August 31, 2012

For several nights now I have been watching the saga of the geckos, little, mostly green, with splayed feet and long tails.   Since they are climbing on the screen I see their undersides, a rather pale mixture of buff and green.  First there was only one, a nice long fat one, coming to the window because the light is on and all kinds of bugs are drawn to it.  He wanders around eating his fill of whatever is small enough for him to eat.  Then, he, the generic he, was joined by another one, not quite as fat, perhaps looking to cash in on this trove of edible treasures.  Last night there were four of them, three larger ones and one very tiny one that moved really fast and tried to stay out of the way of the others.  They all slithered, skittered, plucked the screen and made it thrum, and generally had what appeared to be a great time.  Tonight I am waiting to see if there will be more, word must be spreading through the gecko population about the Crowson smorgasbord!

Going Out To The Garden

Going out to the garden

this morning

to plant seeds

for my winter greens

-the strong, fiery mustard

& the milder

broadleaf turnip-

I saw a gecko

who

like the rest of us

has been

reeling

from the heat.

Geckos like heat

I know this

but the heat

these last few days

has been excessive

for us

& for them.

A spray of water

from the hose

touched its skin:

I thought it would

run away.

There are crevices

aplenty

to hide in:

the garden wall

is made of stones.

But no

not only

did the gecko

not run away

it appeared

to raise

its eyes

& head

looking for more.

I gave it.

Squirt after

squirt

of cooling

spray

from the green

garden hose.

Is it the end

of the world?

It seemed to ask.

This bliss,

is it Paradise?

I bathed it

until we were both

washed clean

of the troubles

of this world

at least for this moment:

this moment of pleasure

of gecko

joy

as I with so much happiness

played Goddess

to Gecko.

Alice Walker

Well, I guess by way of the light spilling late into the night from my window I may be a Goddess to Gecko as well. 

Today is the first day of my new class, the Artist Trading Card workshop.  Everything's ready to go and it's time to leave.  Always exciting to meet a new class!!

August 30, 2012

Yesterday the wind visited every tree and blade of grass.  You don't realize how still it is usually until you have a windy day.  The sound of it is like an ocean of air, waves of it brushing over the earth, making of it a musical instrument, the notes made by everything it touches, leaves rubbing together, branches like the flexible bows of the earth's violin.  Wind moves everything differently, the lacy branches of the crepe myrtle shiver and flicker, the heavier leaves of the maple wave, and the stiff dark leaves of the bushes hardly move at all but the long branches bow to the wind's passing.  The most affected are the pines that sway in their own stately dance, their whole trunk at upper reaches bending gracefully, the arms of the branches embracing the wind.  And the cane, a thousand slender dancers tracing the path of each gust, ribbons of green fluttering, graceful bodies bend and coil around each other, an ensemble of graces.

Sometimes while we are just going about our daily business, walking the path, we come on something . . . suddenly green, suddenly joyful!

Green Frog at Roadstead, Wisconsin

It is the way of a pleasant path

To walk through white birch, fir,

And spruce on a limestone trail

Through the quiet, complacent time

Of summer when, suddenly, the frog jumps

And you jump after him, laughing,

Hopping, frog and woman, to show

The stationary world its flat ways.

Love is a Frog, I grin that greenly

To your green eyes and they leap

At me. Up, I will enter the Frog World

With you and try the leaping ways

Of the heart that we do not fail to find

The sunlit air full of leaping chances.

James Schevill

And the wind leaps through the greenly trees, and our little black frogs come out after a rain and make the most incredible sounds, and even the sunlight, leaping up from the horizon to bounce from every surface, brings to our eye all that beauty and does make the air filled with chances, the chance that we can escape from the world's flat ways and go leaping off into the Frog World and discover the leaping ways of the heart!

August 29, 2012

The morning light is late getting started;  the cobalt blue of the dawn before dawn lingers, a rare occurrence.  As I have been looking out this morning, I realize I see more of the inside reflected from the room's brightness on the glass than I do the outside.  You have to really look hard to see what is out there as it is still mostly dark.  The faint orange moon of the streetlight winks in and out of the leaves because of the wind, which comes and goes in bursts.  We may be getting the edges of Isaac, the very ragged, faint edges, still enough to bring us this wind.  The disk chimes are clashing together, but the ones that make music are still quiet in their sheltered spot, only an occasional note escapes their pipes. 
Sometimes when you start looking for a poem, one just falls right into what you were thinking, like opening a door to something that draws you in.

Credo

I believe at the root
in breath as a first
principle. Breath --

the intake, the giving
out -- is our signature
onto the air.

Next I believe
in the business
of seeing and hearing,

the processes of light
and sound whereby
we inhabit the cracks

and corners of the earth --
the guarded scrutiny
of strangers, the ear

cocked in a waiting room.
Incidental revelations,
accidental wisdoms.

As for mortality,
the cricket ticking
in the long grass

is timepiece enough
for me. Wound up
by the sun,

his spring uncoils
at night and
he dreams in black.

But, as a final article
of faith, I believe in
the heartbeat certainty

of two adjacent hands
on the parapet of
a bridge somewhere

touching, finger to finger,
and breath quickening
to mingle, and this

causing the sun to rise
and the moon to wax
and all the tides to run.

