March 31, 2012

This is the cobalt color of morning, just before sunrise when you can just barely make out the faint shadow of the trees.  That color pierces my heart and I am not sure why, it just does.  There is one lone bird out there this morning, and it sounds like a duck quacking.  We used to have ducks in the neighborhood, the people on the other corner of Youpon, whose backyard faces the ditch, have a big pond with tiny little hills around it.  They built it for their grandchildren I think, they have ATVs and in the summer come most weekends to ride around and around.  The ducks that inhabited the pond were Muscovy ducks, really ugly ducks that were never going to grow up to be swans, black and white splotched with red wrinkly knobs at the base of their beaks.  But after Ike they disappeared and there have been no ducks now for years.  There used to be someone in the area with a rooster too, but I have not heard the rooster in a LONG time.  Maybe he left with the ducks, but the bird out there sure sounds like it's quacking, but much quieter than a real duck.

Today is Matthew's birthday.  The middle child and last in the month for his birthday.  Born the Monday after Easter, in a yellow tile delivery room with the early spring sun flooding in, born at the Naval Hospital in Portsmouth, Virginia.  I wanted to name him Morgan, meaning born by the sea, but his dad said that was the name of a horse, so we named him Matthew.  When he joined the SCA, society for creative anachronism. he needed a society name and chose Ragnar, because of his interest in Vikings, and now in Oklahoma, no one calls him Matthew and they think it strange when we do.  All his friends call him Ragnar, a name of his own choosing, and very like him.  He's always one to go his own way and do his own thing.  One of those people who is an individual, who will stick up for his beliefs, and his choices.  It took me several years to realize that he was never lost at the Renaissance Faire when we went every year, he was just enjoying it his own way, and after awhile I stopped worrying about it.  That's one of the things I admire about him, after you get over being annoyed about not being able to have much influence, you admire that he will choose his own way and take the consequences.  Easy going, almost to a fault, nothing would ever get done in Matthew's life if it were not for the last minute, but that last minute usually comes and things get done, most of the time.  As babies the two brothers were polar opposites, in almost every way, in coloring, in temperament, in approach to the world, yet they shared a lot as well.   I was glad to have Matthew between the other two, he was . . . restful and easy, at least as a baby <smile>.  He didn't go at the world with such . . . energy, he was more content with whatever came his way.  He had the art of meditation down from the start <smile>.

For Matthew, a translation of part of the long poem Havamal, the portion where Odin finds the runes, the runes that guided the Vikings and still do.

Hung I was    on the windswept tree;

Nine full nights I hung,

Pierced by a spear,    a pledge to the god,

To Odin, myself to myself,

On that tree which none    can know the source

From whence its root has run.

None gave me bread,    none brought a horn.

Then low to earth I looked.

I caught up the runes,    roaring I took them,

And fainting, back I fell.

                                                     Havamal

                                                     translation by Jack Hart 

The runes are sort of like a meditation, a symbol to suggest something you might need to think about, a way of getting in touch with what is going on in your life.  Lots of people use them to sort out problems and connect with the spiritual side of life, to be reminded of blessings, and grace, work that needs to be done.  Each person who uses the runes has their own reason for doing so, as each person who prays makes the prayer their own.

Happy Birthday, Ragnar! <grin>

March 30, 2012

It's dark and too early for seeing much more than the darkness.  you have to imagine clouds, and shadows, the trees in their new green.  Except for the normal noises, refrigerator, some low hum that cycles from outside, and I wish I knew what was making that particular noise, it's quiet, too early for school buses or many cars, the ordinary 5:30 truck will not pass by for long slow minutes yet.  A morning of possibilities, as every morning is, possible it will rain, possible something new will be noticed, possible to enjoy the very routine things that will happen, and some things that are not routine.

I did not know that Adrienne Rich died on Tuesday until Dawn sent me one of her poems yesterday as a kind of memorial.  She was 82 and one of the first women to write with great honesty about a woman's life.  Her early poems were formal, feminine, and rather like a shy girl trying to please the people she admired with the loveliness and delicacy of her work, which even then could not hide the bite of a mind already questioning the need to appear so . . . formal and feminine and . . . delicate.  As her work progressed, she began more and more to examine the lives of women: mother, daughter, lover, friend, poet.  She worked to see things from outside the box of expectations society had for women, to examine life the way it had always been, the way it was now, and the way it could be.  She wrote of how she did not always feel what the world would expect a mother to feel, that sometimes she was afraid, or angry, or felt trapped by mothering, that not all of her feelings for her children were "acceptable" and so made it possible for mothers who had those feelings as well to acknowledge them.  She wrote poems of protest, of the will not to go to war, of examining why we did, and how it was possible that we could not go and still survive.  In her work, so many ordinary things were made extraordinary, a woman's skill with embroidery making decorative screens showed us even such an ordinary "womanly" task could hold depths that even a "pretty" poem could not hide.   Two people sitting in a car on a beach, their relationship growing silent and distant as the Canada geese flying beyond them, so quiet a poem you almost feel as if you should sneak away before they notice you watching.  So, for today, I, too, would like to remember the poet and her work.  She showed me so many things, but especially that any thing you felt, anything that you experienced was something you could write about, not just the things you thought might be accpeted, but anything.  Her courage lit the way for many poets to make their own path, not just follow one that was already laid out for them.  And her legacy of work and courage will continue to light that way into a future she won't see but will be place she would examine with that strong light, and we will continue to use her work as a lens to see what is possible.

What Kind of Times Are These

There's a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill
and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows
near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted
who disappeared into those shadows.

I've walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don't be fooled
this isn't a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,
our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,
its own ways of making people disappear.

I won't tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods
meeting the unmarked strip of light—
ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:
I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.

And I won't tell you where it is, so why do I tell you
anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these
to have you listen at all, it's necessary
to talk about trees.

Adrienne Rich

Yes, we make things disappear, people and places and ways of life, this is not a Russian poem, it happens here.  Yet, there is still beauty here, people still listen, and yes, it's possible to start with talking about trees and move on to other things, to what is happening in the daily lives of people here in this country, that not all ways of making things disappear are happening elsewhere.  This poem reminds me of the bristlecone pines, the oldest living things, and that the park service will not tell which is the oldest living tree, for fear of someone destroying it for that reason, and what does that say about the world on both sides of making that decision, the world of people that want to protect what is unique and vulnerable, and the world of people who would go out of their way to destroy something for the same reason.  It could say that both are human, that both impulses are in all of us, that it's all about choices, we make them every day, over and over and it's those choices that tell who we are.  In times like these, we are still listening to what is in our hearts, and poets are still writing down what is in their hearts and in the world, making their observations, their choices, so we can make ours.

March 29, 2012

A fair to middling morning, some sun, some clouds, white and building up to gray, flashes of sun.  Yesterday, later in the morning, a hawk was circling just over the trees.  I would not have noticed it if it hadn't been for its shrill screaming, thin and far away, yet the little sparrow birds or finches,  which had been peeping in the crepe myrtle tree flew as a flock into cane.  All the birds vanished until the hawk was out of range, or at least far enough away you could not hear him.  Slowly, they filtered back, a few at a time.  This morning, they are once again fluttering from twig to twig in the trees and the ligustrum bush just outside the window.  They don't make song so much as they sound like a very tiny flock of baby chicks. 

The sparrows gather nearby...

The sparrows gather nearby,
their anxious heads jerking
every which way.
Someone has taught them
to bring their hunger here,
without quieting their terror
of everything that moves.
And so, having little choice,
they land on the awful perch:
at their feet, all the food in the world,
and just beyond, all the teeth.

David Harris Ebenbach

When I was looking for the poem, this one made me see the hawk from the perspective of the sparrow, though I pretty much got the idea yesterday when they all flew like arrows into the cane.  I just didn't think of that state of mind as so persistent and maybe it isn't, maybe that's just our point of view.  Still, it makes you think of how precarious the world can seem and not just to sparrows!

Mikayla wants to wash her car this morning, but I think perhaps it's going to rain.  Still it may just blow over and leave her with lovely sun and a good morning to make a clean and tidy car!

This morning, may the hawks of your life be far away, and the sun shine on your morning so you can do what needs to be done!

