May 31, 2012

Dark morning, clouds thick and not much sun making it through them.  The air is so wet that even a small puddle made by the hose yesterday is still there this morning.  I was surprised, I thought it would have vanished by now.  A far off jet drags its own thunder behind it.  People are out walking, with and without dogs. Since there is no breeze, everything is still and getting hotter.  It's quiet, either the birds are sleeping in or they are gone out somewhere, too far for me to hear their notes. 

Honey glued the bird's water bowl again, and is filling it up, carefully placing the pumice rock in it so the little birds can drink and won't drown.  The surface has settled and is like a mirror of the leaves above it, there is no wind to ripple it.  There has been no rain for weeks now, though we get clouds, they carry the rain off to other places, leaving us to wonder just how far out of the drought we can remain if this goes on.  The water stays in the bowl so it must have worked, at least for the moment.

Someone hit our mailbox, pushing it over, now he's gone around with the truck to see if he can pull it upright again.  The letters slide too far back for the mail carrier, usually a lady, to reach.  There is always something, even something minor, that needs fixing, or adjusting, or painting, something always needs to be done.

Now the cicadas start their chorus, now the clouds part occasionally and let down the sun, now there is the invisible hand of the wind carressing the leaves.  An ordinary morning, every day something to learn . . .

Mindful

Every day
I see or hear
something
that more or less
kills me
with delight,
that leaves me
like a needle
in the haystack
of light.
It was what I was born for -
to look, to listen,
to lose myself
inside this soft world -
to instruct myself
over and over
in joy,
and acclamation.
Nor am I talking
about the exceptional,
the fearful, the dreadful,
the very extravagant -
but of the ordinary,
the common, the very drab,
the daily presentations.
Oh, good scholar,
I say to myself,
how can you help
but grow wise
with such teachings
as these -
the untrimmable light
of the world,
the ocean's shine,
the prayers that are made
out of grass?

Mary Oliver

Can you learn something from looking out the window and reading the words other people use to tell their stories?  I don't know, but I keep looking out and seeing new things, hearing songs, the variety of light and the lack of it.  The poet's words can make me see the ordinary in not so ordinary ways.  Sometimes I wonder if there is ever any such thing as ordinary, or is everything, every moment unique and precious.  There are days nothing seems ordinary and days when everything is.  Some mornings all the words in the world seem distant and hard to fathom, and I take my meaning from just watching, and doing what is needed, and comfort in that routine.  Though I can't help wonder this morning, what prayers my thinning grass will make, and if those clouds, dark and not so distant now, will rain down more than a quick sprinkle, and keep us from sliding back into drought.

May 30, 2012

Clouded over, a morning of little sun, still warm enough for cicadas, and birds out there doing what birds do, flying, searching, singing.  A pair of little white butterflies drift through the yard, never stopping.  The light changes moment by moment, somewhere a woodpecker is hammering out his morning's work, hollow sounding and rhythm rough.  No breeze moves the leaves, all the wind is aloft moving clouds around to intervene between us and the sun.  Darker green is made darker by so many shadows, even the last white of the new cane is dark for the moment.

This morning I recognize the truth in this poem . . .

The Meaning of Existence

Everything except language
knows the meaning of existence.
Trees, planets, rivers, time
know nothing else. They express it
moment by moment as the universe.

Even this fool of a body
lives it in part, and would
have full dignity within it
but for the ignorant freedom
of my talking mind.

Les Murray 

I remember trying to learn meditation, the emptying of the mind so that for a short space of time, you could just be, just exist without judgment, without thought, with the mind quiet and the body at ease.  Well, good luck with that, I never had much luck with it <chuckle>  I finally found a meditation I could actually use, the thousand petal lotus:  you start with a word, and it leads to another word, and so on round and round just thinking of each word until another one presents itself.  I can do that, the words come so slowly and smoothly that they are like tiny pebbles in a large pond making barely visible ripples.  My talking mind settles and seems less anxious, less unsure, it stops wanting to chatter and slowly begins to listen then just relaxes into the words, and stops looking back or ahead, just rests in the now of each word.  Everything in nature lives in the now, knows nothing but the moment, but I am not sure that the meaning of existence would be a concept to nature.  Why would nature need it?  Our minds, looking forward and back, our minds need language to make sense of that looking, to search for meaning in what we have experienced and what we will experience, we understand the instant of now because we are living it, so full of the moment we can only recognize the experience with reference to the past or that future, and that's what language does for us, lets us hold on to the now, to connect it to time gone before, and what we will experience.  I think I will keep my talking mind, it has its own dignity, a dignity I can understand, keeping me connected to the living world, and appreciating the experience.

The sun is out again, but I'm sure it will not stay long, clouds are still restless and shifting.  Shadows will deepen and bring moments of coolness.  See, my talking mind is anticipating, accepting, moving on through the day, with its ignorant freedom, making memories, and ten thousand connections.

May 29, 2012

Monday on Tuesday, back to routine, sometimes you wonder if a break in the routine is worth trying to get back into the routine at the end of it <smile>  I think summer has arrived, it's hot this morning, and the sky is the summer sky, blue all around broken only by the white clouds coming and going.  There is more breeze this morning, and the sun strobing in and out leaving long streaks of light and shadow across the yard.  The smooth wood of the crepe myrtle glows, painted with sunlight, and the wind chimes make flashes of reflection.  It's hot enough for the cicadas to be calling to each other already, the sound of summer, cicadas and lawnmowers.  Each morning, early just after sunrise or in the long cool of just about dark, someone is mowing, all summer long.  I don't think we would recognize summer without those two sounds.  Mourning doves are adding their own plaintive protest to the late starting week . . .

It's the day after a long weekend, and we all need something to wake us up a little . . .

Espresso

The black coffee they serve out of doors

among tables and chairs gaudy as insects.

Precious distillations

filled with the same strength as Yes and No.

It’s carried out from the gloomy kitchen

and looks into the sun without blinking.

In the daylight a dot of beneficent black

that quickly flows into a pale customer.

It’s like the drops of black profoundness

sometimes gathered up by the soul,

giving a salutary push: Go!

Inspiration to open your eyes.