Dick Jones

I can believe in some of those things as well, in the breath, and . . . inspiration.  That's what the word means, drawing in the air, breathing in, what you have to do to create, take in the world and breathe out something new.  Seeing and hearing, looking at things that slide by every day, that appear briefly and vanish, or that hang round and become familiar, all those cracks and corners that make up our every day.  I am always fascinated by the processes of light, of how it moves and changes, how it makes its way over all we see, creating color and ease releasing us from the dark.  Here where we are, we have crickets, but over the summer it's the cicadas that mark our days with their sounds, and after days of not hearing any, last night just before sunset, I heard three or four of them in a small, very loud chorus, which did not last long, kind of like the last hurrah of their season.   While I think that the world would go on, sun rise, moon wax, tides run, without love, without the human touch, that touch surely gives the world a lot more meaning to us.  The place where we get our morning hugs, stand smooching in the kitchen, get the hugs that send us off to sleep each night, that is the place we breathe in, that inspires us to go on, to take the world and find it good.

August 28, 2012

The light this morning is all rose gold, sheets as thin as the thought of the whole day laid out before us.  Pale blue creeps in high overhead, as more and more of rose rises up.  A breeze, tossing in its sleep, dies down only to turn the leaves again.  Nothing lasts more than a few moments, breeze, color, cloud are all on the move, already entering the day, making their own moves.  The black dog rushes about, nose to the ground, exploring the morning.  Far off, two crows call and a third answers them.  For this moment, no lawnmower growls, it must be summer's end for them to be absent even one morning.

Mist Valley

At the end of August, when all

The letters of the alphabet are waiting,

You drop a teabag in a cup.

The same few letters making many different words,

The same words meaning different things.

Often you've rearranged them on the surface of the fridge.

Without the surface

They're repulsed by one another.

Here are the letters.

The tea is in your cup.

At the end of August, the mind

Is neither the pokeweed piercing the grass

Nor the grass itself.

As Tony Cook says in The Biology of Terrestrial Mollusks

The right thing to do is nothing, the place

A place of concealment,

And the time as often as possible.

James Longenbach

At the end of August, words and tea, what better way to begin the day?  I smiled because I, too, rearrange words, on my breadbox, my refrigerator being too crowded with other things, and then to think about someone reading a book titled, The Biology of Terrestrial Mollusks . . . and getting from it the right thing to do is nothing, and the time as often as possible.  In this world of busy, perhaps we need more time to do nothing, it fills us up in a way no amount of busy can.  When I was gone, there were times I did nothing, but it was not the same kind of nothing as looking out the window, or writing this morning note.  It was the nothing of waiting, or uncertainty, or exhaustion, not the same thing as this nothing, as listening to crows, or watching the light make beauty in the sky and across the yard.  This is the kind of nothing that is the right thing to do, as often as possible, entering a place of concealment from which to observe the world, sip tea, and invite words into the day. 

August 27, 2012

Another lovely morning . . . if you did not have the news, there would be no way of telling there is a storm in the gulf, not a hurricane yet but perhaps on its way to becoming one.   The sky is a high clear blue with hardly a cloud in it.  No wind, not even a breeze, a perfect day for the first day of school.  Without radar, you could be as surprised as the 1900 residents of Galveston.   Now, we all have advanced warning, and can watch a storm approach.  We think we know where it is going, but we still watch because those storms can be fickle and seem to be able to surprise us still, even while we are watching. 

Hurricane Season

1

Those who have already been destroyed

recognize its signs: the sky

clouds like a glaucous eye,

the wind muscles over whatever

is weak. Waves swell, engorged

with too much of something.

A lashing, a swimming of tongues

through air. Birds disappear.

The smell of ocean in the wrong place,

of something diseased, lost fish.

The sky bellows, darkens, roars

like a drunk.

Those unacquainted with destruction

ask for wind speeds, amount of rainfall,

degree of movement. A plotting,

a computation of the destruction.

2

For some of us, all seasons are hurricane.

The winds gale up, working us like seed,

moving us like desire.

What lies beyond measurement

is all of beauty and terror.

To understand is to evacuate.

Sheryl St. Germain

Yes, we all make ready to evacuate, because you know the storm has no mercy, is incapable of it.  And sometimes beauty and terror lie so close together you know they must share a singular desire.  Think of why some people like storms so much, they would not be a beautiful or compelling if there were not that element of danger.  I was so surprised by the results of Ike, how the trees leafed out in unexpected places after being damaged by the wind.  How birds survived, though some took awhile to come back from wherever they went, even afterward there were mockingbirds, and, of course, the opportunistic mosquitoes from so much standing water.  We watch the storm, massive and white in the satellite pictures, and know it must go somewhere.  You feel uncharitable to wish it away from your particular stretch of shore, but you wish it none the less.  The scientist in us does ask for wind speed and direction, and rainfall measurements, something that will help us understand what ir beyond our control.  Some places need the rain so badly you wish you could send that rain to people who need it, but we all must accept what the world gives, even if sometimes it gives too much of what we thought we wanted.