March 28, 2012

Oh the sky is beautiful this morning, shades of rose and pearl pink and orangey red, huge lavender clouds, places where just a hint of blue shines though.  The drama of so much going on, definitely a change in the weather coming.  I can't see the actual sun for the purple and hyacinth clouds, but I am sure it would be red!  Some mornings it pays to get up to see what is outside your window, as it does not last long.  I got Mikayla's camera from the counter and went out to take a picture of the sky, but I think it must be out of battery as I could not get it to work.  Still, it probably would look nothing like it does just standing on the back porch watching it change.  Already the glow is fading and the blue and gray of clouds is taking over.
 
Now, having spent time looking for a poem, the sky has turned gray, darkening, lowering until it seems like a wrinkled canvas making a canopy overheard.  The clouds continue to pile up and the sun, up now and occasionally visible, makes strobes of light between under the edges.

Some Glad Morning

One day, something very old
happened again. The green
came back to the branches,
settling like leafy birds
on the highest twigs;
the ground broke open
as dark as coffee beans.

The clouds took up their
positions in the deep stadium
of the sky, gloving the
bright orb of the sun
before they pitched it
over the horizon.

It was as good as ever:
the air was filled
with the scent of lilac
s and cherry blossoms
sounded their long
whistle down the track
It was some glad morning.

Joyce Sutphen

It sure is very old, this returning of the green, the ground breaking open to all this green life.  We don't have lilacs here, I think it's too warm for them, but we have some ornamental cherry trees, and the early purple of the redbud tree.  I like the idea of scents whistling, they sure do get your attention, and in awhile we will have that most heady scent . . . honeysuckle.  The jasmine at Dawn's house is about bloomed out now but its fragrance still lingers and promises more.  And, yes, it is some glad morning this morning.  All sun and cloud and green, all continuing to bless the world.

March 27, 2012

The air here along the ground is still this morning, but thin white clouds are waving in a wind we can't feel, waving and moving off so the thinner blue is exposed.  As you watch, the sky changes and changes, a morning of those changes and you think nothing stays the same for long.  Every new leaf is greeted by some small bird, every mote of sunlight floats down to scatter the shadows and warm whatever it touches.  A pair of black dogs running erratically and smelling everything round the corner and keep going.  The cat bolts across the yard into the cane.  Maybe it was the dogs, maybe it just had a burning desire to be in another place.  The grass looks so soft, fresh as this morning's sun, cool as the air that sinks over it.

Yesterday, it was the bees that made me take notice, that bees seem to thaw with warmth of the spring.  You don't realize how you miss hearing them until you hear them again, you don't realize how warm and welcoming that sound is.  The poem from Poetry Daily this morning is full of bees.

The Necklace

Take, from my palms, for joy, for ease,
A little honey, a little sun,
That we may obey Persephone's bees.

You can't untie a boat unmoored.
Fur-shod shadows can't be heard,
Nor terror, in this life, mastered.

Love, what's left for us, and of us, is this
Living remnant, loving revenant, brief kiss
Like a bee flying completed dying hiveless

To find in the forest's heart a home,
Night's never-ending hum,
Thriving on meadowsweet, mint, and time.

Take, for all that is good, for all that is gone,
That it may lie rough and real against your collarbone,
This string of bees, that once turned honey into sun.

(NOVEMBER 1920)

Osip Mandelstam
translated from the Russian by Christian Wiman

There is something mysterious about making a necklace of bees, would the hum of the bees persist?  Would you be able to smell the flowers they visited?  Would these be the bees that died far from home looking for a new hive?  The sound of bees fills the spring, all that industry, all that work for the new generation.  When I put honey on a biscuit, the smell of that combination brings back my Grandmother's kitchen and breakfast there in the summer where there were always bees, and biscuits, and the warm sweet smell of tea and honey.   Memory can be a potent as a bee's sting and as welcome as their honey.

Our fur-shod shadows, the squirrels are out this morning, making of each tree a highway to some place in the sun.  Bees have begun to bump the screens now, a faint ticking as they pass on to their work.  The cat, another fur-shod shadow, has trotted out of the cane and out of the yard, the sunlight a shawl across its shoulders.

For all that is good, and for all this is gone into memory, take this spring morning and enjoy it.  The sky is still changing and changing, blue and white in a wind from far off and too high to be felt, but can be experienced in the constant shifting of color.

March 26, 2012

It's one of those morning when everything is so gorgeous and so familiar you wonder how you can get used to such beauty.  When I got home from school, the yard is full of bees.  We had trouble with them last year wanting to set up a new hive behind the cedar shakes near my window.  They must have found some other place after the guys poisoned them several times.  I hate to poison bees, but, being allergic to their stings, I don't want them setting up inside the walls.  Still, their droning hum filled the air, several big carpenter bees buzzed past, the whirring of their wings vaguely mechanical.  There is a gentle breeze, and you can see pollen floating in the air.  Everything is still covered with its yellow dust.  All the pine trees are blooming, and we have a lot of them, long stiff yellow blooms and the breeze shakes them like some alien musical instruments, and pollen is the notes floating out.

I found this poem over the weekend.  Wallace Stevens, I like how he can turn something ordinary into a mystery that hangs in the air and gets absorbed through the skin.

Of the Surface of Things

I
In my room, the world is beyond my understanding;
But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four
        hills and a cloud.

II
From my balcony, I survey the yellow air,
Reading where I have written,
"The spring is like a belle undressing."

III
The gold tree is blue,
The singer has pulled his cloak over his head.
The moon is in the folds of the cloak.

Wallace Stevens

I find the world beyond my understanding quite often.  Even knowing the one little patch of green I see every morning, there are enough questions for a lifetime right there, and not nearly enough answers.  Good thing answers are not a requirement for me.  I just like questions, if answers come along, that's always a bonus.  Today there are no clouds and here there are never any hills.  There are few flatter places on the planet.  The 15 foot rise to the land here is called Red Bluff, but you know you actually see no bluff, it's just the land slopes a slow rise to this point then sort of trails off into the bay.  The lower end of Toddville is really low, caught between the pond and the bay, even a high lunar tide causes minor flooding there.  However, we do have yellow air today, and I would say the belle is pulling on a dress of so many greens, with sprigs of bluebonnets and evening primrose, and all those tiny flowers that no one knows to name, blue ones, and white, and yellow. 

My golden-trunked crepe myrtle grows blue with shadows in the evening, and yes, even here, we can still see the moon.  Several nights this week birds have been singing in the dark.  I never remembering hearing so many of them singing at night, but mockingbirds, and the mourning doves, and the occasional cardinal have all been awake and running through their songs under the moon, a sliver but waxing, thickening with each night.

Such a day as is out my window this morning is one of the pleasures of living here in this place; it may be hot in the summer but no one has more beautiful springs! 

March 25, 2012

Another lovely morning.  Sunday, and except for the one mockingbird trying to impress a lady, it's very quiet.  Sunlight is warming up the trees and the cane.  My heron statue is standing in a little pool of taller grass, stately and observant.  There is not a bit of wind this morning, haze blues the trees across in the park, and fades the sky to the merest hint of blue.  Rarely is the air so still.

It's the morning for the blessing, Sunday, and it lives up to its name today!  I know the farmers are worried about things like asparagus sprouting, and apricots and apples blooming so early, and I know their life depends on these things but it's hard to believe, here anyway, that there will be more cold this year.  Even up north, it's been in the low 80s for several days.  I think this year we are just having a long slow warm spring that will soon enough be summer.   The seasons in Houston . . . almost summer, summer, still summer, not quite summer.   And I am not unhappy about that one little bit.

For today a poem with an title that caught my eye . . . Wage Peace.  It was written after 9/11, all poems from that time on are written after 9/11 no matter what they say.  This one has something that can be said every day, good advice for living in any world.

 Wage Peace

Wage peace with your breath.
Breathe in firemen and rubble,
breathe out whole buildings
and flocks of redwing blackbirds.

Breathe in terrorists and breathe out
sleeping children and freshly mown fields.

Breathe in confusion and breathe out maple trees.

Breathe in the fallen
and breathe out lifelong friendships intact.

Wage peace with your listening:
hearing sirens, pray loud.