Thomas Transtormer

We are not serving it out of doors this morning, but yes, coffee is welcome, and sometimes the inspiration to get up and get moving.  I'm about half for coffee, the other half is tea.  Some mornings, coffee seems too . . . aggressive.  I just want a nice cup of tea, want to wake up gently and warm.  The smell of coffee is its best attribute, that alone can wake you up, sometimes the taste is a pale ghost of that smell.  Tea on the other hand generally tastes more intense than it smells, something you have to get close to actually enjoy.  Coffee is a bully, it reaches out with that great and powerful smell and knocks you up the side of the head with it, and then, when you drink it, imparts the caffeine in a wallop . . . the salutary push!  Go!  While tea wheedles . . . aw, come on, get closer, inhale the aroma, feel your soul settle, now sip and slide into the day.  In my world there is a place for both attitudes!

Settle back into the routine . . . it will be a short week . . .

May 28, 2012

A beautiful morning, sunny, warm, a bit of a breeze, my favorite sky, blue with white fair weather clouds, that build up and vanish while you watch them.  Kids are out on bicycles, riding in groups with dogs trailing after them.  Cars with boat behind them rounding the corner headed down toward the bay, people wanting to be on the water.  How many picnics will there be today? How may family get-togethers?  How many will remember those who helped secure our freedoms at the cost of their lives or their health or simply missing their children and spouses for months at a time, sometimes for years?

Memorial day . . . I am sending this poem about the people who go to war, and what happens for those left behind.  It's about a distant war, but there are really no distant wars, they are all connected, they are all won or lost by the soldiers fighting them for a cause, and there are always causes, and the people in power who send the soldiers, even by the families left behind, and the people those soldiers are fighting for, all are connected, and live with the victory or the defeat and the aftermath of both.  We have our freedoms as a result of sacrifice, of the will of the country to keep our freedom and our way of life.  We need to honor that will and those sacrifices.  We need to remember . . .

Edouard

Edouard shall we leave
tomorrow
for Verdun again
shall we set out for the great days
and never be the same
never
 

time
is what is left
shall we start
this time in the spring
and they lead your cows out
next week to sell at the fair
and the brambles learn to scribble
over the first field
 

Edouard shall we have gone
when the leaves come out
but before the heat
slows the grand marches
days like those
the heights and the dying
at thy right hand
sound a long horn
and here the bright handles
will fog over
things will break and stay broken
in the keeping of women
the sheep get lost
the barns
burned unconsoled in the darkness
 

Edouard what would you have given
not to go
sitting that last night by the fire
again
but shall we be the same
tomorrow night shall we not have gone
leaving the faces and nightingales
as you know we will live
and what never comes back will be
you and me
 

W. S. Merwin

It is one of the truest things ever written, that the people who come back from war are not the people who went, they are changed by the experience, some in ways that make them stronger, some in ways that haunt them the rest of their lives, and either way, those are the sacrifices we need to remember.  "What would you have given not to go" but they went and fought for what they believed in, and some lived to come home, and some did not, but even the living were changed, and their families were, and the country was changed by them.  And today we remember all of them, we have this day to say that we remember . . . that we might not understand all they sacrificed, all the ways they were changed, but that we honor them by remembering . . . 

May 27, 2012

Blank blue sky and sun, mockingbirds doing what they do, singing every other bird's song.  Cicadas beginning with the sun to make a rhythm of noise, the trees and the grass alive with it, each one its own sound, blending with or crossing others, until there is just one long background with the occasional solo loud or close enough to be distinguished.  Flipping through the trees wrens come to see if there is water, and leave without thirst.  A pair of cardinals sit on a near branch, their heads touching, leaning into each other, suddenly at some signal they leap into the air and race away.  The cat looks up from his spot of sun and does nothing but look.   There is just enough air moving to make leaves sway and tip as if some invisible creature passed among then and did not stop.

Sunday and the blessing . . .

Out of the Mouths of a Thousand Birds

Listen -
Listen more carefully to what is around you
Right now.

In my world
There are the bells from the clanks
Of the morning milk drums,

And a wagon wheel outside my window
Just hit a bump

Which turned into an ecstatic chorus
Of the Beloved's Name.

There is the Prayer Call
Rising up like the sun
Out of the mouths of a thousand birds.

There is an astonishing vastness
Of movement and Life

Emanating sound and light
From my folded hands

And my even quieter simple being and heart.

My dear,
Is it true that your mind
Is sometimes like a battering
Ram

Running all through the city,
Shouting so madly inside and out

About the ten thousand things
That do not matter?

Hafiz, too,
For many years beat his head in youth

And thought himself at a great distance,
Far from an armistice
With God.

But that is why this scarred old pilgrim
Has now become such a sweet rare vintage
Who weeps and sings for you.

O listen -
Listen more carefully
To what is inside of you right now.

In my world
All that remains is the wondrous call to
Dance and prayer

Rising up like a thousand suns
Out of the mouth of a
Single bird.

Hafiz

I'm not sure what I prefer, a sun rising from the throats of a thousand birds, or a thousand suns from a single bird.  At the moment, this moment, it's a thousands suns from a thousand cicadas, with the birds making their own shining songs.   Some days I feel like Hafiz, a long way from an armistice with God, but more often now, nearly old, I have come to that place where we don't fight, where we agree, God and I, not to try to figure out everything, to define everything, to ask questions that will never be answered in this life, but are willing to, like the pair of cardinals, lean into each other, and fly from there.  Today, this Sunday, I am going to make food for a family meal, enjoy their company, say my prayers, let my heart dance among those sunlit leaves.  I'm going to listen to the thousand suns from a thousand birds or cicadas or from just one, from my own heart, I'm going to listen and smile and make my own sun rising up through this lovely day.

May 26, 2012

A half and half morning, half of me want to go back to bed, half of me wants to start now and just do stuff, stuff I have been putting off or stuff I have been wanting to do.  I match the outside, half cloudy, half sunny, half something in between.  Yeah I know . . . too many halves but it really depends on the way you mark the halves, so many ways that there are always more halves than you suspect.  Ladies are out running with their dogs this morning, in neon shorts and white tank tops, dogs, big ones, black and golden brown, just trotting along side, looking at everything.  The cat sped through the yard and up close to the house, then it disappeared down the driveway.

