In My Beginning is My End

Boboli Gardens, Florence, Italy

Many years ago one of my colleagues said to me that her mother was completing her life the way in which she had lived it. She was critical of everyone and unhappy. I was younger then and I thought this was a rather startling thing to say. However, I understand it better now. Life is a continuum that once begun can continue in a similar fashion. T.S. Eliot wrote in “Burnt Norton” (“East Coker”) “In my beginning is my end (Line 179).” Things change, houses come and go, civilizations rise and fall, but time past and future and time present are the same. Here it is in the second stanza:

“In my beginning is my end. Now the light falls
Across the open field, leaving the deep lane
Shuttered with branches, dark in the afternoon,
Where you lean against a bank while a van passes,
And the deep lane insists on the direction
Into the village, in the electric heat
Hypnotized. In a warm haze the sultry light
Is absorbed, not refracted, by grey stone.
The dahlias sleep in the empty silence.
Wait for the early owl.”
Life in its cycle waits for the sleep of the dahlias and the early owl to begin everything again. The cycle does not deny us the opportunity to begin anew each day.

Sometimes one is fortunate to begin with their passion. My best friend’s father started out with a passion for debate. He started at Grinnell College and a debate with Harvard took him there where he then transferred. Then he went on to Harvard Law School and a life in law that lasted for over 57 years. He went to the firm until his 103rd birthday, because he loved it. He was an amazing example of finding “time past, present and future” from the beginning. I know musicians and professors who have a passion for their work and make it look effortless when they practice it. One need not be a teacher or a musician to love your work or your avocation. As Gerard Manly Hopkins said in Pied Beauty: “And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.” Diversity in the natural world and in human kind is to be celebrated.

You may not find this path in work or “within the dark woods of the middle of your journey? “ (Dante Alighieri, Inferno). Look along the thin threads of where you have been and see if there are any clues. The great theologian and writer Frederick Buechner said “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” Often calling and need meet face to face later in life when we have the opportunity to be still. There was a very distinct period in my life when things began to take a different turn than I had imagined. It was in graduate school at Brown. I was studying to be a professor. But something different was stirring inside of me. While in Providence my involvement in academia blossomed into my avocation to liturgical worship and music and later my love for literature would lead me into publishing. Recently I saw some young people jumping rope in the park. It reminded me of how easy it can be to jump rope. You stop to take in the cadence and rhythm of the rope, imitate it with your body and then jump into it. We just need to look and listen to sense when and where to jump into our new beginning.

Millbrook, New York