Remember your tools:
flower seeds, clothes pins, clean rivers.

Make soup.

Play music,
Learn the word for thank you in three languages.

Learn to knit, and make a hat.

Think of chaos as dancing raspberries,
Imagine grief as the out-breath of beauty
or the gesture of fish.

Swim for the other side.

Wage peace.

Never has the world seemed so fresh and precious.
Have a cup of tea and rejoice.

Act as if armistice has already arrived.

Don't wait another minute.
Celebrate today!  

Judyth Hill (9/11/01)

I like . . . remember your tools . . . seeds, clothes pins, clean rivers.  Daily things that are useful and bring in the freshness of outside to our interior life.  Breathe in confusion and breath out maple trees . . . vote for life!  Swim for the other side.  That's sometimes a hard thing, to set out swimming for the other side, you have to believe you will get there, you have to have something to aim at, you have to have some faith the water will hold you up and that if you trust it you will survive.  I love that this poem is full of the ordinary things we do, make a hat, say thank you, play music.  I wonder if it's possible to wage peace as fiercely as we have waged war.  The problem with peace seems to be there has never been any, at any time in the world, someone is always making war, civil war, now there's an oxymoron, world war, tribal war, local war . . . conflict seems to be built in to every human civilization.  Someone always wants what someone else has, power, territory, goods.  Someone wants people to believe the same way they do, and everyone has a belief and so many believe only their belief is the right one.  People are afraid of difference, they think different is bad, or wrong, or unacceptable.  They want to get rid of difference, different skin, different history, different faith.  It seems that the people who want to wage peace will have to be the most extreme kind of warrior in a world where war is the norm.  They will have to police themselves with all the vigor others wish to police the world.  They will have to love all people, not just the ones like themselves, they will have to act peacefully, they will have to swim with sharks and not become sharks.  They will have to celebrate each day, and treat with everyone, call everyone family, forgive the unforgiveable.  Even while writing this I can see such a task will be daunting, but we have begin somewhere.  We are not asked to be perfect in our love, just that we begin to love in that way, that we make the effort to live only in love.

For today, I am swimming for the other side, through this lovely day, this morning of freshness, I am celebrating today with every breath!  It is a beginning.

March 24, 2012

A gorgeous morning, early fog has burned away to high blue skies and a warm gentle breeze.  The birds are out in force, some bird mimicking the back up alarm on a truck . . . beep . . . beep . . . beep, high pitched and insistent.   One of the big wood peckers with its jungle laugh, and striking red head, peeping finches, yellow, brown, black, a variety of spots of color and cheer.  At the moment there are no vehicles in the driveway and the cat is taking advantage of that, plopped right down in the sunniest spot on the warm cement.  Sparks of light ray out from the hard drive wind chime as it swings around in the breeze.  Runners are still out, odd time for them, usually they are as early as the birds but two ladies just jogged by in their bright clothes followed by a big loping golden dog.  Kids are riding around the corner, standing on their pedals, pushing their shiny bikes to go faster.

When I was at school yesterday, I happened to overhear several comments that made me realize I was not the only "elder" who was sometimes impatient with the rudeness of younger people . . . cars blaring music with such a pounding bass their whole car shakes, stopping in the middle of a live conversation with someone to text someone else, and the like.  Then there are mornings when as I arrive at school some student sees me and holds open the door, or volunteers to take the cart of supplies out to the truck and return the cart to the library.  All the same young people, and it's the same me as well.  The world is full of such varieties that it's hard to justify grousing as the very next moment there will be some lovely incident that makes you smile.  A poem I read yesterday from one of the books I keep out reminded me forcefully of all this attitude on the part of "elders".  From Galway Kinnell's Imperfect Thirst.

Paradise Elsewhere

Some old people become more upset about human foibles than they
     did when they were younger -- part of getting ready to leave.
For others, human idiocy becomes increasingly precious; they begin to
     see in it the state of mind we will have in heaven.
"What about heaven?" I ask Harold who is ninety-four and lives
     in the VA hospital in Tucson.
He said, "Memory is heaven."
The physicist emeritus tottering across the campus of Cal Tech,
     through the hazy sunshine occasionally chuckles to himself.
Yet it has happened to many others, and to you, too, Galway -- when
     illness, or unhappiness, or imagining the future wears an
     empty place inside us, the idea of paradise elsewhere quickly
     fills it.

Galway Kinnell

For me the paradise is sometimes a longing to see something else, to be somewhere I have never been before, to hear a cadence of speech I do not recognize and cannot understand.   "Memory is heaven."  If we are only what we remember, what happens to us when we begin to lose those memories, both the near ones and the far.  How many times do I stand in front of the fridge and wonder why I opened it ?  Or in the grocery aisle, with a list, thinking what have I forgotten, how many times before I lose something of myself as well as those memories.   Some say older people remember the past more clearly, why would that be?  Do they all think childhood or early life is more pleasant, more memorable?  I would not say that, though there were plenty of times I would remember from that past.  If I find a time I cannot remember all that I would want to, I will have to be content with making new memories.  And content with this moment, this sunny morning, this day opening before me filled with quiet and work that I love and the green oasis of the yard.

March 23, 2012

A very dark morning, because there are no clouds, there is no reflection of near by lighting from the port, so it's actually dark.  And so quiet, quiet enough to make my ears ring with it.  I like the early morning but this early there is not much interesting to see, or hear, though I suspect the birds will be up soon.
  
At This Hour 

Say I am not wrong to want the two finches who ring out.
Say I've begun to lose my way—no one dies
from saying it, no one even turns in their sleep. Certainly I've fallen
into old patterns, the tile markings, the blue
of the milkmaid's apron in the painting, the boys' homework cascading
from the high table. And more—
the note saying "today I felt moody; I ate very little at lunchtime;
at nap I slept," that plus the hand-lettered sign
over the cafeteria freezer offering your choice of chocolate or skim
—it has a certain feel to it, easily it becomes life as we know it. Still,
there's something else. It's dawn now, the school buses flash
their warning lights. Even moments ago, I could feel it,
the sky purpling to blue, the leaves of the maple—
there's no maple but I do remember one, Japanese or red,
a companion from a dream—and there's more, just under the surface,
reticulating, pulled out to pasture, faithful in its disorder.
Or the disorder's me, I'm the object turning in the light,
and the two finches who know I'm alive
are turning too, very quickly—
very quickly headed they know not where.

Carol Ann Davis

Ah, don't we all have old patterns, signs we see everyday that once in awhile we notice and wonder how long they have been there, and what they really mean?  It's all life as we know it, and it is dawn now and the school bus for the high school just rounded the corner without even slowing down.  The maple is still hidden, though I would be reluctant to call it . . . disordered, its leaves all willy-nilly, its branches at every angle.  I am just beginning to recognize the dark of the tree from the dark of the sky.  So many details, that I am sure I don't notice most of them any more, that when I do notice I sometimes get a jolt, seeing something in that new light.  The birds are beginning to make sleepy noises, I hear a mourning dove in this dark.  I don't think it matters much to the birds where they are headed, they go where they need to go and make song of the journey.  This morning, I am going where I need to go, and just trying to notice a few more things along the way!

March 22, 2012

Sunshine!  After days of cloud, this morning the world is full of spring light, sharp and clear, the vault of the sky is high and pale blue, the trees practically glow with their new green, even the grass is sparkling.  A line of new cane has come up, white like vertical dashes against the darker green, so bright you have to squint.  The resident squirrel is glad to be out as well, running up and down each tree, switching its tail, moving like liquid fur, fast and flowing.  It's so busy being joyful, it doesn't even have a cross word for the cat sunning itself at the end of the driveway.  A pair of cardinal have been shifting branches through the crepe myrtle.  They cannot seem to be still for long, the lady in her dowdy dress, following her flashy mate in his scarlet suit.   The air is still and I can hear several groups of birds, even if I can't see them.  The jays are out, sounding remarkably like crows, only . . . with less volume, the timber of their calls less dark.  I hear one of the pileated woodpecker's jungle cries and its thunking into the dead snag across the ditch.  They sure do hit the trees hard, their skulls must be set up special for that kind of work.