August 26, 2012

A bright very still morning.  The air is so clear it's like a magnifying glass over the whole yard, each leaf seems to stand out and the jumble of cane seem to separate into all the long drooping leaves edged in light.  All along the bare ground, there are white cane sprouts from all the rain, proof that hope does spring eternal.

Yesterday Neil Armstrong died.  He was 82 and had a life that can be envied by so many people.  He was a quiet man, not much one for making a lot of appearances and hoopla about his accomplishments.  I have never heard anyone say a single negative word about him, not one.  For that alone he could be remembered.  As the first human to step foot on another world, he was the perfect person to have done that, smart, dignified, willing to share but not exploit his feat.  I always admired him and considered him a hero we could all be proud of.  I know there were plenty of people behind that first step, but someone had to take it and I am it was him.  He was a staunch advocate of manned exploration, one of the few things he would speak out in favor of if asked.  Now we have Curiosity on Mars, perhaps someday we will have another hero, maybe someone not ever born yet who will step foot on that red planet and make their own mark, leave their own footprint on the heart of humanity.

It's the day of the blessing, and we were blessed to have such people exploring the universe and bring us back knowledge, creating inventions to make our lives easier, giving us hope and a goal to strive toward.  May we be blessed by that attitude of seeking out frontiers and pushing at boundaries for all our future.

I liked this poem when I found it, and wondered, as the poet must have, what Neil Armstrong thought about the moon after he had been there, not his public proclamations, but in the quiet of seeing it at night from his back yard or driving down the highway and seeing it rise large and luminous over the road.

Neil Armstrong Shoots the Moon

Neil Armstrong on his back deck
gazes up at the blatant moon
the way you might peer at a vacation photo
of Seattle propped on a cluttered
bookcase. Says, “I’ve been there.”  Or

Neil Armstrong shakes his bristled head,
“I’ve been THERE?”  Same
as you, tossed in time, squint at all those
glossed Seattles floating
deep in inner space, far from your daily orbit.

Or even, like Neil, bathed in moondust,
feel the prick of small
skulking knowledge you’ve been there
but don’t know the place
at all beyond a booted step on a crusty shell.

Or Neil says, “You know, I was only first
because I was sitting near
the door,” and you recall a burbling phone
one tea-cozy morn,
all lunatic thereafter, a kettle whistling mad.

Or, if with a little launch of ego Neil says,
“I’VE been there,” you wonder
what kind of “I” it was saw Seattle, and if
you still know that person
you know you badly need to know.

Or, less likely but to be hoped, Neil swivels
a craggy pate
up to the orange-yellow Buddha, feels
implausible rain or tears,
no telling which, kiss his runneled cheek.

Just as you, one ragged half-corked evening,
home in on the moonface
backlit in the bathroom mirror – so like
your father’s, so much
stranger – gravely seeming to say,

“I’ve been watching
you for years. Time you noticed. Who
are you, really, what
is your intention, where have you been
to give off such a light?”

David Cavanagh

This made such a personal connection to me as I used to favor my mother's side of the family but as I age more and more I look like my father.  I wonder if he would ever have asked me who I was really, and if he would have liked the answer, if I could even give him one.  Sometimes I feel like no one knows where they have been to give off such light as their life will give, or where that light will reach, or what will be illuminated by it.  I just know that each morning I am glad to have whatever light is out there, and whatever grace will enter and take up space in my own heart.  Every day a blessing . . .

August 25, 2012

What started out to be a sunny morning is slowly easing into more clouds and a real possibility of rain.  The sky is slowly darkening to deep gray and the wind has begun to shake up the trees.  I can hear the news in the background saying a small storm cell is over the bay at the moment and may come onshore.   The sudden shift in the wind seems to make rain seem more likely.  The cane is rising up and moving with its lanky grace, its long leaves curling around the wind, where the dark leaves of the lugustrum move the whole branch at once, their stiffness less affected by the wind. Patched and thin the carpet of the grass has a peculiar glow in this strange half light.  No one is out, and even the birds are absent. 
   

I Like the Wind

We are at or near that approximate line

where a stiff breeze becomes

or lapses from a considerable wind,

and I like it here, the chimney smokes

right-angled from west to east but still

for brief intact stretches

the plush animal tails of their fires.

I like how the stiffness rouses the birds

right up until what’s considerable sends them

to shelter. I like how the morning’s rain,

having wakened the soil’s raw materials, sends

a root smell into the air around us,

which the pine trees sway stately within.

I like how the sun strains not

to go down, how the horizon tugs gently at it,

and how the distant grain elevator’s shadow

ripples over the stubble of the field.

I like the bird feeder’s slant

and the dribble of its seeds. I like the cat’s

sleepiness as the breeze then the wind

then the breeze keeps combing her fur.

I like the body of the mouse at her feet.

I like the way the apple core I tossed away

has browned so quickly. It is much to be admired,

as is the way the doe extends her elegant neck

in its direction, and the workings of her black nostrils, too.

I like the sound of the southbound truck

blowing by headed east. I like the fact

that the dog is not barking. I like the ark

of the house afloat on the sea of March,

and the swells of the crop hills bedizened

with cedillas of old snow. I like old snow.

