Carpe viam

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Carpe viam

"seize the road"

was Horace's alternative

in space

instead of time

diem and viam

both symbols

of the circle

we live

the simple flight

of stones

seized and thrown

first rising

then falling

to become the road

in the end
(that never ends)

June 2012

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Starting all over again: "Lark Rise to Candleford"

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It’s a remarkable thing when what you’ve been meditating on and practicing, important truths of human nature—identity, humility, sorrow, betrayal, forgiveness, understanding, patience and love—are suddenly demonstrated by people with real faces, in real situations. Never mind that it’s TV, and fictionalized. This is training of the highest order.

In the last few weeks when Don and I got home from work, after we walked the property and then made supper, we sat down with our food to an episode or two of a British “costume” drama. I rarely watch TV. But as my friend Arti at Ripple Effects said not too long ago, How are you holding up while you wait for the third season of “Downton Abbey”? Well, while waiting we queued up several other BBC costume dramas (thanks to our daughter Lesley’s recommendations) on Netflix. (I posted about “Little Dorrit” here; I love not having to wait a week between episodes, or for the next season months later.) Next was “Lark Rise to Candleford,” and now that we have finished it, I want to tell you that this show is affecting me so much that I am channeling characters in my job and relationships.

The Lark Rise series is based on a trilogy of semi-autobiographic novels by Flora Thompson, written in the 1930s and '40s about her life in a rural hamlet in the late 19th century. The setting is Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire, England, with serene and sublime rural scenery. Lark Rise is a tiny hamlet of families of farmers and craftspeople, and Candleford is a town eight country miles away where fashion and progress are edging their way in. Young Laura of the hamlet goes off to work at the post office in Candleford as an apprentice to her mother’s cousin, the postmistress Dorcas Lane. Thus begins our witness of relationships between the folk of Lark Rise and the folk of Candleford, a sort of lateral Upstairs Downstairs footpath.

Queenie and Alf of the hamlet Lark Rise

Each character is flawed and deeply developed through the four seasons; they model how to push through problems and meet one another with tough love. No one is spared humiliation or failure. There are wise souls in the hamlet, and there are fools. Likewise, you will find the same mix in Candleford, as in all places. When the hamlet and town folk meet, class distinctions and prejudice surface. Society’s rules get challenged. Neighbors help neighbors at home, and between town and hamlet; they hurt them too. They live Rumi’s advice: “Be generous and grateful. Confess when you’re not" (from his poem "The Well"). And then like the old Jerome Kern song says, they pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and start all over again.

Looking for wisdom, I channel Dorcas Lane, postmistress at the center of Candleford life to whom everyone goes with problems. When a student comes into my office for advice on what to do when she has gotten herself into a mess with a professor, missing class, handing in a paper late, threatening to fail, I ask myself, What would Miss Lane say? You can laugh with me when I tell you that when I do find something to say out of her deep wisdom, I often feel my head tip just so, and my voice lilt like hers. “You have to go meet with him, and see if you can set it right. It might not be too late, mmm?” The other character I channel is Queenie Turrill (in the previous photos, above, played with effortless perfection by Linda Bassett), the elderly Zen beekeeper in Lark Rise who opens her home to anyone who needs her, which they often do. She is the center of the hamlet as Miss Lane is of the town. She teaches me not to take myself too seriously, to live in the moment, and to connect with nature. Both Miss Lane and Queenie have failings. A thread through the series is Miss Lane's "one weakness" which accumulates into many weaknesses. I'm not the center of anyone's universe but my own, but I do have about 700 students who turn to me for advice. I also have a grandson who is listening and watching as his little life unfolds. Sometimes the best advice comes out of one's own failings.

Four seasons, forty episodes, 2008 to 2011, and one actor shared with Downton Abbey: Brendan Coyle (Mr. Bates in “Downton Abbey,” Robert Timmins in “Lark Rise to Candleford”). Another actor, the most important one in the series for me, Julia Sawalha, who plays Dorcas Lane, is shared with BBC’s 1995 six-episode TV series “Pride and Prejudice” (which I've watched a dozen times at least): she was Elizabeth Bennet’s sister Lydia, the air-headed flirt who ran off with Wickham. It's illuminating how Sawalha pulls off extreme traits of idiot recklessness in Lydia and prudent serenity in Miss Lane.

