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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My coat

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My coat is not big enough

for the body of the world.

But it is too big for me alone.

The sleeves hang like bells,

my arms ringing for someone to hold.

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Disaster, and why we write

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When the economy tanked two and a half years ago, the magnitude of it didn’t hit me for a couple of weeks, until the Chair of my English department gathered us for the first faculty meeting of fall term. He told us the university had changed forever. Not just our university. He meant that The University as an entity had changed and might never be the same again. He proceeded to describe how the bottom had fallen out of our graduate program, how state funds that had already thinned dramatically, would shrink even more. Some graduate programs across the country would disappear. The question of how to prevent that happening to our own program sat in the room like a cannon ball. For most academic departments, the graduate research program is the driving reason for existence, which is true of ours.

The air was knocked out of me for a couple of days. I couldn’t recall when my outlook on life had ever shifted as dramatically as I felt it at that moment. I continued to advise undergraduate students, but as fear took hold of me, I felt little enthusiasm for the future state of their education. Some students had to drop out of school mid-term as parents lost jobs and their own personal funds disappeared.

After numbly getting through a couple of days advising students, my conversations with them began to shift. I could hear the words coming out of my mouth: “You must write through this.” Like light through the Venetian blinds of my 100-year-old ten-foot office window, something hopeful striped the room as the prospect of writing stories about the suffering and loss that lay ahead of us began to dawn. No matter how dire things would get, we could turn it into a thing of beauty by writing essays, short stories, poems, or screenplays. Even pain can be beautiful.

When cataclysmic events happen in the world, I don’t know how to be. In his "Love Song" Rilke wrote that he would “gladly lodge” his soul “with lost objects in the dark, / in some far still place / that does not tremble when you tremble.” I would gladly protect my soul like that too, but how is it possible to live isolated from tragedy when it happens?

When the earth trembled itself ten inches off its axis, water swept over the lip of Japan’s coast, and the nuclear power plant exploded in Sendai, Inge and I were at the lake cottage on a two-day writing retreat, discussing among other things, the question: Why do we write?

Over the hours some answers came:

• to remember
• to think
• to feel
• to claim an experience as my own
• to meditate and connect with my soul

Ray Bradbury said that you must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

Catherine Drinker Bowen said Writing, I think, is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living. The writer experiences everything twice. Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind.

John K. Hutchens said, A writer and nothing else: a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right.

Truman Capote said, To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the inner music the words make. 


The second stanza of Rilke’s "Love Song":

. . . all that touches us, you and me,
plays us together, like the bow of a violin
that from two strings draws forth one voice.
On what instrument are we strung?
What musician is playing us?
Oh sweet song.

Why do I write? To find the points of light in my experience. When we write, those points of light are notes of inner music our words make. When layered with voices of other writers and artists across the terrain of the world, it becomes a fugue, a galaxy of points of light. Have a listen to Robert Tiso play Bach's Toccato and Fugue in D minor on his glass harp. The four-voice fugue written for organ, played on this remarkable "instrument", is but one individual's expression of his own light, and of Bach's. Can you also hear layers of other voices streaming in their light?

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The almost unbearable weight of love

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I read a friend's post about losing a baby to miscarriage at ten weeks. Her love for the baby she barely knew surmounted what some would imagine, and others might try to comfort away ("thankfully you already have three children . . . "). It brought to mind my daughter's best friend, who learned early in her pregnancy that the infant inside her had anencephaly, the cephalic disorder that prevents the brain developing. There is nothing anyone can do to help the baby survive once she's born, and they usually do go full term, depending on the mother for survival. Lesley's friend named her daughter, carried her in her womb the rest of the months to term, loved her, gave birth with her husband touching her wherever he could, and they held their daughter for a couple of hours until she passed away. I believe that it is possible to distill a full lifetime's love into a short span like that. What is time?

You've probably read about the sixteen-year-old boy who shot the final basket to win the varsity basketball game in Fennville, Michigan, and just after he was carried on the shoulders of his teammates and the crowd surrounded him with hysteria, suddenly, he paled, collapsed. And he died. Fennville is the high school where my siblings and I would have attended if my parents hadn't moved to a different town an hour and a half away shortly before I entered the world. My sister's granddaughter is student teaching in Fennville this year. Wes was in her school, where stunningly, with one missed heartbeat, he won't be Monday morning. We are throwing her a bridal shower tomorrow, for she is marrying a nice fellow named Jeff in May. Tomorrow in our celebration with Katy toward her new life with Jeff, we will also carry the weight of this too-soon-gone sixteen-year-old.