Sometimes a poem, which is probably supposed to be serious, makes me laugh out loud!  It's so startling, or presents such a tilted world image that my brain makes laughter because it has to respond some way, and it chooses joy in that surprise.  This is one of those poems from Verse Daily.  When I first read it, I thought it said  . . . The Universe is a Madman, my brain is still sleepy I guess or in one of its more dyslexic phases.  Yet even when I read it again, and correctly, it made about as much sense as the first rendition.

The Universe is a Madam 

Your star-marked hair is set
with laissez-faire,
but you blink and comets
hightail it. All my life I've tried
to be like you. All my life
I've failed. What do I have to do
to match your husk-voice, your red-
light-pulse?You with your
Spin inside me, worlds. Your
Today a fire appears, today one blackens.
Some nights I walk through
my silent neighborhood with my head down.
I'm giving you a chance, Universe.
Pluck me up. Scold me. Tell me
I'm failing, that the clients
have complained. Then give me
one more chance. Go, I'd like to
hear you say, supernovas churning
inside your gaping mouth,
and make me proud.

Catherine Pierce

Okay, so I have never wanted to be the Universe, but even while reading it I completely understood the impulse, the desire to encompass everything, to be full with stars and worlds!  To be able to know more than I do, to be responsible for making things, for creating so much, for living large in this moment and wanting to share it.  I want star-marked hair set with laissez-faire, heck, I will settle for star-marked!  Wouldn't that be something, walking around at night, hair trailing stars like comets, glowing!  I want to glow in the daytime too, like the skin of the crepe myrtle tree, golden and smooth, with enough wrinkles to be interesting!  Oh, me too, I want to make the universe proud!

March 21, 2012

A morning, windy and dark, with spatters of rain, made cooler by so much wind.  That's the only sound this morning, wind and in the distance the sound of the bay restless along its shore.  Even early vehicles seem to be driving quieter and the silence they leave behind is bigger somehow than the little noise they made.  It's one of those mornings when it's hard to get started, and, even when you do, you are left to wonder, why the body sometimes only wants another hour to sleep, or even just lie there with your brain in neutral.

It seems like the hardest part of something is the beginning, just starting out, not just for new things but for daily things as well.  Once you find yourself up and starting your own routine, things seems to go better, perhaps routine is the fretwork of the day, something we build on, the bones of the morning holding up the flesh of the day.

It Is I Who Must Begin

It is I who must begin.
Once I begin, once I try --
here and now,
right where I am,
not excusing myself
by saying things
would be easier elsewhere,
without grand speeches and
ostentatious gestures,
but all the more persistently
-- to live in harmony
with the "voice of Being," as I
understand it within myself
-- as soon as I begin that,
I suddenly discover,
to my surprise, that
I am neither the only one,
nor the first,
nor the most important one
to have set out
upon that road.

Whether all is really lost
or not depends entirely on
whether or not I am lost.

 Vaclav Havel

I am not the only one starting out on the journey to discover how to live in harmony, or get through the morning, or understand that living where I find myself, in this moment, is probably the best that I can do.  I think we are all discovering that every day, and probably need to discover it for every day.  I am not lost yet, though sometimes finding my way in this early dark can be harder some days.  I am glad the road is out there, the routine I walk down, familiar and timeworn, it keeps me in my place, keeps me from losing my way.  On dark and stormy mornings, rain against the windows and trees yielding to the wind, it's comforting to know that others are finding their way by the map of routine, that we are not lost, that in this moment all around me, people are starting their day, or finishing it.  We are perhaps a little sleepy and reluctant, but are finding that road and setting out.

March 20, 2012

First day of spring, and a line of storms ready to create havoc.  I got up early to pick up my order that got to the school yesterday afternoon.  The storms were supposed to hit around 9 am so I thought I would go and get back before they arrived.   The sky was charcoal at the northern horizon and swathes of gray and darker gray all around.  No bright sunrise this morning.  In the peculiar light, the grass was greener almost than in full sun, a kind of fluorescent green.  Wind from the north steady and gusty at times, bullying the trees into bowing before it.  So much motion it almost makes you seasick to watch them for any length of time.  And the birds have slept in, or taken up shelter in silence.

When I got home, just ahead of the front, the sky darkened to nearly black and as it approached, there was that green light, weird and shining, tornado light, and though we had a few warnings there were not any spotted, yet the air had that electric thrill just before it began to pour.  It's been raining for hours now, there was enough lightning that I did not go to the computer except to check the weather and then turned it off.  I had plenty to do with sorting out the kits for the girls yesterday.  The lightning got pretty close but it never made the power flinch.  Rumbling is all around but we can't see much actual lightning.  Rain is still falling though not nearly as forcefully as it was earlier, it's tapering off now just a steady sprinkle.  Now the sky has lightened up, shades of gray lighter over head and darker at the horizons, still windy, my back porch chime is making its own song, random and bell-like.

Storm Warnings

 
The glass has been falling all the afternoon,
And knowing better than the instrument
What winds are walking overhead, what zone
Of grey unrest is moving across the land,
I leave the book upon a pillowed chair
And walk from window to closed window, watching
Boughs strain against the sky

And think again, as often when the air
Moves inward toward a silent core of waiting,
How with a single purpose time has traveled
By secret currents of the undiscerned
Into this polar realm. Weather abroad
And weather in the heart alike come on
Regardless of prediction.

Between foreseeing and averting change
Lies all the mastery of elements
Which clocks and weatherglasses cannot alter.
Time in the hand is not control of time,
Nor shattered fragments of an instrument
A proof against the wind; the wind will rise,
We can only close the shutters.

I draw the curtains as the sky goes black
And set a match to candles sheathed in glass
Against the keyhole draught, the insistent whine
Of weather through the unsealed aperture.
This is our sole defense against the season;
These are the things we have learned to do
Who live in troubled regions.

Adrienne Rich

I do not draw the curtains, as I want to watch the storm in all its enormous vigor.  We are not proof against the weather, though at times we would like to be, and what she says about weather abroad and weather in the heart alike coming regardless of prediction is surely true.  Measuring time, by clocks, and watches, and computers, and now phones, is not control of time.  No one knows that like me, time is as unruly as the storm, sometimes racing ahead, sometimes stalling out, yet we would not want to be without it.  There are things we learn to do, we who live in troubled regions, and one of those things is keep an eye on the weather, watch what it is doing, be prepared to batten down, or to escape.  Storms have their own travel  plans that they share with no one, they might give you a general idea where they are going and when they will arrive, but don't hold them to it!

We are supposed to have another round of rain tomorrow or late tonight . . . we'll see if it sticks to its itinerary.  In the mean time, we can hope most of it will be over before time for the cars and their passengers to turtle their way home.

March 19, 2012

In the darkness, a single bird awake, making song, greeting the day not yet in evidence.  What makes that one bird sing its song before light, before the hour that raises the sun?  I have heard the song, and wondered at it.  Perhaps it's the early bird, and has gotten the worm already and cannot wait to tell the world how clever it is.  Perhaps it is lonely and seeks to comfort itself in the small hour.  Perhaps it has come home from a long journey and is glad to be here, even in the dark.  Perhaps it has found love, and its heart is too full for silence.  Whatever makes it sing at this hour, it makes me smile to listen to it, to hear in this otherwise silent dark, the sound of one creature, glad to be alive and telling its story to the world.

Bird

It was passed from one bird to another,
the whole gift of the day.
The day went from flute to flute,
went dressed in vegetation,
in flights which opened a tunnel
through the wind would pass
to where birds were breaking open
the dense blue air -
and there, night came in.

When I returned from so many journeys,
I stayed suspended and green
between sun and geography -
I saw how wings worked,
how perfumes are transmitted
by feathery telegraph,
and from above I saw the path,
the springs and the roof tiles,
the fishermen at their trades,
the trousers of the foam;
I saw it all from my green sky.
I had no more alphabet
than the swallows in their courses,
the tiny, shining water
of the small bird on fire
which dances out of the pollen.

Pablo Neruda

There is a small bird on fire out there, on fire to bring on the day, sitting there in a shower of pollen that is everywhere thick as rain.   I am imagining the light, the trees, the wind, the place where it is singing, the shining water that is the bay at rest, the details so familiar to me, one more morning, a gift of this day, unwrapped by song.

