I am thankful when I find time to read to nurture my inner life. This semester, for sundry reasons, I have been engulfed in academic, political, and intellectual matters. It has been difficult to find time to read for nourishing the heart and cultivating the inner life that sustains all other vital affairs. I have found time to swim and to meditate, which are also nourishing, but not so much to read.
Nonetheless, there have been three salient moments of fellowship with Richard Wagamese in Embers, where he articulates a vital philosophy grounded in the way of life and wisdom of the Ojibway first nation of Ontario.
The first moment came at a time of political conflict on campus that resulted from the war in Palestine. As I read by my window on a luminous autumn Sunday, Wagame’s words helped me to find and keep my balance as conflicts unraveled at the university. Wagamese writes of inner strength, though I prefer to call it fortitude:
I find political strength through spiritual strength. Each day is a smudge and a prayer of gratitude for everything, even the conflicts, for they are my teachers. For those who do not understand me, hear me, empathize with the struggles of my people, I pray in gratitude for their well-being, their wholeheartedness, their clarity of mind and the full sweep of their emotions to be brought forward into their days, just as I pray in gratitude for my own. In this way, I find peace, because the truth is that we are one body moving through time together.
The second moment was more intimate, an invitation to contemplate the nature of love. Yesterday, as I rode the train north, from New York City to Beacon, along the Hudson River, this passage moved me:
Love is not always the perfection of moments or the sum of all the shining days--sometimes it's to drift apart, to be broken, to be disassembled by life and living, but always to come back together and be each other's glue again. Love is an act of life, and we are made more by the living.
I looked out the train’s window, to the silver-blue river flowing down to the sea, the rocky cliffs on the western bank, and the azure sky. The moment seemed perfectly luminous, unlike the chiaroscuro of love. But my heart understood what my literary friend was saying. This year I have been broken and disassembled, and now I am better able to love.
And this cold, rainy morning, as I drank my morning coffee and read again by my bedroom’s front window, Wagamese summoned me to a reflection on longing or, more precisely, on saudade:
Missing someone is feeling a piece of your heart gone astray. Sure, it keeps beating, and sure, you keep breathing, but there's a gap in the rhythm of it, and in the rhythm of the everyday things around you. You seem to move a little less gracefully. But you still move, and that's the critical thing. Because missing someone doesn't mean things grind to a halt. Instead, it means you move out of gratitude for the gift of their presence in your life. You move to keep experiencing, to keep confronting head-on, so that your return allows you to reunite with them as more human, more alive, more real.
May you and I, may all of us, keep moving even as we long for each other. If and when we reunite, we will be more alive, more real, more capable of enjoying love. And if we don’t reunite, love will allow us to feel saudade but continue to be free, joyful, and benevolent towards each other.
Daniel G. Campos 