The Diaphanous Breath of Angels

 

We live in a harsh world, a world in which we experience daily the transitory nature of life. As I write this post, my husband Patrick is very ill but, as is his way, he is firmly grasping the fringes of his eloquent and poignant life and holding on. Each day when I walk into his room, the words of Walt Whitman from "Song of Myself" come to mind: 

     To behold the daybreak!

     The little light fades the immense and diaphanous shadows

     The air tastes good to my palate.

Hope returns as I sit by his side, and indeed the little journey to discover the ins and outs of a new word comes to fruition, the beautiful little word diaphanous.

Diaphanous derives from Greek: dia--through and phaino/phanous/phany--to show or make visible. It is usually defined as sheer, delicate, almost transparent, but the word has also been used to describe that which is ethereal. For those of us who love words and the metaphors created with them, this one's a prize.

There is a well-known verse from 1st Corinthians 13:12, "For now we see through a glass darkly...," that seems to be the antithesis of diaphanous. The glass, or mirror, is the apostle Paul's metaphor for polished copper or brass that reflects darkly the image before it. We have come to understand the verse to mean a lack of clarity, of so much more to be understood, later when we are ready. So when we look at the word diaphanous, we imagine those things that are visible, something that not only allows light to pass through but also may even glow with an ethereal light. And such an antithetical image is a hopeful one, much like the garden that Patrick designed for me so many years ago. It is my very own diaphanous breath of angels, especially at dusk.

The back of our house has a number of windows permitting unobstructed views of all sides of the back garden.  Just before the sun goes down, an other worldly pink glow descends on our little space. It is an ephemeral light that deepens every green and pink and red, yellow and orange and white, convincing the onlooker that a miracle is at that moment taking place.

But the garden is not only about light and loveliness. It is a living, breathing, growing, changing pathway to hope and joy. I am a different person when I'm in the garden, my hands in the rich dark soil, performing the rituals of alchemy. 

Twelve bird feeders of all shapes and sizes dot the landscape. The squirrels take over half of them and I'm okay with this, but my winged friends are like angels that visit us throughout the day, soothing and charming us with their birdsong.

 

When I was little, wounded birds seemed to seek out my mother and she nursed them back to health. I fell in love with birds, no doubt, because of her kind and generous diaphanous love. Several years later as a teenager, I discovered Carl Sandburg's famous love poem, Little Word, Little White Bird:

Love is a little white bird

And the flight of it so fast

You can't see it

And you know it's there only by the faint whir of its wings.

Ah, yes, the diaphanous whir of wings. What better description of love than the transparent, ephemeral whir of wings--accompanied by the diaphanous breath of angels.

In this oftentimes harsh world of ours that confounds our sensibilities and strips us of love, replacing it with hate, we need this breath of angels in our lives to guide us and to remind us of that reaffirming cycle of rebirth and second chances. Despite our disappointments, our struggle to make sense of the world around us, we have a choice about how we will respond. If we live in darkness, we can't see the beauty unless we take up the God-given power and knowledge to turn on the light. It is only then that we will recognize the transparency through which that light can shine.

"The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off the works of darkness and let us put on the armor of light."  Romans 13:12 King James Bible