Habitat for human balance

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Excuse my wandering.

How can one be orderly with this?

It's like counting leaves in a garden.   ~ Rumi

The keenest moment is not when our minds dominate but when we lose our minds. ~ Anaïs Nin, Henry and June, p. 47

When I am overwhelmed with news of earthquakes and iPads, I look out the window at the trees, or I go for a walk and sit down on the log bench in the meadow, close my eyes, let the sun heat my face, and listen to birds that I try to recognize. Interesting that there is no less information being transmitted through the air from the habitats in that meadow than there is in the second-by-milisecond chatter habitats in Facebook and the Google news feed. It's just different information, and it's working as a whole. I might not want to count them all, but knowing that the variants of green are made up of leaves opening the size of a child's hands, that look almost identical, is comforting rather than confusing. And it doesn't matter if there are different kinds of trees, and leaves, of unlike shape and color. Or that there are microscopic happenings afoot and amuck, details as distant and unknown to me as the 1.3 billion people of China. When I look at a natural landscape, I feel harmony. I may not understand it with my mind, but I can feel it. Nature lives in balance. I can follow its lead when I need equanimity, by doing something like:

. . . when I hear about the latest iPad-ish technology that I don't understand, I can contemplate lily pads in the horticulture gardens at MSU where lovers recline near sunbathing frogs.

. . . when I read about another earthquake killing hundreds or thousands of living souls, I can lie down and pray under an open sky, and then say thanks for shelter, food, water and a sound body.

. . . when I hear that the food I am eating, that I thought was good for me, is bad, I can stand and listen to honeybees om around the apple tree.

. . . when I read the news about Ford's surprising car sales last quarter and try to conjure hope that it will help Michigan soon, I can sit with the knee-high rhubarb and white-flowered ever-bearing strawberries, and dream of the best bite of pie a la mode.

. . . when I go a little crazy hearing about tea parties, I can invite my conservative neighbor over to one out in the garden, crustless sandwiches and all.

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I bet you can keep the list going . . .
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- jjadf

morel alchemy

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Joy! There's gold in these here woods! At the end of April here on the farm we start hunting for until-now buried treasure: morel mushrooms. Although they look like it, they aren't brains, or Prometheus' liver, but they do grow again overnight, as big as the palm of your hand in a few hours. At the first silver of morning, we slip into jackets and farm shoes and out to the fallen apple tree, and to the woods by the pond, to comb the grass (and new poison ivy shoots if we're not careful) like Sherlock Holmes.

Morel mushroom cells don't reproduce. These fruits of the mycelium organism under the surface of the ground expand with water, which is why they appear after rain storms. They have the same number of cells when they're big Titan thumbs as they did when they were tinier than a baby's toenail and sprouted from mycelium legs underground.

These filigree toes magically dig up through the woodsy soil into the air where we pinch them from their lacy underground body - sort of like that eagle snatching poor Prometheus' liver, then carefully tuck them into deep pockets, empty them onto the kitchen table, bugs and all, soak them in salt water, throw out the bugs, toss the preciousness in flour, and sauté until the filigree turns to gold.

Morel season is just a couple of weeks, and I can't bear to add them to any other food and lose a single sliver of their identity. Sautéed in butter (or in our case, Earth Balance soy margarine) is the only way we eat them.

And after each small plate of delectableness, when I've absorbed the earthiness into my body through my tongue and blissed-out mouth, I swear I never need to eat anything, ever again.

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Reason to believe

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BECOMING MILTON

by Coleman Barks

Milton, the airport driver, retired now

from trucking, who ferried me

from the Greenville-Spartanburg airport

to Athens last Sunday midnight to 2:30 A.M.,

tells me about his son, Tom, just back

from the Gulf war. "He's at Fort Stewart

with the 102nd Mechanized, the first tank unit

over the line, not a shot fired at them.

His job was to check the Iraqi tanks

that the airstrikes hit, hundreds of them.

The boy had never even come up on a car accident

here at home, twenty-four years old. Can you

imagine what he lifted the lid to find?

Three helmets with heads in them staring

from the floor, and that's just one tank.

He has screaming flashbacks, can't talk about it

anymore. I just told him to be strong

and put it out of his mind. With time,

if you stay strong, those things'll go away.

Or they'd find a bunker, one of those holes

they hid in, and yell something in American,

and wait a minute, and then roll grenades in

and check it and find nineteen freshly killed guys,

some sixty, some fourteen, real thin.

They were just too scared to move.

He feels pretty bad about it, truthfully,

all this yellow ribbon celebrating.

It wasn't a war really. I mean, he says

it was just piles and piles of their bodies.

Some of his friends got sick, started vomiting,

and had to be walked back to the rear.

Looks like to me it could have been worked

some other way. My boy came through OK,

but he won't go back, I'll tell you that.

He's getting out as soon as he can.

First chance comes, he'll be in Greenville

selling cars, or fixing them. He's good at both.

Pretty good carpenter too, you know how I know?

He'll tear the whole thing out if it's not right

and start over. There's some that'll look

at a board that's not flush and say shit,

nail it, but he can't do that, Tom."

Listen to Springsteen sing Reason to Believe:

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What's in the frame: an ode to a master

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Henri Cartier-Bresson

first a painter, then the original street photographer and father of photojournalism

August 22, 1908 – August 3, 2004

Cartier-Bresson said, "To take photographs means to recognize - simultaneously and within a fraction of a second - both the fact itself and the rigorous organization of visually perceived forms that give it meaning. It is putting one's head, one's eye and one's heart on the same axis."