I think we are all mothers at times like this. Whatever our gender or childbearing ability, we carry the weight of a child, as Anne Michaels said in her powerful novel, Fugitive Pieces:

"There's a moment when love makes you believe in death for the first time. You recognize the one whose loss, even contemplated, you'll carry forever, like a sleeping child. All grief, anyone's grief...is the weight of a sleeping child."

Sometimes love itself feels this way. Love is almost a grief in its timelessness, ever constrained by the weight of gravity and distance. Even the separation of skin is is almost too much to bear.

 

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Pearl Square and Everywhere

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Pearl Square and Everywhere

How does light sweep
a room, from a tallow candle,
and the room remain cold?

the worn marble floor,
beneath muted statuary

O powerless
the body, in its bone and fat

in this wind
where winter meets spring

on a concrete square
in the center of town

where we sleep!
and dreams are swept

up by the nightwatchman
into his black hole

just as the lights
are beginning to be lit

Listen to a podcast of this poem here.

Garden of Grief

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"Night on the El Train," by Edward Hopper

Garden of Grief

Listening to you
describe your garden

is like listening
to the thrumming wings of a hummingbird

    arcing backward
or forward
       whirring side-
    to-side

whisper-droning a puff of air against my cheek
as you rocket past
to the bee balm

where you suddenly stop and hover in place, steadily
so you can eat the fire
flower by flower

Next, you linger
intent before the faded
damask rose

where no nectar
rewards your lapping tongue

and summoning your last day’s effort
you vault up to the power line
tiny on the perch

to sleep in jeweled torpor
plummeting

into dreams
of a different

garden

-Listen to a podcast of this poem here.

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What Matters Most

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"What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire"

- Title borrowed from the title of Charles Bukowski’s 1999 book of poems, 

after reading a poem of his in The Writer’s Almanac

In the dark of morning the day begins

with another couple of logs snugged into the

cast iron box of the wood stove

after stoking the night’s starry embers.

If the embers aren’t first stoked with the brass poker

the logs take much longer to ignite.

I open the news pages on my laptop

and on one I read about the long iron rod of rape

by Congolese men who enslave 11-year-olds

to mine tin, tungsten, tantalum

the metals used to magically ignite this screen I read.

And just so, in the comfort of my red leather chair

just then, the logs take fire. I hear

the knock as the metal expands, I see the shimmering

orange flames behind the creosoted glass

crisscrossed with a pattern of black iron

and I see that the fire is caged, a tiger

burning bright, all the sun’s heat reborn right here

in my own dark cave, working for me,

warming me, controlled by me, Imagine!

just with a poke of my brass rod

~ Ruth M.

Read Ashley Judd's devastating article about conflict minerals, which are mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo so you and I can have cell phones and laptops, titled Costs of Convenience here.

Read what Business for Social Responsibility said about conflict minerals here.

Read what Steve Jobs said about conflict minerals and his industry here.

Read one take on the Financial Reform bill in the U.S. that includes legislation about conflict minerals and disclosure here.

What came into my head when I saw a pair of panties lying on the sidewalk

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I emerged from the parking structure into the dove gray morning of campus. Gold leaves and black branches of the beech tree behind the white sycamore pulled my eyes toward the bell tower. All within sight was earthy, even the old red brick buildings and gray sidewalks, winding like streams among oaks and maples. But there, within a few feet of me, rumpled on the sidewalk near the stairs of my building, was something arresting in the muted November landscape. When I got to it, I could see that it was a pair of woman’s panties -- cotton, white, and huddled, like a bunny shivering in the wind.

Those underpants lay there unattached, like the ones I didn’t need in the hospital, tucked into my bag in the birthing room when I was in labor for my first child. You don’t need anything between your bare perspiring skin and that thread-bare cotton gown, which is only a pretense of modesty, helping you feel less exposed, but open in the back and tied at the neck. With my feet in stirrups, legs V’ed for the doctor to check my dilation, which was taking forever to get from 2 to 4, let alone the pushing goal of 10, in walked a cohort of interns and their instructing doctor, with me and my birth canal a specimen for instruction on their teaching couch. I felt my spirit climb the wall to the ceiling as if to an observation balcony behind glass, looking down at a woman’s body being examined by my doctor and five strangers whose faces I blocked out in my dissipating fog of modesty. And I was afraid, not knowing what it was going to feel like to push a baby out of me, but wanting desperately to get it out.

The panties lay there on the sidewalk as if they had mischievously tumbled from a laundry basket, clean and white, flirting and wanting to get back in the dirt. Or maybe they had fallen from my Marks & Spencer shopping bag onto the sidewalk on King’s Road in London where I bought underwear a week after a bomb blew up a double-decker bus at Tavistock Square, a block from the dorm where my students lived. A two-foot-wide ribbon of red metal was peeled, and stuck out from the bus’s side like an artery from a neck, while feet, legs, arms, shoes, and other items of clothing were blown from people’s bodies into the air along with the top of the bus.

