Incidence & Coincidence
To die — without the Dying
And live — without the Life
This is the hardest Miracle
Propounded to Belief.
Emily Dickinson #1017
34 of 40
In Texas a photographer was snapping pics in the automatic rat-tat-tat exposures that freeze frame a Heron in flight at the edge of the water. In one frame a Bobcat launches and makes the Heron – in mid flight – his dinner. https://petapixel.com/2024/03/18/once-in-a-lifetime-photo-of-bobcat-pouncing-on-heron-mid-flight/?utm_source=PetaPixel&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=email-share
This is a coincidence: Bobcat looking, Heron distracted, looking for fish in the water to eat, Human looking at the Heron. And all three happen in a photo. Coincidence.
125 years earlier, Paul Cezanne is painting. He sees a quarry. Fallow enough that growth is overtaking the rock. In the distance the rock triumphs in a mountain. Living, Dead, Eternal coincide in the Mind’s Eye.
30 years before that Emily Dickinson is in her room, again, thinking about words, for over the 1,000th time in the last 20 years. Her life, the absence of death, the miracle of both make a coincidence.
“To die — without the Dying
And live — without the Life
This is the hardest Miracle
Propounded to Belief.”
The incidence of “Belief” – that turns life into “Life” and to die into “Dying” is what turns words into Poetry. Dinner into a photograph. Rock into a mountain. These incidences become coincidences in us.
The things we do not want do happen. They become things done “to” us. When they just happen. We are created to propound the “Miracle” into “Belief.” We believe, we know words, rocks, cameras. We are not so sure about “Life” and other “Miracles”.
I have friends who are definably dying in real time. No “Belief”, no camera, not even a poem. It would be easy to control the meaning that we do not have by making this incidence into coincidence – to have the inevitable become something done “to” us – a conspiracy of coincidence. They see no coincidences, they are at the incidence of the end of what they know. That’s it. I hope to be them in the unwanted incidence we are all given.
The plants did not plan to end the rock. The rock did not design itself a mountain, The Bobcat did not know the Heron would be there, let alone the photographer. And Emily knew that she did not know what she, and me, and you, want to know.
We want to know “Miracles” because we want to have them. But “Life” and “Dying” are not ours to “Propound into Belief.”
But, godammit, we can write poetry.
That has been given us.
And snap a pic. And paint a “Miracle.”
We can live the the life we have been given without “Propounding” “the Life.” We can only do this because God made us differently than the Bobcat, rock or Heron. The gifts we cannot understand, cannot earn, cannot even refuse, are just us.
We have been given this. It is a miracle, whether we believe it or not. That miracle is the coincidence we have no understanding of, the incidence of love in creation. For all the incidences surround us we invent coincidences to control what is uncontrollable – that was given to us, too.
So we snap, paint, write Beauty. Especially in Lent.
Saved By Design 