I like my lungs and their conversions

to the gospel of spring. I like the wing

of the magpie outheld as he probes beneath it

for fleas or lice. That’s especially nice,

the last sun pinkening his underfeathers

as it also pinks the dark when I close my eyes,

which I like to do, in the face of it,

this stiff breeze that was,

when I closed them, a considerable wind.

Robert Wrigley

I like this poem!  I like that it is so very particular, and involves so much interacting with the wind.  Today I would have to tell of the cane and the thick canopy of green, the clouds taking over from the sun, the emptiness of the yard, the sudden intervals of stillness where nothing moves then the burst of motion of every leaf and the sounds of the chimes telling me the wind's song.  You know the poet watched that magpie, watched the sunset make that salmon pink shine from its white feathers and absorbed by the dark ones.   Often to savor something you close your eyes to cut out the overwhelming distraction of sight just to feel the wind touch your face, or the sun soaking in, or the rain softly patting your cheek.   Cedilla is such a lovely word, a hook or tail under a letter to change its sound, a hook or the tail end of old snow lying under bushes in shadows knowing spring sun will soon find it and soak it into the dark ground.  So now I have my experience of the wind of this morning and his of the wind crossing over from breeze in the first days of the month known for its blustery weather.  I like having them both! 

August 23, 2012

Earlier the sky was gray and close, now more blue and some distant clouds.  In the night, quiet steady rain for awhile, water dripping off the roof, and the grumbling of a mockingbird awakened by getting wet.  I could hear it in the holly bush, rummaging around and making disgruntled snatches of song: rusty squeak of the lady cardinal, soft caws of crow or blue jay.  Eventually it found a drier place and quieted down.  The sunlight is clear and gold this morning, the warmed wood glowing with it.

This morning the poem captures a moment as if a strobe light thrust it into memory, that one instant of total clarity.  (And don't you just love the title of this one <chuckle>?)

Matters About Which Unfortunately I Have No Brilliant Opinion to Offer Readers    

With the arrival of the night

some of his words, like the intermittent

flare [Here, I detected a point

of inflection provoked by the peculiar

nature of desire.

Which came to me

even faster than imagination

since it needs not move at all,

waiting hidden always

everywhere] of a cigarette,

called my attention to a luminous

moment before it faded away.

Sandra Santana

translated by Forrest Gander 

When the kids go out onto the back porch to smoke, they often come in and take me outside to see something: a weird view of the moon, a baby owl playing in the crepe myrtle, a troop of geckos on the kitchen window screen.  These are often moments that get caught up in memory because someone shared them.  And, though I know the poet was probably talking about a different state of desire, the need, the willingness to share something out of the ordinary is also a strong desire, why else would people write of something so simple as a moment of sharing in the flare of lighting a cigarette.  Morning or night, there has been a lot of sharing of luminous moments over the years.  Those moments in the night, ones I would surely have missed otherwise, are some of the keenest memories, lit by that desire to share, to point out something that might be missed.   That's one of the reasons I read poems every morning, to come to those moments I would not have otherwise, to have other memories, other things illuminated in my life.  How many times have I experienced something out of the realm of possibility for me, only to come to the conclusion the fundamental memory, that connection, is not so very different from things I have experienced.  Circumstances might vary but the heart of what is shown makes some connection to my life.  Not a bad way to start the day!

August 22, 2012

Something has changed, the sky has that autumn look, and I know it's early, but there it is.  The sun has moved around so now it lights up the trunk of the crepe myrtle earlier and earlier, the smooth gold wood of it beautiful as woman's silky complexion.  The stripes of sun come in a different place, slanting across the sparse grass.  A slick black cat slinks around the maple tree, sunlight making its dense fur shine in ripples, this is a new cat, not the small black one that used to sleep under the shed.  This one looks wild, the way it walks full of the jungle and nothing of the indolent inside cat in its stride.  The blue jay sits among the leaves waiting until the cat disappears around Mikayla's car before it visits the water bowl.  A slender breeze picks at the late myrtle blooms, sprinkling them like the good housewife decorating a plain cake.  Somewhere near by a lawn mower growls moving restlessly back and forth, smoothing the green to accepted tidiness.

Sometimes you read a poem and the first time through you think it's about one thing, and when you read it again, you discover other things that you did not know in that first reading, being so full of what you thought it would be about.  There are all kinds of grief . . .

Day of Grief

I was forcing a wasp to the top of a window
where there was some sky and there were tiger lilies
outside just to love him or maybe only
simply a kiss for he was hurrying home
to fight a broom and I was trying to open
a door with one hand while the other was swinging
tomatoes, and you could even smell the corn
for corn travels by wind and there was the first
hint of cold and dark though it was nothing
compared to what would come, and someone should mark
the day, I think it was August 20th, and
that should be the day of grief for grief
begins then and the corn man starts to shiver
and crows too and dogs who hate the wind
though grief would come later and it was a relief
to know I wasn't alone, but be as it may,
since it was cold and dark I found myself singing
the brilliant love songs of my other religion.

