Friday Dispatch: My First Pair of Glasses

A meditation on language & prayer

I read every sign
from the car. On journeys I read
maps. I read every cereal box
and can, spelling out the hard words.
All printing was sacred.

~ Marge Piercy, from Learning to Read

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Friday greetings,

On the day I got my first pair of glasses, I read every sign from the car.

I marveled at the crisp letters, each shape clear, each word significant, a world suddenly filled with instructions, warnings, announcements, advertisements. The memory of my revelation stops there. I imagine being able to see so clearly soon became ordinary.

But I kept loving words. I collected them in small notebooks. Rhyming words, words in rows called sentences, lined up like kids at gym class (though I hated gym class), words with different shapes and sounds, words that clicked and words that hummed and words that sang and words that stung, words in Spanish and Cyrillic.

Later, I’d imagine that all of the world’s languages already lived in me, dormant, awaiting a time when I would relearn them, return to them, remember them, and then be able to speak to anyone anywhere in their native tongue, each language with its own music and personality, rules and exceptions.

Alas, I did not learn all of the languages. I learned one, then two, then drifted away and forgot most things about them except the way they made me feel (languages are like people that way). Do they forgive me? I learned bits and smatterings of a few others, then moved on… am I a dabbler, a debutante of syntax and grammar, or simply one who delights in each new encounter?

To my right, a pretty hardcover book. Talking to God: Personal Prayers for Times of Joy, Sadness, Struggle, and Celebration by Naomi Levy. Is that the language I’ve always wanted to speak, the one where the soul meets the stuff of everyday life and gives us a place to rest, a source of solace or courage, hope or release, or sometimes, even, peace?

I fall short, unable to find the words or remember the rules. Some, I never learned; others I’ve already broken. The words remain elusive and hidden. Or maybe they aren’t hiding but simply taking their time, whispering to me, “What’s your rush?”

I sit and listen – cars passing by, a bird singing, something stirring in me, something old and familiar I want to name, like a cloud before it releases the rain or a bud before it unfurls to leaf. It is the time just before a thing finds its form, like when a child points insistently but grows frustrated with her parents’ inability to see the obvious in plain sight – an orange, a toy, a bell, a sunset’s breathtaking colors as they overtake the sky.

On the day I got my first pair of glasses, I read every sign from the car. Now, I glance back at the cover of the book and notice that Naomi Levy is also the author of To Begin Again. And suddenly, I notice something.

The learning and forgetting, the drifting and returning, the quest for memory, the searching for the “right” words, the need for more patience and self-compassion… all of this is a practice in beginning again.

“Come back to one,” the meditation instructor says. Come back to this place where you started, when you were newly wowed by the miracle of seeing, when each word, each sign, each sentence, each sound was a wide-open window to the world.

Come back to the breath, the origin of all the words.

Shabbat Shalom and love,

Jena

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BOOKS IN THE HOUSE 🤩

Now you can order signed/inscribed copies of Fierce Encouragement: 201 Writing Prompts for Staying Grounded in Fragile Times from me directly! I just received a shipment of books and will be hitting my local post office soon.

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