September 30, 2012

A gray and plain morning, wind in the trees, water standing on the ground, everything washed clean but darkened from muted light.  The sun behind blank gray, nothing bright but everything moving.  People out running, the black dog tracing the yard with his nose, the birds flickering from branch to branch, and the little yellow coins of crepe myrtle leaves falling down in a shower of gold to skid along the ground then lay still.  The gray squirrel hunches in the middle of the yard for a moment before stretching out to run up the maple.  The long feathery blooms of the cane weigh it down so it bends and leans with the wind.

Things are changing, you can feel it, the air not quite as heavy with heat, the mornings cooler, and the night comes sooner.  For now, I see some things more clearly, and must get used to the change in vision near and far.

I Saw Her Dancing

Nothing moves in a straight line,
But in arcs, epicycles, spirals and gyres.
Nothing living grows in cubes, cones, or rhomboids,
But we take a little here and we give a little there,
And the wind blows right through us,
And blows the apples off the tree, and hangs a red kite suddenly there,
And a fox comes to bite the apples curiously,
And we change.
Or we die
And then change.
It is many as raindrops.
It is one as rain.
And we eat it, and it eats us.
And fullness is never,
And now.

Marge Piercy

Nothing here stays the same, everything changes, even me, perhaps especially me.  This day is made to be on the cusp, a blessing for the week, the rest before new work or old, time to think things through, or just sit and watch what comes.  We do take a little here and give a little there, it's in our nature and in the rest of the living world.  No man is an island, and neither is any other living thing.  We should be grateful for that because it means we are connected to things beyond ourselves, we share the world, and are blessed by those connections.  It could have been otherwise, we could live as islands, but we were not meant to, we were created to be part of the dance, to have the wind blow through us, to be a single drop of rain in a shower of it, to devour it all and be devoured in exchange and changed by it.  I don't suppose we are ever full, and some moments more full than we could ever have imagined.  So, today I am grateful for connections and blessed by them, even the blank gray sky has something to say to me, and the wind moves me to imagine all the places its been, all those its touched.  It's strange that Marge Piercy should imagine a red kite in the wind . . . I wonder if it's the same red kite that has always meant the connection between loves for me, the excitement of red against a bight blue, the thin string holding fragile paper against the wind, how the heart lifts to see it soaring in spite of that very fragility, the way love makes its way in the world, buffeted by the winds that change us, and still connected, still soaring.

September 24, 2012

A very busy day, school, and pre-op for surgery tomorrow, and grocery shopping, so we will have something to eat while I cannot drive or go to the store for a while.  Now, mostly I am ready.  Mikayla will take over my class on Wednesday, and I will probably be back at school on Friday with her driving me and doing the lifting and such.  I am so ready for this, when Dr. Tran is done, I will see clearly for the first time in years!  And will not need glasses, only ones for reading.  How strange that will seem to wake up in the middle of the night and be able to tell what time it is, or be able to read signs at the market, and on the street!  The spines on my bookshelf will actually convey information to me once again.  I will be . . .what is that word I am looking for, oh, yeah . . . AMAZING!!

So, for a couple of days at least I will not send the morning note again but this should be the last break, I hope!  This has been an eventful year, all kinds of eventful!  But this is one of the events that I have been looking forward to, even asked Dr Tran to do this eye the week after he did the other one.  No, was his reply and I waited the month but not patiently.  He is doing this at St. Johns this time because he will not be at the Pasadena place for another three weeks, and I am grateful to him for arranging this to do it as soon as possible.  I know it is extra work for him as I will be the only patient he will do there tomorrow.  He will come to do me after having done his schedule at one of the other offices!  He's kind to take all that trouble and I am lucky to have him do this.  He smiles and nods every time I tell him how amazing this whole experience has been!  I hope this one goes as easily and with such good results as last time!

So a poem about seeing . . .

How to See Deer

Forget roadside crossings.
Go nowhere with guns.
Go elsewhere your own way,

lonely and wanting. Or
stay and be early:
next to deep woods

inhabit old orchards.
All clearings promise.
Sunrise is good,

and fog before sun.
Expect nothing always;
find your luck slowly.

Wait out the windfall.
Take your good time
to learn to read ferns;

make like a turtle:
downhill toward slow water.
Instructed by heron,

drink the pure silence.
Be compassed by wind.
If you quiver like aspen

trust your quick nature:
let your ear teach you
which way to listen.

You've come to assume
protective color; now
colors reform to

new shapes in your eye.
You've learned by now
to wait without waiting;

as if it were dusk
look into light falling;
in deep relief

things even out. Be
careless of nothing. See
what you see.