Gerald Stern

I am wondering about the other religion, one of grief, and one of joy?  I don't like the cold and relish being able to go outside and have the heat sink into my bones and be thoroughly warm for a time.  It's being on the cusp, caught somewhere between, that causes grief, the waiting.  When the season has changed, you deal with it.  It's the unsettling time between that is both exciting and unnerving, that cold creeping in why fall has always been my favorite season, something like that black cat, full of wild, the wind changing, the leaves beginning the long journey to another kind of brilliance.  Far away, crows are calling to each other, and near at hand the woodpecker bangs his beak against the bark, the tattoo of sound loud and frantic.  There is that  other religion, that religion of not being alone in the change, of connection to the corn man, the crows, and in this case, the cat.  I know there is plenty of summer yet to come, but you can feel fall waiting across the green park, watching the door, leaching a little blue from the early morning.  Do we sing those brilliant love songs to comfort ourselves, to cope with change, to recognize we are not alone?   The tomatoes are still warm and ripening, cherries are abundant, summer has not stepped down, but you know it's slowing, you know the light has already begun its slow shift to another country.

August 21, 2012

This morning on the way to the market, no, we did not get around to going yesterday, there was a huge, soft, white cloud, almost transparent covering most of the sky, making the most peculiar light.  Even though my eyes are still unreliable, need to get the other one done, the light made everything look very vivid, the green this bright dark color, the blue of the sky at the edges of the cloud this deep vibrant blue.  I took off the very dark sunglasses I have been wearing and found the colors still very strange.  Almost like looking though some kind of lens that both brightened and developed colors to their maximum saturation, a really strange and almost magical light.  It did not last long as the cloud was thin and fragile and soon dissipated to the usual summer brightness.  Though it didn't last, like lots of beautiful things, it's a lovely memory now.

Several years ago, Dawn and I were writing poems together over a couple of months. One time we collected these lines from other writings and tried to use them to make poems of our own.  I remember my lines came from a newspaper article about Arthur Ashe and another one about Charles Darwin.  I don't remember where Dawn's came from, but I found them in a folder where I did not find the poem I was looking for.  I had written several things from those lines and found I liked some of what I had written.   I worked on those lines again, thinking there was something pleasurable about using other people's phrases, almost like a framework, to build something new.  The "borrowed lines" are in italics; the other lines are the original ones from me.

Open Lines

The scary part goes like this . . .

That there is always something

you don’t see coming,

excruciating and profoundly scarring,

you are blind-sided by ignorance

by not knowing what you need to know,

watching a giant empty thing topple to the ground

right in front of you so you can’t miss it

so there is nothing to do but live with it

vulnerable, exposed, it bears the impossible weight of expectations

of wanting to be incorporated, part of your

vocabulary, a daily mechanism held in the heart,

the sum of a thousand tiny complications

it longs to be filled with discoveries,

drenched with every kind of light.

Transformation is change from one thing to another,

but it started as nothing,

falling through the world you never suspected

landing at your feet ready to become something other

It was you who broke the new wood

you harvested to begin the work of change

and breaking it you began to recognize it.

Now is a time for carving,

to pick up the tools and the salvaged pieces,

to make something of nothing you ever wanted..

I like the idea of making something of salvaged pieces, of nothing you might have wanted, of taking the pieces from other writers and making something new of them, like building a box to hold new thoughts, new memories.  We all stumble across our ignorance every day, we confront things that scare us, things that frustrate and anger us.  We understand the world will never be perfect, but that it is preferable to take whatever tools we can hold and make something.   Even the giant emptiness we sometimes contain does want to be drenched with light, even the odd vibrant light that comes from being half-obscured, that will come brighter later.  We just have to be willing to do what we can, change what we must. take those tools and begin making.  That's why it's so satisfying to create something, to take beads and make a ring, to take words and make a poem, to take wood and make a home for books, even making clean clothes, polishing the furniture, making a meal, all satisfying on some level for making order and beauty.

There is work enough for us all, the making keeps holding the world together, keeps replacing destruction, filling up that emptiness with meaning.

August 20, 2012

Ah, after storms, this morning it's like fall, though still really warm, the sky and the light have a distinctly fall look.  Or perhaps I am just ready for it to be fall.  School starts again soon and maybe that has influenced my perceptions.  It's very sunny and the white clouds there are seem thin and insubstantial.  Everything rinsed by rain looks brighter and free of dust.  There is no wind, not even a leaf stirring.  In the background, over the news from the TV, I can hear lawn mowers and a distant leafblower.  Still the sounds of summer . . .

It's Mikayla's day off and we are going to the market later, not a chore I look forward to and, as I still can't drive until Wednesday, Mikayla is going to take me.  Always makes it more fun to go with someone, I think going alone is one of the reasons I find it a chore, that and figuring out meals for a week.  Though we have already figured out the meals so that part will be easy.  Think of all the time we would save if we did not have to eat . . . hmnm, think of not having ice cream or steaks or ripe sweet cherries . .. okay maybe eating is a good thing <chuckle>!

This morning is like any morning . . .

Any Morning

Just lying on the couch and being happy.

Only humming a little, the quiet sound in the head.

Trouble is busy elsewhere at the moment, it has

so much to do in the world.

People who might judge are mostly asleep; they can't

monitor you all the time, and sometimes they forget.

When dawn flows over the hedge you can

get up and act busy.