March 18, 2012

Sun and sheer clouds, the spring blue tempered to a wash by white, the trees still and the birds making a joyful noise.  The leaves are leafier, getting that look they will keep all summer, so many shades of green you could never reproduce them all.  The bicyclers are out, a pack just rounded the corner, all bright colors, orange and pink and green and yellow, and helmets of shocking colors, and the inevitable stragglers, talking, not so much interested in speed as company.  It's the last day of spring break, school tomorrow for me and all the students.  Kemah has been crowded with traffic and fun seekers all week.  The roads as mobbed as the rollercoaster, or all those fancy restaurants.  The boats going in and out, by the hundreds, a handful at a time.  When you cross the bridge you can see so many little white boats out on the bay, as if someone stood at the apex of the bridge and threw out hands full of torn paper, and the wind scattered it over the gray-blue water, lit in patches of green by bright sun.  Triangular sails swollen by wind for sheer exhilaration of speed and the sound of rushing water!

Sunday, and the day for the blessing.  Today Michael is going to Oklahoma, not just for vacation but to live there for a time, maybe for good, and maybe it will be.  He's leaving later to day with Mendi who came for his birthday and will go back today as well.  They will travel packed up with worldly goods and memories, looking forward to a new adventure with excitement, and here things will be different, but that is what happens, things change.  You cannot escape it, you just have to accept it.  The only thing you can do is choose how you will react to those changes.  Today I am glad for Michael and for Mendi, they seem to have found warmth and affection and perhaps love, they surely have found a lot to talk about, every night on the phone, almost all night, in the quiet they discovered each other.  Now they will go off and discover more about each other, and what else could that be but an adventure.  Matthew is there, and Kaci and Shawn, it's not like they are going off to some place where they will not have any connections.  Michael will have family and friends and new work, what that will be we don't know but . . . remember, adventure!  And we will be here still loving him and wishing him happiness and all good things that can come with finding someone to share your life.

Here is a good poem for starting the adventure of the rest of your life.

A Morning Offering

I bless the night that nourished my heart
To set the ghosts of longing free
Into the flow and figure of dream
That went to harvest from the dark
Bread for the hunger no one sees.

All that is eternal in me
Welcome the wonder of this day,
The field of brightness it creates
Offering time for each thing
To arise and illuminate.

I place on the altar of dawn:
The quiet loyalty of breath,
The tent of thought where I shelter,
Wave of desire I am shore to
And all beauty drawn to the eye.

May my mind come alive today
To the invisible geography
That invites me to new frontiers,
To break the dead shell of yesterdays,
To risk being disturbed and changed.

May I have the courage today
To live the life that I would love,
To postpone my dream no longer
But do at last what I came here for
And waste my heart on fear no more.

John O'Donohue

Being invited to new frontiers, breaking the shell of yesterday, the risk of being disturbed and changed.  Linda had in her office had something that said to have the change you desire, you have to give up the way things are.   So today Michael is having that courage to go and live the life he would love, perhaps to do what he came here for, to go to that new frontier and explore all that is out there.  We will surely miss him, miss having him in the intimate way of day to day life, but there will be connections, and words will be part of those, and love, and who would tell anyone you love not to go, not to discover what brings them joy, what will challenge them, and the world the place it can be for them.  Today I have my own new frontiers, and I will not waste my heart on fear or such sadness that involves only how I see things, and I see his dream and want him to have that life he would love.

Here's to new frontiers!  To love and all that means, all the changes, the mind coming alive to this day, to this invisible geography we all are traveling through!

March 17, 2012

It is certainly green enough out there for St. Patrick's Day!  And all the Irish everywhere make a day for celebration, a day to remember a green place that many of them have never seen, and likely never will, but have made their home in some other green country, or desert, and carry the green inside them wherever they may be.

It's sunny enough, clouds cover and uncover the sun, like a quilt with holes worn through with use, the fluff escaping from the background blue.  The day is quiet enough for all of that, except for the squirrel who is out there giving someone hell, sounding like a hoarse crow grinding out the same note over and over.  I don't see it but I can hear it just fine.  For a long while I did not realize it was the squirrels making that unlovely sound, and blamed it on the birds, but once in awhile you can see the squirrel sitting on branch its tail thrashing and its mouth open making threat to the cat or one of the dogs that visit.  It makes sure its well out of reach of either one before beginning its scold.  The striped cat is too . . . corpulent to climb trees and the dogs bark but have no chance to catch the squirrel and it knows this.  So it's safe to vent its spleen on others in the yard.

There is a gentle breeze wandering around this morning, touching things, moving them about, making leaves flutter, and twigs sway.  The more leaves the more motion because in winter it's a lot harder to tell when there is just a little breeze, but this time of year every breath makes something twitch.

Shaking the Tree
 
Vine and branch we’re connected in this world
of sound and echo, figure and shadow, the leaves
contingent, roots pushing against earth. An apple
 
belongs to itself, to stem and tree, to air
that claims it, then ground. Connections
balance, each motion changes another. Precarious,
 
hanging together, we don’t know what our lives
support, and we touch in the least shift of breathing.
Each holy thing is borrowed.  Everything depends.

Jeanne Lohmann

Everything depends . . . Dawn is always telling me that for me everything is a "depends" question.  And you are right, it all depends, all hangs on something else, there is nothing in isolation, we all connect.  Everything we do touches something or someone and we may not even see the connection, kind of like the butterfly wind analogy for the weather, a butterfly flaps its wings in Chile and we get rain here!  Chaos theory, just a scientific way of saying we can never know everything because there is chance in the world, and so many connections.  Einstein liked to say "God doesn't throw dice."  But suppose God doesn't need to throw dice because chance and connections were built in at the beginning, fundamental and impossible to predict, then even God could be surprised, and will never grow bored with creation.  That would be a good thing because from early times the stories of bored godheads never ended well.

Today with so much wind, there has to be thousands of butterflies flapping somewhere stirring up the uinverse and making waves!  And even God is smiling!

March 16, 2012

I've been paying bills, and waiting for the light, really, not metaphorically!  I don't think there is any light in paying bills, just so much routine that has to be done.  It's still dark though, the one streetlight is shining its orange light through all those new leaves, and the trees are still absent in the darkness.  Birds are not awake, but planes are, I hear one of the big jets going over, high and almost sounding like distant thunder, but more regular somehow.  The 5:30 truck has left already, a few minutes late this morning, either spring break or daylight savings time making it hard to keep strictly to time routines.  The paper has not come yet, I have not heard it, but some mornings since the paper has gotten so skinny and the truck that used to bring it now a smaller car, I just miss hearing it, and it is there when Honey goes out to get it. 

Still darkness, though I am sure it should be light by now, it must be cloudy or foggy or both, or perhaps this is the place the light is taken from to give us light longer in the evening.  A poem this morning about night, about the night sky and how we look at it, or how we don't.

Now that no one looking
     
Now that no one looking at the night—
Sky blanked by leakage from electric lamps
And headlights prowling through the parking lot
Could recognize the Babylonian dance
That once held every gazer; now that spoons
And scales, and swordsmen battling with beasts
Have decomposed into a few stars strewn
Illegibly across an empty space,
Maybe the old unfalsifiable
Predictions and extrapolated spheres
No longer need to be an obstacle
To hearing what it is the stars declare:
That there are things created of a size
We can't and weren't meant to understand,
As fish know nothing of the sun that writes
Its bright glyphs on the black waves overhead.

Adam Kirsch

There are things like the vast reaches of space, and the concept of plurality of infinities, or God, that the mind just balks at.  We are small in our measure, yet we can hold such concepts, if only lightly.  We can cast our mind back to history, even if we can't understand it, or accept what we have done, or change it, we are unlike the fish in that regard.  We know something of all these things, we know enough to realize there will always be things beyond our understanding, that we can only understand our own small part of the puzzle, that the entire picture is bigger and more vast than we can know.  Yet, we go on learning, we go on looking for answers, even while accepting we might not find all the answers we need.  It's the search for them that keeps us going, that keeps us human.

I am waiting for the light this morning, to see what kind of day it will be.  So far, still dark, but I believe the trees are slowly condensing.  I hear an owl, it must be going to bed, sounding sleepy, sounding far away.  Perhaps it will be asleep before the crows wake up, or the sun.  There are no stars out this morning, only blankness, and the one-star streetlight.

