It’s early and dark. In the south-east there is a place were the sun will come up, should it choose. Indications are good. So I wait for the first signs of brightening behind the city-scape.
Winter waits too. The soil of summer-fallow waits, bulbs wait, bamboo is excellent at waiting, geese wait until the time is right. Beavers don’t abide waiting, but orb weavers don’t seem to mind. They spin and wait as long as it takes. The earth spins too, waiting for its equinox.
But light bulbs, street lights, clocks, little chips in computers, never wait and will never care to wait. And we use them and anything else we can think of to train the waiting out of our lives.
The world of industry is bringing waiting to an end. Commerce keeps company with the future. Companies race each other to see how far they can project themselves into the future, or how much of it they can drag into the present. A destruction of both.
There is madness here that we’ve normalized. We forget that this life, our second womb, has something to do with waiting. Waiting, not like Estragon and Vladimir, but waiting without excessive effort in acceptance of a serial now.
Advent is the season of specific expectation. A time for rekindled waiting. A rendezvous with a midwife.
In Advent, we wait in a commemorative way, for the birth of Jesus. But as people of the paschal mystery we are always anticipating some kind of birth and some kind of resurrection, in the knowledge that there was a birth and that the son has risen. We wait as one waits for dawn.
I can’t see it yet but soon the east will grow lavender. Behind the berm of buildings across the North Saskatchewan river, the trees high on the bank will become skeletal as behind them the light strengthens.