Little corners like this, pieces of Heaven

left lying around, can be picked up and saved.

People wont even see that you have them,

they are so light and easy to hide.

Later in the day you can act like the others.

You can shake your head. You can frown.

William Stafford

Trouble is busy elsewhere, dawn flowed over the yard in bright sheets of light, and as I looked around when I got up, I realized I was glad to be home, to be doing all the ordinary things, even the market, and that all this joy was something that came from just being here in this moment.  So, I don't want to act otherwise, shake my head or frown.  Joy, even the ordinary joy of waking in your own home, should not be hidden but shared, as William Stafford shared it, making much of something so light and easy to hide, exposing it for the sheer happiness you can have just lying on the couch watching the morning light fill the room and knowing you are surrounded by all these little pieces of Heaven!

August 19, 2012

The yard is drenched, puddles standing on the driveway, yet all the water has soaked into the thirsty ground.  Everything looks dark and heavy with water; yet the smooth bark of the crepe myrtle shines with lines of reflected light, gleaming like silver glaze.  Water is dripping off leaves, sending them twitching upward at the release of weight.  The usually bright disks of the windchime are dark in the shadow, the sky gray and close, lightening finally but slowly, only the barest hint of the blue to come.  The birds, wakened by such intense lightning and thunder last night must be sleeping in, huddled in some sheltered place dreaming of sunlight.

The blessing today is that everything looks so detailed and I think I will remember this lovely feeling of discovering the world again!  How nice to come in my later years to find that there is still so much to be joyful about, so many new experiences to enjoy.  How lucky to have a new way of seeing just when you might be getting too used to the world the way it was.  I am grateful for the new sight of ten thousand things!

For the Artist at the Start of Day
May morning be astir with the harvest of night;
Your mind quickening to the eros of a new question,
Your eyes seduced by some unintended glimpse
That cut right through the surface to a source.

May this be a morning of innocent beginning,
When the gift within you slips clear
Of the sticky web of the personal
With its hurt and its hauntings,
And fixed fortress corners,

A Morning when you become a pure vessel
For what wants to ascend from silence,

May your imagination know
The grace of perfect danger,

To reach beyond imitation,
And the wheel of repetition,

Deep into the call of all
The unfinished and unsolved

Until the veil of the unknown yields
And something original begins
To stir toward your senses
And grow stronger in your heart

In order to come to birth
In a clean line of form,
That claims from time
A rhythm not yet heard,
That calls space to
A different shape.

May it be its own force field
And dwell uniquely
Between the heart and the light

To surprise the hungry eye
By how deftly it fits
About its secret loss.

John O'Donohue

How deftly new vision comes from secret loss.  If I had not first loss vision, I would not now be so opened by the newness of these sights.  It's a blessing to know that the losses we experience can be part of that call of all that makes us recognize the shape of the world fitting around that loss.  You might discover hidden depths to the most ordinary things, recalling how people have touched you in the past, with tenderness and love, how they gave of themselves when they might have given up instead.   How the most basic love is always a choice and cannot exist without work, without the care, without some sense of surprise that in the face of loss the heart goes on looking for the light, and because it is looking, finds it.

August 17, 2012

This early light is so slow to creep in this morning, the usual fading through that lovely blue took awhile and now there are strange glowing reflections off the white clouds that already are sailing in.  The sky is just hinting at blue, kind of washed out and anemic.   There have been lots of people out this morning, riding bicycles and walking the dogs.  An older lady, dressed to kill, nice suit, heels, hair all done up, just strode past with a big white dog, both of them looking like they started behind and will have to rush to catch up to the day.  The dog, fluffy and very white, seemed as determined as the lady, neither looking left nor right just trotting along beside her as she stretched her long legs in a quick march.  I hope she finds a minute or two to unwind sometime during the day.   Two boys and a girl just zipped by on bicycles, for the few seconds I saw them, you could tell they were having some kind of heated discussion their heads inclined toward each other, their bodies tense, or perhaps it was just the speed they were going that made them look that way.

The air is so still, not a breath stirring, even the smallest twig hangs motionless.  And except for people, and dogs, there does not seem to be any animals out, not the cat or a squirrel, not even a mockingbird.  It's very quiet.  The hum of my computer is the loudest thing at the moment.

View #8 (excerpt)
Sometimes
the world is merely
empty, except for its refuse,
and goes nowhere, like a
cul-de-sac.  And sometimes
it's empty but wide open,
the fruitless winter vines
dreaming of a vintage season.
You don't need anything
that isn't yours to keep going.
If someone is holding you
inside themselves
the way you're learning
to hold them, so much
the better.  Sometimes
there is no difference
between a mind and a mind,
a heart and a heart, a mind
and a heart.  Sometimes
the world won't move
unless you move.
Won't hold its course
unless you show it how.
And sometimes, the world holds
the two of you in one moment
and whispers: Yes. Now.

Thomas Centrolella 

The perceptions of the world and what it holds in this poem are very soothing.  I want to send it as a letter to the lady with the dog.  Then, maybe she is the one moving the world this morning, holding it on course, and i, looking out my window at the stillness in her wake, am just along for the ride.  And, you know, that's all right with me.  Perhaps we are both where we need to be, and doing such holding as we can.  A long slant of sun just burst out from behind the maple tree and lit up the grass as if it were green fire.   A mockingbird just started singing, and I am thinking . . . yes.  Now.  I am holding on to this moment, and both my heart and my mind are at ease, nothing else is necessary!

