An Ode
Mariana Meireles Curado
I find it hard to articulate my relationship with the divine, it just doesn’t sound coherent when I say it out loud. Maybe I don’t need to have the words to express everything I feel. Maybe it isn’t all about understanding, I’m sure none of it matters in the end. But it does make me uneasy not being able to communicate about something that means so much to me. I see the divine in the people I love (likely place for it to be); and in Mary Oliver’s Wild Geese, who call to you announcing your place in the family of things. There are settings that feel divine to me - when you stand atop a mountain and grasp the extension of what surrounds you, and how infinitely bigger what surrounds that is. But others definitely don’t - like TK Maxx on Christmas eve. Would there be a divine if it was setting-dependent? I shy away from calling myself religious because the thought of subscribing to the same set of rules an entire life, making no room for the perpetual motion that flows through everything to change us too, sounds deeply undivine to me. Or maybe it’s that I would just prefer burning in eternal damnation than committing to a single thing in this short life on earth. If I had to present my thesis before Saint Peter, and try to make it short because he’s obviously a very busy man, I would say that if you have ever experienced the feeling of laying your weary little head on a crispy cold pillow and drifting into sweet slumber for a couple of hours in the afternoon, you have experienced something divine. And then you just know. An ode to naps.
