mud, branch and sky

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I said in my untethered donkey post a few days ago that I am the author and authority of my life. What arrogance! Was it arrogance? Was I setting myself up for a heavenly lightning trident to spear me into humility, pinned to this red leather chair, writhing in ego pain? I do see myself on a throne, Leo that I am. It is a perch somewhere between heaven and earth, close enough to drop to the mud and claw for wormy sapphires and garlic, and open to the empty sky above for ascending into perspective taking. . . .

Garlic and sapphires in the mud

Clot the bedded axle-tree. 

The trilling wire in the blood

Sings below inveterate scars

Appeasing long forgotten wars.

The dance along the artery

The circulation of the lymph

Are figured in the drift of stars

Ascend to summer in the tree

We move above the moving tree

In light upon the figured leaf

And hear upon the sodden floor

Below, the boarhound and the boar

Pursue their pattern as before

But reconciled among the stars. 

    ~ T.S. Eliot, from Four Quartets

Where are scars reconciled among stars? How can I find that centering, bedded axle-tree?

I can’t control the circumstances and authorities that tell me what to do. Students ask for advice, I must answer. I have to pay bills and make deposits to cover them, which means Don and I have to earn a paycheck. I brake for stoplights. I make food for us and our hungry bellies. I can’t just tell it all to go take a hike. Well, I could, but where would we be?

So what am I the authority of? I am the authority of my attitude. Like a bird who drops to the earth for thistle seeds, bugs, worms and juniper berries, I, too, keep hunting for body and soul food. Like a bird who carries scraps to her perch for a nest, I transport words and ideas from literature, art, music, world events and relationships -- especially relationships -- to this branch in me where I weave the nest of my soul. And like a bird, I dash up to the expanse of air above to see what it all looks like below. This is a continuous cycle. Dig in the earth. Carry to the perch. Rise above on air currents in an open space of sky. Back to the ground. Up to the nest. Fly to the sky. It is that rising above where I scan, reflect, and rewrite my mindset, remembering that life is not all mud and toil, or just nesting, or only flight above the touch, labor and pain of life.

In the nest, something gets created in the cycle. I find that I don’t, and can’t, create something inspired and fresh (ideas, writing) if I am only stuck in the mud of duties and stress, nor can I create something of value if I am only in the sky of my heart-mind. Beauty and new life are born in the nest when the air pulled down from above in arcs of flight meets the mud from my claws, in the nest embedded in the axle-tree. Whoooshh -- thwapp -- piing! . . . sapphires and garlic.

GO WITH MUDDY FEET

When you hear dirty story

         wash your ears

When you see ugly stuff

         wash your eyes.

When you get bad thoughts

         wash your mind.

                           and

Keep your feet muddy.

    ~ Nanao Sakaki

Here's a twig I gathered from my husband last week: Did you know that birds sound different from each other in flight? Have you heard a parakeet flap its wings? Loud! Have you heard an owl flap into flight? Silent. Their feathers have different textures of softness, as my dear Susie discovered when she rescued an injured barred owl from the side of the road and felt her silky-soft downy feathers, so unlike her chickens' feathers. Glide and scout, silently on a thermal. 

The walk . . . and Happy Birthday, Mary Oliver

                      . . . for the roses

Had the look of flowers that are looked at.

- from Four Quartets, by T. S. Eliot

Ever since my poetry teacher told me that she thought Four Quartets was the best, most important poem in the English language, I've intended to read it. One day I found it on the free book table in the big old dark hall outside my office at the university. It was strange, I thought, finding a discarded copy of the best poem in the English language. What English professor would cast it off that way? Oh well, my luck. Maybe they had an extra copy. The tiny black paperback volume sat for years on a small stack of books next to my telephone. Every morning when I listened to voice messages, I looked at the cover. It sat there, like my dad's tiny wooden screwdriver, photographs of my family, and a white piece of the refurbished Pont-neuf. The poem-book was something treasured, not for any personal reason yet, except that someone I thought highly of treasured it. At last, one lunch hour I picked it up and began to read, getting as far as the third page. I stopped reading because of the quote, above, on the second page, and another on the third. These were enough, I thought, for a while. This, my friends, is why I rarely finish books.

Then George posted about the poem Four Quartets, and because I like George and how he walks the world, I found my small black book, which had shifted from the desk next to my work phone to the dresser stack of books at home. I read it through (!). I went back and commented on George's post that I too was hooked. The poem would be a life-long friend.

About the quote, " . . . for the roses / Had the look of flowers that are looked at . . . ," it's been working in my psyche all this time since first cracking the book open years ago. I was thinking about beauty in our culture, of the cost of it, the extent to which we will go to be looked at and admired. What hadn't occurred to me was that Eliot's little black poem-book had the look of flowers that are looked at, for me anyway. I didn't open it, read it and pull the words into my own flesh and blood, and maybe I wasn't ready. The quote on the third page that also paused me? "Garlic and sapphires in the mud". Catchy, a good title for a blog, I thought. But that line has also haunted my mind. It is the opener of a stanza that is like a free-standing poem in the bigger poem, an opaque passage, with too many words I don't understand. I don't know what Eliot meant by it. But today, after all this time and after reading the poem through now, these two lines together mean something like this to me: The stuff of life is what we walk through, what gets us dirty, what we wear out from frequent use, the things we treasure because we know them so well and soften up with our oily fingers. As Nanao Sakaki said, "Keep your feet muddy."

OK. So then, what? Help me get this from my head to real life. What are sapphires and garlic doing in the mud, and what does it mean to keep your feet muddy? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

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That's where the post was going to end, and I was going to wait a couple of days to post it. After all, I don't post every day! Yikes. Lately it just seems there has been so much wanting to come out. But since writing the above, and then reading LoriKim's beautiful response (What about thorns?) at her blog A Year's Risings with Mary Oliver to a poem by Mary Oliver about roses, and because today is Mary Oliver's birthday, and because she is . . . is in the world, in me, expressing what floods from my heart every moment, I must post this today.
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