"Sun, but in substance": D.H. Lawrence and Joaquín Sorolla

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Girl on the Beach, by Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida

I was nudged by two friends toward two artists this past week. One was Robert of The Solitary Walker, who mentioned D.H. Lawrence's sensual poems about things in a comment at my last post "Ode to a Cantaloupe." The other was Lorenzo of The Alchemist's Pillow about the Spanish painter Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida. (This site embedded in the painter's name includes his complete works.) As I began reading Lawrence's poems and browsing Sorolla's paintings, I loved how they met, like salt and wind. So I'm sharing a taste of that meeting here, with the ending of Lawrence's poem 'The Wild Common' and a few of Sorolla's seaside paintings. Lawrence believed that anything existential has to do with substance, not eternity. He did not want to dwell in the shadows, in the abstract, in the ether. He wanted stuff, something touchable — wings, feathers, waves, and something screaming like peewits, or pealing like larks. Feel the textures of sand, cotton clothing, hair, and water on skin in Sorolla's paintings. Languish over shapes, relationships, the way the wind is blowing. Hear the sounds of the sea, the bulls bellowing in the water, laughter of children swallowed in the slap and blur of the surf. And be sure to smell that salt in the wind, while you read Lawrence's rhapsody over being substance. If you have time, follow the link to the whole poem in the title (I like version 2; both are at the link).


excerpt from The Wild Common (version 2, 1928)
    by D.H. Lawrence

. . . But how splendid it is to be substance, here!
My shadow is neither here nor there; but I, I am royally here!
I am here! I am here! screams the peewit; the may-blobs burst out in a laugh as they hear!

Here! flick the rabbits. Here! pants the gorse. Here! say the insects far and near.

Over my skin in the sunshine, the warm, clinging air
Flushed with the songs of seven larks singing at once, goes kissing me glad.
You are here! You are here! We have found you! Everywhere
We sought you substantial, you touchstone of caresses, you naked lad!

Oh but the water loves me and folds me,
Plays with me, sways me, lifts me and sinks me, murmurs: Oh marvellous stuff!
No longer shadow!—and it holds me
Close, and it rolls me, enfolds me, touches me, as if never it could touch me enough.

Sun, but in substance, yellow water-blobs!
Wings and feathers on the crying, mysterious ages, peewits wheeling!
All that is right, all that is good, all that is God takes substance! a rabbit lobs
In confirmation, I hear sevenfold lark-songs pealing.

 Sea Idyll, 1909, by Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida

 Children in the Sea, by Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida

 On the Beach, by Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida

 The Young Yachtsman, by Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida

 The Bathing Hour, by Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida 

 

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Poem: 'bellwether' ~ for Char

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Char's image at her post wondering

bellwether

she has gone before

us

you and I

loping along

in this woolly herd

looking for something

green to eat

and return it

to the earth

transformed

I hear the distant

tinkle

of a bell

softened

in the rising earth

of the hill between us

My heart doesn't understand what my ears hear. Our friend Char of ramblins passed away suddenly June 6. She was just 53 years young. On the sidebar at her blog she had said:

life is too short to waste a single day:
eat cookies, dance when no one is looking,
and try to be as happy as you can.

She also quoted Charles de Lint:

When it's all said and done, all roads lead to the same end. 

So it’s not so much which road you take, as how you take it. 

 Another way of saying it is in one of her images — always simple, luxuriant and tender . . . 

You seem to be gone, but I still see, hear, and feel you, friend.

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Birth mandala, baby poem, and a wee announcement

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I wrote a poem for my friend, the Renaissance woman Dutchbaby, at her request for the occasion of a baby shower for a friend. Dutchbaby introduced me to the idea of birth mandalas, which take Carl Jung's concept of mandalas representing the Self, to the next level: an image for a mother to focus her imagination on the emerging identity of her baby. That's one of Jung's mandalas at the right, which I happened upon after writing the poem, with its image of paisley.