The cane is winning again!  There is a whole forest of little white sprouts, some a foot tall now, lavish and lush growing where Honey had cleared it all out.  It's just amazing stuff, and I am sure y'all are tired of hearing about it but, it's just such a vote for continuing in the face of adversity, of thriving in spite of everything, of the persistence of life that I can't resist it.   Down on Toddville every year someone cuts a whole huge square of that cane down to the ground, and in a month its six feet tall again and turning green.  By the end of summer it looks just as thick and lively as ever.

This morning a poem about . . . poetry, well, and other things.  There are all kinds of silences, even as noisy as our lives are, so many devices with so many sounds, there are times when we have silence inside and out.

Silences
for Elizabeth

1
Poetry is a weapon, and should be used,
though not in the crudity of violence.
It is a prayer before an unknown altar,
a spell to bless the silence.

2
There is a music beyond all this,
beyond all forms of grievance,
where anger lays its muzzle down
into the lap of silence.

3
Or some butterfly script,
fathomed only by the other,
as supple fingers draw
a silent message from the tangible.

John Montague

Poetry as prayer at an unknown altar; a lot of poems seem like that, wanting to send a prayer into the world, a prayer for the noticing of things, for what is in our hearts, and questions in our minds.  So much anger in the world, most headlines scream with it, and for this few days, when I have not been listening to the news, the silence of ignorance has been a blessing, though I know that all that rage and fear and anger is not lying its muzzle in the lap of silence, I am having an indulgence of silence.  Every poem, someone is writing script that the poet and reader share, the messages are between the lines and in the connections, and the poet is someone who starts the connection but neither the poet nor the reader know where it will go, or what meaning will arrive, even after years, new things will be discovered in a poem because a new reader is reading it, you bring new vision to it, a re-vision of it.

Every moment this morning has been a sort of reading between the lines, lines of cloud and sun, of shadow and deeper shadow.  Between the notes of mockingbird and mourning dove there is silence, "the beauty of innuendoes" and in that silence what I hear are my own thoughts pulsing, and then outside the rhythm of cicadas.

May 25, 2012

Last day of school for this year, everything done and finished, left early to make final copies and take next year's first class's supplies to be stored at school!  Hooray!  Purchase orders all done, grades turned in, surprises for the girls, and final farewells.  That was the most fun class I have ever done, though tons of work and kind of scary to start with.  All the girl's were talking about how much time they would have over the summer to do beading, several were already thinking of things they could make to sell at their churches and in their neighborhoods.  I was glad to see them so excited, and pleased that they enjoyed it enough to continue to do it.

There were all kinds of birds out when I left this morning, mourning doves, and cardinals predominated.  I don't know where all the morning doves are coming from, as I usually don't see so many.  You might hear them but I have certainly seen a bunch this week.  We always have cardinals and blue jays, and little wrens or sparrows, but mourning doves and the big woodpeckers, and the egrets both tall and small are more rare. 

It's Friday of a holiday weekend, and because I was hurrying around yesterday and this morning doing all the final stuff, I thought about how full my head was of bits and pieces of things I need to do and things I want to do and so on.  So here is an end of the week poem if I have ever read one.  Actually, of all the people I send this note to, I am sure Mikayla will laugh the hardest and understand it the most!!

There are Days    
     for Lawrence Sullivan

There are days when
one should be able
to pluck off one's head
like a dented or worn
helmet, straight from
the nape and collarbone
(those crackling branches!)

and place it firmly down
in the bed of a flowing stream.
Clear, clean, chill currents
coursing and spuming through
the sour and stale compartments
of the brain, dimmed eardrums,
bleared eyesockets, filmed tongue.

And then set it back again
on the base of the shoulders:
well tamped down, of course,
the laved skin and mouth,
the marble of the eyes
rinsed and ready
for love; for prophecy?

John Montague

Yes, I think there have been a lot of times in my life when that would have been such a welcome skill to have, just clear everything out to the walls, empty the brain, refresh everything, and see the world with new eyes, and be read for anything that would come from all that scouring and cleaning things out!

So there it is for the end of the week and for me the end of one more year of classes.  I did not realize how long I have been doing this. since 1997 I think, or !996, and how much I look forward to doing it again next year.  Hope you have a lovely Friday and that there were be joys both great and small to brighten the end of your week, and that a long weekend will find you having fun in good company!

May 24, 2012

Overcast and getting deeper, gray blooming up and erasing the pale and paler blue.  This morning the air swings between breezes, still then movement, over and over.  The yard the same shade of shadow, everything darker, even the cane subdued.  The heron statue dark as thunder, evenly sounded.  A flash between clouds lights up the yard for a minute, sunlight so clear by contrast, and bright enough to make you squint, then it vanishes, back to shadow.  A morning unsettled . . .

A Light Breather

The spirit moves,
Yet stays:
Stirs as a blossom stirs,
Still wet from its bud-sheath,
Slowly unfolding,
Turning in the light with its tendrils;
Plays as a minnow plays,
Tethered to a limp weed, swinging
Tail around, nosing in and out of the current,
Its shadows loose, a watery finger;
Moves, like the snail,
Still inward,
Taking and embracing its surroundings,
Never wishing itself away,
Unafraid of what it is,
A music in a hood,
A small thing,
Singing.

Theodore Roethke 

A hummingbird has been coming to the water bowl, never resting on the edge, just dipping its long beak in and flying away.  The water level has dropped until the bird disappears into the bowl, then rises up, a gray blur that hangs a moment, then vanishes.  So many experiences are momentary, perhaps that is why we try to capture them, try to keep them just a little longer, the bird's whir of wings, the early song of mockingbird, the in and out of sunlight in the yard, the pair of cardinals swooping down and landing together on a slender branch that bends alarmingly under their weight, the sound of cicadas chirring in their uneven rhythm, the distant roar of jets fading away, leaving a momentary silence.   All for a moment, all the small things singing, or turning in the light, or unfolding right before my eyes.  And for a moment, when the sunlight bursts again into the back yard for that instant of brightness, I know what that poet meant . . .I'm a light breather!

