In Due Season

As a boy I took apart a clock that was hidden in my grandmother’s attic—an activity “just right” for a kid who couldn’t see. Alone in the top of that Victorian house I was like a tree planted by streams of water—I was bearing fruit in due season as The Psalter says—I was sprouting leaves while taking apart a dead time piece. And sometimes I heard wind at the eaves. I was happy doing that work in that time and place. Pulling gears from a clock was my ticket to the future when I would become a person who can make poetry and literature out of nothing or nothingness.

In due season people who believe shall prosper.

The boyhood self, the tinkerer, did not know he had beliefs. Actions are the taproots of subsequent understandings. But you can’t call them beliefs. Beliefs are the verities of acting. Taking action, improvising in the dark, this is the unconscious faith in “due season” as if to say “tomorrow” I shall understand.

In due season I shall understand…

Today in mid-life I am confused. I walk around my house and feel the fatigue of adult life. I want to fix something that’s broken at the university. I feel helpless to do good. Today I do not have faith, knowledge, virtue, temperance, patience. I am a child again. I need to reacquaint myself with “due season”. I must grow in these hours.

“I have been entrusted to you ever since I was born; you were my God when I was still in my mother’s womb.”

In due season I shall understand…

Just as I want to make sense of what’s happening in the minds of others, my friends, my wife, or all those with whom I must work, just so I wish to make sense of my hopes for my soul—my tinkerer’s wish for sense.

The boy in me knew what to do. He took apart an intricate mechanism in the dark.

In due season…

So one of these days the fruits of today’s labors will become clear. Perhaps it will be years from now the signs of a sole moment will resolve before my eyes. I will understand a cloud low on the horizon. Not as a sign. Those clouds will promise rain along a stand of pines. I will recall something then—something that occurred today though I couldn’t know it.

I have only what I hope for.

S.K.