Dutchbaby colored a mandala, below (from online mandala coloring pages), in PhotoShop for her expecting friend, who has Swedish heritage. From it I feel my own connection with Sweden through Grandma Olive. The blue and yellow remind me of tole painting on a pitcher or a barn's peak, or in Carl Larsson's kitchen. Dutchbaby paired my poem with her mandala as a gift to the mom-to-be Saturday. (Bless this baby, oh universe.)

Dutchbaby did not know when she requested the poem that we have our own baby on the way. I am going to be a gramma! And so I offer this poem not only to a friend's friend, but also for my daughter Lesley, and the little poppy seed growing inside her to the great size of a kidney bean at this moment, with webbed feet, a bulging head, and joints in her/his knees. Imagine.

Don and I are over the moon, and no amount of exclamatory punctuation is enough for what I feel, so I used just the one, but picture exclam-infinity. (Bless this baby, oh universe.) How about this photo of them with my nephew's baby, Evangeline? (Bless Eva, too.)

The multi-bonus is that Lesley & Brian are moving to Michigan where he begins a teaching job in the fall (exclam-infinity). We will be close by when baby enters the world (due in January), no need for booking flights at just the right time to NYC. Just hop in the car and drive an hour and a half.

Our son Peter (right, with his sister on her 30th birthday this year) just moved to L.A. to join his band Lord Huron (all the band members are from Michigan). Such is life, the child who lived close moves far away, and the one who lived far away moves close. But we are incredibly excited for Peter and feel, well . . . expectant about this change for him.

Dutchbaby's mandala and my poem are below.

A note about koans (in the poem title): When Dutchbaby told me that the expectant mom said the baby was "sitting like Buddha" in her belly, I decided to shape the poem in koan-like questions. (The image of a sitting Buddha also made me think of paisley.) A koan is a question a Zen sage asks a pupil that does not have an answer from the reasoning mind. A famous koan is: What is the sound of one hand clapping? "The master is not looking for a specific answer but for evidence that the disciple has grasped the state of mind expressed by the kōan itself." More on koans here. Samples of koans at The Gateless Gate. If you listen carefully to the podcast of the poem, you can hear the birds that chirp incessantly outside my office window. Does a bird's song answer the heart's questions?

Koan-like Questions of a Mother to her Unborn Child

Is there something quieter than sleep?

      My whispers circle you like jasmine vine, the way

      my arms want to, when my palm will cup your head,

      my thumb in the shallow petal of your temple.

      Terrace.

Where is the pocket in the nightshirt of early morning?

      You didn’t notice just now that I turned over in bed, rolling

      first onto my right side, then onto my left.

      Leaves everywhere on blue-white cotton.

What shape are you?

      In my teardrop body you sleep, sucking your thumb —

      puzzle piece in the circle of your mouth.

      Paisley baby, paisley thumb,

      paisley me, paisley breast. Lace.

What is grace?

      I pull myself up, like a camel, into a sitting position,

      lean left, push off, grunt, rise, stand, and low into the sway

      of this me, your cradle, creaking at my hips.

      Caravanserai.

Do you remember it, that hymn from the old church

through the window as we slowly climbed the stair?

      Holding the bedpost, carved like an altar,

      my eyes closed, up from the organ

      in my chest the music — unnamed song

      through the vibrating reed of my watery throat.

      Repeat.

      Stained glass moon. Bosphorus.

Can you see me in the dark?

      My hand rests on the olive of your shoulder,

      or is that a heel? Hush, keep sleeping, don’t worry

      about positions. You are touching everything

      in any case.

      Mountain magnolia blossom.

Listen to a podcast of this poem here. (You can hear the birds outside my office window if you listen carefully.)

Poem notes: 

Caravanserai: the fortress-like hostelries for sojourners on the Silk Road.

Bosphorus: the body of water between the European and Asian sides of Istanbul; 'bosphorus' means 'throat' in Turkish; Lesley went to school on the European side, crossing the Bosphorus every morning and evening from and to our home on the Asian side.