May 23, 2012

A late start, school this morning, and then before I though of it, starting to grade their final exams, and now I need a break and a poem.  It's summer outside, hot and sticky and blindingly bright!  There is only one part of that I don't like . . . sticky!  The heat in the car when I got out of class just soaked into my bones and was the first time I really felt warm since last summer <smile>!  Nobody seems to understand that the real heat in a closed up car really does feel like it's soaking down through the skin to warm up your bones.  I have never minded the heat but sometimes our humidity can be very oppressive, like trying to breathe soup, the air tends to move sluggishly in and out of your lungs, and your skin seems to condense water out of the air, leaving your clothes sticking to that dampness.  This is the time of year I miss the desert most, when it's just beginning to get hot.  There the heat is so different that sometimes you have a hard time imagining it's from the same source.

There were a dozen mourning doves on the driveway as I left this morning, usually I only see one, maybe two.  This morning the driveway was awash with cooing that sounds like a little owl, a sad little owl at that.  They all flew up in a gray cloud when I started the car and vanished in seconds. 

Today, longing for the desert, I'm going to send a poem I wrote while living there.  Kind of like a way to both acknowledge the longing and ease it a little. 

Desert

There is something
about the land
I cannot condense
and pour into your ear
or lay at your feet.

Sometimes the air
blooms up the mountainside
like fine white flour.

A raven's stellar eye
stalks the fractured earth
for an absence of motion.

Wind waves of sand
crash against the glass
howling at separation.

Seldom rains
clatter down on plants
living a stone's life.

There is something other
and the other
cannot be named,
but can be felt
through the skin
like the slow numb
blade of a knife.

All those desert things seem so alien here, where we are surrounded by so much green and water in every form, creek, bayou, bay, gulf.  Rainfall here would be a deluge in the desert, though we verge on drought, the desert never lives expecting rain, it celebrates when it arrives and then lets it go.  Things bloom in an instant, even small shrimp in Death Valley suddenly come out of . . . hiding and flourish briefly in the shallow brackish puddles.  A few days after a rain, there is green in so many unexpected places, and in the spring carpets of flowers, or arbors of tiny fragrant pink roses in the canyons.  Still, here it's hard to imagine this country as dangerous, though it certainly has its share, but when you live in the desert, you know it can kill you, you understand that on some fundamental level you never forget or fail to recognize.   One year in the desert, it did not rain the entire year, and yes, that was not normal, but things went on pretty much as they always had; here an entire year without rain, which I don't think has ever happened, and it's catastrophe, things die all over, lakes dry up, and houses crack, and that happens when there is still rain, just not as much as we are used to.   Both places are home to a variety of people and creatures who live there.  Here, life is perhaps easier, perhaps more gentle. but not any more beautiful, just a different kind of beauty in both places, both under the same sky, both at the mercy of circumstances, weather, and civilization.  Both feel like home to me.

May 22, 2012

A strong breeze is coming from the west this morning, everything moving especially the cane.  The clouds have dissolved into sheer white over the blue, making the sunlight softer.  The yard is quiet, no manic mockingbirds this morning, just a lot of shadows and and some smaller birds cheeping in the crepe myrtle.  Perhaps all the other birds have found mates by now and are quietly nesting. 

Some days don't start with a smile and something in the very air makes you feel jumpy and cross.  Whatever it is, I have no patience this morning.  I'm going directly to find a poem and see if that won't make a difference.
 
Mind Wanting More

Only a beige slat of sun
above the horizon, like a shade pulled
not quite down.  Otherwise,
clouds.  Sea rippled here and
there.  Birds reluctant to fly.
The mind wants a shaft of sun to
stir the grey porridge of clouds,
an osprey to stitch sea to sky
with its barred wings, some dramatic
music: a symphony, perhaps
a Chinese gong. 

But the mind always
wants more than it has --
one more bright day of sun,
one more clear night in bed
with the moon; one more hour
to get the words right; one
more chance for the heart in hiding
to emerge from its thicket
in dried grasses -- as if this quiet day
with its tentative light weren't enough,
as if joy weren't strewn all around. 

Holly Hughes 

It does seem this morning that my mind wants more of something, I just wish I knew what it was, something dramatic would be good, or one more hour to come up with some better words, or perhaps the egret to come back and bring its white peace into the morning.  I don't know, some days are just restless and aching for something that I can't even identify.  Some days the cicada's sound is not a pleasant background to the heat of the day, but an annoying buzz kind of like one cricket that gets in and sings its one-note song loudly and for hours in the dead of night.   Even my eternal fascination with how fast the cane grows this morning finds nothing but uneasiness in that, as if its constant search for territory is something dreadful.

All right, there are enough joys strewn around to make a difference.  It is sunny, not raining or gloomy, there are small birds out there making the rounds of their day.  The cat is lying in the sun, without a care in the world, warm and sleepy.  People are still going to work, all the school buses have gone now with their loads of restless kids here near the end of school.  Mikayla will be home today and we are going out, out to errands, and to the craft store, just out!  Perhaps we will go by the nursery and get a new bird bowl!  The day will go on with it's unnerving out-of-sortness and joys will be discovered and even things out <chuckle>  Well, I can hope, yes? <grin>

May 21 2012

 You can tell it's close to our summer, the days grow humid and hot, everything is bathed in sunlight, the clouds line up for a chance at afternoon showers, and the flowers have mostly all bloomed by now, and the green has matured.  The birds have been . . . squirrelly lately, probably the last few males wanting to hitch up to one of the last available females, and the desperation making them short tempered and squally.  Until late afternoon there is a lot of shade on the ground and sun in the tops of trees, only after noon does the light start creeping over the thinning grass.

This is the last week of school and I am finishing up making the ring pattern for Friday.  I had promised them something fun to do on the last day and the way this ring is turning out it's bound to appeal to them, I hope <smile>.   They have been a good class as a whole and some of them have really blossomed and experimented with the patterns and stitches.  I can't wait to see their final exams, two bracelets they had to make from a pattern they altered.  They could not make it the way it was written, so basically they had to figure out two new patterns using different shapes and sizes of beads and create their own clasps.  It should be great to see what they come up with. 

