April 5, 2012

I hear a cricket outside, one lone cricket making its song in the dark.  You would think you could not hear something so thin through the glass, but you evidently can.  Once in awhile in the summer, a cricket will make its way inside and start singing, and they can be loud!  Just out of curiosity I looked up cricket song and discovered that the singing and its frequency are related to temperature, and that there is a formula for determining the current temperature by counting the cricket chirps in a 14 second period.   And that there are four kinds of song, and that only males chirp, to call a female and to warn other males away, one he sings softly when a female is near, an aggressive song in the presence of another male, and a song after successful mating.  Considering it's early spring maybe this one is just looking for a date <smile>!

Thinking about Easter this weekend made me look up when the full moon is and it's this Saturday.  The date set for Easter varies because it's the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox.  How's that for complicated?  And even more complicated is that the definition of full moon is not necessarily astronomical but ecclesiastical which is calculated differently but mostly coincides with the astronomical one. Since it's cloudy this morning there was no way for me to tell by looking if the moon was full.  I love the Internet!  You can look up anything, you just have to be willing to look it up several times for a consensus as not everything is all that accurate!  Not a surprise by any means <smile>.

This morning, when no one is up yet, except the cricket, and possibly the person who drives that 5:20 truck, I am living in The Night House:

The Night House

Every day the body works in the fields of the world
mending a stone wall
or swinging a sickle through the tall grass --
the grass of civics, the grass of money --
and every night the body curls around itself
and listens for the soft bells of sleep.

But the heart is restless and rises
from the body in the middle of the night,
and leaves the trapezoidal bedroom
with its thick, pictureless walls
to sit by herself at the kitchen table
and heat some milk in a pan.

And the mind gets up too, puts on a robe
and goes downstairs, lights a cigarette,
and opens a book on engineering.
Even the conscience awakens
and roams from room to room in the dark,
darting away from every mirror like a strange fish.

And the soul is up on the roof
in her nightdress, straddling the ridge,
singing a song about the wildness of the sea
until the first rip of pink appears in the sky.
Then, they all will return to the sleeping body
the way a flock of birds settles back into a tree,

resuming their daily colloquy,
talking to each other or themselves
even through the heat of the long afternoons.
Which is why the body -- that house of voices --
sometimes puts down its metal tongs, its needle, or its pen
to stare into the distance,

to listen to all its names being called
before bending again to its labor.

 Billy Collins

That house of voices, don't you sometimes feel that way?  That there are so many voices inside you that they cannot all be speaking at the same time, that they take turns, and that some are pushier than others?  In the quiet of early morning, or night, you can hear more of them than you do through the daytime work.  That daytime voice is pretty loud, and sometimes makes it hard to hear the soul singing on the roof, or the mind longing for a book on engineering, or the conscience roaming in the dark, yet they all do talk to each other, those ghosts of all our aspects murmuring and whispering even in the sunlight, even when we are so busy.  A sudden cricket song will make us stop to listen, a cloud will rise up and we will recognize the coming thunder in its color, the moon will mark the day of celebration that we calculate from that light and from our desire to rise up into a new day, another life, each day arriving whether we wield the needle or the pen, or both.