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Nouvelle 55: Four Directions - The Star

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"Four Directions" by stained glass artist Stratoz

My friend Stratoz invited me to write a Nouvelle 55 based upon one of his stunning stained glass pieces. This poem is the result. I feel drawn to connect Stratoz' piece with art by Marc Chagall and Carl Jung (who found in mandalas representations of the Self), two people whose souls exploded in creativity, as bright and wild as Stratoz' "Four Directions." This piece is a square mandala, when most manadalas are a circle (some with a square inside). Read Stratoz' post about the healing ways of mandalas here.

The story of Israel — of Jews, of Arabs— of the great conflicts that never end, was made more poignant for me this morning when I read that the large Arab population in the Galilee region of Israel is predominantly Druze. Some believe that the Druze people descended from the Tribe of Zebulun, one of the twelve tribes of Israel. Oh that the tribes of the world could be joined as skillfully as Stratoz melds the living colors of his stained glass, and as Chagall did his stained glass, and as Jung did the colors of the unbreakable self.

The Star

prompted by Stratoz' "Four Directions"

Break the mirror.
Four-square hands
reunite in sacred sand.

Gather saturation,
arrowed imagination

east-ended by the sea
a sky-blue Galilee

in the colors of this dream.
Gate my red
leaf-paint the green

Bright my heart—
     good this art
circling the sacred soul apart.

Pull into light, my star—
Self, borne into near
and far

Lithograph, by Marc Chagall

"The Tribe of Zebulun"

from The Twelve Maquettes
Of Stained Glass Windows
For Jerusalem, 1964

found here

The Red Cross, Carl Jung's illustration from The Red Book

Nouvelle 55 is a flash fiction written in exactly 55 words, based on a piece of art. 

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A new mothering poem & a national radio show

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Under the open sky

You are a constant bridge
between mother
and child.

I walk from this side
a sprout
to the other shore’s
bones

and back again
and again

through your unfolding
womb
— your opening mouth

where I go inside
and listen
to our unwrinkling
skin.

My blog friend Susan of Everyday People invited me to share three poem podcasts on her nationally aired public radio program 51% The Women's Perspective for this week of Mother's Day. Susan's excellent program focuses on issues that are relevant and resonant for all of us, not only women. The poems are ones I have previously posted at this blog and are "A world, and you in it," "Aubade" and "Little One." I'm pretty excited. (Did I say "nationally" enough times? Eeeeeeee.) The poems are on the topic of mothering, which seems to be where I live these days in my heart. The 30 minute show airs live Wednesday, May 4 at 3 PM EST on her station out of Woodstock, NY, WAMC. The program will be archived Thursday, May 5, show #1138 here. You'll be able to download an mp3 of the program at NPR here. (Yeah, well I'll probably be the only one doing that, ha.) To find a station that airs 51% The Women's Perspective, go here. Thank you, Susan, for liking my poems enough to broadcast them on your show!

UPDATE: Listen to the archive of Susan Barnett's very interesting 51% The Women's Perspective show from yesterday (archive #1138 here), a special Mother's Day edition in which Carla Goldstein explains the feminist origins of Mother's Day, and the intent of its founders to end all war. Then listen to a young woman from Ireland talk about her heartbreaking last days with her mother, who had dementia (a story I understand personally). The 30-minute program is well worth listening to. My poem "A world, and you in it" is at the end of the program. Thanks again, Susan, for hosting an important program and for airing my poem in such fine company.

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Here, have a chocolate chip waffle

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This image is the gate to the delights of my friend Terresa Wellborn, who has been generously featuring poets from the blogosphere during National Poetry Month at her blog The Chocolate Chip Waffle.

Today, I am her featured guest! What a wonder. You can get there from here.

I'll take this chance to tell you if you have not already passed through her gate that Terresa is a force of nature, as delicate and as strong as a cosmos flower rising up through a crack in the sidewalk.