August 16, 2012

It's hard for me to imagine how badly I was seeing for the surgery to make such a difference!  I think I have worn everyone out saying how amazing it is!  The colors so much brighter and so much more detail for everything.  I won't need glasses for distance any more, at least I don't at the moment, but will need something for reading I believe.  There are no halos around streetlights!  Now that was a given for years I think.  I actually had to go out last night and look just to see if they were really gone, and they were!  With the right lens out of my glasses, my brain is trying valiantly to mush the two very different kinds of vision together.  I do believe it's working something out in there!  I asked Dr. Tran if I could have the left eye done like tomorrow, <sigh> he said at least a month between surgeries!  I can't wait! 

This is a strange poem, Fiat Lux, let there be light!  I think this morning, seeing so many things in such a new way.  I understand that I might begin to imagine the world I now inhabit, some new creature, with new dreams.

                             Fiat Lux 

My sister asks what ate the bird's eyes

   as she cradles the dead chickadee she found

       on the porch. Ants, I say, knowing the soft ocular

cells are the easiest way into the red feast of heart,

   liver, kidney. I tell her that when they ate the bird

       they saw the blue bowled sky, the patchwork

of soybean fields and sunflowers, a bear loping

   across a gravel road. Already, they are bringing

       back to their tunnels the slow chapters of spring—

a slough drying to become a meadow and the bruised

   smell of sex inside flowers. They start to itch

       for a mate's black-feathered cheeks and music.

As she cushions the eggs, their queen dreams

   of young chickadees stretching their necks and crying

       for their mother to protect them until they learn to see.

Sister, it is like this—the visions begin to waver,

   and the colony goes mad, fearful they'll never see

       another dahlia tell its purple rumor, or see a river commit

itself to the ocean. As the last memory leaves them,

   they twitch in their sleep, trying to make out the distant

       boatman lifting his lantern, his face disfigured by light.

                         Traci Brimhall

All this soft tissue the basis of so much of how we experience the world.  How frightening it was to think of losing that view through the delicate lens!  How joyful to have such daily sights restored to so much clarity that it is almost overwhelming!  What impatience to have to wait to have the other eye come clear, the fear outweighed by the magnificent results of the first trial!

Today, a dream of new visions!  A dream come true and will come true again, until this new vision is the reality and the old dull film is only a vague and distant memory!

August 14, 2012

This morning I am going . . . early . . . to have the cataract removed from my right eye.  While I am nervous about having it done, I will be glad to be able to see the birds at the water bowl more clearly, to read more easily, and to do beading and art I have been putting off because I see so badly at the moment.  I will have the other one done as soon as I see how this one goes and if I can work it in while I am doing school. 

The poem for this morning is one that describes what you see with cataracts pretty well, though Monet might refuse the operation, I am not going to.  I might miss some of the lovely . . . smudges that light makes, but I will enjoy the brightness of colors that will return with a clear lens, as well has seeing only one moon in the sky, though the overlapping, venn diagram of moons has been . . . interesting.  Yesterday my sister sent me this very poem, knowing what I was going to do today.  I thought, yep, we are truly sisters, who would have thought we would pick the same poem for this occasion, one that seems to speak against having the surgery done?  I should have thought; I know it is one of her favorite poems as it is mine as well. 

Monet Refuses the Operation

Doctor, you say there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don't see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolves
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don't know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent. The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and change our bones, skin, clothes
to gases. Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

Lisel Mueller

We all see the world in different ways, in different arrangements of color, just ask any artist, any beader who asks another to confirm what color those beads are, any one who sews, or knits, or does any kind of work with color, will tell you color is very subjective.  It's one of those things that make you believe in a consensus universe; we all just agree, yes, that range of color is sort of blue, or green, or purple, or some lovely shade of brown.

Look at colors today!  I am sure I will be looking at them!

August 13, 2012

The yard is a cavern of green shadow this late in the morning, the sun nearly overhead, the sky a fair blue without cloud.  There is a faint breeze, just enough to stir the leaves a little, and you out there battling the cane again.  I think it has perhaps just become an exercise in . . . exercise, with not real hope of victory.  I have not seen the blue jays this morning, nor the squirrels; it's rather quiet and empty out, now that the weed eater is silent.  An occasional jet traces sound overhead, and there is news in the background.

Driving home from El Paso, you can see both expected things and unexpected things.  One of the things you often see on the way is a thin line of green along some hidden stream or arroyo.  Here trees take advantage of whatever water collects there, often in the driest places, sheltered by near hills, cottonwoods grow.  They get their name from the white fluffy seeds they let loose to drift like dandelion down on every breeze, often looking like a kind of dry snow.  They are hardy trees, given to living in places other trees find too difficult.  They begin new lives by letting go of old ones, something they can perhaps teach us, to begin a day or a week or a life by giving something away to the wind, by letting go.