The writing of Bill Gallagher’s screenplays is some of the best I have ever seen on film. Every episode made me weep (and often Don too). At the end of an hour’s watch, Don and I would look at one another, stunned that an easier and more clichéd line or closing had not been written, and that the writing was so intensely satisfying. Insights are astute and deep. This is not only for women. My husband got annoyed whenever the next DVD was delayed. Directed by Charles Palmer.

I welcome suggestions for other series. Next on our queue is "Cranford" but I am sure we'll start this one all over again at some point.

top photo: ChurchCrawler at flickr

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Caravanserai

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Caravanserai

Cords of silken blood flow in the peaks
and passes of my body, a traveling

miracle, while I read the news,
all of which barely reaches me—

economies of elections, wars, and
minerals harvested from asteroids

in the celestial commerce of billionaires.
Numb with armchair trade,

I remember the seduction
of the Silk Road. Quieted, I hear

spirit through the flutes of my bones—
the music of the steppes, the tinkle of pots

on your back. I smell the fust of Turkish
rugs on the floor and know

I would walk a thousand miles
to curl up on felt-covered stone with you

and these other traveling strangers, harbored
inside trusted walls, away from danger.

In the morning we finger sunrise apricots
in a copper breakfast bowl

before recommencing our planetary
journey, a mouthful of sweet chai, and I ask

what you know of the soul’s trade—
its breakdowns, its tinkerings

its thieves and swindlers? And you say,
Tonight we will come again to a caravanserai,

a courtyard of companionship, a warm stop
on the long road. Nothing else matters.


April 2012

Note: One of the thrills of my life was staying with Don, our two children, and my sister in a Caravanserai in Turkey, an outpost along the Silk Road where for centuries caravaners were given three nights free lodging, food and fodder for their animals. It was far from “free” as a hotel when we lodged, but worth every penny to me. These stone fortresses were built in a huge square, with one front portal large enough for camels to pass through. Rooms for sleeping were around the outer edge on the second floor, while service rooms, including a Turkish bath and shops to repair horseshoes, filled the lower floor. In the middle was a courtyard where goods and animals were kept. When we stayed at the Caravanserai in Kuşadası, transformed into a hotel, we dined in the courtyard. The best part of the experience for me was the two-foot thick stone wall that made our room’s window wells large enough for a small child to sleep in. My imagination has never rested since those nights.

Posted for DVerse Open Link Night, hosted this week by Brian Miller. Join the community.

 

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Resurrection

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Resurrection pulses through me like a river
pushing aside moments of death. My foot steps
ahead toward the Russian olive, solitary, about
to bloom in the meadow, fresh-mown for summer.

But for now it is spring, the season of risings.
What good are prayers for the already dead? Where
does that love go? I see the raccoon’s den-hole
beside the grass-covered log long fallen,

its dark opening only he can trust. I hear
the watery throat of a cowbird and know it
as the same stream, already across the pasture
where I follow. I watch her fly away, and disappear.


April 2012

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Poem: The Soul's Correspondence

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The Soul’s Correspondence

Freely, the black locusts bend and wave
from limbs and fingers, waterfall
spray across their stone slab of sky.
The older the tree, and taller,
the greater the grace. The young
birch and plum imitate with curtsies
in their small way, new to the wind.
The spruce’s scraggles heave and flutter.
Bamboo hisses; leafless poplar echoes.
They write poems with ease,
roots deepening below them in the earth.
Not buried exactly. But weighted,
spindling toward magnetic center.
Listen birds, stop squawking at me.
I want to hear the Soul’s correspondence
through the spirits of trees, while I rest
hands in my lap. No writing. No work.
Up from the essence of survival. No,
listen. It is far more than that.


March 2012

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Poem: What they'll say when she's gone

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Here's a bit of experimentation as I contemplate what lasts.

What they’ll say when she’s gone

I can’t believe I will never hear her
____________ again, reminds me of
the way I felt after I lost ___________.
I wish she would have left me
her blue ___________, so delicate, irreplaceably
graceful. I was smitten with something in her eyes
when she talked, the ____________ of her
lips, the blossom on her _______________,
the way ____________ fell on her hair every autumn.
I was surprised and taken with
her handwriting, as elegant as a __________
flying from her hand, gone forever.
She was an excellent listmaker, but
she could never finish her _____________.
The _____________ she made was divine,
but her ______________ was an utter flop.
The attention she gave to every
_______________ overcame the way
she _____________. Her love of _____________
made her do things
I would never, could never do.