Here is a sample of Terresa's poetry I especially like.

Red Shoes

I was thirty-three,
I wasn't sure I could carry it off,
throated birds sprouting as feet,
sunsets,
a catastrophe.

They rushed over my toes,
I couldn't help it,
they spoke in slick tongues,
an August heat.

They unbuckled like the
back porch unlocking rain,
the color you hear in
veins, colliding.

I wear them now
every day,
they speak nothing of
desire.

-Terresa Wellborn

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My 5th blog anniversary, a winner, and salons

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Thank you for celebrating five years with me this week. It has been beautiful to contemplate the rewards of blogging, and of knowing you, my friends.

My gift of gratitude

With the help of List Randomizer, I tossed all your pretty avatars from the previous post comments into the bag and came up with a very pretty blogger avatar indeed! Margaret Bednar, I will be painting you a bluebird on a piece of wood (see previous post).This may be a little like sending coals to Newcastle, since you are an artist! Margaret lives in North Carolina, has six gorgeous children, and still has time to create art, write poetry and maintain two art blogs: Art Happens (Painting & Sketching) and Art Happens 365 (photography & poetry)! Margaret, thank you for making this little salon sparkle with your presence.

Speaking of salon. I’d like to ‘splain, since I use the term salon in my comment box. The word sounds either hoi polloi, or hoity toity in the U.S, where the only rooms we call salons are for hair stylists and nails, but we vaguely know about the European salons. To call my blog a salon either sounds like I’m about to give you a virtual shampoo-massage, or that I delude myself by thinking I am a European sophisticate like Mme. Geoffrin on rue St. Honoré. (See Lemonnier's painting of her salon at the right/above, and read a wonderful essay about the history of the European salon at the Oxford University Press site here.)

But the word salon is quite special to me, actually. Until we moved to Istanbul, I hadn’t heard the word used much, except in books located in Europe when friends gathered in them, or as in the art and literary salons in France and other places where artists like Rodin submitted their work (and were sometimes rejected, yes even Rodin). So when we moved to Istanbul in 1985, we learned that the “living room” was called the salon. We bought salon furniture and satin drapes with tulle sheers, in the rather elaborate fashion of Turks, for whom hospitality, and the attitude of welcome at the very least, is one of the most important values. The salon was the room where guests were entertained, and believe me, in Turkey guests are still entertained, or at least they were twenty-five years ago. Whether accompanied by çay and börek in the afternoon with the ladies of the apartment building crocheting and gossiping, or çay, dolma and pastries in the evening with couples or families, it was the center of conversation. We kept track of each other's lives. If we had been better at the language, it might have been something like the salons you read about in Henry James or Edith Wharton novels (well maybe not so fancy) where friends came in from the cold to engage in stimulating discourse. If someone had a particularly skillful touch with delicacies from the kitchen, combined with an ease of hospitality and a gift for encouraging people to talk, and if the çay kept pouring into those little glasses with saucers, then their salon was rarely empty any given week. Friends would travel through the heaviest downpours or ignore wedding invitations to sit and visit in such a salon. (See Michael Naples' beautiful painting, above, of the Turkish çay glass and saucer -- ours were just like that; the tea doesn't have a chance to get cold in those small glasses; when I found his image on Google, I thought it was a photograph; do explore his Daily Paintings.)

I have nothing in my life like a drawing room, parlor, living room, or front porch where guests come regularly to sit and visit together . . . except this salon where my blog friends come. We can cozy up by the wood stove here on the farm and chat, never stiff or formal like Mme. Geoffrin's, I hope (though like her, I receive an education by listening to my guests!), and some days I kinda want it to be more like a saloon! (Yes, same word, anglicized . . . or americanized.)

Western Saloon, by Lee Dubin

Or I'd like to invite you to a warm, festive supper, like this:

Julaftonen (Christmas Eve), by Carl Larsson

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However we drink our beverages here, coffee, tea, Christmas punch, or draft beer from the bar, I love having you come! Or in Turkish: Hoş geldiniz! ("We welcome you with pleasure!" Hoş is pronounced "hosh" -- long "o") Now you say: Hoş bulduk! ("We're happy to be here!")

