The Weekly Photo Challenge prompt invites us to interpret the theme “Between”. This response is dedicated to my oldest, Susan. When she was a little girl in Kindergarten, she memorized a poem by A. A. Milne (the author of the Winnie the Pooh stories) and performed it for the K-3rd grade Speech and Oratorical Contest of her elementary school. Here is the poem:
Before Tea by A. A. Milne
Emmeline
Has not been seen
For more than week. She slipped between
The two tall trees at the end of the green…
We all went after her. “Emmeline!”
“Emmeline, I didn’t mean — I only said that your hands weren’t clean.” We went to the trees at the end of the green… But Emmeline Was not to be seen.
Emmeline Came slipping between The two tall trees at the end of the green. We all ran up to her. “Emmeline! Where have you been? Where have you been? Why, it’s more than week!” And Emmeline Said, “Sillies, I went and saw the Queen. She says my hands are purfickly clean!”
Susan did not perform this poem ‘purfickly’. As I recall, she left rather a long pause between the second and third stanzas, perhaps for dramatic effect, perhaps to indicate that some time goes by in that part. The audience began to applaud too early. Nevertheless, her memory was perfect, and she finished in her own time, in her little 5-year old lisp, “Thillieth…”, and I was, of course, inordinately proud of her. I still am. I visited her this past Sunday, and we went for a stroll in the UW Madison Arboretum, where she slipped between the branches of trees — like this:
NaPoWriMo!!!It’s SPRING and it’s POETRY and the world is a wonderful place! I feel the excitement, the bloom of emotion, the fascination of symbol and script! It’s romantic, pedantic, nostalgic, elegiac, existential and full of potential. WHOOOOOT!
Okay, with all of this enthusiasm, you’d think I was about to bust out a whole anthology of poems that I’ve just written. Sorry to disappoint, but it’s also Spring Break month (because, really, no two school districts plan this for the same week) and things at Discovery World Museum are pretty hectic – meaning that after being indoors with 600 school children for 7 hours, my ears are ringing and my head is aching and I haven’t been in my quiet, creative place all day. Still, I have looked up the prompt from the NaPoWriMo site and consulted the Bibliomancy Oracle. It has led me to a wonderful poem called Parable on Fish & Fire. Coincidentally, I made tilapia for dinner tonight, and after sitting down and offering my thanksgiving for fish, I recalled the saying by Kabir, “I laughed when I hear that the fish in the water is thirsty.” We are thirsty fish, we are celebratory poets. We celebrate the mundane, the environment of being human. Love, life, beauty, truth, concept and experience…we make it up and tear it down. We’re social animals with big brains, but we’re only minimally distinct from all the other carbon life forms on this planet. Isn’t that a riot? Sure it is. So let’s riot…but stay a little aware. 😉
Victoria Slotto’s prompt post invites me to share a poem written in the second person. She says, “It is less rare to encounter poetry in the second person. As poets, we love to address our “audience,” celebrity figures, other poets or teachers who have an influence on us, people we love (or hate), God, mythological figures, people from our past.” I went through the book of poems that I self-published back in 1997 and found one that I like. Back in that decade, I was extremely rooted in a Christian identity and was rather prolific in my writing to God. These days, I do not identify myself as Christian or even theistic per se, but I still have a great sense of appreciation. The world is an amazing place; the beauty of it often makes me weep. My brain is accustomed to seeking a source for manifestations, but I now realize that is more about me than it is necessarily about the way Life is. I often find myself wondering, “Who do I thank for this?” It’s more likely that there are myriad contributing factors to the conditions that arise, the harmonious conjunction attributable to all of them simultaneously without hierarchy. So I simply say, “Thanks be,” and leave it at that.
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The Sky
Did I ever thank you for the sky spread far around like an open field piled high with moods and structures, a playground for my soul?
This space above bids my thoughts expand to climb the heights of an anvil-cloud and teeter on the edge of a dazzling glare or slide down the shafts of the sun,
To swim to the center of its lonely blue where I find no mist to hide me, and lie exposed to the western wind like a mountain braced for sunrise.
Or clad in the shroud of brooding gray, it coaxes me to musing far removed from the minutiae that chains me to my life.
I search for light and openness to shadow the bonds of earth, exploring the vault of heaven for its meaning and its truth.
Thanks for this cathedral speaking glory through its art. Thank you for these eyes admitting You into my heart.
