June 18, 2012

A morning of early noise, cicadas and birds, early heat, already kind of breathless out there, early light, while the sky looks full of cloud they do not seem to be hiding the sun.  Later they say rain is coming, but, again, I'll believe that when it starts falling.  The stealth rain was not forecast and yet watered the yard some, and often forecast rain just passes us by.  There are new shoots of cane coming up through the leaf litter, spears that have not opened to leaves yet.  It was a nice weekend, lots of food and family and fun. It was an opportunity for me to use my new dishes and napkins and such, bright colors and festive.  It's good to have a pleasant break in the routine.

Some beautiful pictures this weekend included several pictures of rivers, a vast oxbow of water in one of them, a swiftly flowing river, a river slowly pushing out into the gulf, you could see the silt carried by it.  They all reminded me of a poem I had written several years ago, mostly about getting older, but about rivers as well.  The end of this week we are leaving to visit my husband's sisters and attend a whole school reunion for his high school, and after that we will go spend July fourth with the boys and see Shawn and Kaci and their boys.  I guess I remembered this poem because it's a kind of looking back . . .

Natural Process

Stepping again into a river
it's never the same river
the next moment
a new river
and the next
and after that . . .

The water is clear
moving makes it so,
when it slows
toward a bigger body
it's full of . . . stuff
collected on the way.

Aging is natural
and incontrovertibly
irreversible,
inevitable as dawn
irrefutable as time
incomprehensible.

It's the stuff of life
that makes youth
irretrievable
silt of events
sift and swirl
making mud of us

in that mud
all that we are
makes food
for other lives
we pour ourselves
into more and more

until at last
we become vast
by disappearing

S.  Crowson

I hope we become vast, by giving, by sharing, by ending up part of something bigger than ourselves, part of continuing life, and knowledge, and the particular will we have to join our lives to others.  In a long life, we gather up so many things, so much . . . stuff, our connections to others live in those things, are reflected in what we keep, we turn into hoarders of experience, we touch those things and remember kindnesses, and absent friend, and family far afield yet still connected to us.  Every place we connect brings us more connections and on and on until we can experience being joined with the world, with what is out there, and what is inside as well.