Now, drink your tea. It'll get cold.

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"The blog thing" at 5 years

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My first blog post

Five years ago this week was my first blog post. You can see it above, though the template was different. My sister Ginnie ("Bootsie" to me) was my first and only commenter for some time and the first person I knew who had a blog (the wonderful In Soul). Three months later, my "brother" rauf introduced himself from India, and much more of the world opened to me via his posts at Daylight Again. And so the wonder began. Let me wander as I wonder at the full hand of these years.

∞ I picked the name synchronizing after seeing my hand held device "synchronizing" with my computer when I linked them at the end of a work day. I liked the idea of bringing things together in some kind of unity. I changed it to synch-ro-ni-zing, adding the hyphens, to sort of help people understand that "synchronizing" is different from "synchronicity."  This blog isn't necessarily about meaningful coincidence (synchronicity), but more about the intentional pairing of things.

∞ My blog is just as eclectic today as it was five years ago. You might find Paris paired with Bishop the barncat, memories of my mom with a walk in the meadow, or raptures over a sublime salad during a long, beautiful winter. I just tell you what's going on inside. This past year I've done that more in poems, because I've been writing more poems, a direct result of being freshly and deeply inspired by blog friends. You know who you are.

∞ Speaking of blog friends, I have met some of the most wonderful people of my life, here, in these five years at synch. There is more talent, imagination, insight, knowledge, wisdom, humor, experience, story-telling skill, beauty, strength and love here than anyone who doesn't blog might understand.

∞ As a result of these friends and conversations, I have changed. I have grown more confident, better at writing, better at photography, better at life, better at me! It has been like a non-stop class in the arts and humanities, critical thinking, communication, and the soul's journey. The world has shrunk, and so have I. I am less, and I am more.

∞ Blogger has gotten better and easier to use. I pay $3.95 a year for this space, since I overflowed my space limit sometime in the last year or two. I'd say it's a pretty darn good bargain. Compare it to, say, a Burger King Whopper ($3.29).

∞ Two years ago today I received the honor of Blogger's Blog of Note, eleven days after my friend Barry of An Explorer's View of Life received the same honor. I was fortunate to find him through that award, instantly enthralled by his story-telling sweetness. Of course we didn't know we would lose him the next year to cancer. I rejoice, and gasp, whenever I see his comments in old posts around the blogosphere. He is still with us, but I miss him.

∞ Vastly more important than Blog of Note, immeasurably more, is the reward of being together with you, in this heartland. Hear what Walt Whitman meant in his poem "Song of Myself," for yes, this blog is a song of myself! always about myself, because it is from my heart. Yet for me and for you and your blog, our songs are like his song. The song of "myself" is not just about me, but contains much more . . .

“ . . . in all people I see myself, none more and not one a barleycorn less
and the good or bad I say of myself I say of them . . .”

“I am large, I contain multitudes.”

“For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”

And this from his Song can be our guiding light, because while we read each other's words (and lots and lots of books), as Rumi says in a similar vein, "Let the beauty we love be what we do. / There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground."

"Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of
all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions
of suns left,)
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through
the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self."

A little gift of gratefulness

In the list of traditional gifts for [wedding] anniversaries, five years is celebrated with gifts of wood. It feels appropriate seeing the spruce bough in my first post, in light of this. And also in this light, I would like to celebrate my full hand of joy and gratitude by sending one of you a [humble] hand painted wooden ornament of a special bird here on the farm: a bluebird. It will look something like the one I painted for Peter's girlfriend for Christmas, below. (I just started tole painting, cultivating my dormant Swedish roots from Grandma Olive.) After wandering through the bag of friends who leave a comment at this post, I'll announce the person I randomly choose (with List Randomizer, so cool) on the anniversary of my blog on Friday, January 21. Then I will paint a bluebird, with you in mind specifically, whoever you are, and with the bluebird in mind in his round russet breast and shy, quiet presence. And I will paint meditating on the rest of you too, and the connections we hold so dearly in our hearts. This gift is a way to be reminded that we are physical beings, who touch and feel material things. The blog thing is real.