March 15, 2012

More and more crowded with the black silhouettes of leaves the morning becomes as the chalk of a cloudy morning rises.  Closer and closer seem the trees, black against gray, they seem to walk right up to the window.  The small lace of crepe myrtle leaves makes its delicate pattern, the hand-sized maple leaves make a litter of layers, folding into something that looks like cut paper patterns, as if the leaves were holes in the gray sky.  The birds are still asleep.  A huge mayfly bumps against the inside of the window, futile life trapped away from its short hours of fertility or freedom.  We have escaped the fog, but not so many thick clouds that light barely shrugs its way through.

I bought and brought home a small paper pot of miniature daffodils for Mikayla's birthday.  Here in this mostly tropical place, bulbs do not do all that well.  We do not have enough cold, not enough freezing for daffodils, or hyacinths, or crocus to come up crisp and fragrant though the last spring snow.  We have early heat, spring that explodes into all this warmth; we have grass everywhere, and cane, and trees.  Our flowers are the hardier sort, azaleas and white spyria, magnolias and later oleander, in all its variety of color.

This week with the temperatures in the low 80s and the beaches in Galveston filled with kids on spring break, I kind of envy places of colder clime, where spring is just now shoving its green shoulders into winter, where flowers are just beginning to come up, and their trees are still bare and have all that leafing out to look forward to.

Crocus    

When trees have lost remembrance of the leaves
that spring bequeaths to summer, autumn weaves
and loosens mournfully — this dirge, to whom
does it belong — who treads the hidden loom?

When peaks are overwhelmed with snow and ice,
and clouds with crepe bedeck and shroud the skies —
nor any sun or moon or star, it seems,
can wedge a path of light through such black dreams —

All motion cold, and dead all traces thereof:
What sudden shock below, or spark above,
starts torrents raging down till rivers surge —
that aid the first small crocus to emerge?

The earth will turn and spin and fairly soar,
that couldn't move a tortoise-foot before —
and planets permeate the atmosphere
till misery depart and mystery clear! —

And yet, so insignificant a hearse? —
who gave it the endurance so to brave
such elements? — shove winter down a grave? —
and then lead on again the universe?

Alfred Kreymborg

I have to laugh about shoving winter down a grave and the brave bright crocus leading the universe into its spring.  Here it's the trees that signal the earliest spring, not flowers.  It's the bloom of the maple tree, the oak pollinating, yellow dust of the pine trees, even the grass seems to take a back seat to the fecundity of the trees.  The white or pink blossoms of the fruit trees, ornamental or otherwise, come early, sometimes twice a year, confused by midwinter warmth on occasion.  I just like the idea of something so fragile and lovely, defeating something so huge and so cold!

In this there is hope for us all, the very essence of spring!

March 14, 2012

A foggy morning, sort of distant fog, can see across the street to the little park, but not a lot further.  The trees stand like dark ghosts there, dissolving out of the slow fog.  There is no wind, dead calm, with the splat of dripping moisture, leaves glazed with it, the trunks of the crepe myrtles shadowed with streaks of wet trickling down.  The maple with its layers of leaves, almost fully formed now, is losing the brightest green and slowly growing more somber but still fresh.  There is a small forest of white new canes rising like spear heads from the leaf litter and the margins of grass.  A cardinal sits in the bush, running through its various songs . . . it always amazes me that birds have a song for every reason and none as well. What you think might be half a dozen birds turns out to be the same bird just practicing every song it knows.

Today is the birthday of my oldest son, the first born, the one you make all your first mistakes on, the one that survives your new terror and inexperience.  I can't really say the one you make all your mistakes on, because there are always more mistakes, you run across new ones for every child.  You do learn things, like they will survive most anything, that they are not as fragile as they seem, that nothing is more important to them than knowing you love them, and that love covers a multitude of sins.  When you have three children, each unique, the opportunity for unique blunders is there for each of them.  Still, they are more joy than anything else, even now, even grown, they are still good company, still the kind of people I am glad to know.  There is a little triumph in that, small victory over all those errors!

Even though Michael is grown now, you never really forget that first moment, all those firsts.

First Born
Nothing is so deep a revolution
As carrying another life,
A change so permanent
It can be read in the bones
And abyss crossed
That cuts your life
Into two countries,
Before and after.

Before, a singular view,
Before, the body unmapped
It’s life shared only
In that intimate opening
That makes another life
In soft pink light
In the heat of summer
In the heat of discovery.

After the two of us
We are three
And I am two of us
And the world enters,
The body measured
Mapped, explored
ten thousand ways
in every light.

And the months
Grow long and large
And there is new
Strange terrain,
Shifting and making
Landmarks of events
In the body and blood
Under the skin and heart.

Even after the exploration,
There are new territories,
Futile work of muscle
The new life caught
Trapped by bones,
Exhausted both of us,
Freed finally
By the surgeon’s knife.

First born,
Both joy and terror
From first glimpse,
Blue, swollen, dented,
Marked by hard passage
Into a country of love
We must all survive
And discover together.

S. Crowson

A poem I wrote for that discovery, that we all live in that country of love and are still exploring it, from the first terrifying moments, until now, when I get hugs and conversation and explanations for technical issues that are beyond comprehension, and another window on the world with his own view of just about everything.  That's what you get when you have children, more windows on the world, more views, more opinions, actually when it comes right down to it, more just about everything that you wouldn't have wanted to miss.  You also get these things from all your children and other people's children, and that is such an amazing blessing, from my sister and Brian's Sam and Winonah, from the children's friends, from my friends, from the students at school, so many windows, so many different worlds! 

How can we ever be bored in such a world?  How can we ever run out of love with so much giving and taking and exploring?

So today it's . . . Happy birthday, Michael! 

March 13, 2012

A foggy morning getting foggier, cool air warmer water, fog filtering in from the bay, stealthy as a snake.  Gray air and shadows, a morning for quiet, everything subdued and remote.  The cat asleep on the porch, the birds quiet, the trees still.  Nothing much going on.

Sometimes when you read or listen to the news, there are stories that affect you to a greater extent, the soldier in Afghanistan who kills civilians, even children, in an indiscriminate shooting, this morning's story about a 12 year old forced by school officials to give up her password to her Facebook account, mothers allowing their children to be killed by their boyfriends, some things I would wish I knew nothing about, not because I don't want to know what's going on in the world, but because I feel so helpless to do anything about what I am being presented with.  How could I have helped that soldier, how can I protect that child's privacy, how could I protect that baby from the very people who are supposed to love and protect him?   I don't know the answer.   I don't think anyone does.  There are so many things happening so quickly, I am sure I am not the only one to feel lost and more powerless than I would like to be.  It seems sometimes the only ones with power are those that shouldn't ever have it to start with.

So, today it's all the green growing things that are my solace, all the trees, and grasses, the cane with its voracious life, and also the birds who squabble and then sing, who have such fragile lives and yet continue to sing.

What the Seed Knows

winter plods on like a Russian novel, spring
     hints, haiku

tight blouses unbutton, jackets unzip,
     skin is not just skin

rich soil proliferates
     in the heart, in the hand
     that can never let go

rivers flow unseen, underground, unfettered
     unfathomable

some dig down, some rise up
     some survive

sleep is not dreamless:
     how else the orange, the dogwood?
     the phalanx of asparagus?

coddled in the pod,
     all the seed needs:

darkness, more snug
     than light

grit splits the rock, raises
     a tiny fist, screams
     the world into profusion
     of petaled racket

     to uncurl and unfurl
     to unhusk from the crust

to inhale, exhale
     turn toward what's bright

Anita Skeen

I'm glad there are seeds to scream the world into petaled racket.  Yesterday evening Mikayla showed me all the maple seedlings growing where there is the least bit of water and . . . grit, in the crack between the porch and the house, along the edge of that old outside table, among the weeds by the hose, in random pots of dirt where there use to be other plants, and that don't have new ones yet.  She's going to take some of the seedlings to work for a friend.  Michael still has his little maple trees from last year and the year before, making bonsai out of them.  To look out on all that green is soothing to the spirit, reminds me the world continues to grow green in its own time, even leafless things are not dead, but may be waiting to burst into new green.  