And, I got the best compliments this morning, something I overheard as I was going around looking at what they were doing.  One of the eight grade girls was talking about how she would miss mini-courses next year in the ninth grade.  She told her friend before she started taking mini-courses she had to have a rubric, a step by step plan of what was expected and how it would be graded, but the mini courses taught her to make her own plan and do her own evaluation.  And she said she was glad the parents had so little say in what mini courses contained, or which ones they took because some of the mini courses she took that her parents thought were a waste of time, like beading, taught her the most about how do figure things out for herself.  I had to restrain myself from going over there and giving her a great big hug for just about making my whole entire nine weeks, but I try not to react to things they are discussing among themselves, unless they invite me into the conversation, and I was not at her table.  But I felt like maybe all this work was worth something if even one of the girls got that much out of this course!  Hooray! <chuckle>

 from "Tweets"

White gull glissando
& minor cormorant notes
Wild keyboard

Turkey vulture floats above
The littered highway
Waste management

Marie Harris

When I was out this morning, I almost ran into a flock of turkey vultures, having a breakfast of armadillo around the corner down the street from us, a blind corner.  When I drove round it, three or four vultures suddenly flapped up barely skimming the windshield and one just hopped over to the other lane.  These were all black, and the skin of the armadillo gleamed oily silver in the sun.  It scared me so bad I was still shaking when I got to the corner to make the turn on Toddville.  They are huge black apparitions that you know are around, that you see on telephone poles and street lights, in dead trees and, like this morning, on the road.  Lately, they seem to be more reluctant to move, even if they see you coming, but this morning the surprise was on both sides, a moment frozen in a heartbeat and then over, danger averted, and I could see them settle down again at their meal before I got to the end of the road.  This haiku recalled their purpose, waste management, and they were doin' a fine job of it!

At the library, where I went to discuss this month's book, you could see sea gulls in the air above the bay, like white strokes of ink on the blue paper sky.  They sure do make a racket when there are a bunch of them together.  They are as loud and abrasive in their own way as the crows are some mornings, the black and white of rough voices.

The clouds are still lining up and up, perhaps they will condense to rain, but I think maybe the sun will win this round, too much blue, too much light

May 20, 2012

This morning there is no pleasant singing to wake to, for some reason the mockingbirds have decided to be angry birds this morning, about six of them in the yard all making almost the same demented sound as angry squirrels.  They are driving the cat crazy, the striped one too chubby to really be able to chase them, but he has been launching himself half way up the crepe myrtle just to get close.  He drops down on the canoe with a thud like a 50 pound sack of cement.  I don't know what is making the mockingbirds so cantankerous, they are chasing each other through the trees and sitting there on different branches just making that horrible hissing, or the loud rusty door noises.  The flashes of their white barred wings are opening and closing through the leaves like fans of ladies annoyed by too much sun, and not enough air.   I am at a loss to even begin to know why there are so many out there this morning, and why they are so riled up!

It's Sunday, and the day for the blessing, and this morning I'd like to find a nice peaceful one to counteract the battleground of the back yard.

When the Holy Thaws

A woman's body, like the earth, has seasons;
when the mountain stream flows,
when the holy
thaws,

when I am most fragile and in need,
it was then, it seemed,
God came
closest.

God, like a medic on a field, is tending our souls.
Our horns get locked with desires, but don't hold yourself
too accountable; for all desires are
really innocent.  That is what
the compassion in His
eyes tell me.

Why this great war between the countries -- the countries --
inside of us?

What are all these insane borders we protect?
What are all these different names for the same church of love
we kneel in together?   For it is true, together we live; and only
at that shrine where all are welcome will God sing
loud enough to be heard.

Our horns got locked with the earth and sky in some odd
marriage ritual; so what, don't worry.  We should be proud of
ourselves for everything we helped create in this
magic world.

And God is always there, if you feel wounded.  He kneels
over this earth like
a divine medic,

and His love thaws
the holy in us.

St. Teresa of Avila

For all the times when I feel vulnerable and fragile, I'm glad there is someone out there stronger to lean on.  The idea that all desires are innocent is an unusual one, that what we want is part of the world, part of who we are, that there is compassion somewhere for those needs, those desires.  It's the inclusion I like about this poem.  I would like to write on a wall somewhere, hundreds of feet high so thousands would see and notice: Only at that shrine where ALL are welcome will God sing loud enough to be heard.  There is something sad about all those countries inside us and the borders we impose on ourselves and everyone else, making the world narrower, making people strangers to us when we are all so much the same thing, so much in need of the love that thaws the holy in us.  How can there be so much anger between all the people who love God?   How can there be room for all that anger, all that making of borders to divide us, if we are having the love of God and for God in our lives?  The idea or perhaps the ideal of love sometimes sounds so much like a cliche, watered down and made into some weak tea that has nothing to offer.  But real love is not weak, it's harder than almost any other choice, and choosing it over everything else can be a choice that takes years to finally be able to accept.  Love takes work, and a lot of knowing, and a lot of courage most of the time.  Thinking of loving like God, thinking of God in everyone, all of us, even the people we don't understand, who are not like us, who believe strange things and do things we cannot believe in, even they are like God, made in the image of the creator.  And that image is just that, an image, even the bible says you cannot know the true God, no image, no thought we have can contain the whole, so we think of the parts we can understand, we think of the parts we can relate to, the human parts, the parts our mind can touch, and so we all think of different parts, because we come to understanding in different ways.  There is no wrong way to love.  Sometimes in our terror or despair or fatigue we want an answer, the answer, so we can rest in that belief, and for those times there is that answer, the same answer for everyone dressed up in clothes they can wear and go on living, sometimes we take that answer and make of it a crusade, when all that is wanted is that we just accept the love and share it.

For today I wish the mockingbirds more love, perhaps they will go back to singing.  The birds and the cat and the squirrels all living the lives they were created to live and so am I, with all my desires and with the love I understand, sometimes even with the love I don't understand but just keep on loving.  The sunlight is beginning to fill up the edges of the yard, the light clear and bright.  A Sunday morning full of that light, people I love, and a lot of noisy birds!