Cottonwood Trees

The cottonwoods are
flinging themselves outward,
filling the air with spiraling flurries,
covering lawns in deepening drifts.
You could not call this generosity.
Like any being, they
let loose what they have
in order to survive,
in order that their lives might continue
in a new year's growth.
The more seeds they send out
on their lofted journeys
the greater the chance
for their kind to flourish.
There is no hesitation.
No one asks how much
they will give. Without words
they know so clearly
that everything depends
on what we call giving,
that which the world knows only as creation.

Lynn Ungar

Creation, hmm, this weekend in the Brain Pickings there was a segment about making art, and it has a lot of interesting things to say.  One of the most interesting things was from Sister Corita Kent, one of her "rules" for the art department:  Nothing is a mistake.  There's no win and no fail, there's only make.  For months and months I've had, as a gift from Mikayla, Chinese inks and brushes for painting in that style.  I've bought books on the technique, more than several, and yet after all this time, I have not started to work with them.  I realized why . . . I'm afraid I won't be able to do it, that I will fail.  I tell my students my grandmother's maxim, Anything worth doing well is worth doing badly for a time.  I tell them that but somewhere deep in my heart, I don't trust it, not, at least, for this.  I want to be good when I start out.  I don't want to make stupid drawings, clumsy, inadequate things.  I want to make graceful, elegant drawings that have spirit and heart.   Fear has shut the door, and even gone so far as to lock it tight.   So, I think today I chose the cottonwood poem perhaps because I am coming up on the time when I need to give away my fear, so I can just make, no win, no fail, just make.   Just loft out all those drawing that will not be perfect, just throw seeds around until something takes and I get an idea of how to do it.  Sometimes things come together from different sources to give you a push in the direction of your desire.  I think I've had my push <smile>.

August 12, 2012

There is the biggest blue jay at the water bowl this morning, making his rusty chirp sounds and hopping between the rim of the bowl and the rock in the middle.  That has got to be the biggest bluest jay I have seen yet and he must have called his mate as there are two of them out there not, the other one not quite so big.  They seem to be having a lot of fun out there, they certainly enjoy water more than I thought birds might.  So beautiful and outrageous, they seem to love clowning around.  The sky is pale today, marked by huge banks of white cloud, some thin as a curtain, some piled up so thick they look like concrete constructions of fantasy.  A soft breeze fans the leaves making them swing and sway.

Sunday morning and I have already been blessed by blue jays and white clouds, a finge of new cane my husband is grumbling over, the green shade of the back yard this close to midday, even the slow path of the cat stepping along the edge of the driveway keeping an eye on the birds in the bowl.  So if you had to choose what to you would be  . . .

The Greatest Grandeur

Some say it’s in the reptilian dance
of the purple-tongued sand goanna,
for there the magnificent translation
of tenacity into bone and grace occurs.

And some declare it to be an expansive
desert—solid rust-orange rock
like dusk captured on earth in stone—
simply for the perfect contrast it provides
to the blue-grey ridge of rain
in the distant hills.

Some claim the harmonics of shifting
electron rings to be most rare and some
the complex motion of seven sandpipers
bisecting the arcs and pitches
of come and retreat over the mounting
hayfield.

Others, for grandeur, choose the terror
of lightning peals on prairies or the tall
collapsing cathedrals of stormy seas,
because there they feel dwarfed
and appropriately helpless; others select
the serenity of that ceiling/cellar
of stars they see at night on placid lakes,
because there they feel assured
and universally magnanimous.

But it is the dark emptiness contained
in every next moment that seems to me
the most singularly glorious gift,
that void which one is free to fill
with processions of men bearing burning
cedar knots or with parades of blue horses,
belled and ribboned and stepping sideways,
with tumbling white-faced mimes or companies
of black-robed choristers; to fill simply
with hammered silver teapots or kiln-dried
crockery, tangerine and almond custards,
polonaises, polkas, whittling sticks, wailing
walls; that space large enough to hold all
invented blasphemies and pieties, 10,000
definitions of God and more, never fully
filled, never.

 
Pattiann Rogers

I don't want to have to choose, it's not a competition anyone can win, yes?  Still, imagining all those winners, all the greatest blessings filling up my life makes me smile, and the dark emptiness of the very next moment is somehow so appealing, the allure of what has not happened yet, what we can imagine to fill it, what can be seen or felt or read or experienced next is what keeps us going.  Do you sometimes feel that some things you read are as real to you as things you have experienced in your own life?  Sometimes it's kind of . . . wonderful to be able to have those memories alongside the ones you have made for yourself, kind of the magic of imagination opening the door to places you could never discover on your own in your real world.  Then again, what exactly is the real world?  The one I experience, or the one you do, or something of a consensus, or all of it together, each in their own creation.  Here come the 10,000 definitions of God, and aren't we glad there are so many, and so many more than that so each of us can have our own.  As many definitions as there are kinds of love, and who knows how many kind of that there are!  We have not come to the end of definitions for that and I hope we never will.

Today, Sunday, there are more than enough definitions of God and love, and they might be one and the same thing, depending on how you are willing to look at both.  All I know, all I want to know today, is I have been more than blessed by God and love in my life, and on Sunday I like to think of all those blessings and feel gratitude for them and joy in their presence!