Did you know that when the builders in the Middle Ages erected their cathedrals with their great barrel vaults and pointed arches and flying buttresses, it was the not the mortar between the stones that kept them standing? The mortar didn't serve as medieval masonry glue but as a thin layer of leveling, smoothing the imperfections between them, one to another, to provide a continuous contact surface so that when one brick sat on the one before it and was followed by the rest, their combined weight would press them into a geometric shape whose weighted thrust extended in straight lines right through them into the ground.
It wasn't the mortar that kept the building together. It was the horde of gradually assembled stones that wouldn't work until each had taken its place. Not until that had happened, and the stones had time to sink into one another firmly by virtue not of a masonry glue, but only by their own accumulated pressure, would the great soaring structure be finished.
And so it is that the weight of years forms a life.
It has often seemed that as the years of my life increase, so does the weight of them so that I carry them as a kind of burden, like a sack I have to throw over my back before I can go anywhere. But I've been looking at them wrong, I think. Maybe they aren't a burden, but a building - a magnificent cathedral of lived days that I don't carry, but live in, roaming its rooms, examing its structure, admiring its beauty. Each stone has been laid painstakingly on the one before it day by day, adding weight, yes, but also creating stability.
My building isn't complete yet until I've lived my last day, but it is taking shape into something I couldn't see coherently until now, when the building is nearly complete. What began as a fortress has morphed into a cathedral of Gothic lace, and I can't help but think that is what it was meant to be all along.
And it is beautiful.
No comments:
Post a Comment