~ Philip Booth ~

Here we don't even have to go to all that trouble, you can see them some mornings right here in your neighborhood, on the edge of the road, eating the long-unmowed grass, or grazing in the various plants that grow in the ditch when there is not water there, their heads sticking up on a level with the road, a strange sight! You can see them move at a stately walk through your yard and out across the road.  And now I will be able to see them in a different light.  I will see what is there, I will see what I see and it will be a LOT more than I used to see.  I look at the light nearly every morning, one of my fascinations!  I can't wait!  There are some joys to growing old that come to you unexpectedly and turn out to be such blessings you know no one can every deserve them, they are just grace! 

So tomorrow I am graced by Dr. Tran and my family who will take over my usual chores while I come home and sleep, and my eye heals and a new vision will be mine for years to come!  And no glasses!!  How strange that will be, and how wonderful!

September 23, 2012

A lovely day for the first full day of fall . . . warm, sunny, with a little breeze and not a cloud in the sky!   Overhead, the sky has that pale, almost translucent quality to it, as if the deep dark of space faded into this hue by layers of bright white light.  Walking slowly through the back yard, the cat is going no place in particular, stopping often to look around, then moseying on.  From the deepest summer green, the canopy of leaves is just the slightest bit faded, and the grass is thinning from its . . . thinness, though this year its thinness was not quite as thin as usual.  The remaining cane is blooming, tops opened out to feathery gold-trimmed russet brushes, like the plumage of some exotic bird. 

Such a contradictory season, harvest and plenty contrasted with empty fields and falling leaves.  Everything that ripens, bears fruit, or matures has mostly done so, and the wild is frantically storing what it can against the cold of winter.  Here I don't believe things are quite so frantic as they are in places where the ground is covered with so much snow, and freezes into a hardness that is rigid and unforgiving.  Things are milder in this climate, the squirrels fatter, the raccoons inclined to occasionally raid the cat food, only when we are at the few coldest days we have.  Even the crows seem bigger, feathers glisten with oil, their voices rough and often heard.  There is enough of a change you can tell it's fall, but not enough to make you believe in winter.

 Sunday, and a blessing . . . this one from a journeying God . . .

Journeying God,
pitch your tent with mine
so that I may not become deterred
by hardship, strangeness, doubt.
Show me the movement I must make
toward a wealth not dependent on possessions,
toward a wisdom not based on books,
toward a strength not bolstered by might,
toward a God not confined to heaven.
Help me to find myself as I walk in other's shoes. 

(Prayer song from Ghana, traditional, translator unknown)

Show me the movement . . . that's what I need, movement, moving on, through the changes in life and the season.   Fall seems like a season caught between looking back at the fullness of the harvest and looking forward to . . . the fallow time, which I suppose can be looked at more than one way.  Fallow is . . .ready to be planted but empty at the moment, something like the day at its beginning, where the night and its dreams have moved on, and the day is filling with sun, ready to be planted.  The wisdom of the morning is not found in any book but in the experience itself, and isn't it a good thing we all have wealth not dependent on possessions?  God cannot be confined to heaven, being inside us all, being evident in everything that surrounds us, even those things we wish would not happen, because if you believe in grace and God, you have to think those things happen so we might make grace of them and thereby show what we believe.   As we meet others on our way, those encounters make us aware of our own beliefs, and how we find God in every person, even the ones we are sure are not . . . godly.  Those probably have the most to teach us about who we are and the gift of grace.  So everything that happens could be construed as a blessing, some are just kindlier than others, but all bring some gift for us, an opportunity of choice, something to learn not found in books, only in living this daily life.

September, 21, 2012

Just beginning to get light . . . the news on in the background, the smell of toast and coffee surrounding me.  School this morning, the high school bus just went around the corner, mostly empty as usual.  On my desk the fittonia, all crisp green and white, is making gigantic new leaves, not sure why they suddenly are so much bigger than usual, but they are certainly very . . . showy.  If you have trouble growing anything, this is the plant you need.  This one is about three years old now when I have the reputation for killing even the tough aloe vera!  I think this one has survived partly because it's so hardy and partly because it sits right here where I see it often enough to remember to water it and not water it too much.  Must be a juxtaposition of circumstances that have contributed to its longevity, and I get great pleasure out of greeting it every morning. 

The fittonia made me think of Dawn's bougainvillea . . . now there is a hardy prolific plant!  It certainly has taking over the whole front of her house, and it looks so very green and wild!  I seem to like the green wild ones; it's going to be spectacular when it is in full bloom.  Her maple trees seem to be doing well too!  I'm really glad of that, my maple tree is one of my favorites in the yard, they have such lush leaves and the seeds are so much fun!