But I have to say, it was the way she ___________,
always there, that I will try to never forget. She did it like
no one I knew, or read of, or could
possibly imagine. She’s stayed in my dreams
more than she’ll ever know, and less
than I now believe, or remember.


March 2012

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When you feel imprisoned

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graveyard in Kinsale, Ireland

The Prisoner

I
My hand has one gesture left:
to push things away.
From the rock dampness drips
on old stones.

This dripping is all I can hear.
My heart keeps pace
with the drops falling
and sinks away with them.

If the drops fall faster
an animal might come to drink.
Somewhere it is brighter than this—
but what do we know.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke
Part II of "The Prisoner" is here
translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy

For some time now the word I focus on in meditation is free. I don't meditate daily; maybe a couple times a week. I close my eyes for a few minutes, focus on my breath, and while I exhale, I hear, see and feel the word free. Sometimes I'm up in the sky, with birds, coasting on air currents. Sometimes free appears as a prayer for someone. But it had not occurred to me until now that it was an unconscious "choice," this meditation word, in a time when I am bumping up against the stone walls of physical limitations for the first time in my life.

I've been slowed by hand-wrist-arm-shoulder-neck pain since December. These are repetitive strain injuries, the result of twenty years at a computer at work. I am getting manipulations by an osteopath, and learning the Alexander technique, in hopes of relieving it. Dictation software has been a mixed blessing; often I get more tension using it than not when I have to repeat a sentence many times. Last month I was also diagnosed with hypothyroidism, which accounts for some of my fatigue, and soon I'll go on the lowest dosage of medication for it, taking a prescription drug long term for the first time. I'm 55. (The natural remedies for hypothyroidism include avoiding cruciferous vegetables—broccoli, cauliflower, kale, spinach—because they block the thyroid hormone. I would rather not give these up, so I'm hoping the low dose of levothyroxine is enough to restore my metabolism and does not result in the dizzy or "drunk" feeling some people encounter. My bad cholesterol has shot up from 193 to 243, which is another reason it seems important to go on this med.)

Learning the Alexander technique from my teacher Elinore is about unlearning bad habits of hunching my shoulders, holding tension, rushing into space, pulling my head back onto my spine, affecting every movement of my body in painful ways. (This 10 minute video explains quite well how the Alexander technique helps pupils regain balance and lightness.) For years I've thrust forward into the next thing, as if life was an emergency.

More than the pain, what bothers me most is having to slow down. "Somewhere it is brighter than this," says the prisoner in Rilke's poem. Truly, somewhere it is much darker than this where I am. But this has taken some adjustment. I am no longer quick, and youthful. Suddenly I act like an old woman, not the plan I had when I became a grandma in January.

We just finished watching "Little Dorrit" the BBC series on Netflix DVDs. It's the Dickens story of a young woman who lives in a debtors' prison in London with her father. She was born there and knows nothing different. She even loves her life caring for her father and prefers it to the new life of wealth that comes to them suddenly. Her father Mr. Dorrit suffers daily from his imprisonment and degradation, however, believing he is worthy of something far better. But once he arrives at the something far better, he finds no peace there either.

I take inspiration from Little Amy Dorrit. Inside the stone walls of Marshallsea Prison for Debt she angelically loves and cares for her father in spite of his irksome resistance and condescension. Like Dickens' characters often are, she is probably a caricature of what a human can really be, in this case softer and more philanthropically positive than seems possible in her situation. But even she could not adjust to the seismic changes that came with enormous wealth. We humans are creatures of habit, even when our habits keep us confined.

"We need to stop trying so hard and allow our lives to unfold naturally," says Richard Brennan in my Alexander book. For some years now I've been doing spiritual work to learn to love what is and what comes, which is helping me with this physical learning.  To not "push it away" as the prisoner in Rilke's poem, now that's the real work.

For another take on changing habits, see a new post at sparks & mirrors, "To deliver oneself up to silence."

