In the Wild Light

by Jeff Zentner

I’ve always loved when the light finds the broken spots in the world and makes them beautiful.

“Because for every way the world tries to kill us, it gives us a way to survive. You just gotta find it.”

“Death’s all around us. We live our whole lives in its shadow. It’ll do what it will. So we need to do what we will while we can.”

Here we are, survivors of quiet wars. Like trees that have weathered a brutal storm, but with broken branches and fallen blossoms littering the ground around us.

“You’ll never regret a decision more than the one you make out of fear. Fear tells you to make your life small. Fear tells you to think small. Fear tells you to be small-hearted. Fear seeks to preserve itself, and the bigger you let your life and perspective and heart get, the less air you give fear to survive.”

I’ve seen that life is filled with unimaginable horror. But it’s also threaded through with unimaginable wonder. Live through enough of the one, maybe you’re due some of the other.

This must be what it’s like to die. You look around you and see how much of what you love you leave behind.

I’d thought about how funny it would be if when you got to heaven, God could give you a printout with all of your life’s vital statistics. How much hair you produced. How many colds you defeated. How many times you skinned your knees. How many nightmares you endured. How many pancakes you ate. Every brave thing you did. Every heartbreak you overcame. Everyone you mourned. Everyone you ever loved. Everyone who ever loved you.

Life often won’t freely give you moments of joy. Sometimes you have to wrench them away and cup them in your hands, to protect them from the wind and rain. Art is a pair of cupped hands. Poetry is a pair of cupped hands.”

“Every hurt, every sorrow, every scar has brought you here. Poetry lets us turn pain into fire by which to warm ourselves. Go build a fire.”

This is what you remember of the people you love when they’re gone—the ways they knew you that no one else did—even you. In that way, their passing is a death of a piece of yourself.

You are not a creature of grief. You are not a congregation of wounds. You are not the sum of your losses. Your skin is not your scars. Your life is yours, and it can be new and wondrous. Remember that.”

In the Wild Light (Elegy for Phillip Earl Pruitt) You were there when my life felt like I was trying to stop a falling axe with my hands, every time I dreamed of rows of doors like teeth in a death-clenched jaw You spoke “tree” and “wind” to me for the first time, as if whispering God’s secret name in my ear This world is knives and wolves but also swans and stars; you taught me that Once, in August, before you had to beg the air for breath, I watched a hawk descend on a field and fly back into the yawning blue with talons empty I marveled at a creature that could fall without being fallen and still rise clutching such emptiness and hunger To learn of loss is only to know it a little and not to become armored against its fearsome edge The sun is setting now as I write this in the first season of your absence And I see you in the wild light; I hear you whisper “tree” and “wind” to me in the wild light