Summer storm

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William Butler Yeats said,

"We can make our minds so like clear water that beings gather around us, that they might see their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even fiercer life because of our quiet.”

I remember one summer night lying in bed at the cottage in the big bedroom upstairs in one of the two double beds encompassed by open screened windows on three walls. I was fourteen, and I had my small FM radio playing quietly so only I could hear it from the nightstand a few inches from my pillow, the only light in the room from its linear dial. It was a hot Michigan night, and a storm was building around us, the way they always did at that place. One storm would come, the clouds would burst, and then another would follow it in a circle of storms. I loved sleeping in that room and waking to the rain on the tin roof, an occasional acorn falling with the rain. Quietly that night when I was the only one awake, my mom and dad in the bedroom downstairs, over the radio came keyboards, thunder, rain and Jim Morrison singing “Riders on the Storm” and I knew the luxury of sound. I did not understand who the “killer on the road” in the song was, or that Jim Morrison had just died of a heroine overdose. I had not yet studied Yeats in college, or visited sites of Dublin's Easter Rising. I did not know much at all, come to think of it.

I still relish the luxury of that emptiness in a thunderstorm, surrounded by a sky brimming with power, and so much depending on how we listen.

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Reigniting the spirit

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Inge and I are away at the lake with our books and writing tablets, tucked in under the rickrack of oak leaves outside. Indoors, surrounded by knotty pine, we're reading, writing and talking by the fire. Each fall and spring we escape after work for a weekend at my family’s cottage where it seems that within minutes of arriving our spirits are relit.

We quietly watch logs in the fireplace, like our souls: steady, certain, whole. Strike a match, light kindling, and flames cup and curl around them, like our spirits, which must be fed by some fuel. Without time in solitude, away from pressing routines, even for a few minutes a day in my red chair at home, my spirit lags. I must locate my soul, hidden in the thick maze of this chaotic life. I must hold her face in my hands. I remember, then, what it is I want. This is not narcissistic hedonism, but a force divine and true that guides me in calibrating my steps through this hectic and crazy-making world.

I will catch up with you in a couple of days.

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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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Acorn season

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Nineteen of us, including babies, headed to the family cottage for the fall clean-up Saturday. We took out screens on the porch and washed the storm windows before putting them up. We cleaned behind the stove and fridge. We raked leaves. We raked and raked and raked. We piled leaves on tarps and dragged them into the woods.

There's a lot to rake, all the way around, down the hill to the lake, and down the driveway.

Our cottage sits on a hill, the highest point on the lake, except for the state-owned woods next door, which we don't have to rake, thankfully. If you know about feng shui, our cottage has a pretty good feng shui position with its hill at the back and side, and facing water.

This is the view of the place from the lake.

It takes a big investment of energy and funds from our individual selves to maintain this place and keep it in the family, now that Mom and Dad are gone. Sometimes Don and I think of the vacations we could take somewhere every year with our share if we didn't have this place to keep up.

And then we gather with our family at one of the spring or fall work days, or the 4th of July, or New Year's, and we realize again that we have something very special. We have a home where our tribe can go, and keep our love alive.

I wasn't even going to post about the cottage clean-up this year, and then when I viewed my pictures I had to show you the acorn harvest and what I learned.

For hours, the kids picked cleaned up acorns. (Their work was important.) There was a bumper crop this year! I asked Audrey if she thought they could pick them ALL up. She said with complete assurance: Yes. Of course it became a competition between the girls and the boys. But when I asked Audrey if they were going to count them all, and she said, No, I said, well how will you know who wins? That stumped her. She and Lydia stored theirs in the playhouse oven. Eli and Johnny stored theirs in the plastic dock owl. I don't know who won. I don't even know if they know who won. I do know that not all the acorns got picked up, but don't tell them.

The icing on the acorn cake was when Casey (in the next to the last photo, below) decided she was going to make acorn cakes. (You can see the ball of acorn dough in her right hand in that photo; that's a lot of acorns.) I asked her if acorns are edible, she just shrugged her shoulders and smiled big with her gorgeous white teeth just released from their cages (braces). I told her I was not about to sample her acorn cake until I knew they were not poisonous (where was my sick-at-home husband when I needed him?). Someone googled it on their iPhone and we decided we were safe. You know what? Acorn cakes are not bad. She just added flour and water. I could survive with Casey if we were stranded near oak trees.