The woman’s panties lay there on the sidewalk in a soft fleshy pile, like the ones clutched by Lois, our friends’ daughter who was abducted from our Pasadena shopping mall, on the escalator down to the parking garage under Lord & Taylor. At gunpoint the young men made her take them to her car and drive to the abandoned dry aqueduct where they entered her, again and again, in the same V place where her infant daughter had entered the world from the opposite direction a couple of years before. When they were done they shot her in the head and left her to lie with her remaining hours gazing at the yellow-orange Royal Ann cherry of a sun as it slipped from the sky behind hazy Los Angeles, her panties twisted in her fist.

I crouched down and touched the white cotton panties, ready to pick them up, then turned my head to find a trash bin close. I was embarrassed that they were there, out in the open. Students were walking toward me from every direction on their way to class. I panicked, not wanting them to think the fallen panties were mine, though I felt utterly as if they were mine, as if they were every woman’s. I abandoned them there suddenly and dashed up the stairs of my building, as if some unknown, unholy terror was at my heels, and I was afraid, or unable, to defend what belonged to me.

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Horrors transcended

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Happy Halloween! I love how this day gives us a chance to play with fright and pretend we're someone else (and eat Reese's peanut butter cups).

Just before our mid-term elections here in the U.S., while politicians flood the air waves with last ditch efforts to get voters out Tuesday, Comedy Central's Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert held a Rally to Restore Sanity on Washington DC's mall, which brought out well over 200,000 people. Was the rally to support a political party or candidate? No. In his comments at the end of the comedic and musically entertaining event, Stewart asks, What exactly was this? What was the point? His point was to pull back from 24-hour media pundit craziness-inducing overreactions of the Left and Right and remind us that we are not made up of those caricature-warped portrayals of us Americans. I take great hope from the success of this rally that called out hate and reminded us not to let ourselves be driven by the media's polarizing takes on reality.

I'd like to use this moment when politics are all we're hearing on the TV and radio, on Halloween's day of pretend horrors, to talk about three of our human species who truly suffered under another kind of horror, the political kind. While I complain about the faulty systems of my country and the inefficacy of politicians to fix the mess, and while I feel myself getting more cynical and disengaged (but I will force myself to stop at City Hall on the way to work Tuesday to exercise my right to vote), there are far worse political nightmares in the history of the world. The three people I'm spotlighting lived through some of the most terrifying realities of the 20th century. Yesterday, October 30, was not only the day of the Rally to Restore Sanity, it was Miguel Hernández's centenary birthday. He is the third person in my spotlight, below. In the poem of his I share, he says something like Jon Stewart said yesterday:

You are the body of water

that I am— we, together,

are the river

which as it grows deeper

is seen to run slower, clearer.

Besides perspective-taking in today's context of political lunacy, this is also about the power of language and poetry to not only express the inexpressible, but to sustain us, even when life is at its most dire. Whether in the reading of it, or in writing it, these three show that poetry can transcend the worst that mankind offers and lift us on powerful and delicate wings into the shining sun at the core of ourselves.

For further biographical information on each of these three, please click on their names.

Nelson Mandela, Prisoner 466/64, born 1918

After spending more than twenty years working for equal rights for Blacks in apartheid-heavy South Africa, Nelson Mandela was arrested for sabotage and sentenced to life in prison. He served almost 27 years in three prisons – Robben Island, Pollsmoor Prison and Victor Verster Prison, until his release in 1990. He was elected President of the African National Congress in 1991, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993, and was elected the first black President of South Africa in 1994. He said, “In my country we go to prison first and then become President.”

Nelson Mandela said the poem Invictus sustained him through his nearly 27 years in prison.

Invictus

by William Ernest Henley

Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the Pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeonings of chance

My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears

Looms but the Horror of the shade,

And yet the menace of the years

Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll.

I am the master of my fate:

I am the captain of my soul.

Anna Akhmatova, 1889 - 1966
"Before this sorrow mountains bow . . ."

Poet Anna Akhmatova lived during the most turbulent time of Russian history, and though she was not herself imprisoned by the Bolsheviks, her first husband, after their divorce, was executed, and her son imprisoned for seventeen months. Most of those closest to her were exiled, imprisoned or executed for their political leanings. Her poetry was banned, she lived under surveillance. Her masterpiece about the horrors and sorrows of Stalin's death camps, Requiem, was written and dedicated to the women she met standing outside Leningrad's Kresty Prison while her son was imprisoned there. The poem was not published until after her death. Please do read the entire poem in the link above. Here is one stanza from Requiem, followed by a poem called Solitude that speaks to her own lack of freedom and the writing that sustained her.

from Requiem

by Anna Akhmatova

5

Seventeen months I’ve pleaded

for you to come home.