Today I'm not going to send a poem, but an entry from a blog I follow called Aesthetics of Joy written by Ingrid Fetell.  Some days I just need what she offers, lots of color, unusual photographs, and a shot in the arm of good cheer.  A couple of weeks ago she posted an entry with a quote from Diane Ackerman's A Natural History of the Senses and I had to laugh as I recognized myself in it, standing in the yard, holding one of the rare really vibrant red maple leaves, just amazed by the color and the veins running through it.  Sometimes you get one leaf that is red but the veins are still green, a marvelous combination.  Anyway, I asked permission to reprint her entry and she graciously let me use it here.  So from Ingrid and me this morning . . .

"While looking up a reference yesterday in Diane Ackerman’s breathtaking A Natural History of the Senses, I came across a passage that stopped me in my tracks, and I wanted to share it with you.

When you consider something like death, after which (there being no news flash to the contrary) we may well go out like a candle flame, then it probably doesn’t matter if we try too hard, are awkward sometimes, care for one another too deeply, are excessively curious about nature, are too open to experience, enjoy a nonstop expense of the senses in an effort to know life intimately and lovingly. It probably doesn’t matter if, while trying to be modest and eager watchers of life’s many spectacles, we sometimes look clumsy or get dirty or ask stupid questions or reveal our ignorance or say the wrong thing or light up with wonder like the children we are. It probably doesn’t matter if a passerby sees us dipping a finger into the moist pouches of dozens of lady’s slippers to find out what bugs tend to fall into them, and thinks us a bit eccentric. Or a neighbor, fetching her mail, sees us standing in the cold with our own letters in one hand and a seismically red autumn leaf in the other, its color hitting our senses like a blow from a stun gun, as we stand with a huge grin, too paralyzed by the intricately veined gaudiness of the leaf to move.

This is the wonderfully uncool essence of joy for me: trying too hard and caring too deeply. At the end of the day, you regret the things you didn’t do more than the ones you did.

Have a joyful, creative weekend. I hope you’re out with people you love, or getting lost in something that inspires you. Be clumsy, get dirty, grin big. What else are you here for?"

So, what are you waiting for?  Go find something to get happy about!

  

September 20, 2012

The nights are getting longer, and the days shorter.  Light later and later so now the school bus goes round in the dark and when dinner is a little late, it's early dark beyond the door when we eat.  In this morning the crepe myrtles are glowing faintly with the always present fluorescent light from the kitchen window; the road is a flat orange ribbon though the dark verge, lit by the streetlight moon.  The easing of night has not reached that deep indigo blue that is one of my favorite colors.  A little breeze is rocking the flat silver discs of the wind chime outside the window making it gleam with reflected shine.

Adagio

Third Movement from Feierliche Abendmusik

 (Holiday Music in the Evening)

A dream gives what the day wore out;

At night, when the conscious will surrenders,

Some powers, set free, reach upward,

Sensing something godly, and following.

The woods rustle, and the stream, and through

    the night blue sky

Of the quick soul, the summer lighting blows.

The world and my self, everything

Within and without me, grows into one.

Clouds drift through my heart,

Woods dream my dream,

House and pear tree tell me

The forgotten story of common childhood.

Streams resound and gorges cast shadows in me,

The moon, and the faint star, my close friends.

But the mild night,

That bows with its gentle clouds above me,

Has my mother's face,

Kisses me, smiling, with inexhaustible love,

Shakes her head dreamily

As she used to do, and her hair

Waves through the world, and within it

The thousand stars, shuddering, turn pale.

-- Hermann Hesse

Translated by James Wright

I woke this morning from a dream of mother, her kissing me, bending over me in the narrow bed of my childhood.  And I came to find this poem, which I remembered but had to search for, forgetting its name.  I have been avoiding writing because everything seemed so tied to Mama that I would just not be able to write anything without grief.  And now, this morning, when I woke with her love kissing me, I decided that there is no use denying the grief, because in that way I am denying how much I loved her and how I am missing, not her love which I know was inexhaustible, but her presence.  In waking from that dream of her, I embraced her presence in that dream, and remembered this poem and realized the dance of love is not over, just continues on though the night where she can still kiss me into the day where I carry that love and give it away, sharing it with every one in my life.

This is why I have not been doing the morning note, but I decided that sometimes it's all right to talk about the difficult times, and some griefs cannot be avoided, and this is one of those times, and perhaps it will get easier if I stop trying to avoid any mention of how I feel and just write it like I do the rest of my life.  Something about how sweetly Mama kissed me this morning gave me . . . courage.

