Joseph L. Kagle, Jr. Peace Essays

In Celebration of a Fine Misty Day

One problem with finding peace is that the search is not coordinated with observations each moment of each day. One famous statement went like this: “Peace is for individuals who can live with uncertainty.” A misty day where part of the world is wrapped in gray and hidden is the kind of day that sings to the person who likes a mystery. Life is a mystery. Peace is a mystery that we only know its essence when we are there.

     Driving from my house on the cliffs, past the community college and then down along the Brazos river, the mist drifts slowly up and fills nature with mystery, romance and anticipation.

     It is a Chinese, Northern Sung day a Whistler Nocturne Day.  It is not a good day (meaning, I know from being told, a sunny day) or a bad day (meaning not what is normal, whatever normal is supposed to look like).  It is just a day, with mist rising with majestic wonder from the liquid mirror of the river.  It is a day to celebrate mist and mystery.

     It is a day to wear my turned-up London coat, pretending I am Bulldog Drummond, famed detective of mystery novels.  It is time to celebrate inside, safe and comfortable with the chill mist playing with my eyes like a kitten finding that the world is newborn.

A changing landscape

     It is a day to listen to Phantom of the Opera by Andrew Lloyd Weber, or Indian temple bells, or Mozart or Liszt or Debussy.  It is a day to sit in front of a picture window and frame the changing landscape of this unknown and unknowable moment.

     It is a moment in time to sing, quietly some almost forgotten tune from the past.  It is a time to sip fine wine in my mind, driving to the next meeting, the next engagement and the next piece of business.

     What will linger in the soul: the mist-filled moment in the early morning or the business meeting which will be forgotten as soon as it is  over?  Mist lives.  Mist returns.  It is part of the cycle of living.  As much as the sunshine is part of our lives so are the misty days in the spring.

Wonderful day

     And when someone says, “Isn’t this an awful day?” it’s a time to reply, “No it is my Chinese day. No, it is my Whistler day. No, it is a wonderful day. “

     Unlike others around me, I have always loved days which were not included on the “best” list.  I love cloud-filled, mist-filled days.  They fill me with the joy of uncertainty, like a Christmas day when all the presents do not come form my list of wants.

     Those days which others might discard are my special days for refection, discernment, multiple shades of gray, sipping red wine, remembering good friends and standing alone in my moment of shadows.

     I sit by the “windows of my eyes” with Whistler, Ryder, Munch, da Vinci, Bacon and all the lyrical romantic painters like Gauguin and Turner.

     On a misty, gray morning in a spring daze, I read Coleridge, Keats, Byron, Shelley, the eccentric Chinese poets, the marvelous Greek writer Kazantzakis, the Brownings, Robert Frost, Dylan Thomas and Maya Angelou.  Not all at once, of course. I take small bits to go with the feast of the gray mystery outside.

     Sitting long ago with Robert Frost at Dartmouth College, where he was poet in residence and I was student, I asked about The Road Not Taken. He told me, “I do not know what you will get from the poetry.  What I do is create something important to me with holes in it so that you can put yourself into the fabric of the poem.”  So it has been for me with misty gray days.

     I love the lack of definition, the search for images which only give a glimpse of their sunlit form.  That is the nature of romance and the romantic image.  It is always “far-away places with strange sounding names.”  It is “there” (not here) and always “other.”

     Therefore, on a misty day in Waco, there is wonder, mystery romance and a sense the that world is newly formed, just for me to discover, just now to dream of things not yet here and just for my amazement.  In my spring daze, I sing the praises of “a foggy day in Waco town…”

At the end of all my articles for the Waco newspaper, they would add: Joe Kagle is member of the Board of Contributors, 32 Central Texans who submit columns regularly to the Tribune-Herald.  He is director of The Art Center.