Flung myself at the hangman’s feet,

my terror, oh my son.

And I can’t understand,

now all’s eternal confusion,

who’s beast, and who’s man,

how long till execution.

And only flowers of dust,

ringing of censers, tracks just

running somewhere, nowhere, far.

And deep in my eyes gazing,

swift, fatal, threatening,

one enormous star.

(Translated by Yevgeny Bonver)

Solitude

by Anna Akhmatova

So many stones are thrown at me

that I no longer cower,

the turret’s cage is shapely,

high among high towers.

My thanks, to its builders,

may they escape pain and woe,

here, I see suns rise earlier,

here, their last splendours glow.

And often winds from northern seas

fill the windows of my sanctuary,

and a dove eats corn from my palm…

and divinely light and calm,

the Muse’s sunburnt hand’s at play,

finishing my unfinished page.

(I'm sorry, but I don't know who translated this version of "Solitude") 

Miguel Hernández, 1910 (October 30) - 1942

Yesterday was Miguel Hernández' centenary birthday. I didn't know about Hernández until my dear friend Lorenzo of The Alchemist's Pillow offered a beautiful look at him in his post called Cicada Dirge. This special birthday was hugely celebrated in Spain and around the Spanish-speaking world this weekend. Coming out of poverty and his father's adamant rejections of his literary and poetic interests, Hernández beat incredible odds to become one of the most admired Spanish poets. As a supporter and soldier of the anti-fascist Republican forces against Franco's Nationalists in the Spanish Civil war, he was arrested and sentenced first to death, and then life in prison when Franco took power. He didn't survive long in prison, as the terrible conditions led to his death by tuberculosis at the age of 31.

Post script: Lorenzo at The Alchemist's Pillow has posted a new commemorative essay called Milking a goat and a dream, tenderly showing more intimate details of Miguel Hernández's story. He plans to continue his series on Hernández in future posts as well.

The world is as it appears

by Miguel Hernández

The world is as it appears

before my five senses,

and before yours, which are

the borders of my own.

The others' world

is not ours: not the same.

You are the body of water

that I am— we, together,

are the river

which as it grows deeper

is seen to run slower, clearer.

Images of life—

as soon as we receive them,

they receive us, delivered

jointly, in one rhythm.

But things form themselves

in our own delirium.

The air has the hugeness

of the heart I breathe,

and the sun is like the light

with which I challenge it.

Blind to the others,

dark, always remiss,

we always look inside,

we see from the most intimate places.

It takes work and love

to see these things with you;

to appear, like water

with sand, always one.

No one will see me completely.

Nor is anyone the way I see him.

We are something more than we see,

something less than we look into.

Some parts of the whole

pass unnoticed.

No one has seen us. We have seen

no one, blind as we are from seeing.

(translated by Don Share)

To love life

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Inge and me after walking in the Making Strides event

This is my best friend, Inge. She is a breast cancer survivor. Today we walked a 5K from our state capitol for Making Strides Against Breast Cancer.

Inge. (Please say it in your mind's voice with a soft g, as in flying.) Inge is faithful, and disciplined; she loves language and reads voraciously when she isn't working too hard; she also loves numbers and being organized. She is fascinated by memory and why we remember some things, and not others. She has artistic, intelligent hand writing. Inge is a poet; she is German, with a steel-trap mind; her English is more proficient than many Americans I know. She has beautiful, dewy skin; she adores her 16-year-old son Piet; she is golden, with a golden heart. When we sit together, it's as if we are one person, with two sets of eyes. At lunch today after the walk Inge shared David Brooks' recent column "The Flock Comedies" describing friendship, saying that this passage quoting C.S. Lewis is how she sees ours. I agree:

Most essayistic celebrations of friendship have also been about the deep and total commitment that can exist between one person and another. In his book, “The Four Loves,” C.S. Lewis paints a wonderful picture of such an ideal: “It seems no wonder if our ancestors regarded Friendship as something that raised us almost above humanity. This love, free from instinct, free from all duties but those which love has freely assumed, almost wholly free from jealousy, and free without qualification from the need to be needed, is eminently spiritual. It is the sort of love one can imagine between angels.”

Warning: Mixed metaphors follow.