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Poem: Bamboo in Winter

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Bamboo in Winter

Wind blurs the bamboo branches into 
     spinning ribbons of two-toned sage.
It is a singular being with root-stalks rattling
     out of the snowed and heavy ground.
Or is it the other bamboo sticks' chiming I hear?
     The ones the children tied with shells and twine
when Summer jumped the wind with lissome limbs?

Winter bones now rattle the wind, unfastened
     in tatters. Skeletal bells from porch hooks
keep flapping. What did we carry from Summer,
     in the hands of the children?
Keep on, keep on, call the bamboo chimes
     to their living kin across Winter’s yard.
Bend quietly, dear sons and daughters.
     Bend lithely, while you can. And the shells clap
their hands like cymbals, hearing
     Summer's tide in the sound of the wind.


February 2012

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poem: "the dreams that you dare to dream"

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“the dreams that you dare to dream”

goes the song
about somewhere

far enough away
to be uncompromised,

yet for a few minutes a day
plays in this room

when the sun and cut glass conspire
to drop a rainbow

on old cement
where the feet and guano

of chickens once fell
when it was a pecking house

of life, an egg factory,
before someone opened

a way in for more light
at the peak facing east,

a leaded glass window
that breaks the sun-yolk

onto the floor
into something dreamy

here and now,
something I haven’t

yet understood the truth of,
how and what happens

when life falls out
of the breaking and orderly
mechanisms of this world

February 2012

These shelves were the chicken roosts.

  photos from my atelier in warmer days;

once a chicken coop, which Don and Peter

transformed into
another kind of living and working space;

my Grandma Olive's easel from art school,

with Lesley's sunflower picture

from her art school days;

my paint brushes, cairn, jump rope

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Wisława Szymborska on loan

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Everything’s mine but just on loan,

nothing for the memory to hold,

though mine as long as I look. . . .

. . .

I won’t retain one blade of grass

as it’s truly seen. . . .

. . .

Salutation and farewell

in a single glance.

~ From the poem “Travel Elegy”
by Wisława Szymborska, 
who bid us farewell February 1st

"Think of your spine ending inside your head, not at the top of your neck, and feel your head floating there atop the spine," my Alexander teacher tells me as she helps me relearn the posture of a child, one of many tactics of a strategy I am waging to alleviate the pain of repetitive strain injury that radiates from my hands up to my neck. So I focus on the essence of that physical relationship, and the unlikelihood of carrying around an eight-pound weight upon something as thin as a spine, like a Chinese circus performer balancing a white plate vertically on the end of a stick. It is almost easier to picture my head invisible, like those of vestal virgins standing in stone along the lane of the Roman Forum. Those heads are gone from their bodies—weightless in their absence—yet their essence remains, sacred in memory and imagination. However I think of it, there needs to be mindfulness of my head and spine as one, in flow.

What is hidden within flesh and bone? What radiates in spite of them?

The 2009 head shot of Wisława Szymborska, above, magnetizes me. The face was on loan to her for a lifetime, evolving with age, yet momentary as a sunrise. It is now just a memory, a hint of earth on a bronze brow, eyes brown stones embedded in the palest rose sky, cheeks hill pastures in the morning sun, a trace of lipstick on an upwinged smile about to fly.

Wisława returns to the sky and the soil, a bridge between hello and good-bye. At birth and death, we attend to essence as to a smudge stick of dried and bundled sage, carefully lit at the start, held closely above a candle flame. Then small rosy ember-buds sketch fragrant shadows on air for a time, until at last they burn out, just dried leaf-sticks with singed heads. Yet how wild, musky and holy their scent remains as I hold them to my nostrils, opening heaven to earth, and earth to heaven, as if their flame never burns out at all. Wisława's writing strikes me as weight born like effortless floating, all flame and fragrance simultaneously . . .

. . . For surplus and absence alike,

a single action of the neck.            

 my sage smudge stick smells like heaven to me

Poem "Travel Elegy" by Wisława Szymborska from the selected poems titled 'view with a grain of sand' published by Harcourt Brace & Company, 1993

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Poem: A birth, and a death

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A birth, and a death

for Lister Matheson

No snow, and little
to speak of this warm winter;
ochre moss in laced stars
below small knobs of dried, dun
prairie fleabane,

planetary in death,
trembling in the circle of wind.

