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.