May 19, 2012

Two squirrels are having a tussle this morning, almost before it's light, the yellow only reaching just past the horizon.  One chased the other down the trunk of the maple and across the yard and up the chaste tree then they both leaped down to the ground and started wrestling, flipping over and over in the grass, chittering and hissing and generally sounding irate and nasty.  After a few moments of this they sprung apart, like magnets and just sat staring at each other across two feet of air, not making a sound.  I watched to see what would happen, and I'm not sure what would have happened between them but the striped cat showed up at the edge of the driveway and the squirrels leaped up in the air, and vanished up separate trees, one shooting up the maple tree and out of sight, the other flowed up the crepe myrtle and after a moment I could hear it running along the edge of the roof, then nothing.  The cat sat down in the middle of the yard and groomed his shoulders, his tail, long and fluffy, twitching against the grass.  Then he came over and curled up on the canoe and it looks like he's taking a nap, or perhaps just reinforcing his claim to the space.  The squirrels have vanished and the light is just beginning to be bright enough to make stripes of shine on the top of the cane and on the curve in the road.

Sometimes watching something like the squirrels, I wonder what they are thinking, if we would look as foolish or as mysterious to outsiders, to aliens even, as those squirrels did to me.  I have no idea what moves them, why they are rolling around the grass in the dawn light, or why the cat suddenly turns up much earlier than usual just in time to move them hastily into trees.   It's no surprise to me cats are a mystery, but it seems kind of like squirrels should be an open book, but they're not.  Even the smallest bird's life is too mysterious to fathom.  So, this morning a poem about mystery, about seeing something familiar from a new perspective, known but alien.

Science Fiction

Here, said the spirit,
is the Diamond Planet.
Shall I change you into a diamond?
No?  Then let us proceed
to the Red Planet,
desert star,
rocks too young to know
lichens.  There's plenty
of room.  Stay as long
as you like.  You don't like?
Then let us go forth to
the Planet of Mists,
the veiled bride,
the pleasures of losing and finding,
the refinement of symbols.
She's all yours.

I see you looking at that blue planet.
It's mostly water.
The land's crowded with
creatures.  You have mists
but they rain, diamonds
but they cost.  You have
only one moon.
You have camels and babies and cigars
but everything grows up
or wears out.
And on clear nights
you have the stars
without having them.

Nancy Willard 

How would you describe the earth?  The blue planet, and so much more, a little of everything from other planets, deserts, oceans, mountains, canyons, but here it's babies and camels and cigars, too.  And the stars are out there, and from the looks of things lately, likely to remain so, out there beyond our reach, visited only in poems and stories.  A vast cosmos of mysteries that we will explore from out back yard, though telescope and imagination.  It's a good thing we have so much imagination, is it not?

Yes, they grow up, and things wear out.  We have rain and diamonds are costly and there is only one moon, but it's moon enough for me.  I would only be distracted by more than one, it would dilute something of the wonder of it, I think.  I like the rain, and don't even own a diamond, though I have a moonstone that captures the clear blue of a summer sky with its white translucent clouds.  I am content with what is here, and not likely to want more world than I have.

Where else can you see a pair of mockingbirds conspire to annoy the cat by dive-bombing his head and then sit in the tree and make fun of it in song?  Or this morning's squirrels, or such light as slowly climbs down the trees as the sun climbs up?  I'll keep my little world and cherish it.

May 18, 2012

Some mornings start with a bang some with a whimper, this morning it was two very different birds, the mockingbird right outside in the holly bush and an egret just passing through.  The mockingbird decided to start singing while it was still pitch black dark, the clock said 4:17 and he kept it up, the same series of songs over and over until I got up at 5:30.  I think as I sat down here to start this note, he moved around to the back yard and started singing again, mostly cardinal songs with occasional mourning dove, and the added spice of blue jay.  The egret flew in between the trees to land just under the maple and begin a careful inspection of the grass between the trees: not one of the cattle egrets but one of the taller common egrets, with a wing span of maybe four feet or so.  After a little bit, it moved elegantly down the driveway and out into the quiet street, its head bobbing with its long stride and occasionally looking left or right.  Then it vanished past the shed and the yard seemed a lot emptier than it had been only moments before.  Still, the mockingbird is out there, singing, and the bird that calls "cheater, cheater, cheater" is too.  It could be that one is another mockingbird and they are having a duel.

For light and the white wings of the egret . . .

From "The Hours of Darkness"

it is the light
that appears to change and be many
to be today
to flutter as leaves
to recognize the rings of trees
to come again
one of the stars is from
the day of the cowrie
one is from a time in the garden
we see the youth of the light
in all its ages
we see it as bright
points of animals
made long ago out of night

how small the day is
the time of colors
the rush of brightness

W. S. Merwin

That egret was like a star, like a constellation of brightness in the shadowed morning under the trees with their silent rings.  Its presence made the day seem wider, more open, white riding its wings like the shine of those stars in the night.  I suppose if you live where the night sky is full of the depth of stars that the day might seem smaller, but here, lit up by so many artificial stars, and usually clouded, the night sky is a lid you could sometimes reach out and touch.  It takes the shining of birds in the daylight to raise it up and make it more distant.

May 17, 2012

A long slow fall toward light this morning, so slow it seemed undecided whether to enter or just go on dozing at the horizon.  Finally, a burnished orange fading fast to yellow climbing up and up to meet the pale blue, and daylight arrives, with the sweet sound of mourning doves and mockingbirds, awake and filling the trees with song and the flutter of wings.

Yesterday I skipped the post because of school and then I went to the Library for the Men's Book Group, and, yes, I did say Men's.  First there was only one book group at the library, but the men found they did not so much enjoy the books that were selected for reading.  I rather think they were too full of . . . women's stuff, so they formed their own book group to read . . . other things.  What they read for this month appealed to me and so the librarian, when asked, said anyone could come to the Men's Book Group if they read the book and wanted to talk about it.