September 12, 2012

Storms forecast . . . too dark yet to make out what the weather will be like.  Sometimes they're right, sometimes not, just like most of the world.  If you had to go by the air, I would say it's way too still for storms, silent and all in silhouette against chalk blue sky just brightening into existence.  Mid-week, the easy day for my students when all they have to do is work on their cards for Friday, easy for me too as I get to go around and see what they are doing with the theme of Fall: The Season!  Their choice, and perhaps a little surprising to me, when they had choices like dragons and eyes to choose from.  Perhaps it is because this is such an iconic time, back to school, harvest, Halloween, Thanksgiving, it gives them a lot of things to choose from.

So, a poem for this week's card theme . . .

Fall Song

Another year gone, leaving everywhere

its rich spiced residues: vines, leaves,

the uneaten fruits crumbling damply

in the shadows, unmattering back

from the particular island

of this summer, this NOW, that now is nowhere

except underfoot, moldering

in that black subterranean castle

of unobservable mysteries - roots and sealed seeds

and the wanderings of water. This

I try to remember when time's measure

painfully chafes, for instance when autumn

flares out at the last, boisterous and like us longing

to stay - how everything lives, shifting

from one bright vision to another, forever

in these momentary pastures.

 Mary Oliver

I love that poets make up words . . . unmattering . . .what a delicious word and you know exactly what it means, it smacks of going to be undone, of the rich decay from which life is made, of leaf mold and tunneling insects making the ground fertile.   This poem is full of luscious words, words that are long and full of sound and fury . . . moldering, unobservable, wandering, boisterous . . . and momentary.  Just like this morning . . . a momentary pleasure of sunrise and silence to start the day.  A poem for the season, even though summer may still hold sway, you can feel it's grip loosening, the sky fading, and the leaves beginning to lose their green, moving into the house of yellow and gold and the sometime bright red.  If there are storms in the future, this moment is beyond them, clear and growing more light.

September 10, 2012

Dark with streaks of light this morning, light low in the sky slowly fading the night into day.  Stillness hangs among the branches and the silhouettes of leaves are like a dark painting on a moving canvas of light.  Monday mornings are always a little harder to get started, especially when the weekend was busy, full of putting up pictures, cleaning out things to make more order, and, of course, grading papers and cards.  I did not realize that 20 students would seem like so many more than 16, but it does!  Now that I am organized, it should be easier, but I'm not counting on it!  Just because I have a plan, especially on a Monday . . .

The Plan

All right, here’s the plan

I plan on making,

When I get around to it:

I plan for the sun to rise

And after that I don’t know

What I plan until I make

A plan for the next moment.

I am expert plan maker.

I have had lots of practice.

I plan to write a book about plans,

How you can have a daily plan,

Plan events; mark your calendar;

Manage time; be organized;

There’s nothing to making a plan.

The remarkable thing, the killer,

Is to plan what you will do

When your plan falls through,

And there is always solution,

As you might have guessed,

Make a new plan, here’s where

All that practice comes in.

Oh, and about your plan

For the plan for when the plan

Doesn’t quiet work out?

I’m sorry to say there are days

When that plan, too, will miss.

Things change, be ready,

Some day the sun won’t rise.

End of plan.

S. Crowson 

Today, however, it looks like the sun will rise and so I had better get going.  A breeze has begun to ease in between the leaves, and yellow and pearl are lighting further up into the sky reaches.  I am packed up, organized, and ready to begin.  We'll see how well all this planning goes, at least, if this plan doesn't work out, there are always more plans to be made, and not every change is a dreadful one, some are just annoying, and some actually make us laugh at the world and at ourselves!  So make a bunch of plans today!  Anticipate change!  Be ready!  You never know what will happen, but . . <smile> something will! 

September 9, 2012

A cooler morning, drier, the sky's thin blue laced with white, long ribbons of sheer cloud.  The sun has swung around to light up the base of the trees, whose leave filter that light, with a bleached green, paler with sun, already a thinner light than at the height of summer.  A constant breeze makes everything move to its fitfulness, branches rubbing against each other making the soft sighing with the whisper of leaves, as many sounds as there are shapes.  A flock of tiny gray-brown birds descends to the water bowl, a sudden flutter of wings and chatter, gone in seconds.   The black cat, like a whiff of jungle, stalks across the short grass, too late to scare the birds, but goes by and peers in the bowl just in case one might be left, sees nothing but ripples, and continues out of sight.  Two blue jays watch from the middle of the maple tree, quiet, their feathers streaked with sun, sky-with-clouds blue.  So much motion with the wind rising, hard to tell from which direction because everything seems to be moving in its own way, bending, side to side, bobbing, flickering, swaying, each leaf its own dance.