O my friend you are dead
and traveling
even while all for me is reborn

long before spring
in this non-winter of brown nothing
that is even so

beautiful, from the trodden meadow path
to the slim trees grown tall,
black, and sunlit by morning's horizon.

January 2012

Poetry should be heard.

Postscript: This small poem should be considered a momentary and brief snapshot in a series of poetic responses in these early days of my grandson's life. It cannot suffice as a fitting tribute or memorial to Lister, whose expanse of life, work and persona would need several volumes of momentary—and epic—responses. My thanks to Brendan for his comments, which helped me to realize that I needed to say this here in the post.

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My new life

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I type this with one finger while James sleeps on my chest. We are at home in his apartment on his fifth day of life, with his mommy and daddy. Daddy goes back to teaching today. Mommy will have a visit from a nurse to check in.

I have been living in the organic multi-day emergence of a new human being. In some ways it is a blur of minutes, hours and days, without clear delineation of what happened when. Yet we are constantly counting, in the way of civilized humans. The number of hours in labor, of hours pushing, inventory of fingers and toes, how many minutes at the breast, how many poos and pees in 24 hours. Time with its quantities is our way of measuring health and wellbeing, and with the major systems of eating and digestion well established, and my daughter’s healing underway, we ease into the stream and rippling flow of the journey.

All this amid the unspeakable wonder of exquisitely intense intimacy. The now-ness of every second. His phenomenal beauty of face and body. His peaceful countenance. His downy and fragrant temple against my lips. The whisper of his breath, the snuffles and squeaks of his voice, and the quiet smacks of his lips. I have plenty of photos to take with me today when I leave him for home and work. But the feel of his weight on my chest, the sounds of his breath and sighing voice, the scent of his warm head—these will be swaddled in the memory of my senses for a few days, until I snuggle with him again.

I am saturated and unsatiated in love. Yet there is a growing awareness that time and work call me back to their necessities. Just as James will grow past these first days of utter dependence—so beautiful and desirable to me now—I, too, will grow into my life, with new tendrils sprouting from the grafted stem.

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concrete poem, and alternate traditional form: family tree

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family tree

while   traveling

at the speed of a car   a particle hovers in the
passenger seat next to me      a neutrino of time and
space travel that I do not need to prove to anyone   or apologize

to the standing cows    for talking to myself like a mad scientist
who is to say he isn’t my self    a particle miracle      I go on
about my dead brother and gasp because he is not old enough
yet to hear about death    not even arrived here in this hubbled air
not having swum the arc through his mother’s arch    that opens
to the courtyard wherein the    family tree spreads limbs
on which my brother,   my father,     my mother have already

ripened and fallen in earth’s gravity    and I tell him
we don’t even know what they are

gravity    or death     or falling

but     soon    he    will
drop    and      be
caught     in
his
mother’s

ivory
hands

then

perched

and

nestled

in the

fork

of her

armpit

and

breast

his head

a plum

the crease

of his mouth open

for the galaxy of milk and I point

to the calf in the farmer’s field holding on to his mother for dear life

from the twig of her teat between the branches of her legs and say see life falls like that

Added note, from wiki: Concrete poetry or Size poetry is poetry in which the typographical arrangement of words is as important in conveying the intended effect as the conventional elements of the poem, such as meaning of words, rhythm, rhyme and so on. 

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11/20/11 7:22am I am reposting the poem without the shape, which may be a distraction this time. Fun to experiment (as Brendan says in his comment), but maybe this poem is better served in a traditional shape. 

family tree

while traveling at the speed of a car
a particle hovers in the passenger seat next to me
a neutrino of time and space travel
that I do not need to prove to anyone
or apologize to the standing cows
for talking to myself like a mad scientist

who is to say he isn’t my self
a particle miracle

I go on about my dead brother and gasp
because he is not old enough yet to hear about death
not even arrived here in this hubbled air
not having swum the arc through his mother’s arch
that opens to the courtyard
wherein the family tree spreads limbs
on which my brother, my father, my mother
have already ripened and fallen in earth’s gravity
and I tell him we don’t even know what they are
gravity or death or falling
but soon he will drop
and be caught in his mother’s ivory hands
then perched and nestled in the fork
of her armpit and breast
his head a plum
the crease of his mouth open
for the galaxy of milk
and I point to the calf in the farmer’s field
holding on to his mother for dear life
from the twig of her teat between the branches
of her legs and say see life falls like that

