visitations and progressions: bloomington, indiana lake lemon

Today, on my last day in Indiana, Akiko and I went Sunday driving. We went to Lake Lemon, where we had gone several summers before. The lake was still frozen over in the center, although its icy edges were disappearing because of the progression towards spring. Akiko said: “Nature is moving forward to spring – that means that this is the time that we must also move forward to the next stage of our life.” We have not yet figured out what that next stage is going to be, but it was breakthrough enough to know that we have to have movement forward.

Grief can lull us into a stasis, a frozen silence, when confronted with the enormity of loss. It is an almost-impossible effort to enunciate its effects – to verbalize how specifically it fills the void of what was sundered. In his essay “The Poet,” Ralph W. Emerson writes that the quality of the imagination is to flow and not to freeze. To metamorphize grief into elegy, to revolutionize loss into value, is to know how to navigate tenderly, with respectful care, these icy floats upon which we need to sit for a while before we can even think of being lured back to the shore – where, as Elizabeth Bishop writes – “love will unexpectedly appear over & over again.”