Sunday, and here I am blessed again, thinking about prayer and gratitude, thinking about so many different voices, so many different songs, human or not and all the same Creator.

Different Ways to Pray

There was the method of kneeling,
a fine method, if you lived in a country
where stones were smooth.
The women dreamed wistfully of bleached courtyards,
hidden corners where knee fit rock.
Their prayers were weathered rib bones,
small calcium words uttered in sequence,
as if this shedding of syllables could somehow
fuse them to the sky.

There were the men who had been shepherds so long
they walked like sheep.
Under the olive trees, they raised their arms—
Hear us! We have pain on earth!
We have so much pain there is no place to store it!
But the olives bobbed peacefully
in fragrant buckets of vinegar and thyme.
At night the men ate heartily, flat bread and white cheese,
and were happy in spite of the pain,
because there was also happiness.

Some prized the pilgrimage,
wrapping themselves in new white linen
to ride buses across miles of vacant sand.
When they arrived at Mecca
they would circle the holy places,
on foot, many times,
they would bend to kiss the earth
and return, their lean faces housing mystery.

While for certain cousins and grandmothers
the pilgrimage occurred daily,
lugging water from the spring
or balancing the baskets of grapes.
These were the ones present at births,
humming quietly to perspiring mothers.
The ones stitching intricate needlework into children’s dresses,
forgetting how easily children soil clothes.

There were those who didn’t care about praying.
The young ones. The ones who had been to America.
They told the old ones, you are wasting your time.

      Time?—The old ones prayed for the young ones.

They prayed for Allah to mend their brains,
for the twig, the round moon,
to speak suddenly in a commanding tone.

And occasionally there would be one
who did none of this,
the old man Fowzi, for example, Fowzi the fool,
who beat everyone at dominoes,
insisted he spoke with God as he spoke with goats,
and was famous for his laugh.

Naomi Shihab Nye

So many ways to pray, so many they are too numerous to count, each person having their own conversation with God, ritual words, rituals themselves, cries of joy or grief, faith in the daily tasks, praying with their lives of service, people praying for those they think do not believe the correct way, or who appear not to believe at all.  And the fool , the fool who talks to God, the same way he talks to goats, and is this not prayer as well?  Who is to judge one man's prayer?  People talk to God all the time, in every holy book, by every name imaginable, and in every circumstance.  If you credit the prayers written down over the centuries with your belief, so the man who talks to God every day, makes God part of his daily life must be allowed his own prayers, which seem to make for him a life full of laughter!  May your prayers bring you that same joy, no matter how you pray!

September 8, 2012

Thick bands of dark clouds against pale gray, and the rusty two note call of a cardinal start the morning.  A truck hauling a huge boat rounded the corner . . . got to be a fisherman.  Who else gets up so early on a Saturday, runners, fishers, and the insomniacs!  Maybe the dog walkers as well.  The elegant lady, today in gray sweats, just jogged past with her big fluffy white dog looking a lot more comfortable than she does when I see her in heels and a suit walking that dog during the week.   A little breeze is flickering through the branches.  I can see that cardinal but in this light it looks black, not the usual orange and gray-brown, just a silhouette.  Today a front is supposed to come through bringing cooler temperatures and drier air, and most people will be glad of it.  When there are so many clouds the sunrise is usually more full of color but this morning just gray on gray.

Seagulls just went wheeling past in their loose ragged flock, screeching and dipping, seagulls or terns, gray and black and bright white figures, flying swiftly if not in any rigid formation like geese, coming in ahead of weather I guess, don't see them away from the water except for storms or other disturbances, like this front.  Now the blue jays are up cawing like a couple of little crows, loud and getting louder.  They've come to the water bowl, flapping around getting thoroughly wet, the male first then the female, at least I assume that second one is female, smaller and a little grayer, and not quite as enthusiastic about getting wet.

One Heart

Look at the birds. Even flying

is born

out of nothing. The first sky

is inside you, open

at either end of day.

The work of wings

was always freedom, fastening

one heart to every falling thing.

Li-Young Lee

When I watch the birds fly, sometimes I wish to fly with them, then I think of the first step off the branch, when the terror of falling must fill the young bird's heart, and wonder if I would ever have been so brave to take that step and risk the fall.  Some days, I think flight would be worth any risk, some days I think I would be paralyzed by the fear, some days I think I would fall and never fly.  I will never know about flying except in dreams, and there I have flown and took that leap.  Here in this morning, with light beginning to fill the yard and the clouds lifting so the sun shines beneath them and the early breeze is crossing over into wind, I think I don't have to decide to fly, that the heart, the one heart falling, just keeps falling and falling through the sky inside us over and over.  It keeps its own dreams, falling through the morning, until that falling becomes flight in an instant of belief, and the day begins, and something of that freedom is carried into the hours, filled with so many daily things, so many choices made, standing on that branch!