So, I went, and we talked about The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester.  I have always been fascinated by dictionaries, any kind, and I own quite a few of them, including the compact edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, awkward to use, but full of such an abundance of weird and wonderful words.  Winchester's book is about the creating of the OED and the contribution made by a madman, an American Army officer incarcerated in an asylum for the criminally insane.  When I started reading, I expected more about the construction of the dictionary, but the story was actually more about Dr. Minor, the army officer, and Professor Murray, the editor of the OED.   Most of the discussion centered on the madman, his life and how he was viewed by the society of that time, and his contribution in the form of tens of thousands of entry slips bearing sentences from various sources used to help define the range of meanings for the words included in the dictionary.  I had not realized that much of the dictionary work had been done by volunteers, from all walks of life, who read books and pulled out sentences to be used, and sent them by post to Oxford.   The organization of a task like that, hundreds of thousands of words defined and illustrated in all their shades of meaning, would take a genius and a very persistent and meticulous person, which Professor Murray evidently was, yet Dr. Minor, for all his paranoia, which had caused him to shoot an innocent man. was very similar, if mostly in the daylight hours to the professor and they became great friends, as much as they were able.   It was a book that seemed to acknowledge that even in the most constrained circumstances, people are able to contribute to something meaningful, to make of their lives something more than those circumstances.  For June, they are reading The Perfect Storm . . . perhaps I will continue to attend if they continue to read books that appeal to me <smile>

For today, a dictionary poem, in honor of the OED, and it's impact on the history of one of the world's most influential languages . . .

Sleeping with the Dictionary

I beg to dicker with my silver-tongued companion, whose lips are ready to read my shining gloss. A versatile partner, conversant and well-versed in the verbal art, the dictionary is not averse to the solitary habits of the curiously wide-awake reader. In the dark night’s insomnia, the book is a stimulating sedative, awakening my tired imagination to the hypnagogic trance of language. Retiring to the canopy of the bedroom, turning on the bedside light, taking the big dictionary to bed, clutching the unabridged bulk, heavy with the weight of all the meanings between these covers, smoothing the thin sheets, thick with accented syllables—all are exercises in the conscious regimen of dreamers, who toss words on their tongues while turning illuminated pages. To go through all these motions and procedures, groping in the dark for an alluring word, is the poet’s nocturnal mission. Aroused by myriad possibilities, we try out the most perverse positions in the practice of our nightly act, the penetration of the denotative body of the work. Any exit from the logic of language might be an entry in a symptomatic dictionary. The alphabetical order of this ample block of knowledge might render a dense lexicon of lucid hallucinations. Beside the bed, a pad lies open to record the meandering of migratory words. In the rapid eye movement of the poet’s night vision, this dictum can be decoded, like the secret acrostic of a lover’s name.

Harryette Mullen

I have spent nights like that, reading the dictionary, especially when I first got the OED because it was so full of words I never heard of before.  Like armozeen, the black silk used to make cassocks and mourning garments, which I stumbled across while I was looking for something else and turned into the name of a dark elf character for a game I play, it was perfect for her, dark silk and mourning, or the cause of mourning <smile>, mysterious and arcane as the word itself.  This poem cross-pollinates the almost erotic allure of words and their possibilities, with actual erotic, making me recall the idea that the mind is the most essential organ for sex, without its imagination actual sex would be reduced to the mechanical.  All the sly allusions in this poem make me chuckle and realize that to write this poem the poet had to have made that particular connection with words when she started writing, and then she just had fun seeing how far she could stretch it, which was pretty much just about as far as she could.  The poem made me realize that I was not alone getting . . . lost in the dictionary!

The sun has risen far enough now to light most of the back yard, the shadows there are tinged with bright edges.  The birds still out there singing and excited, bouncing from one tree to another.  They sound like the kids let out of class  all noise and cheer bursting with energy!  Some mornings I fall into the sin of envy for all that energy!

May 15, 2012

It started out with light this morning, the still blue light of dawn, then sun, now deepening clouds and gray, and a late start.  The birds are so noisy this morning; they've all been through the yard at one time or another, cardinals, mourning doves, blue jays, sparrows, and wrens.  The cardinals hav been happy for days, perhaps an abundance of lady cardinals.  One of the ladies came right up to the window and looked in the other morning, clinging to the screen, her bright black eyes full of curiosity, her smooth feathers that peculiar gray with a lot of orange in it, feathers that look like shiny satin in the sun.  Her sharp claws caught the screen making a peculiar sound and she moved several times plucking the screen like some strange musical instrument before flying off.

It's odd, when there is sun, there are spots of bright sun and even deeper shade, but when there are a lot of clouds smoothed out over the sky, the yard is in nearly uniform shadow, with only deep spots under the shed or the truck.  Everything darker but a smooth dark, and I had not noticed before that you can see further into the cane when the yard is in the clouded shadow, almost as if there were more light rather than less.  The wind that has sprung up is fitful, sometimes dying down to stillness, sometimes making the chimes swing and glint with a flat tinny ping.  

Usually when it's cloudy like this there are no bees to be seen, yet this morning, I have seen them coming and going to the last of the ligustrum, or just flying past the window where there hum is to soft too be heard.  I know they like the honeysuckle by the back fence and this morning I can see a . . . flock of butterflies, white and fluttery, like snippets of paper caught in a breeze, rising up from the yellowed blooms.  Every time you go out the back door you can hear the loud zumming drone of carpenter bees, who seem to like to make holes under the eaves by the garage door, their heavy black bodies flying in tight circles or whizzing past your face.  So many little lives we seldom notice, like the chorus of frogs Mother's Day night when we came back from the restaurant, they were so loud, so varied, from ones that sounded like birds chirping to the basso of the bigger frogs croaking in the deeper water of the ditch that runs down to the bayou, dozens of them grateful for the rain we had and singing about it.

I think that bees and butterflies must be common enough for everyone to notice them sometimes . . .

Without Compare

These leavened bees,
        
            this world
hung in concert between, from stem
to hive, each hum touched

         with sibling sadness,
tethered
         to a diminishing life, bid

to and from.

Worn, the shantung
         of them: breathless forms
shuttling through sunlight,

glistening
         between bud and home.
        
         How loyally they hold their vigil,
 speechless as heirs
        
         pacing a marbled hall,
                   weighing the falling

pulse of the monarch.

Paula Bohince
 
This morning there isn't even sunlight, just bees going to and from their marbled halls, and the tiny white butterflies making their own clouds above the honeysuckle.   Something about this poem catches the heart in surprise, like the silence of ordinary things that change after someone you love dies, that moment when you realize the change is permanent and cannot be overcome by will, only by acceptance.  The drone of bees speaks the daily work of the world that goes on, even after that silence, taking all that they travel through from bud to home and changing it to music and honey.