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In love with love

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Lesley planting our garden 2 1/2 years ago

There is the delusion of falling in love with love. My unborn grandson is a fragile being (and also powerful), and within minutes of his birth (maybe even mere seconds), his foibles will begin to appear, and my own will keep unwrapping, in our miraculous humanness. Something of love’s litany of pleasures remains in the heart, so that we seek another new love. We might reap more joy than sorrow, once again, this time. And when the new love is imperfect, meaning that we, or they, are disappointed, we come to the next fork in the road, able to choose: I will love you even if you do not want me in the way I envision. I will love you even when you are so different than the boy of my dreams. Is a dream a fallacy? Reality’s moment hoped into fairy kingdoms? O blessed are the realities that exceed our dreams. But set my heart in the fertile ground that includes poo in the compost. Rotting matter is what feeds the next fruit of abundance.

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Poem: Red Pines

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Red Pines

Every day I drive to work
and it is the same thing. Listen
to two minutes of political news
or economic disaster. Turn it off. Sail
past farmlands with birds.
Sit at my desk, answer, type, question.
Drive home between the same
houses for sale. Work to Friday.

On Saturday the sun shines down
on the oasis of meadow and I get up
to walk the still-wet grass into the end
of summer. Sunflowers fall away
from the sun, petal-stripped but big
bellies of seeds still feeding the traffic
of chickadees. Goldenrod and Canada
thistle sputter in ragged frizzles out of
dirty brown stems; royal pokeberries
droop down down down like antique
necklaces from the necks of dowagers.

Long they stood, these thin strong
spines, day in and out. Would I
complain in their constant stillness,
rejoice in the skyslide of a storm?
So slow ! this meadow watching, and yet
too rushed the machinery of what I live.
Now they fall headlong, tassels touching
each other over the path, weaving a baldachin
over half-moons of egg-yolk mushrooms.
Orbs of green walnuts revolve around them
in planetary randomness.

Rain on my glasses blurs sight:
My favorite red pines in a long row glowing
and backlit — Are needles dying among
the soft green plumage? Tenderly I pull
a cluster, and without resistance they release
and fall into my palm, spent. Some blight
is taking the trees. O Beauty, where to?
I am always at the edge, this side of that. A fly
flies in and out, drawn to some heat
in me, or scent: the other. I am apart, skin
side out, embarking or disembarking
onto the path whose current pulls me
into the fields like kindness.

What honeyed dark energy sings
from the yellow soybeans in the field
next door as the beans dry brown, harvestable,
the green leaves going going almost gone?
Can the farmer, scientist
or economic analyst answer:
No matter the speed of matter,
no matter where we are falling,
what makes the heart keep accelerating?

Poetry should be heard.

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Poem: A year in an apple

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A year in an apple

Crunch into the sweet flesh,
and winter snow crumbles under a black branch
where the juncko lands.

With the second bite, the entire orchard
blossoms pink again in your mouth.

Hold its red skin against your cheek
and it is a hot summer day
but you are cool in the shade
of the tree it fell from.

It is autumn, you are eating an apple.
For a few moments remember the year,
how it opened and fell into a thousand pieces
and how you widened your being.

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S.O.S.

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Through the window this morning, flickering behind poplar leaves, the sun rose. Was it S.O.S. he coded? I was on the phone, but I wanted to end it, someone else was calling. What if I, and only I, were the last hope of the sun, losing his way? Now tonight, three flaming candle wicks in glass duck and bob in the corner of this dimly lit bathtub like ladies urgently gossiping around a red tablecloth. I can almost hear them lisping. Yellow heads beat toward each other, but not toward me, and too rapidly and quietly to be comprehended while I am submerged, steamed and exhausted into stillness—eyes fixed on them and nearly hypnotized into sleep. I am an outsider, the last to know, and then, slow to respond. Is it urgency when poplar leaves twist and flutter like drowning hands? Or are they not drowning, but waving? Earthy sheaves of leaf and flesh lace over what burns and glows. Even just atmosphere alone flips the flame into frenzy. Glimpsing, we see some truth of it. But the light is still, in itself, and does not need rescuing.

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