Seven years ago, Inge told me she had a malignant tumor. That "cosmic two-by-four," as she calls it, smacked her into an intense journey of chemo, radiation, and exploration of the soul. Shortly after the diagnosis, over lunch out of Bento boxes, she described her session that morning with an esoteric healer who was helping her go beyond medical treatment, toward inner wholeness. Hearing about it I practically jumped over the table into her lap with excitement. The moment was full, and I was eager, recognizing instantly that we would be doing this work together. I could feel an unseen world of mystery and beauty ready to flood us with its light, if we could just get the curtains open. For a couple of years we devoured every book that leapt off the shelf at us, starting with Eckhart Tolle's Power of Now, and on into meticulous inner excavations with Don Miguel Ruiz, Michael Brown, Osho, Krishnamurti, Rumi, Thomas Moore, John Hillman, Ken Wilber, Carl Jung, G. I. Gurdjieff, Rainer Maria Rilke, Mary Oliver, and others in snippets, poems and synchronicities. Even a mother beech tree in Ireland and a Scotch pine in a back yard were our teachers. We dug, scraped, chipped, whittled and brushed off caked-on layers of bad habits we'd accumulated, such as resentment, fear, judgment, dependence and jealousy. No matter where we looked, everything in every direction was vibrating: . . . Life! . . . Love! All seemed simultaneously more . . . and less important. An apple, a leaf or a bird were the center of the universe. The present moment was the only one, and it was eternal. Our conversations flowed with enthusiasm, discovery, and hunger for more. As frightening as Inge's cancer was (thank God I didn't lose her), I am grateful that it was the wrecking ball that knocked down my shabby, haphazard scaffolding, revealing a spare, quiet sunlit meadow of peace at the center of myself. The ugly scaffolding isn't gone completely, but the work isn't as aggressive now. It seems to happen on its own, like a hummingbird whose wings are moving, but almost imperceptibly, as if on a different plane.

Life keeps happening. We are healthy (I too, survived melanoma), but death hovers all around, through distant stories, and sometimes close to home. A couple of weeks ago, there was a terrible car wreck here. In one car three teenagers, and in the second car two grandparents lost their lives. One of the teenagers was a friend of Inge's son's and a former 4th grade student in my husband's class. There isn't much to say about such unthinkable sorrows. But a few days later, a rare morning when I failed to read my Writer's Almanac poem, Inge emailed it to me and said, Read this. Sometimes poems transcend the inadequacy of words, cutting right to your core. Love and life become a choice. This was the poem that day:

The Thing Is

by Ellen Bass

to love life, to love it even

when you have no stomach for it

and everything you've held dear

crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,

your throat filled with the silt of it.

When grief sits with you, its tropical heat

thickening the air, heavy as water

more fit for gills than lungs;

when grief weights you like your own flesh

only more of it, an obesity of grief,

you think, How can a body withstand this?

Then you hold life like a face

between your palms, a plain face,

no charming smile, no violet eyes,

and you say, yes, I will take you

I will love you, again.

"The Thing Is" by Ellen Bass, from Mules of Love. © BOA Editions, Ltd., 2002.

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synchronicity

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Carl Jung coined the term synchronicity for "meaningful coincidences," or acausal connection of two or more psycho-physic phenomena. Here is the most famous of the stories from his book Synchronicity:

"A young woman I was treating had, at a critical moment, a dream in which she was given a golden scarab. While she was telling me this dream, I sat with my back to the closed window. Suddenly I heard a noise behind me, like a gentle tapping. I turned round and saw a flying insect knocking against the window-pane from the outside. I opened the window and caught the creature in the air as it flew in. It was the nearest analogy to a golden scarab one finds in our latitudes, a scarabaeid beetle, the common rose-chafer, which, contrary to its usual habits had evidently felt the urge to get into a dark room at this particular moment. I must admit that nothing like it ever happened to me before or since."

Carl Jung Resources explains that Dr. Jung developed a treatment for this patient, ". . . this coincidence is not senseless, a simple coincidence. By using the amplification method, Jung associates in connection with the scarab and comes to the concept of death and rebirth from the esoteric philosophy of antiquity, a process that, in a symbolic way, the patient should experience for a renewal and vitalization of her unilateral personality, the cause of the neurosis she was suffering from."

Some are skeptical that coincidences are ever meaningful, and others are ecstatic when events seem to collide with sparks and intrigue. If they aren't meaningful, then so be it. If they are meaningful, what difference does it make?

When my brother Bennett died suddenly in 1996 at the age of 47 of severe arteriosclerosis (all four arteries were blocked), a series of events unfolded in the following weeks and months that could be mere coincidence, but for my family and me, were stunning occasions of conjunction. I want to tell them to you, and I am guessing you want to hear them. I know I have a human curiosity to hear stories that touch on magic and miracle, with a chink of light from beyond the veil of the unknown. The half dozen or so other occasions are eerie and chilling, but I'd like to share two of the quieter, less macabre and dramatic ones, to honor Bennett, who sometimes teased me while he laughed, "Ruthie, I just love how dramatic you are!" Moo, hee? (my mother's exclamation, for Who, me?)

