read the poem.

In German, the phrase Rilke uses for “take part in” is daran Sie teilnehmen dürfen. Another possible translation (so I’m told) is that things are filled with a happening (Geschehen) “in which you can participate.” There is a life in things that invites our involvement, revealing our own enmeshment in the world, encouraging our participation in it. Our own rearrangements, our attention, our play—these participatory acts, suggests Rilke, can unearth (or help us to perceive) a hidden depth. Little murmurations in every corner, speaking to something tucked away somewhere in me too. And when apprehended once—in part if not in full—this previously concealed reality becomes easier to spot again.

In this, then, are all things like the sacraments to some degree, inciting a perception of the world “in its totality” as “an epiphany” or “means of…revelation,” a hidden depth of “presence” in which we too are involved?10 Do my daughter’s assemblages function like the “things” of bread and wine—material things that welcome our participation in a hidden, immaterial reality? Is this a sentimental stretch or just a sacramental vision of the world? If I choose to attend her collections like found poems, it is only because of the world’s poetry. Even as I write this—attempting to get closer to the world I inhabit—I am simply rearranging the materiality of language (words are things) to participate in this world’s excess, to apprehend some greater “happening” within.

About Scrap Paper

This newsletter (Scrap Paper) will be, in part, just that: a series of infrequent notes attempting to get close to the life I inhabit—things jotted down between research and writing, between dinner prep and playgrounds, in an attempt to recognize the wider reality in which my daily existence is enmeshed. It will be a mix of extended marginalia and half-baked observations or wonderings, like this one. Events and experiences pinned so that I can plumb their depths, like an entomologist hangs her butterflies for further study—but less taxonomical. What better place to begin than the objects that clutter my living room floor?

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