The Pansy's Purple Patience

When the snow-girt earth

Cracks to let through a spurt

Of sudden green, and from the muddy dirt

A snowdrop leaps, how mark its worth

To eyes frost-hardened, and do weary men

Feel patience then?

—Amy Lowell, “Patience”

On our way to work on Friday I felt strangely happy to notice we were following a builder’s truck, with two pieces of planed wood sticking out over the tailgate, a bucketful of trowels for smoothing a new sidewalk (though a pawprint or a name will afterwards be left in its hardening surface for a lifetime) or perhaps for scraping a thousand years of accumulation off the surface of an archaeological dig, and in the back window of the passenger cab a small jaunty white terrier.

Today, for my well-being, I’m asked to reflect on the power of patience.  It is that, I think, those few small details that connect us to the earth.

Patience is laying out the walk, smoothing the fresh cement, observing laid-down building rituals so the entirety will stand.  A new foundation, a new life or home, life going on.

Wendell Berry, in his “In a Hotel Parking Lot Thinking of Dr. Williams” writes similarly about people needing to have, and no longer having, patience—

     the patience for beauty: the weighted

     grainfield, the shady street,

     the well-laid stone and the changing tree

     whose branches spread above.

     For want of songs and stories

     they have dug away the soil,

     paved over what is left,

     set up their perfunctory walls

     in tribute to no god,

     for the love of no man or woman,

     so that the good that was here

     cannot be called back

     except by long waiting, by great

     sorrows remembered and to come

     by invoking the thunderstones

     of the world, and the vivid air.

Patience involves (and enables) a particular relationship with the world, with time.  Care and tenderness and an awareness of what’s past and what’s ahead, while living yet in the moment in the manner of sages, poets, saints.

The most patient I have been was pruning a fenceful of overgrown potato vine one summer, cutting out the dead layers without cutting the new, tracing tendrils.  One bit at a time, seeing the fence and garden and my mind itself and my heart clear.

Patience on a monument.  Patience is a monument.  The time-worn statue visited each day over the years, the heartsease visiting it brings, the sturdy friendship with the stone and elements that write on it the slow and patient stories, some with multiple endings.

E.E. cummings writes about patience a lot—

     i wake to a perfect patience of mountains



     i am a little church (far from the frantic
world 

     with its rapture and anguish) at peace with nature

and

     Being is

     patience is patient is (patiently

     all the eyes of these with listening

     hands only fishermen are prevented by cathedrals

and again

     the lilac's smoke the poppy's pompous fire


     the pansy's purple patience and the grave


     frailty of daises

The pansy’s purple patience says it all.  All peace and well-being are there.

image:  Patience on a Monument Smiling at Grief, John Roddam Spencer Stanhope (the artist's life moving from Yorkshire to Florence)