A Sky with Diamonds

A Counter-Mood

I am writing to you at the end of a heavy week for me. If you read my last piece, Dropping out of the New Year Race, you’ll know that this year began with heft.

This letter is later than I expected. I lost an Aunt who was really special to me. I knew her the best of all my aunties because she and I often overlapped for weeks when I lived with my grandmother during hot East coast summers as a late teen.

While she had many challenges (including being dependent on formal care for most of her adult life) she was a powerful teacher to me. In the midst of great vulnerability and struggle, her capacity to be curious and interested in everyone she met was unrivaled.

In the last couple of days, she spoke little. But at one point, she told my cousin very seriously that we mustn’t “forget the Love Boat.”

The Love Boat? Like Capital L, Capital B?

For those of you who grew up in the 70s and 80s, you’ll catch this reference. The Love Boat was an American love drama on the MS Pacific Princess. Since most of us only had three TV channels when we grew up, chances are you spent part of your Saturday night watching that hunk of a Captain Stubing.

When my Aunt shared this wisdom, with a serious tone, I wonder whether she might have meant something else besides the show that came before Fantasy Island.

*

To be with my grief, I’ve been taking lots of long afternoon walks. On one of them, the Sun pierced through two months of near-constant gray. It was as if she knocked on Earth’s door and forgot to take off her shoes.

As I made my way up a ridge, I saw something I’d never seen. It wasn’t a classic sun dog, those rainbow like horizontal sun spots. But a gigantic beam of light interpenetrated by diamond snow crystals that looked more like a cosmic vertical universe opening up its arms.

Here it is…caught in real time.

All I could think of was the song Diamonds on the Soles of her Shoes by Paul Simon. I also couldn’t help but recall that gorgeous Tlingit name for sunbeam, shared by my friend Lance X’unei Twichell in his book of poems G̱agaan X̱ʼusyee / Below the Foot of the Sun.

Stunned by this solar phenomenon, I stood still for what seemed like ages. It felt good to take in something that felt inherently counter to the violent global mood.

*

Earlier this week I wrote “While there are some who want us to believe that power is wielded by force, intimidation, threats and violence- and that there’s no use in resisting- somehow these subtle cosmic sky crystals reveal a different truth.

Yes to principled and pragmatic, diplomacy and dialogue. But an even bigger yes to the wilder, stop-me-in-my tracks, strangeness of solar surprise.

There is magic in unforeseen futures- not necessarily a certainty we’ve been wanting. But for wilder seeings that come in dreams, deaths and deluges.

Perhaps it comes as a thousand cell phones witnessing ICE. A river of meals for those who cannot leave their homes.

Or maybe it comes as a flood of diamonds we’ll never own. A spiral of falls we cannot prevent. A light so fierce we must squint to see.

I don’t know what the sky was trying to say, but I’m on my knees listening.”

*

Maybe this blue-green orb is the Love Boat.

Not an idealized place where we fall in love, sip champagne, and dance till dawn—
but a place where we become the shoes our entangled planet needs to walk somewhere new.

Here’s that Paul Simon’s song with Ladysmith Black Mambazo accompanying.