Of course when I got home and asked the sick [smarty-pants] husband about eating acorns, he coughed and sneezed out a fine lecture on the Native Americans, especially those in California, who made breads and mush with nutritious acorns, soaking them first in water to remove the tannins. They used the tannin water to tan animal hides. Read this beautiful history in our National Archives of the California Indian Acorn Culture. You know what I just remembered? I think Casey's mom has Native American heritage. Casey was not taught this by a relative though. It was in her somewhere, waiting for acorn season when the acorns called.

In the photo above, you can see a number of things: The original structure, on the right, built in the 1920s with its tin roof that is wonderful to fall asleep under in our beds at night when there is a rainfall lullaby (but alarming under acornfall!) and badly needs replacing; at the left, the addition my father built in the 1960s (after my grandpa bought the place for my mom) to accommodate the ten of us, and eventually many, many more; and most importantly for this post, notice the little green sandbox lid at the bottom left behind the woodshed where Casey and Sydney stashed their acorn collection, which ended up in the acorn cake, below. (Oh! Casey and Sydney won!) In the first picture, Gary (visiting from Guatemala, next to Rachel from Brazil), is smelling the acorn dough.

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Rowboat

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Rowboat

There is a life that was not meant for me,
of sailboats, and Nantucket shingles

of white shorts, white sails, white teeth, white gulls, the wind of the Cape,
the salt in the crab, the spit of the white bow piercing teal water,
of teak and polish and legs of sempiternal tan

I am not of pencil-thin
masts and marinas
clubbed, decked and chromed,
morning wedge of glint and beacon

But oh I am white
and privileged, without a doubt
peachy, the white of Lake Michigan sand,
of shells on that sand, striated with necklaces
of fine-grained earthery,
of peeling sun-blazed birch bark tree
organza diaphany,
skirt of light,
easy

I am of one rowboat
on one small lake, but infinite,
the rowboat of the patchwork paint,
of one broken oarlock,
of oars painted dove gray, one corner
of one oar missing,
with its splitting feathers
raised in the air

Water streaming down the oar-wing
onto my hand, paused
in one moment of many moments
and even more
and yes more
of airy moments
of leisure
of one coasting kind
or another

~ Ruth M.

Here me read the poem here.

Happy Birthday, Dee Dee.

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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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blue cousins

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Here are second cousins, sons of two of my nephews. Second cousins are of the same generation, and they have different grandparents but the same great-grandparents, in this case my mom and dad. At the cottage clean-up day, Asher, on the left, was shy at first. But pretty quickly he and Aden realized they had probably met before (lots of times) and they must like the same things. The rest of the day they were inseparable.

Here they are at the spring 2007 cottage clean-up day, Aden on the left this time.



I myself had one cousin. And she died young. I have no memories like this.



Well I would have been playing with dolls, not cars.

































Do you see three-year-olds? Or future old men?














My one cousin was Marjorie. I think I met her twice, maybe three times. In fact I had so little contact with her I forgot her name and had to ask Bootsie. I was remembering "Melanie." She and my father's brother, Uncle Jimmie, lived in Richmond and it was a big deal if they, or we, made the long road trip to visit. I never met Aunt Virginia, who died before I was born. One Thanksgiving when I was about eleven, they came. Marjorie was already a mature fragile Southern flower, and maybe I would have pictured her like Blanche DuBois if I had known Tennessee Williams' character then. Her skin was pale, her hair the color of the lightest salmon maple leaf. She hardly spoke, and if she did, it was in a soft Virginian voice of grace. She was modest, unsure. We shared a room that week, and I don't remember a word passing between us. I knew she suffered a mental fragility, related in part to her mother's mental illness, which was triggered at the time of Marjorie's own birth. I didn't know how to talk to such a person. A couple decades later when she died, there was mystery and suspicion around the circumstances. Supposedly it was suicide, but my uncle, who believed in everyone, was certain that her husband, whom she had met in a hospital and who was not unlike Stanley Kowalski, was responsible.

Why share all that in a post about three-year-old cousins who rediscover the joy of boyhood every time they meet? To show that there are some things we learn later in life, like how cousins can be good friends. Don't we as parents try to make our children's lives better than our own, in whatever ways we can? It's the nature of our Instinct. All possibilities are reborn with every new child.

Right, DeeDee? Welcome to sweet little Lily.
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