But even though our blogs are tangible -- seeming somehow indelible on the Internet -- and our blog friends are true friends, we and our blogs will fade one day like leaves of grass, like wood dust. But oh, my friends, we are also stardust.

 Though I incorporated the crack in this slice of ash wood

into Andrea's painting, the disk I paint for one of you will have no crack,

I pray! Don found beautiful seasoned oak

and has already cut the piece.

This could be your piece of wood :)

-- about 6" diameter, with a bluebird from the farm.

I'll gladly mail it anywhere in the world. 

(I have also created several other blogs. Oh dear. Yes I would create one a month just to design it if I had time to maintain them all. Currently: daily posts at RUMI DAYS and A Year with Rilke (the latter with Lorenzo of The Alchemist's Pillow) -- see sidebar for regular updates. These daily readings are nourishment for my soul.) 

The Interior Castle: Chagall, Rilke & a new Rilke Blog

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Segment 1 of "America Windows" by Marc Chagall, Art Institute of Chicago

In this late afternoon blue winter light, as the window of one year is being shuttered and a new one about to be opened with the flare of a candle, thoughts about an artist and a poet are synchronizing in me.

Segment 2 of "America Windows" by Marc Chagall, Art Institute of Chicago

Wednesday I had the mighty joy of standing in the radiance of Marc Chagall’s stained glass "America Windows" at the Art Institute of Chicago, which he created expressly for the museum out of appreciation. Newly cleaned and returned to the Art Institute in its new modern wing, Chagall’s blues, reds, yellows and pink are as resplendent as they must have been when he completed them in 1977. (If you are interested in learning more about the windows and how Chagall created them out of gratitude for the Art Institute's dedication of a gallery to him, go here; if you ever make it to the Midwest, I feel a trip to the Art Institute is worthwhile for these windows alone.)

Segment 3 of "America Windows" by Marc Chagall, Art Institute of Chicago

"America Windows" by Marc Chagall, Art Institute of Chicago 

(this photo from The History Blog)

As you may have noticed I have been posting a lot of poems by German poet Rainer Maria Rilke these last few months. His focus on the inner landscape is right up my alley, and with every new poem I read, my heart expands a bit more.

What came together for me as Don and I walked the streets of Chicago were the parallels between Marc Chagall and Rainer Maria Rilke. For both men, Russia is incredibly important. Chagall was born there (in Vitebsk, Belarus, in 1887 – he died in 1985), and Rilke (born in Prague in 1875, and died December 29 in 1926 in Switzerland) spent many months there with his dear friend Lou Andreas-Salomé. For Chagall, though he left Vitebsk for Paris and other parts of the world for good when he was 36, Russia remained his soul’s home throughout his 97 years of life. For Rilke, after just a few months in Russia, he claimed it as his heartland and felt that no people understood spirituality more than the Russians. Both men lived through World War I and struggled to make sense of a world in which such a war could happen. Both men migrated to Paris and found intense inspiration from artists there. For both of them, angels populate their work. Chagall’s windows and paintings are sprinkled with angels flying in the skies. For ten years Rilke wrote the Duino Elegies, of which angels are a central theme.

What most impresses me in connecting Chagall and Rilke is how they carried the world consciously in their souls. Chagall left his hometown of Vitebsk, but it was so dear to him that he kept painting it in signs and symbols in many of his paintings, often with his beloved wife Bella as a personal representation of Russia, his soul’s home. Rilke too transformed the stuff of life – things -- into inner material that could remain with him always. And always he was trying to reconcile the true and even dark facts of the world into a harmony of the soul. You can see what I mean in the poem of his I’m posting, below.