September 7, 2012

This is the time of year when, suddenly it seems, it's dark later, the day begins in the dark before dawn, and the early evening shadows prove the days are shortening toward winter.  Soon, the powers-that-be will fix that and we will fall back and have Standard time again, though I believe that Standard time now months shorter than Savings time, and I am not sure what we are saving time for any more.  The streetlight still shines its orange light on the corner, and I have not seen anyone out this time of dark.  There may be some hardy souls out there walking the dog but not around our corner.

It seems like teaching a class is akin to going back to school yourself.  You have to learn what you need to teach, and that can be an interesting process that makes you feel like a student again, no matter that now you are the one doing the grading and supposed to know enough about the subject to be able to teach it.  When teaching something like Art Cards, there is history behind it, though a short one as art goes, and then there is the question of art.  What is it anyway?  I asked my students to bring some representation of art they love, a book of pictures by a favorite artist, a print out of something they saw that they loved, just something to show what kind of art appeals to them.  I have a book of Georgia O'Keeffe's work that I will use for my show-and-tell.  But I also have a book that introduces a bunch of different artists from a lot of different schools of art, from antiquity to the present.  Sometimes I introduce them to some artists they have not seen before or do not recognize, and they do the same for me.  They are much more familiar with modern art and with things like the art of anime and manga.  So we all get to say hello to work we might not otherwise have seen.  It makes for an interesting morning!!

Introductions

Some of what we love

we stumble upon —

a purse of gold thrown on the road,

a poem, a friend, a great song.

And more

discloses itself to us —

a well among green hazels,

a nut thicket —

when we are worn out searching

for something quite different.

And more

comes to us, carried

as carefully

as a bright cup of water,

as new bread.

 Moya Cannon

This morning I think that it might be a little of all those things.  I will stumble on things to share while I am looking for something else, it always happens.  The students will amaze me with their choices, which will be quite different most likely from anything I would choose.  And they will bring me what they love, what they are trying to accomplish, what they dream.  I am lucky to have such an opportunity, at my age to have the door opened every class day to what the people of tomorrow are seeing, what they love, to be part of the dreams that will carry them into that future they see!

September 6, 2012

The familiar can seem strange at times when seen from outside usual perceptions.  The trees this morning are lit up, the smooth bark of the crepe myrtles seems to multiply in the shifting of the sun to another angle, swinging around to light up the yard more brilliantly, and earlier.   Their leaves are starting the fall turn, the earliest ones, small gold coins littering the patio, dropping at every breath of wind, mingled with the last of their curly flowers, an occasional spear of pink or white not yet ready to let go.   A huge gray jay, oddly painted only the barest blue, takes a dip in the water bowl, even though the water is obscured by fallen leaves.  Grass on the verge of the road is smooth this morning, a yellow-green carpet after the mowers came yesterday.  Overhead the blue is blank as an unwritten page, spread out to infinity, though you know behind it the black of space looms forever above the fragile shell of air we depend on.

Sometimes talking to people in various parts of the world, you come upon things ordinary to them that are strange to you, and you surprise them too.  Like Texas two-time zones big, seems obscene to people from much smaller countries, and having such heat as we have in the summer can seem outrageous to people who must battle rain and cold a lot more often than we do.  The idea of it being 45 degrees for a summer night . . . well, that's just seems much too cold for us, or dealing snow on a regular basis,  a constant bitter cold all winter, or even people living through July without air conditioning, which doesn't bear thinking about here.  I found a poem from Poetry  magazine this month by Billy Collins, and I recognized the feeling, only in reverse, thinking about places like he might have come from, all those cold climates.

Report from the Subtropics

For one thing, there’s no more snow
to watch from an evening window,
and no armfuls of logs to carry into the house
so cumbersome you have to touch the latch with an elbow,

and once inside, no iron stove waiting like an old woman
for her early dinner of wood.

No hexagrams of frost to study carefully
on the cold glass pages of the bathroom.

And there’s no black sweater to pull over my head
while I wait for the coffee to brew.

Instead, I walk around in children’s clothes—
shorts and a T-shirt with the name of a band
lettered on the front, announcing me to nobody.

The sun never fails to arrive early
and refuses to leave the party
even after I go from room to room,
turning out all the lights, and making a face.