May 14, 2012

A gorgeous morning, mostly sunny and blue, no wind, no rain, everything green and fresh and bright!  A cardinal out there has been singing since I got home, even the leaf blower did not chase him off, and a host of small birds chattering flew up and settled back down again.  The back yard is like a cavern of green, sun only at the edges because there are so many leaves on the trees now. 

My students turned in their beading project, brick stitch amulet bags, and there are some outstanding designs and some interesting combinations of colors, which is half, well, more than half the fun of doing this kind of class.  These girls once they understand the basic pattern are always looking for something different to do with it.  Starting Friday, that will be their final exam, to take a simple pattern and make two more complicated variations of it, change the bead size or type, vary the width of the pattern or make a pattern of their own using the type of work, mostly a modified chevron stitch.  I will be interested to see if anyone makes the correlation and devolves the pattern back to the original chevron, that would be a real surprise to them and to me!  I can't wait to see what I get for this project, it will tell me if they understand how different parts of the design relater to each other and how to use units of the pattern to make the elements their own.  We only have two more weeks of school, then they will be out for the summer.

This morning's poem is about language . . .

Words    

The world does not need words. It articulates itself

in sunlight, leaves, and shadows. The stones on the path

are no less real for lying uncatalogued and uncounted.

The fluent leaves speak only the dialect of pure being.

The kiss is still fully itself though no words were spoken.

And one word transforms it into something less or other--

illicit, chaste, perfunctory, conjugal, covert.

Even calling it a kiss betrays the fluster of hands

glancing the skin or gripping a shoulder, the slow

arching of neck or knee, the silent touching of tongues.

Yet the stones remain less real to those who cannot

name them, or read the mute syllables graven in silica.

To see a red stone is less than seeing it as jasper--

metamorphic quartz, cousin to the flint the Kiowa

carved as arrowheads. To name is to know and remember.

The sunlight needs no praise piercing the rainclouds,

painting the rocks and leaves with light, then dissolving

each lucent droplet back into the clouds that engendered it.

The daylight needs no praise, and so we praise it always--

greater than ourselves and all the airy words we summon.

Dana Gioia 

I don't know if things are less real because they have no names, or because we don't know them; however, I do know I get pleasure out of naming things, and knowing the names.  Somethings don't need names, all the varieties of sunlight and shadow in the back yard, there are not names for those, not names but perhaps words.  I don't know if stones are less real to those who don't know the names of granite, or jasper, or obsidian or agate, but the pleasure I get from recognizing what the rocks are called is real enough.  The sunlight might need no praise but, yep, I praise it often, as paints everything brighter colors, more vivid, more . . . noticeable, lifts my spirits and makes me smile.  It's interesting to know there are all kinds of names for clouds, but a lot fewer for the light.  Perhaps the light, being so pervasive cannot be defined the same way cloud structures can, that light is too fluid to be contained by our . . . airy words.

May 13, 2012

Sunday and Mother's Day and time for the blessing . . .

It's a beautiful day here, cool and breezy, fresh as only spring can be, the bay sparkling in its arms of shore, the sky blue and white and ever-changing.  So many birds are out after all the rain, even the seagulls seem to be noisy this morning, and earlier, my favorite, the crows were out as well, though I couldn't see them, I could hear them discussing this lovely morning.  It's a day to realize how blessed you are and to be grateful for those blessings.

Several years ago I wrote a Mother's Day poem because I could not find one I liked, and I find I still like it, so for today this blessing . . .

A Blessing for Mothers

Bless hands that hold us

Support and strengthen

So we might be strong

Bless words that comfort

Over and over when

There is no help for pain

Bless time that gives us

A measure of who we are

Of who we might become

Bless answers to questions

For which there were answers

And for those that had none

Bless work we noticed and

Work we did not  all work

Daily and continuing

Bless joys as simple as

Sun and sand and those

Still being completed

Bless letting us go and go

When all you wanted was

To keep us and keep us safe

You can't solve all the problems or answer all the questions, you can't hold on when they need to go, you just have to do what you can, and hope.   The easiest part is all the joy, even answering ten thousand questions, taking them to the tide pools, or early morning bird watching for science fair.  The hardest parts are when there is pain and not much you can do, or when they need to go and you have to let them, over and over.  Still there is not anything I would trade for the experience of having each of our kids, whether I gave birth to them, or they just became part of our family.  So today I am grateful for all the kids that call me Mom, for all the children that have been part of our lives and for the fact that our lives embrace and we all continue to grow.

May 12, 2012

This is like a rerun of Thursday night, only more explosive!  The thunder last night sounded like I imagine artillery shells might sound, sudden, hugely loud, the sound battering the ground, following the charged air.  When it was right overhead, all you could do was wait for it to move over and let in some quiet, but it did not seem inclined to do that.  At the moment, we are in an empty space, a break in the action, storms south of us and storms north of us, and nothing over us for a few minutes, but more storm coming.  I'm amazed the mockingbird has found heart to sing, but it is out there a symphony in one throat, singing in the brief respite from the rain.  A very brief respite . . . and now the thunder has changed to the dwarf bowling thunder, where the ball rolls down the alley forever and finally falls off the lane.  At least it is not quite so nerve wracking as the artillery thunder.

The sky has that green tinge that strong storms bring, but this storm is pecularly windless, except for movement by the force of the rain, there seems to be no wind, and no sunlight, just a slow fading of dark that arrested at the nearly light stage, clouds still thick, and vibrating with sound.  There have been no cars and no people out, everyone hunkering down and waiting the end of the rain.

All night thunder
slipped though the split air
and widened the gap
shoving through the shoulders
of cloud seen only by accident
of an instant of light

All night the ear
cringed and the body
wakened over and over
to the force of sound
beating at the door
the roof and every window

All night rain
made its own thunder
falling through turbulence
gathering speed until it
could go no faster
then striking

All night everything
struck and resounding
with the violence
making its own cry
in the lacuna of dawn
the mockingbird sang

The thunder is reduced to grumbling, muttering farther and farther away, the rain reduced as well, just making a soft tattoo on the overturned canoe, dripping off trees, a sprinkle not a cataract.  The mocking bird is out here pretending to be a cardinal just now, and in the background the last of the thunder finally falling silent.  Yet the heart does not believe, nor the ear straining against that silence . . .