The first picture I
saw this morning was taken at Hovenweep, six prehistoric villages on the border
of Colorado and Utah, and showed the “the moon giving way to the morning sun.”
In my sleepy state,
on the border of dreaming and waking, before my decaf Sumatra and warm
croissant with olallieberry preserves, I started wondering about the idea of
giving way—my dreamy morning hours giving way to rain and midday obligations,
winter beginning to give way to spring, and everywhere, examples of this
continuity which makes up life.
The meaning of it,
giving way, is ceding, passing the baton or the torch, letting the other have
its turn.
But beyond that,
giving way is allowing passage, enabling a journey, leading to or even
carrying. The stairs give
way. A train gives way, as does a
horse, a mule descending the Pololu Valley, or a donkey climbing the steep rise
of Santorini with its sheer white cliffs.
A wheelchair, graciously, gives way to those whose only way is that.
And in a further
sense of that, the spritual, it’s causing or inspiring a creative path. Claude Monet wrote “I perhaps owe
having become a painter to flowers.”
The flowers by their very nature gave way to Monet’s paintings of them,
which in turn give way to the viewer’s pleasure, sharing the flowers.
The meaning of that
first moon and sun “giving way” is yielding, but that, too, has several sides. Yielding as in letting someone else go
ahead of you, as in losing yourself to temptation (both implying a kind of
lessening of self, a ceding of one’s place in the landscape or moral world);
but also as in producing—offering—yielding fruit or flowers or some other rich and generous bounty. Giving of yourself to
others, to the world, with natural and voluntary grace. Not losing anything, but gaining
everything.
Finally, the giving way reminds me of the Navajo Blessing Way and Beauty Way, another way of healing and of finding harmony.
image: Christie B. Cochrell, Stairs (York)
