Reeds of the Ultramarine Cosmos

—Man is a thinking reed

Man is a thinking reed, Pascal wrote.

But the reed does not know that it is a reed. When the wind comes, it bends; when the wind passes, it returns. It does not know that it is rooted in the ultramarine depth of an ever-expanding universe. The concept of time does not reach it. The concept of space does not reach it. And yet the reed is, certainly, there.

At night, when you look up at the sky, what stretches between the stars is not darkness but ultramarine. It is the color of a place where light does not fully arrive, and yet is not fully absent either. The universe keeps expanding. The earth keeps turning. The grassland beneath our feet has been traveling, unnoticed, hundreds of millions of kilometers. The reed does not know this. And I, too, know almost nothing.

If you weave the reeds that grow thick in the grassland, they become a roof that shelters you from the rain. The roof has a shape, a function, a name. But unweave the roof, and the reeds return to the grassland as if nothing had ever been there. The time of being a roof and the time of being a reed are held within the same single life. Fragile, weak, and yet certainly there.

My son is a devout Catholic.

He has chosen to live inside the roof. He has God as a place to lean on, prayer as a practice, community as a roof above him. When a small church lights up across the evening grassland, his hands fold of their own accord. In his world, there is the strength of not having to ask what he is. I am, from the bottom of my heart, glad of this.

But I stand among the reeds.

Without a roof, unable to weave one, half-hidden in the reeds, I look out at the ultramarine cosmos. I can call myself by the name of my profession. I can call myself by my role within my family. But none of those is the name of a woven roof, not the name of the reed itself. Unweave the roof, and I am once again a single stalk in the grassland.

For a long time, I thought of this as something missing.

Whenever I saw someone like my son, someone who has a place to stand, I thought there was something lacking in me. That I had failed to weave the roof I should have woven. That I had failed to settle where I should have settled. But at some point, another reading began, quietly, to surface.

If something can be known by trying to know it, then it belongs not to the reed but to the roof. To become “someone” is to be woven, and what is woven will, sooner or later, be unwoven. To remain in the state of not knowing—perhaps that is what it means to be the reed itself.

What separates my son and me is not the presence or absence of faith. He has chosen to live inside the roof. I have chosen, or have been made to choose, to be without a roof, to be the reed itself. Neither is right. There are simply two ways of being a reed.

And probably you, the reader, have your own way of being.

Perhaps you are in a season of weaving, trying earnestly to become someone. Perhaps you are in a season of feeling something wrong about the roof you have woven, beginning to take it apart. Or perhaps you are in a season of having woven nothing yet, simply swaying in the wind. All of these are reeds. Within the ultramarine cosmos, each leaning in its own way, each a single reed standing.

Beyond my son’s praying back, the church lights up.

Beyond my own back, there is the field of reeds, and the castle past it, and the infinite stars.

Both are within the ultramarine.

When the wind comes, the reed bends.
Returns. Bends. Returns.

And I still do not know what I am.