And the birds with those long white necks?
All they do is swivel their heads
to look at me as I walk past
as if they all knew my password
and the name of the city where I was born.

Billy Collins

Here in the subtropics, we do not have frost hexagrams on the bathroom window, but geckos seeking a dinner of moths attracted to the light, and the hum of the air conditioner, in our case a very loud hum, accompanies the morning coffee, and I am the only one to want a shawl, or a sweater, every one else groans at seeing me covered up against its cool draft.  And egrets are so common here, several kinds of them, that to think of them absent in other climates just seems strange, that those must be the same people who have never seen the ocean, or who would think the rabid growth of green we have is unsettling.  I'm glad of the chance to see our everyday by the light of someone else's sun, new eyes for old, a phrase that has new meaning to me, and not just for experiencing the familiar from a colder viewpoint!

September 5, 2012

The clear sky lightens upward, from a gray getting paler to the deeper cobalt of the night lingering.  Hot and humid, the air hangs still and not even the birds are awake yet.  The bus for the high school has come and gone, empty seats mostly only a few students dozing against the windows.  The first thing I heard this morning was the person who delivers the newspaper, the throbbing sound of the truck accelerating and decelerating up the road, the turn around at the dead end, and coming back, the paper hitting the ground outside, and sliding to a stop, then the truck  rounding the corner and the sound fades over to the next block.  The silhouettes of the leaves obscure most of the sky, the cane looking like impossibly tall skinny corn against the gray.

In the background of my morning are coffee and toast, the news, the daily sounds . . . and we want these quiet mornings to continue just the way they are . . .

Love Poem With Toast

Some of what we do, we do
to make things happen,
the alarm to wake us up, the coffee to perc,
the car to start.
The rest of what we do, we do
trying to keep something from doing something,
the skin from aging, the hoe from rusting,
the truth from getting out.
With yes and no like the poles of a battery
powering our passage through the days,
we move, as we call it, forward,
wanting to be wanted,
wanting not to lose the rain forest,
wanting the water to boil,
wanting not to have cancer,
wanting to be home by dark,
wanting not to run out of gas,
as each of us wants the other
watching at the end,
as both want not to leave the other alone,
as wanting to love beyond this meat and bone,
we gaze across breakfast and pretend.

Miller Williams

We pretend every day will be like this, that the ordinary things will just go on and on.  Some days that's all we can ask for and all we need! 

September 3, 2012

Today is Labor Day, a time to remember the worker, the people who make things, who keep the world together, construct ordinary objects we wear, and handle, and use, and take for granted.  Also, a time to remember that a good portion of the world's work is unpaid labor, the daily tasks, mostly of women, who grow food or fish for the household, who clean, and fix, and raise the children, who teach, and carry water, and make a place that is home, even in the harshest conditions, even in the face of despair, or they move and try to start a new life, following the work men do, the paid work, because no matter what work is paid for, their work is the same and always needing to be done.  No matter what kind of work is done, today is for remembering it, for being grateful for it, not only for the fact of it being done, but for the need to do it, the work that makes a place we can call home and all the treasures we keep there, all the memories.

The poem today is one I have used before but today it seem appropriate to remember that everything around us, the house we live in, and all it contains, from the simplest thing to the most complex, is like this Shirt . . .

Shirt

The back, the yoke, the yardage. Lapped seams,

The nearly invisible stitches along the collar

Turned in a sweatshop by Koreans or Malaysians

Gossiping over tea and noodles on their break

Or talking money or politics while one fitted

This armpiece with its overseam to the band

Of cuff I button at my wrist. The presser, the cutter,

The wringer, the mangle. The needle, the union,

The treadle, the bobbin. The code. The infamous blaze

At the Triangle Factory in nineteen-eleven.

One hundred and forty-six died in the flames

On the ninth floor, no hydrants, no fire escapes—

The witness in a building across the street

Who watched how a young man helped a girl to step

Up to the windowsill, then held her out

Away from the masonry wall and let her drop.

And then another. As if he were helping them up

To enter a streetcar, and not eternity.

A third before he dropped her put her arms 

Around his neck and kissed him. Then he held

Her into space, and dropped her. Almost at once

He stepped to the sill himself, his jacket flared

And fluttered up from his shirt as he came down,

Air filling up the legs of his gray trousers—

Like Hart Crane’s Bedlamite, “shrill shirt ballooning.”

Wonderful how the pattern matches perfectly

Across the placket and over the twin bar-tacked

Corners of both pockets, like a strict rhyme

Or a major chord.   Prints, plaids, checks,

Houndstooth, Tattersall, Madras. The clan tartans

Invented by mill-owners inspired by the hoax of Ossian,

To control their savage Scottish workers, tamed

By a fabricated heraldry: MacGregor,

Bailey, MacMartin. The kilt, devised for workers

To wear among the dusty clattering looms.