It’s been kind of a crazy week inside my head. Steve admitted to being a little scared of me. It started out on a real high – Valentine’s Day. I was full of positive energy, on my biological upswing, energetic and eager to communicate my passions, my dreams, my optimism. I went face-to-face with Steve’s downswing and asserted my intent not to be the killjoy in his life or the cause for his anxieties. “Go ahead, follow your bliss and don’t worry about explaining it to me! I’d rather come home to a mess in the living room and you deep into an exciting project than be greeted by restrained order and depression.” I went face-to-face with a family issue the next day, emotionally charged and endlessly repercussive, feeling open to multiple possibilities and honestly vulnerable. My karma was kickin’, I thought. My vibes were sure to cause some awesome progress in the near future.
The next day was a Federal holiday, but I was at work at the museum and anticipating starting lessons with a new student directly after my shift. Families with kids home from school opted not to venture out, however, because of a huge snowstorm in the forecast. The staff was dismissed at 2pm because the place was so empty. I drove 2 co-workers home in a complete white-out and was barely able to maneuver my car into the driveway through ankle-deep snow. I decided to cancel my lesson, hoping my new client wouldn’t mind. She never called me back. I began to doubt my decisions.
The next day, I bundled up boxes of books for shipping and headed out the door for work, running a little late in order to get the last package included. Sitting in the driver’s seat, I noticed there was still snow crusted on the windshield wipers. I pulled the door handle to pop out and clear them off, but nothing happened. I thought perhaps the door was frozen. I pushed with my shoulder. Nothing. “I’m trapped!” I phoned Steve in the house. He told me that he had a similar difficulty the night before when he returned from shoveling at his mom’s house. “Just roll down the window and open the door from the outside,” he suggested. The window is frozen. I finally squeeze my way out the passenger door into a snow pile and meet Steve in the driveway. “When? Why? What do I do?” I’m late to work, and I don’t know if my window will thaw in time to let me collect a ticket and enter the parking garage without parking the car and climbing out the other side. What if the gate closes on me? And I REALLY have to pee! I arrive at work late, flustered and cramped. I wonder why Steve didn’t mention this door issue to help me prepare. Is this a small fire? Why am I feeling angry and unsettled? We talk at dinner, and I tell him my plan to slow down, breathe and concentrate on my bliss the next day.
My shift starts slowly, sun streaming through the windows, small family groups perusing the museum. Suddenly, the school groups arrive. I will be calm and proactive. I will greet them all and give them information and safety rules and smile. But they’re arriving one on top of another, and not listening to me! I whirl around and lunge at a girl going head first down the ladder and drive my knee into the boards of the ship. Ouch! Can’t think about that now, I’m still talking to this other group…and I realize I’m talking so fast that I can’t breathe. My chest is constricting. Asthma? Heart attack? No, you’re still talking. Stop talking and take a breath, you fool!
I am panicked. I am going way too fast. Where is my Willy Wonka detachment? “Stop, don’t, come back…” I am addicted to my thoughts (as Eckhardt Tolle would say), to my ego, to my responsibility, and it’s causing me to suffer. I need to let go and get grounded once more. My knee throbs. I can’t walk. I must slow down now. I have no other option.
I had my first lesson with another new voice student last night. It went very well. I rang the wrong doorbell initially; I don’t think it hurt my client’s first impression too much. Steve and I had planned to go to Madison to take a class at the arboretum this morning, but with a “wintry mix” of snow, sleet, and rain on the roads, we decided to stay home. Initially, this was one more disappointment in my Manic to Panic downfall, but it dawned on me that I could choose to look at it as an opportunity. An opportunity to really slow down. To sink. Like the Titanic.
It’s a very real, natural environment down here. Nothing is “good”, “bad”, “successful” or “progressive” among the fish. It simply is. Things happen. Fish eat fish, waves come and go, and any drama is simply in my head. I meditate on plankton, sucking in and gushing out, enriched by the flow, going along. I’m staying here for a while. I’ll let you know when (and if) I surface.
Ever had one of those days? Decidedly moody, unable to focus, liable to shed tears at any moment. It started as I was driving in to work. By lunch break, I had a poem scribbled on the back of a museum map in my pocket. By afternoon break, I had texted my children just to tell them I missed their dad. Lovely souls that they are, they reached back immediately with cyber hugs. (thanks, kids!) So here’s the poem – no title came with it.
What can I do?
— it’s October
the sumac is red and my poor, backward head
is flooding nostalgia like liquid amber.
If I picked up guitar and a blues-country twang
— and sang
it’d be you in the sunshine
white overalls, your shirt as blue as your eyes
walking me home from school
sweet, musky sweat
your warm, solid arm
the newness of the world in the flash of your smile
Your fragile skin is smooth and taut, a drum head.
