November 1, 2012

Yesterday I had a lovely Halloween poem but no paste!  Every time I tried to paste something to Hotmail, I got a blank white square.  After messing with it for 2 hours, I gave up.  I ran my virus scan last night, and even though it says nothing was found, this morning I have paste.  Perhaps shutting it down cleared whatever made that frustration, I don't know.  I will be glad if it works this morning!

This is the warmest morning we've had for a while, and it will get warmer today.  The air is so still, not a leaf even twitching except where the fat squirrel is running.  I could see his tail twitching at the edge of the saw-tooth oak, then he ran up and out along one branch, the leaves shivering in his wake.  Squirrels move with such fluidity, as if they were poured out, that I'm sort of surprised the leaves even noticed his passing.  I have heard very few birds this morning, the lady cardinal, and one woodpecker I can't see, just hear the thwock of it somewhere out back, probably the dead pine tree across the ditch from the neighbor.  It's a huge old pine that did its last dying during the drought.  The pileated woodpeckers have made a huge hole in it about 3/4ths the way up, and several smaller holes looking like satellites around it.  I suppose insects find dead trees more hospitible than living ones, and that's fine with the woodpeckers.

Yesterday, Mikayla went with me to see the movie Cloud Atlas, and it was a long movie, but one I liked very much.  Six stories woven together through centuries, not time travel or paradox, just telling of how the stories are related.  It was kind of like having an eagle's eye view of so many lives.  When you read a book, you sort of get what the theme of it is, if it has one, by osmosis, by experience of the book yourself.  In going to see a movie made from a book, you see it through so many different eyes, you see what the directors and actors choose for you to see, along with the people who do the sets and the costumes.  This movie made me want to go to the source, to see what the book was like.  It was an amazing movie just from the point of those things, costumes and design, and even more amazing the actors played so many different characters, and did it so well that you often did not recognize them in their roles.   Their changing roles were the thread that made the movie come together as a whole, that and the various themes.  See it for yourself, it might be difficult at first, I found the dialect at the start hard to understand, but don't let that put you off, you will be amply rewarded by the whole experience.  I ordered the book with my birthday money, and will surely buy the dvd when it comes out.  This is one movie that I believe will reward the viewer many times.  Now that I have sounded like a commercial, I will move on <smile>!

This poem reminds me of wanting to know what the squirrel knows, or that black jungly cat that occasionally stalks through the yard.  Sometimes I would like to be out of my body into another, wilder and more natural, living more in the moment, in the world that I recognize sometimes but can't inhabit.

Atavism

1

Sometimes in the open you look up

where birds go by, or just nothing,

and wait. A dim feeling comes

you were like this once, there was air,

and quiet; it was by a lake, or

maybe a river you were alert

as an otter and were suddenly born

like the evening star into wide

still worlds like this one you have found

again, for a moment, in the open.

2

Something is being told in the woods: aisles of

shadow lead away; a branch waves;

a pencil of sunlight slowly travels its

path. A withheld presence almost

speaks, but then retreats, rustles

a patch of brush. You can feel

the centuries ripple generations

of wandering, discovering, being lost

and found, eating, dying, being born.

A walk through the forest strokes your fur,

the fur you no longer have. And your gaze

down a forest aisle is a strange, long

plunge, dark eyes looking for home.

For delicious minutes you can feel your whiskers

wider than your mind, away out over everything.

William Stafford

I would like to have fur, and whiskers, just to know how that feels, just to be that connected to the natural world, but then I want to come back and have everything I have now, books, and reason, and love.  I would not want to stay in that world at the end of nerves, only knowing the now, I want my past and my future.  I want to know things, not just experience them.  I want to decide about good and evil, to think about the world and how all is connected, to love and be loved, not only now, but in all the times of my life, especially going forward.  Still, I would like, for a moment, to be something else, the squirrel, or the black cat, or the blue jay looking for water in the empty bowl.