What's in the frame

A moment is an eternal wheel

that you froze,

or the center of a wheel,

like a cigarette in a mouth,

and all around,
the world is

puffing, blowing, kissing,

touching you

with its beautiful lips.

- ruth m.

There is a photography exhibit at the MoMA of Henri Cartier-Bresson's photos shot in the U.S., which I plan to see next month. Browse his portfolio. Read the history of the Magnum Photo Agency, which he helped found. You can see MoMA's interactives about the exhibit.

Martine's Legs. 1967.

INDIA. Gujarat. Ahmedabad. 1966.
Women spreading out their saris before the sun.

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another kind of tea bag

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. . . "for the roses
Had the look of flowers that are looked at."

T.S.Eliot
4 quartets
p 14

Looking in my fluorescent magnifying mirror,
dabbing dots of concealer on the bags
under my eyes as the magazine for aging women
who want to stay beautiful shows,
I suddenly feel the register in the room's music
deepen and know that my Auntie Sue is sitting behind me
on the worn chair that was Aunt Edith's. O both these women
had eye bags to beat the band.
"Aunt" Edith, my mother's stepmother
with that gene that creates these features on your face
like a nose or a mouth or a chin but that don't
start growing until somewhere after 40 about the time earlobes
also seem to have grown longer,
Aunt Edith whose pedigree and provenance I know nothing of
and never cared to because I didn't like her. But
Auntie Sue, my dad's sister, was different.
The woman had the most glorious eye bosooms
in the history of womankind,
reminding me of the women gathering tea
on the hills by the Black Sea,
their soft burlap tea bag carried in front
like one large breast
growing as they stuffed in more leaves.
I wish I'd had more time with her,
because what she carried in her eye bags was fragrant,
like that black tea, not poisoned like Aunt Edith's Chernobyl tea bags.
Auntie Sue whose humor was her pedigree and when you aimed
a camera her way said she'd break it,
whom all of us adored and never had enough of in her 92 years.
She might as well have lived by the Black Sea she was so far away
in Virginia where tobacco leaves grow but here she is, sitting behind me!
- smiling her wryness as I try to cover what we got from her mother,
and she says: One day you won't be able to cover them Ruthie
but just be sure that what you carry in them is fragrant.


*Note: On April 26, 1986 the worst nuclear accident in history occurred in Chernobyl, Ukraine (then USSR) and the radioactive cloud it released contaminated the tea growing along the Black Sea in Turkey, which was while we lived in Istanbul. There was a tea crisis, and the tea already in stores sold out in a day.

Wet laundry

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Grab a cuppa coffee,

or you can make it tea,

come on for a visit,

and you can bring laundry.

Marcie, Kath and Margie,

and my sister Ginnie too,

invited me to their blog

to try out someplace new,

where women of a certain age

put words and pictures on the page.

The place they have is Vision and Verb,

and I for one think it's superb!

Here's Wet Laundry at Vision and Verb.
(It's not a poem.
And gack, the one above is ridiculous,
but I am a happy slave to
National Poetry Month.)

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As if

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As if

I should have known something was up
when we told the host our name, and he instantly
gestured and led us to a table by the brick wall,
as if it belonged to us - now, always, ad infinitum,

as if we were a quiet, gray couple in Chicago
or St. Louis, who have had that standing table
for fifty years and nod to the maitre d with familiarity
every week, not just on anniversaries and birthdays.

So when I saw the exuberance of flowers and tissue paper
my husband had asked a florist to deliver - magenta and chartreuse,
bold and lusty, as if this tabletop was a declaration
of young new love, as if the bee were seducing the flower -

when I saw them, the room swam, and almost in a swoon I struggled
to take off my chartreuse coat and hang it on the back
of a chair. I said, Oh, the camera is in the car, and dutifully he left for it.
He left, and he didn't return. I waited. After 32 years,

where could he be? A siren drowned out the music, and then
one emotion was traded for another. I called him on my magenta
phone. No answer. I jumped up and ran out the door,
down the street to the parked car. Not

there. As if he, like a bee, had made his brief, purposeful visit
and left the flower, alone. Ad infinitum. I waited.
In actuality, it was no more than ten minutes. You see,
he found primroses on the sidewalk for sale.

Primroses, that I love and have not tucked into
a flower bed since three houses ago. Primroses
that were being taken inside for the night,
that would not be there after dinner. He bought four.

And as if he had died and come back to life,
when he returned to our table I was about to weep,
just when the waitress swept up to tell us
the night's specials: grouper and mahi mahi and trout,

and I told her to please go away, we needed no pretty
young women selling fish and champagne. Out of the
16,819,200 minutes we'd been together, just now we needed five
secluded on our island of love, with only the hot tropical flowers as witness.

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Standing

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There is a season

for standing.

It begins

low,

and keeps on slow.

The wind

blows

dirt from your head.

You clean up nice
and when your height

is enough

you'll get the attention of some.

Ahem. Hello, Ladies and Gentlemen.

What I have to say today is . . .

Well, I have nothing to say.

Let me just show you.

~ Ruth M.

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a Friday poem

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Cradle your son, Mary.

He is gone a while.

Sunlight, refrigerated in earth.

Stored up, like breath

held - until we gasp

and catch it again -

Held in an egg, in a wing, 

in a black eye, darting

- shiny and alert.

Held in the waiting

of thirst and hunger.

Held in a gliding flight

up a hill of wind that slopes

up, then down again,

the flyer floating

back down, silent as a blade of sun

that pierces a seed

and spills life into the ground.

Cradle your son, Mary.

He is gone a while.

~ Ruth M.

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