Fences I never before found

http://benjaminwblog.com/2014/07/fences-i-never-before-found/

It’s difficult for me to sleep, fighting. My hands jitter, my heart drops, my head enters into a sky-vision, where everything is so distant and immense, so colossally on the horizon, that I’m nauseated by that grandiosity. If nothing else, I am at least that.

And then everything settles into an uncomfortable silence, an eerie, graveyard calm. I’m tired, and I’m exhausted, but I’m blessed, and my heart is stronger than it was once before. It is the same as callouses on the fingertips after working with wood and stone, as the hard-packed earth after the storm brushes away the loose earth, as a fire burns away the impurities of coinage metals, for though the process is blood, and sand-blasting, and scorching heat, the result is a rugged, noteworthy one. Not always beautiful, not always kind, but dashing, and poignant. You grow a respect for the hardiness of the desert flower and the cliff-side brush and the Amazonian trees deep-rooted on the banks of the floodplain.

And the world is full, too, fuller than you know.

I’ve discovered a whole different life, and how many bridges I never saw. Life is a city a million miles wide, and I won’t finish exploring my own side, the bazaar, the esplanade, the city-scape. And you Wendell-Berry-come, full of life from the forest I never knew resides over the hilltop I never crossed.

I measure life boundaries in blocks: a poetic, tired skyscraper, a cracked sidewalk, a roadblock and all the construction no one ever found in a run-down port of a town with only an alley-cat or two, some garbage, and a confusing cottage whose smokestack coughs like a tiny factory.

Do you know what all my fingers are letting go? How I’m dropping rubies for diamonds for gold? Life is a simple transaction of beauty to beauty, mud for mud, and your hands are only so large for what you must hold – and I’ve got small hands.