Like the seeds, I will inhale, exhale and turn toward what's bright.  What else can be done?  We can only do what keeps us going.  Ah . . . and here comes some sun!

March 12, 2012

All right, it's still overcast and gray.  The rain has stopped, but the sun is taking its own sweet time making an appearance,  The chalk light has smeared away the dark but there is nothing of brightness this morning, uniform shadow over everything.  Not a leaf stirs, nothing is moving save the occasional car around the corner.  Not even a school bus.  The new leaves hang limp and green, the little lakes in the yard have been absorbed, the only bright spot is the new cane, blinding white at the moment, shooting up from the ground like some natural fireworks, the white so startling against everything else that's green.  My stone heron is still dark with wet.  

The birds are chattering away this morning, a chorus of "cheater, cheater, cheater" and the "who . . who who who" of the mourning dove, clicks and whistles of the little birds sounding a lot like a bunch of tiny rusty doors opening and closing.  I don't see many but the cardinals and the jays, the yards usual residents, so colorful they are easy to spot.  One of the birds I think of as a lady cardinal might be something else, as I think it's got a red crest on its head, and is larger and has more orange on it than the lady cardinal.  There are so many sounds that I have no idea who makes them, one makes a persistent "pew pew pew"  Kind of reminds me of the sound generated for lasers in a game. <chuckle> 

It's warmer this morning, but still not sunny, however, I think we are filling up the drought spaces in our lakes and our trees sure a looking happier than they did last year at this time.  The maple has big leaves now, it and the sawtooth oak the first in the area to spread their leaves, though the ashes are not far behind.  Now the bald cypress is hazing over with tiny green needles, green like a mist settling over the thin branches.  The color is so vibrant, wish there were a colored pencil or marker that color! 

This poem is for after a storm, and we surely had enough storm yesterday for it to have some meaning for us, still lingering under the clouds.


Thinking of Work    

A brief storm
blew the earth clean. 

There was much
to do: sun to put up,
clouds to put out,
blue to install,
limbs to remove,
grass to implant. 

(The grass failed.
We ordered new grass.) 

A limb had cracked
in half in the short storm,
short with its feeling. 
We saw its innards,
all the hollow places. 

Something flew out of
the window and then
the window flew out of the window.

James Shea

The aftermath, always something falls, always something to pick up, things blown around, dead wood lying in puddles.  I like . . . sun to put up/ clouds to put out,/ blue to install.  Yep, we need someone who knows something about the installation of blue, or how to put up the sun.  I love that he says "The grass failed./ We ordered new grass.)  We've done that several times, but it's the shade that keeps the grass from growing.  And I don't want to give up the trees.  Always when you see something out of place, a limb on the ground, I am astonished at how much mystery is hidden inside the places we don't usually get to see.  My curoisity is aroused by hidden things, the insides of leaves or stones, or windmills, or what lives at the bottom of the ocean or even the bay.  There are whole worlds I never get to see, except from the outside.  When you get a glimpse, it's what makes the heart lurch with new knowledge, something you could never imagine, hidden and secret, revealed in its glory.  And there are days when the window flies out of the window, out into the world, out where there are more secrets than can be shared, more to the day then you can experience! 

Thinking of work, there are all kinds of work; today it's secrets that are working, finding their way into everyone's life.

March 11, 2012

Daylight Savings Time, hmm . . . good thing I have off this week of spring break to adjust to the time change.  It will take at least that long because my body is slow accepting the lie of this time change.  It knows what time it is, for real, and refuses to give up its reality for outside impositions.  I have to slowly convince it to . . . as my husband's Garmin GPS says . . . recalculate!  And it is not nearly as easy to convince as the GPS, it continues to believe in the "real" time.  This morning, no matter what hour it claims to be, it is dark and gloomy, gray and overcast when not actively drizzling.  The rain has helped with the pollen some, where the rain ran off the roof, it frothed yellow as if it were some weird carbonated drink.  It seems to be getting darker this morning instead of lighter.  They say, and we all know who they are,  it will be warmer and sunnier by Tuesday . . . I am holding them to it!
Today is the day for the blessing, and even grumpy about time and gloom, I know my life is filled with innumerable blessings.  It seems that even when we realize that, it does not preclude the fact we are all prone to grumble occasionally.

Before He Makes Each One

Before he makes each one
of us, God speaks.

Then, without speaking,
he takes each one 
out of the darkness.

And these are the cloudy
words God speaks
before each of us begins:

"You have been sent out
by your senses. Go
to the farthest edge
of desire, and give me
clothing: burn like a great
fire so that the stretched-out
shadows of the things
of the world cover
me completely.
Let everything happen
to you: beauty and terror.
You must just go--
no feeling is the farthest
you can go. Don't let
yourself be separated
from me. The country
called life is close.
By its seriousness,
you will know it.
Give me your hand."

Rainer Maria Rilke

Let everything happen to you . . . and not just the good stuff, everything.  It will all happen no matter what you chose, there is no life without some moments of beauty, and some moments of terror.  We must just go and live out there in our feelings.  In us there are so many countries, so many feelings, so much we believe and believe in.  Life is a serious thing, the most serious thing we know, yet, it's okay to take joy seriously, or fun, or all those frivolous things that make us happy.  They are included in the shadows of things, because they cover the ground of our lives with their existence, because we burn with the joy of them.  We are sent out by our senses, how else can we experience God, or anything?  Our senses give us the world, and even if you believe God to be wholly insensible, you can only have a relationship with God through what you experience, and we experience through our senses.  We might imagine things, we might create things, ideas, art, but we all work in the world, using what we know from the senses to do all that.   If we live in the world we cannot be separated from God because it is the world God created, and we put out our hand to that world every day.  We create our interaction with the world, that is our greatest creation, our response to what we sense, to what the world is.

The blessing is in our choices, in what we do with the world and how we use it, how we think about it, and how we love!  We have been blessed with this world and all the worlds out there, all the worlds to come from our choices, from our lives, from our loves.   We create our own blessings with God stuff, with the stuff of the world, and all the love we create in working with our world, in our lives, with our desires, we give God clothing.  Now that is a thought that gives a whole new meaning to the idea of blessing <smile>.

March 10, 2012

Hello . . .

The sounds of rain all night, sometimes beating the ground as if it were a drum, sometimes the tickle of rain falling into rain, rain on the canoe, sliding off its rounded shoulders, hiss of rain on the street where cars disturb its sleep, constant sound of water, a cocoon of water wrapping the tree's new green leaves in an embrace of drops,  pulling the azalea flowers from their short stems, flaming colors scattered from the bush, slate blue sky revealed where there is no sunrise to speak of just less dark.  And with the rain, wind, in torrents, in gusts, in murmurs, pushing the rain down, a bully nothing can escape, only its deep desire to be somewhere else, allows us to continue, even the trees tremble before it, knowing they can be broken.  Water stands in the yard, flat blank mirrors, deep enough to hide the grass, to reflect more rain, and accept it, having no choice, except runoff, when that certain depth is achieved, from here the ditches cannot be seen, though by this time they are more like rivers carrying the water out into the bay, where it will dilute the salt from the sea, the bay tossing and turning in its shallow bed snoring, waves breathing in and out, more out as water is pushed back like a useless blanket by the north wind.

A black and gray morning, like an old photograph of some place familiar yet just enough strange that it keeps you looking to see what you recognize, the old neighborhood, a trick of shadow, the black dog running down the road.  You see all that is not there as well as all the things you know, each tree in its season, the same truck rounding the same corner at the same time, the cane in its eternal dance, the streetlight still glowing, shedding orange light , the light swallowed up by the rain, each drop carrying its own little dot into the dark morning, dividing and diminishing it. 

Rain in all circumstances, in the imagination, in its reality, we watch it fall and dream.
 

Rain on Tin

If I ever get over the bodies of women, I'm going to think of the rain,

of waiting under the eaves of an old house

at that moment

when it takes a form like fog.

It makes the mountain vanish.

Then the smell of rain, which is the smell of the earth a plow turns up

only condensed and refined.

How many years since thunder rolled

and the nerves woke like secret agents under the skin.

Brazil is where I wanted to live.