One such moment was when we went to a high school play my nephew was in. The week before the play, a dozen of us were cleaning out my parents' house where Dad had passed away the year before and where Mom no longer lived, having moved to an assisted living home with Alzheimer's. At lunch we calculated that we were going to be one ticket shy of the number needed for our family members attending my nephew's play the following week. Bennett, who went by "Ben" with all his friends, said, I don't need a seat, I'll be video-taping it from the back of the auditorium anyway. That night, in my parents' empty home, Bennett died. Without a lick of furniture to lean on, we mourned and paced and lay on the rose-carpeted floor, in shock. The following weekend, as we sat in the high school auditorium waiting for my nephew's play to start, some sitting, some standing, we were chatting, and I leaned over the as yet unoccupied seat in front of me. I looked down at the dark green cracked leather, worn from decades of student assemblies, and there, scratched in the leather, was I ♥ Ben.

One other of many more such stories (which swell in their cumulative effect) is this. As the executor of my brother's estate, I made arrangements to sell the beautiful country acres he owned, where he had built a log garage and had just received all the materials to build a custom log home, by himself. He had laid out his gardens on grid paper, meticulous to a delicious fault. After Don and I left the property sale closing in September of 1996 with the new owners, and after we'd had a beer with them and raised our glasses to Ben, Don and I knew we had to drive out to the property one last time. It was the place where Don, our kids, Bennett and I had lain under the stars one March night, watching for a meteor shower that never materialized. Bennett was an avid amateur astronomer. I've told you before that he was also a brilliant amateur photographer, and his avatar was this grasshopper he shot somewhere. Don and I walked the property, peeked in the windows of the garage where his memorial service had been held on a very cold February day earlier that year, and we climbed back into the van to leave, windows down on that warm September evening. As Don inched along, both of us reluctant to leave, I happened to look down at the ground. Just at the edge of the tall grass by the drive, on one stalk of timothy grass, perched a lone grasshopper, swaying in the breeze. We stopped then, for a while longer. What are the chances of a grasshopper sitting on a blade of grass in the country on a September night? Probably astronomical. But maybe the chances of me looking right there, right then are a bit less.

What does it mean? I suppose it doesn't have to mean anything. But because we were heavy with shock and loss, all of our attention was riding close to the asphalt of what happened around us. We saw the connections, which felt as if they were more than the average, and more intense. But really, aren't we always connected to everything? If we were but to pay closer attention, and feel the wonder of the miracles in a blade of grass that stands up straight though it's as light as a feather, and bends when a breeze blows, not breaking, would we be amazed? And a grasshopper. Have you seen how far and how high a grasshopper can jump, and land on that exact stalk of grass that just happens to be in the perfect spot, and hold on? Is that not magic?

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The Season of Falling

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It is the season of falling.

Falling down. Falling apart. Falling in love. Falling into step. Falling by the side of the road. Falling out. There must be more falling idioms I'm not thinking of.

Pears are falling. Leaves, tomatoes and sunflowers too.

One of my treasures is a poem by James Dickey called “Falling.” This is the same James Dickey who wrote the 1970 novel Deliverance and also the screenplay for the culturally significant 1972 movie of the same name. At six pages in his book Poems, 1957-1967, the very last entry (I love that), the poem "Falling" is too long to post here. But please read it when you have a few minutes and if you are interested, here, because what Dickey managed in "Falling" is beyond what I can imagine having the skill and inspiration to do. He took a tragic prompt from a New York Times news story, of a stewardess who was sucked through the door of an airplane that suddenly opened in flight, and wrote a six-page poem describing her descent to earth. Six pages. On falling. I almost can't abide its frightening content, while at the same time coming back to its beauty and craft again and again.

. . . with the plane nowhere and her body taking by the throat

The undying cry of the void    falling    living     beginning to be something

That no one has ever been and lived through      screaming without enough air

Still neat    lipsticked    stockinged     girdled by regulation     her hat

Still on . . .

It's shocking, how a writer can connect us with an imagined experience. My friend Inge said over her Pinot Grigio this week that novels are about loss. She explained that while novels may be sad, or tragic, when we read them we find solace that we are not alone in our own losses and sorrows. I feel that poems are like this too. There are ways to find beauty in loss, in the shared experience of being human. Sometimes pages of a book are the friend we turn to, when we don’t want to explain anything, when we just want someone who understands, even someone fictional.

