Middle time

WILL SOMEONE PLEASE TELL ME HOW TO GET PARAGRAPH (HARD RETURNS) TO SHOW? EVER SINCE BLOGGER UPDATED ITS FORMATTING, NONE OF MY PARAGRAPH BREAKS SHOW UP. ARGH. DOES THIS MEAN I HAVE TO ENTER MANUALLY THE HTML CODE FOR HARD RETURNS???

I have been reading Still: Notes on a Mid-Life Faith Crisis by Lauren Winner, in which she speaks of 'middle time' — that place in between. In her reflection on the middle voice in some languages, she says: 'The middle is the language of spirituality, of devotion, the language of religious choreography. It is the middle voice that captures the strange ways activity and passivity dance together in the religious life: it is the voice that tells you that I am changed when I do these things and that there is something about me that allows these happenings to happen; and yet it is the voice that insists that there is another agent at work, another agent always vivifying the action, even when unnamed' (156-57).

That describes so well what life has been as I enter my sixth month of unemployment, and third month living up at the end of a dirt road. This is a middle time for me and I wait for that middle voice to act. As Winner writes, 'If I could make English speak middle, I would use it to say this: I wait; I doubt;as the deer yearns for a drink of water, so I yearn. I long. I praise' (ibid.).

My life has become increasingly more simple, because there is so much less to occupy it. And so it gets caught up in the small particularities of life up at the end of a dirt road.

The neighbour (who isn't around but has rented his house to a bunch of people making a film (which means they light up our pond at night and we wonder when they are going to blow out all the electricity because who knows how much energy they are drawing), who clearly are not paying attention to the livestock that comes with the rental house. The rooster and six hens have busted loose out of their barn and think that my front yard is just the place to come forage for food. The rooster has a good crow.

Today they decided to come even closer to the house. Who knows what they could find in the driveway.

Meanwhile, daffodils bloom in the ravaged yard that was underwater last year in the Irene-caused floods. There still is so much river silt and garbage that has re-emerged from the snow (such as it was). Yet, these hardy daffodils have bloomed undeterred by the destruction around them.

Life is quiet, in between, as I listen to 'what next?'