Singing Our Sorrows

I have been reading Natalie Goldberg’s ‘Writing Down the Bones’. I picked up the book in a secondhand bookshop and have dipped into it rather than read it from cover to cover. In one of the early chapters she lists ideas to get the writer writing and tells me to write my own list. I had started a list at the back of one of the notebooks last week. I’d like to say that there are lots of ideas written, but at the last count there were just the three. One of her suggestions is to take a line from a poem and see where it leads you.

The poem I happened to be reading was James Thomson’s ‘The Seasons: Spring’. It was only a bit of the poem which is very long and, most likely, I wouldn’t have been reading it at all but it was one of the poems listed for a unit on nature writing that I’m studying. Let’s tell you at the off before you google it – the poem isn’t really about nature at all. Thomson is writing about birds and building nests and he probably knows very little about birds or nests. It’s all metaphor, which I did not know when I read it. The nest building is all about England and Scotland and the Union and being British rather than English or Scots. It paints a picture using the bird nest building metaphor of a happy and settled future as one nation rather than two. However, as I said, I didn’t know this. I just thought it was about birds.

The line that caught my attention – ‘She sings her sorrows through the night.’ It is about a nightingale, I think. She found her mate. They, or perhaps he, built the nest – it might have been part of the whole ‘wooing’ thing, the nest building. There are eggs that hatch and the parent birds spend a lot of time hunting food to feed the chicks, perhaps to the extend that they themselves go hungry. It reminded me of parents with a limited income making sure their children eat when they themselves don’t. The parents also try to protect the chicks from predators, perhaps luring these hunters away by pretending to be injured and dragging a wing along the ground as some birds do.  Sometimes they return to the nest to discover it is empty. Their ploy to lure the predator away was not successful. That’s when she sings her sorrows. She takes the loss of her chicks hard. But she is a bird and not a person and she moves on. She begins again. I read up on baby chicks’ survival rates. Sometimes it is just 20% of chicks that make it through to adulthood.

‘She sings her sorrows through the night.’ I imagine there are very few mothers that don’t want to see their children thrive. They want the best for their children and make sacrifices to see that happen. But when it doesn’t? There is a line in the poem that talks of birds captured and put into cages. Their colours fade and there is no joy in the songs that they sing.  They are enslaved. What dreams do mothers have for their sons and daughters? I think they might not want them to end up in some dea- end job that pays poor wages and never allows them to have enough to do the things they would like to do. They never aspire to work for something better.

A friend has a friend who has sones who are drug addicts. Addiction is their cage. But it doesn’t have to be drugs. Addiction comes in all shapes and sizes, colours and flavours. It doesn’t have to be addiction at all – just the failure to measure up to a parent’s expectations. Maybe it is a sweeping statement but mothers tend to take it harder, perhaps. They mind the nest and do the laundry.

‘She sings her sorrows through the night.’ Darkness has a way of amplifying the troubles we go through. Sounds we don’t notice during the day, at nighttime seem louder. Nighttime is a time when there is no activity to distract  us, and the tears are not seen by anyone.

I am not a mother but I have sung my sorrows through the night too. I have had my share of disappointments and hurts andI haven’t always measured up to my own expectations.

The nightingale moves on. There is nothing she can do to bring her babies home. Nature compels her to move on. But people are not nightingales.

I don’t know what other people do, only what I do. There are things that I cannot change. I will continue to disappoint myself. Do I lower my expectations? Set a low bar that I know I can reach? Or do I continue to set the bar high? Continue to hope for something better? My husband insists that hope is not wishful thinking, or pie in the sky or some kind of vague optimism. Hope is confident expectation. This is where my faith in a just and loving, omnipotent God steps in. He doesn’t step in to make my life better or wave a wand that wipes it all away. Sometimes He plots the path through the valley of death, but He walks with me through it and opens up to me a storehouse of treasure.

My songs of sorrow are to be sung for sure. They are not to be dismissed. But they are not the only songs I sing.

Psalm 30:5 in the Bible says, “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning”. Close your eyes and picture the horizon. See in your mind’s eye the faint light of dawn. It’s almost morning.  And joy will come.