In spring, the natural world rises. Tiny, thin sprouts and foal legs sway in a breeze and in a few weeks become strong with fiber and bone. In autumn, part of Nature retreats. Even though trees and plants become still as they cycle into dormancy, life is ongoing, keeping on, in a needful rest. If I can, I always want to live where the seasons contrast in extremes. Maybe I see in that a comfort, that I too have wide variations in my self, differing needs in different seasons, be they for an hour, a day, or a year.

What falls, goes into the earth and becomes one with it, even nourishes and feeds it. Decay is as beautiful and life giving as tender green shoots. What we lose is still in us, and can nurture if we let it. Falling . . . living . . .

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Travel well, Barry

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My dear friend Barry left us Tuesday, yesterday, at noon, after a hard fought struggle with esophageal cancer. Special thanks and love to Barry's beautiful wife, Linda.

On February 18 I joined bloggers around the world and rang the bell for Barry's health, when he finished a round of chemotherapy. I shared something of what his exploration of life meant to me in that post.

Just five days ago, on July 16 Barry posted: Where Am I? Today I flew. Look for him now, resting on a wind current. Good-bye, kind, tender, smart, funny, brave story telling man. Thank you for sharing your life, right up to the end.  I will miss you, and I know your dog Lindsay will too.

Postscript: I just found this at the very bottom of Barry's blog, An Explorer's View of Life:

“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”

- T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

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Family reunion #2: my family at the lake cottage

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I did pull down a jigsaw puzzle. It says it's the Columbia River Gorge in Oregon, although the castle-like house looks European. It was just what Nancy and I wanted, lots of green. In this shot midway through the weekend, my brother-in-law Rodger only has about 750 pieces to go. I don't know if it got completed after we left Sunday evening.

The kids keep us young. But they didn't stay as little as they were at the last family gathering. They keep narrowing the gap between short and tall. I wish I could harvest and store the youthful energy that was spent running, jumping, diving and swimming. Not that I know what I'd do with it if I had it. You also have to have something you want to do, and the will to do it. I am a sedentary person, but Don and I have decided we're going to start biking around our beautiful state. At least I can do that sitting down.

There were play fights. There were serious adult conversations too. Sometimes I think some play fighting as adults wouldn't be a bad idea, as long as there are quick peace talks, the way the A-team, Aden and Asher demonstrated.

There was sport and adventure. Eric, my tireless fisher-nephew, was no end of entertainment for his nieces, nephews and first cousins once removed. (Did I say that right?) But poor Lydia didn't have a stomach for the fish's pain.

Eric tried to show how to cause the least amount of damage extricating the hook, before letting the fish go.

We have gobs of love and joy in our family, but we also have pain, just like everyone. There is illness, there is heartache. In the cycle of family, new ones being born and starting life's journey, it's up to the older ones to show the younger ones how to not only endure suffering, but how to gather around each other, encircling and touching, even when we don't understand. We fail sometimes when we can't stomach the particular type of hardship we face. Other times the younger ones show the older ones how to do it better. 

Life gets so messy. When you're at the cottage with 20 or 30 people, life really gets disheveled, and you're sleeping pretty close to someone else. You might be closer to the person in the next bed than you are to the one in your own. You wouldn't do that with just anyone.

We all have shadow selves, the parts we don't really want anyone to see, the aspects that cause us shame. But these are thankfully only part of who we are. What I saw this 4th of July, more than any other in memory, were some of the greatest challenges we've faced to the cohesiveness and flexibility of our big, and getting bigger, family. Look at us. We look like oddly shaped countries, with distinct borders, and big bodies of water separating us. The nice thing about being human, and not land mass, is that we can easily grab hands and shoulders and instantly thin the distance to a stream. One that flows between us and is easily crossed.

There is a Blogger issue I have reported at a forum, along with many other bloggers, that comments that get posted (since at least 9:30pm EST July 5) do not appear on the post. I received email notification of 8 comments from Mystic Rose, Gemma, Anna, Terresa, Delilas, Gwei Mui and rauf, but they have not appeared at this post. When I posted a comment about this below, it appeared when I posted it, but when I refreshed the page, it was not there. I hope you are not experiencing this at your blog, and I sincerely hope it is rectified soon. I am still not over the grief of discovering some time ago that I had lost at least the first year's comments at this blog, and also at Paris Deconstructed. These were precious exchanges with dear friends, including the first time rauf visited synch-ro-ni-zing, with Wordsworth's daffodil poem. :(

UPDATE: As of 11:30AM July 6, comments seem to be sticking. 

UPDATE: As of 1:00PM July 6, some comments don't stick! It's a random comment stickiness.