The border is not far from here.

Lonely and grateful would be my way to end,

and something for the pain pleas,

a little purity to sand the rough edges,

a slow downpour from the dark ages,

a drizzle from the Pleistocene.

As I dream of the rain's long body

I will eliminate from mind all the qualities that rain deletes

and then I will be primed to study rain's power,

the first drops lightly hallowing

but now and again a great gallop of the horse of rain

or an explosion of orange-green light.

A simple radiance, it requires no discipline.

Before I knew women, I knew the lonely pleasures of rain.

The mist then the clearing.

I will listen where the lightning thrills the rooster up a willow

and my whole life flowing

until I have no choice, only the rain

and I step into it.

Rodney Jones

This morning we all know the lonely pleasures of rain, and are still not so far removed from drought that we don't welcome it and consider it a blessing.

March 9, 2012

Wind and rain, wind and rain, north wind and cold rain, a cacophony of wind chimes, and drumming rain that has eased off to drips now, but I don't expect it will end.  I think it's just resting a bit.  The sound of the wind is intensified by the sound of the bay as restless and thundery as the sky.  The cold is settling in because we have had the air conditioning on instead of the heat.  It was 80+ yesterday ahead of this front, now in the mid 50s and falling I think.  It's so dark this morning it reminds me of what you sometimes hear police say on a tv show . . ."Nothing to see here, move along."

It's still dark, and still raining slowly.  It's a water night, opening up into a water morning.

Water night

Night with the eyes of a horse that trembles in the night,
night with eyes of water in the field asleep
is in your eyes, a horse that trembles,
is in your eyes of secret water.

Eyes of shadow-water,
eyes of well-water,
eyes of dream-water

Silence and solitude,
two little animals moon-led,
drink in your eyes,
drink in those waters.

If you open your eyes,
night opens, doors of musk,
the secret kingdom of the water opens
flowing from the center of the night.

And if you close your eyes,
a river fills you from within,
flows forward, darkens you:
night brings its wetness to beaches in your soul.

Octavio Paz

So, I am moving on, wetness coming to my beaches, the river in me flowing from this darkness, waiting for light.  This is the last day of this class where the girls have made artist trading cards, and today they get to trade them in one big trade.  They have made some to keep and a bunch to trade, and for 90 minutes they will get to talk and trade and discuss what they like and what they don't, and they will have memories to take away and so will I.  I have made a card for each girl and some extras to trade as well.  I will like having some artwork by each of them.

Rain is still making its own song, replacing for awhile the song of birds still sheltering from its presence.  May you find shelter from the storm today and every day. 

March 8, 2012

Looks like not much sun this morning, gray evenly distributed and looking thicker and thicker, shadow over everything.  It’s getting lighter just not much brighter, sort of like it’s seeping in but having a difficult time of it.  It’s so still, not even a single leaf moving.  A huge hawk is circling just above the trees, I see it on one small portion of its round, haven’t seen a hawk out in a long time.   One afternoon at Dawn’s house, we watched a hawk chase some of the smaller birds and the rest just vanished.  Could be why I don’t see any smaller birds this morning, actually I don’t hear any either, strange for so late, usually at least hear the mockingbirds by this time.  It’s so quiet I hear one of the big ships in the channel, the throb of its engine a regular sound but louder than usual, maybe they are hurrying in ahead of the bad weather.

I think it looks like a good morning to do errands early, the weather guessers say rain surely by this afternoon, and looking out, it seems they might be right.  It’s odd how last year’s devastating drought changed my attitude about rain, even living in the desert did not have such an impact on me.  In the desert there is supposed to be little rain, you did not think anything about not seeing rain for months at a time, because that was normal.  But here, months without rain is not normal, here so much green needs all the rain it usually gets, and not getting it changes the landscape in ways that are heartbreaking, so hard on plants and animals both.  I think of all that water filling up the low lakes, and swelling the rivers with water for towns to drink, so that now, though I am not fond of the grayness that sometimes lasts for days, I can’t seem to resent the rain one little bit.

A poem by Wendell Berry that makes me smile, about rain, and about all this singing, about joining the chorus!

The Law That Marries All Things

1.
The cloud is free only
to go with the wind.

The rain is free
only in falling.

The water is free only
in its gathering together,

in its downward courses,
in its rising into the air.

2.
In law is rest
if you love the law,
if you enter, singing, into it
as water in its descent.

3.
Or song is truest law,
and you must enter singing;
it has no other entrance.

It is the great chorus
of parts.  The only outlawry
is in division.

4.
Whatever is singing
is found, awaiting the return
of whatever is lost.

5.
Meet us in the air
over the water,
sing the swallows.

Meet me, meet me,
the redbird sings,
here here here here.

Wendell Berry 

There is such joy in this, in following the natural progression, of water that is rain falling down and spirit rising up to fall again, in all the singing you hear joining parts of the earth together, the way our hearts lift with birdsong, with the sound of rain after a long dryness.  In those moments, it’s easy to feel that law of joining, of being married to all that beauty.  And you can feel too that the only bad things in the world are those things that divide us from each other and us from the earth and all its glory.  Some mornings the birds sing so loudly you can’t miss their song, and some mornings, like this one you have to sit still and listen intently to hear them.  No matter, they are all singing here here here, here in this moment is your gladness.

Hear birds today pointing out gladness, raising voices to say here it is, just open up and take it.

March 7, 2012

Lavendar sky, lit from below with all the shades of pale purple fading into the darkening gray.  It's windy and warm, a nice March morning, the clouds pushed around and thinned over time by the wind.  Moisture up from the Gulf is supposed to bring rain by tomorrow, but today it's only making soft air and soft blue, the clouds bleached out from this morning to a puffy white.  Every day the trees are more and more green; it's amazing that the green comes on so fast once it starts.  The maple has some real leaves, and is beginning to create shade already, bad for the grass but nice for everything else, birds and people included.

Something sensuous about the wood of the crepe myrtle, so smooth and golden, it warms up any kind of light that reaches it.  I have never seen a tree with a more lovely trunk, and now the little lace of its leaves is spreading out along more branches.  The baby magnolia tree is making its spears of yellow green, the only way you can really tell it's a magnolia is that it leafs out the same time as the others in the area, making that same shade of yellow green tinged with brown that darkens into that deep glossy green with the smooth hard edges.   It has much thinner leaves, longer and more pointed, than the other magnolias in the area.  For the longest time I did not realize what it was, but it's recognizable in the spring along with the others.

Next week is spring break and you can tell it from the students, they are wound up tight and noisy as a flock of crows, and just as in that flock of crows some are a lot louder than others, but they set to work and though they talked and laughed loudly, they were all working on something, cards to trade on Friday, and just experimenting with new things, inch square cards and altering playing cards.  They have been really creative in what they are doing, I love seeing them work out their ideas, figuring how to make it look or work the way they want it to.  It's the most fun I have, just trying to figure out what they are attempting!  They have the exuberance of spring leaves, but are not as silent!
 
Dear March - come in -

 Dear March - Come in -
How glad I am -
I hoped for you before -
Put down your Hat -
You must have walked -
How out of Breath you are -
Dear March, how are you, and the Rest -
Did you leave Nature well -
Oh March, Come right upstairs with me -
I have so much to tell -

I got your Letter, and the Birds -
The Maples never knew that you were coming -
I declare - how Red their Faces grew -
But March, forgive me -
And all those Hills you left for me to Hue -
There was no Purple suitable -
You took it all with you -

Who knocks? That April -
Lock the Door -
I will not be pursued -
He stayed away a Year to call
When I am occupied -
But trifles look so trivial
As soon as you have come

That blame is just as dear as Praise
And Praise as mere as Blame -

Emily Dickinson

This is one of the longest poems I've ready by Dickinson, and I so enjoy it.  She includes many of the things I treasure in spring, the maples, the birds, the wind, and the purple light often seen in the early morning this time of year, and in the sunsets as well.  And how droll she is telling April he can just stay away because it took him a year to come around, and now she won't be persued <chuckle>  How like a lady to want to be unpredictable, and choose her own suitor and her own time. 

So March, come along, you have come right into the yard, bringing all your lovely treasures, and air so soft and sweet we could get drunk on it!