In the mind-boggling and cumbersome intensity of the world’s problems bending the corner with us into the new year, I am inspired by these two who continually processed and transformed the facts of the world into the truth of the soul, where our response to the world is what matters. Through creative expressions, we can love this place of ours.

Out of the deep admiration that my friend Lorenzo of The Alchemist’s Pillow and I feel for Rilke’s poetry, and because there is a new volume of daily readings titled A Year with Rilke (translated and edited by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows), we are launching a new blog containing these daily passages, much like my blog RUMI DAYS, which shares readings from another HarperOne publication, A Year With Rumi. Our blog A Year With Rilke will offer passages of letters, prose and poems of Rainer Maria Rilke exactly as published in that book, except that we will add images to the readings. The blog is live, and daily postings will begin January 1. The following poem will be featured at the blog March 18 and expresses what I have shared today.




The Interior Castle

by Rainer Maria Rilke

Nowhere, Beloved, will the world exist, but within us.

Our lives are constant transformations. The external

grows ever smaller. Where a solid house once stood,

now a mental image takes its place,

almost as if it were all in the imagination.

Our era has created vast reservoirs of power,

as formless as the currents of energy they transmit.

Temples are no longer known. In our hearts

these can be secretly saved. Where one survives—

a Thing once prayed to, worshipped, knelt before—

its true nature seems already to have passed

into the Invisible. Many no longer take it for real,

and do not seize the chance to build it

inwardly, and yet more vividly, with all its pillars and statues.

~ from the Seventh Duino Elegy 

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A Note of Thanks

To my Blog Friends on Thanksgiving ~

In the rare hush over America
when Thanksgiving closes out November,
when Democrats and Republicans shelve their squeaky horns,
and early commercial Christmas crooners mute their carols,
in this silence when the sibilance of our familial

kissing and embracing,
back slapping and handshaking,
head bowing and glass raising

whispers sighs and murmurs of thanks,

I want to say thank you to You.

You shine your flashlight on aspects of life
and the world that no one else illuminates.
You help me think. You teach me your ways,
and you listen to mine.
I learn about music, art, biographies, history, culture, travel, films, books
all through your inimitable voices.
You write wild and wise stories and poems.
You show nature surrounding you through luminous photographs.
You let me see your grandchildren, and I pretend to hold them.
When I am afraid, you give me tips!
We play, you make me laugh!
You teach me to cook!
When you get sick, I pray.
When we’re happy, we’re happy together.
When we’re sad, ours is a chorus of weeping.

Thank you, my friends, for what you bring to this place,
which is not held captive in screeny web boxes,
but suffuses and inspires my heart-mind.
Yes, you're here, in my heart,
which is full and fat, and still hungry for more.
Soon it will have to lie on its side
like the 200-pound pumpkin Don grew!

I will be away for a few days.

Happy Thanksgiving!

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Autumn haiku

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how many times you try
to land right
but you forget the wind

    ~

my mother's mind
a leaf in the air
blowing away

    ~

a leaf stem
held by a wet stair
allowing the leaf to watch below
like a turkey vulture

    ~

a floating petal
caught on a spider's shaft
a crane stutters overhead

    ~

caught in his arms

late in life

she said, I do

Have you tried haiku? Though the strict form is 5-7-5, meaning five syllables on the first line, then 7 on the second and 5 on the third (a syllable is on in Japanese) modern haiku is less structured. Haiku in Japanese means "playful verse". The most important elements in haiku traditionally are the kigo, or season word (such as frog, which indicates spring) and the kireji, which is the cutting word. The cutting word, which comes somewhere in the middle, creates the playfulness between the first part and the second, maybe a tension or a revelation. Also, the poem should invoke images, which is what Robert at The Solitary Walker did in his poem "aeolian"-- very imagistic and haiku-esque, as in this couplet: 

     black crows strut on black earth
     tricking the eye

Thank you, Robert, for the inspiration. I was writing haiku in my mind all the way to work after reading that poem. It's nice that your treks inform your inner journey, something I've enjoyed from George at Transit Notes and Lorenzo at The Alchemist's Pillow as well.

