Cheers everyone and welcome to Friday’s Morning Open Thread.
Morning Open Thread is a daily, copyrighted post from a host of editors and guest writers. We support our community, invite and share ideas, and encourage thoughtful, respectful dialogue in an open forum.
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Notes from Below Sea Level
“To Catch A Lark”
Despite where we find ourselves at any given moment, we are—at times—a thousand miles, a thousand days or hours, or a thousand lifetimes away. Perhaps a combination of those flights of memory can explain where I am this lovely morning reminiscing around the humor and sardonic musings of a Franciscan Priest who wrote back at the beginning of the 15th century in France. Irreverent, constantly in trouble with the authorities and his superiors, this French humanist (also trained as a lawyer and doctor) published a series of four books later collected into a single volume known as Garantuan and Pantagruel.
That scholar, from whose name we inherit the word “Rabelaisian,” is Francois Rabelais, who wrote that “if the skies fall, one may hope to catch larks.” I first read those lines in the late summer of 1981 in Marseilles on the southern coast of France. Recovering from a long and slightly heart-wrenching trip through the Aegean Islands, I was renting a small room a few blocks from the fish markets of the old port. She was headed toward home and her job in San Francisco and I was seeking solace in solitude and ancient tomes turned into cheap paperbacks with colorful covers. Though the market didn’t officially open until a couple hours after sunrise, the port woke before dawn—the boats moved into the quay two and three deep, hauls unloaded, stands set up, and catches laid out. The smells would layer the sounds like icing and melt with the cool breezes slipping inland and eventually through my open windows to nudge me awake.
Having spent my entire life in a small town on the Gulf Coast of Louisiana, it didn’t strike me until much later how very at home I felt in France’s second largest city. No doubt it was partly the seafood, the smell of combusted diesel, and the proximity to salt water; but it was also the very mixture of the city itself—what I think of as the distinctive flavor of a place. A mélange of peoples since it was founded some 2,600 years ago by seafaring Greeks, the place reeks of commerce and flesh and decay. It offers as well clearing breezes and long-cast shadows of faiths from around the world. While the Basilique Notre-Dame de la Garde towers over the city, Catholicism has always lived alongside Eastern Orthodox, Armenian, and sizable Muslim and Jewish populations.
Today, most people think of the quartiers nords when they think of Marseilles. But back then those quarters weren’t quite so feared or closed off to the wandering traveler: what I describe years later as the city before hash was replaced by heroin and a deep sense of community driven out by the over-protective parents of parochialism, prejudice and xenophobia. At heart, though, it is a port city; and, like most port cities, survived on grit, the hustle of black-market trade, a flourishing grey economy, and a healthy dose of inexplicable optimism in the face of dire prognostications from the self-serving politicians to the struggling fishmongers.
But my thoughts this morning aren’t so much about a particular place as they are about real feelings of belonging and hope in the face of falling skies—feelings deeply embedded and held onto, white-knuckled, like the wheel of a skiff tossed in a sea of storms. I woke this morning to the smells of distant fish markets carried on the chilly breezes of memory. Life (I know) is made up of insignificant, simple things—a note from a friend last evening about the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac, the link to a lullaby texted to me while I slept last night, the voice of my lover (as I drifted off to sleep) metaphorically reminding me that the present holds the promise of future larks.
(March, 2018-2024)
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My hope for the day is that each of you celebrates life in one way or another and finds peace in these turbulent times. Be well, be kind, and appreciate the love you have in your life.
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What's on your mind this morning?