Weavers, carders, spinners. The loader,

The docker, the navvy. The planter, the picker, the sorter

Sweating at her machine in a litter of cotton

As slaves in calico headrags sweated in fields:

George Herbert, your descendant is a Black

Lady in South Carolina, her name is Irma

And she inspected my shirt. Its color and fit

And feel and its clean smell have satisfied

Both her and me. We have culled its cost and quality

Down to the buttons of simulated bone,

The buttonholes, the sizing, the facing, the characters

Printed in black on neckband and tail. The shape,

The label, the labor, the color, the shade. The shirt.

Robert Pinsky

  
So much associated with just one article, just a shirt, I tried to think of all the people who would make a book, of which I have so many, but my imagination failed me.  Paper and binding and printing and all the people whose hands touched all of those things and their parts and their raw materials, so many people to make the everyday things that surround us all.  And all those intangible things, that work unseen, telephone, television, Internet, it boggles the mind.  And so I am grateful today for all the work and all the workers, and celebrate the ingenuity of the human spirit to create so many things, to work out our future.  There will always be more creators than those whose only will is to destroy things, it's how we survive and live through our days.  Bravo workers of the world, bravo to all of us!

September 2, 2012

Sunday, the blessing day, and today the blessing will be sharing it with family.  Looking out my window this morning, I don't see much.  It's so hot and humid the window is all foggerd up.  I see the tracks of bugs and geckos in the moisture.  At the top of the window it a nearly white sky with only a few patches of vibrating blue.  Everything is still, the lace of some leaves just barely fluttering.  Even the cane looks kind of limp with heat and humidity. and you know that cane can endure just about anything!

Splendor

One day it's the clouds,
one day the mountains.
One day the latest bloom
of roses - the pure monochromes,
the dazzling hybrids - inspiration
for the cathedral's round windows.
Every now and then
there's the splendor
of thought: the singular
idea and its brilliant retinue -
words, cadence, point of view,
little gold arrows flitting
between the lines.
And too the splendor
of no thought at all:
hands lying calmly
in the lap, or swinging
a six iron with effortless
tempo.  More often than not
splendor is the star we orbit
without a second thought,
especially as it arrives
and departs.  One day
it's the blue glassy bay,
one day the night
and its array of jewels,
visible and invisible.
Sometimes it's the warm clarity
of a face that finds your face
and doesn't turn away.
Sometimes a kindness, unexpected,
that will radiate farther
than you might imagine.
One day it's the entire day
itself, each hour foregoing
its number and name,
its cumbersome clothes, a day
that says come as you are,
large enough for fear and doubt,
with room to spare: the most secret
wish, the deepest, the darkest,
turned inside out.

Thomas Centolella

For all this . . . the blessing of such splendor, we are grateful!  An entire day, come as you are, if your frightened, exhausted, overwhelmed, come to all this splendor and be at ease.  Look around, even the sky changes hourly, and we do too.  Today the hottest sun, the whitest clouds, the song of the cardinal, the screams of the jays, all will change, turning hourly to the next hour, all the day we have spread out before us, and all questions, all moods, all beauty, even all the doubt and fear, is all part of the come-as-you-are day, and the night will come bringing its own questions without answers, and tomorrow, if we are lucky, another day to be part of all the changes that go on hourly for our whole entire life!!

September 1, 2012

Full moon last night, shining like a pale sun through the window, pushing the dark back, barely visible through the trees but its light gilding everything, making much of its mirror of stones.  This morning crows calling over and over in the dark the moon left behind.  Soon the jays join their cousins in the call to the day, and for awhile, between the moon and the sun, the sky is filled with sound, with silhouettes of dark with open throats and voice urgent and clamoring.  There are mornings of sweet song and pearly dawn light and then there are mornings like this . . . 

Moonlight and Crows

The full moon sets

taking its shining

to someone else's night

and crows wake

calling the sun

up from the dark

their loud voices

repeating their longing

The light rises

chalking the sky

gray then bluer

blank as paper

crows the ink

their harsh words

welcome the day

that never fails

to rise to their need.

S. Crowson

It rises to our need as well, the eternal constant, reliable as the word and the work.  We say "Sure as the sun rises" because we cannot say that about the moon.  Streaked with red this morning, fading quickly to massive gray, the sky changes constantly and the wind rises.   With the crows, I am welcoming the day, calling it up, glad the long night is disappearing into light.