Good haiku is not easy, I think. I like going back to the "old" haiku poets for studying their skill at capturing so much in just a few words and sounds, like Basho:

An old silent pond...
A frog jumps into the pond,
splash! Silence again.

~ Basho (1644-1694)

. . . or Soseki:

Over the wintry
forest, winds howl in rage
with no leaves to blow.

~ Soseki (1275-1351)

For more inspiration, a nice site for modern haiku is modernhaiku.org.

Reading or writing haiku is an illuminating way to meditate.

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An Interview

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My friend Bonnie at Original Art Studio is an artist, thinker, questioner and writer. Out of her generous spirit, she is unveiling a series of interviews of a few of her blog friends, and I'm the first! I'm so excited. Please visit Bonnie's blog, not just to see how I answered her interesting questions (I really felt like I was on the stage of Inside the Actors Studio), but also to browse her beautiful images and be challenged by her thought-provoking posts, examining how we live. Her aesthetics and sensitivities are really very lovely.

And she even creates word puzzles, like this one:

Bonnie will be interviewing other bloggers in this series, some of whom I already know well, some I know a little, and others I don't know at all. I look forward to getting to know my friends better, and to make new friends.

Thank you so much, Bonnie!

travel, transience, transition

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I have been thinking that we are now living in an age of change, so rapid that it is hard to keep up, and that this is sort of new. Change is so prevalent, we're wired for it. Before the latest iPhone is released, we're anticipating the next version. But the truth is, everything is transitory. It always has been.

There is a way of living that is called wabi-sabi and looks at the transitory nature of things. My friend George has been talking about the wabi-sabi way. His excellent posts are here and here. I also wrote about it back in April 2008. It's hard to sum up wabi-sabi, as George says -- a world view that has been around thousands of years, but this is what I'm focusing on in this post: it emphasizes the beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete.

My friend Tracy is moving soon, transitioning, traveling from her temporary home in Australia, back to Texas. She sent me a poem she'd heard the other day, which made her think of me, because it's about Michigan. I told her I'd posted it back in 2008, accompanied by this temporary map collage of Michigan I laid out with some significant Michigan symbols. (See that post for good comments about them.)

The map of Michigan existed for an hour or so in June 2008, then I put everything away. But the photo is still here for us to see. Think of photographs, and how they last and last, making us feel that things are permanent. They make us think we can hold on to something. As Susan Sontag said, on top of the already overwhelming happenings in the world, we also have photographs of them, adding to the weight of what we "know." Somehow by seeing those images, we think we understand, or think we should understand.

So. Things change, evolve, wear out. Funnily enough, I have a preference for material things that do change. Patinas that evolve. Not chrome. Not plastic. I love organic things. Wood. Leather. Paper. Natural fibers. Have you noticed that for the most part, organic materials age gracefully, but man made materials do not? A wool carpet is better after decades of foot falls. A wooden door frame gets polished with oil from hands. The marble floor of a cathedral begins to lie less perfectly flat after centuries of scuffling feet, in beautiful subtle waves. But a chrome fender is less attractive after a few decades of spreading rust. Plastic just looks dirty over time, with embedded grime in those artificial textures that factory molds create. Do you think it's an accident that my laptop made of steel and plastic is called Apple. And I named mine Apple Blossom?

It's time for another temporary collage -- this time, of me. Ruth. Featherhead. I have already been dismantled and elements put away. What is doesn't stay is for long.

But guess what. Sometimes things stay constant too. A little synchronicity I just found, post script: the tiny striped feather slipping down off the Upper Peninsula in the Michigan map collage is the same feather in the me collage below, in the middle of my forehead. Post post script: 2 more items in both collages, I just noticed -- two petals of the orange flower in Michigan became my lips, and the shell near Lake Michigan became my nose. EEEEEE.

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