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It's a puzzle

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Friday we are away to the lake cottage for the weekend, Family Reunion #2. I don't fish for fish. I fish for jigsaw puzzle pieces. Well I haven't done that in a while, so I think I'll pull down one of the boxed puzzles from the tall stack at the top of the linen closet, spread the hundreds of picture fragments out on a card table in a corner of the living room, and corral them into something whole. Others can stop and sit and search for a piece too, through the hours of the weekend, between intervals of swimming, fishing for fish, boat-riding, eating, talking, playing guitar, singing, drinking coffee on the screen porch, playing cards, roasting marshmallows around the deck fireplace, watching fireworks bloom in the black sky above the lake, and sleeping.

This 4th of July it is difficult to find something to celebrate nationally. It's even tough to believe any more that working on one piece at a time will accomplish anything. A jigsaw puzzle this 4th of July is a prayer, that it is still possible to reassemble broken pieces into something whole. As Lovely You at the good in you powerfully said in her post on lemons & limes, The 7-Up Lesson, the sour side of life is essential to transformation. As I connect the pieces in my jigsaw prayer, I will meditate on how the broken is also part of the whole.

If you live in the U.S., enjoy the long holiday weekend. If you are outside of the U.S. and a citizen of another country, or an American abroad, please accept a humble American's heartfelt wishes for a wonderful weekend. I like thinking that I have connected with you out there, and we help make the world more whole, like puzzle pieces, together.

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Father's Day

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Sunday, June 20 is Father's Day in the U.S. Since I devoted a recent post to my dad (the oak book case), I'm going to focus this Father's Day post on my dad's brother, Uncle Jimmie.

My dad was the pastor, the sun shining from the pulpit. Uncle Jimmie was the moon, the kind of man who could slip by without notice. (Not that I don't always look for the moon when I'm out at night.) Two of his dark losses the poem refers to are losing his wife early, and losing his only child Marjorie in her thirties, in a tragic death. Also born in Virginia, like my dad, he stayed there his entire life. I love how he said "Mrs. Culpepper" -- Mrs. Culpeppah. Maybe the Virginian accent is the most beautiful of all the Southern accents. Uncle Jimmie had the humblest and most loving smile of anyone I've ever known. He was very shy, even physically. You could feel him try to disappear into his skin. Yet somehow he managed to transform himself for us kids when he hand-combed his hair down over his eyes, shrank his tall thin self down, dragging his knuckles on the floor, jutting his lower jaw out and sticking his tongue inside his upper lip to make himself look like an ape, and leapt and oh-oh-ohed monkey gutturals around the room, just to entertain us. I miss him. He was a tremendous man, uncle and father. He died in 1994, and I wrote this poem shortly after that.

"Flying to Uncle Jimmie's Funeral" is a catalog poem. That just means you write lists and descriptions, cataloging something, or many things. So if you look, you can see many catalogs of different things. It's a way of expanding a metaphor, like the moon, into more layers.

Flying to Uncle Jimmie's Funeral

He was not magnetic in life.
We did not gather to him like birds
around a sunrise,
airplanes on the tarmac around the hub of gates,
garden club seniors around flowering dogwoods,
doctors around the bed of a dying man
or mourners around a coffin.
He was not central.

He was adjacent.
Reflective of someone else's glory,
like the moon outside my cabin window,
or the pond reflecting the moon
in the farmer's field below,
a point of interest along the route
under a plane flying somewhere else,
the man in the moon, slightly off center,
shy of looking at you full-faced.

More accurately, he was adjacent
and translucent, the man in the moon
in daylight,
a filmy petal at the side of the sky,
delicately agreeing with the sun,
drawing little attention to himself,
allowing other light, not only to take credit,
but also to define him,
so simply lucid he was.

Still, he was light,
undeniably brighter and warmer than the space
to which he was adjacent.
Now that I have looked long enough to study him
I don't recall that a shadow
ever eclipsed his face even a sliver,
somehow, miraculously staying full
throughout the dark losses
of his life.

Now, he lies in Richmond in a casket,
waiting at the center of all our routes,
my parents, my brother and I from Michigan,
my sisters from California,
Chicago, Atlanta,
and those in Virginia,
his sister from Bridgewater,
his ancient friends from Fredericksburg,
Harrisonburg, Charlottesville.
He is the hub of our spokes,
a magnet guiding our courses,
the point to which we aspire,
the focus of every thought.

I imagine the man in the moon, contained
in a closed box
that can't accommodate the rays,
like his fragile body that condensed power
and couldn't keep it from spilling out
despite his efforts,
beams overflowing,
having the life of a respirator tube,
the beauty of a dogwood branch
and the attraction of
a simple white line on the edge
of the runway that turns out
to be an arrow.


~ Ruth M.
February 1994
Published in the Red Cedar Review May 1994

Listen to me read "Flying to Uncle Jimmie's Funeral", here.

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