Shadows surround your bones.
Your waning flesh a cry for mercy.
You dream
a hermit’s life
of walking at a slower pace
unburdened.
* Steve became a City Carrier Assistant for the US Postal Service in April. His sister and his father have both had long careers in the P.O. Steve has left a lifestyle of self employment in the online bookselling business in order to make fast money with overtime and extended hours walking a city mail route. This is a temporary solution designed to retire some debt. At six foot two inches tall, he now weighs only 155 lbs – less than he weighed in high school. In the sanctuary of his home office, surrounded by stacks and stacks of used books and melodies of Handel, Beethoven, Schubert and Mahler, he is a happier person. Scholar & Poet Books is his personal work. Walking the footpaths of Wisconsin is his preferred route. He longs to return to this Walden by the time he turns 50 years old. *
I was in a mood. A little pouty and weepy, my inner 4-year-old whining, “I just don’t feel special!” God, why does this keep happening every month? It’s so ridiculous. Okay, rather than stuff it and wait for it to go away, I will wrap that little girl in my own arms and listen to her. She wants to feel loved. She doubts her self-worth every once in awhile and wants someone to show a preference for her and please her. “Little One, you are precious,” I tell her. I am taking responsibility for caring for this vulnerable one. Me. Passing that burden on to anyone else is manipulative and fosters a kind of co-dependency. I don’t want that any more. Oh, but I used to rely on it pretty routinely. I had a husband who, for 24 years, lavished me with gifts and compliments and love letters. I have been with Steve now for 4 years. He has never even bought me a greeting card. I do not want him to be other than he is, and I believe he loves me profoundly. So, what is the love letter game about? “What’s in a love letter, anyway?” Steve asked.
Six parts flattery to one part youth…or is that a martini? So I began tomake a list of the elements of a love letter, Cat Stevens’ song “Two Fine People”running through my brain.In one column, I put the parts that I know Steve would never embrace. In the other column, I put the bits that I think he does communicate, albeit in person and not in writing. The list began to resemble another amusing song: “Title of the Song” (by DaVinci’s Notebook), which you really must click on and listen to if you never have before. …Now, wasn’t that fun?
So I showed Steve the little orange Post-It note that carried this weighty list. On the left, I’d written “flattery; promises: to rescue, for future, to provide; declaration of desire”. On the right I’d written “honesty, appreciation, gratitude, description of how I love”. I told him that his description of how he loves is unique and authentic to him and doesn’t resemble Cat Stevens’ (“…though Time may fade and mountains turn to sand…’til the very same come back to the land”). He walked to one of his bookshelves and took down his “Bible”, a copy of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. “How’s this for a love letter?” he asked and read from “Song of Myself”:
The smoke of my own breath;
Echoes, ripples, buzz’d whispers, love-root, silk-thread, crotch and vine;
My respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart, the passing of blood and air through my lungs;
The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore, and dark-color’d sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn;
The sound of the belch’d words of my voice, words loos’d to the eddies of the wind;
A few light kisses, a few embraces, a reaching around of arms;
The play of shine and shade on the trees as the supple boughs wag;
The delight alone, or in the rush of the streets, or along the fields and hill-sides;
The feeling of health, the full-noon trill, the song of me rising from bed and meeting the sun.
Have you reckon’d a thousand acres much? have you reckon’d the earth much?
Have you practis’d so long to learn to read?
Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?
Stop this day and night with me, and you shall possess the origin of all poems;
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun—(there are millions of suns left;)
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books;
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me:
You shall listen to all sides, and filter them from yourself.
The little girl opens her wet eyes and looks wide. Wondering, feeling alive, an equal to the sun and the trees and the birds in the sky and every playmate in the Universe. Is this not Love, this embrace? I reckon that it is.
Steve had a headache; I have a head cold. We talked about celebration and seriousness, listened to Medieval motets and re-read John Keats’ The Eve of St. Agnes. We watched The Apartment again, and fell asleep shortly after midnight, listening to music. Thich Nhat Hahn talks of birthdays and other milestones simply as “continuations”. Life goes on; time is our own invention. There will be another occasion for champagne. Today we slept and listened to our bodies healing.
Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light:
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.
Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.
Ring out the grief that saps the mind
For those that here we see no more;
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.
Ring out a slowly dying cause,
And ancient forms of party strife;
Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.
Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
The faithless coldness of the times;
Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes
But ring the fuller minstrel in.
Ring out false pride in place and blood,
The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.
Ring out old shapes of foul disease;
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.
Ring in the valiant man and free,
The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.
from In Memoriam A.H.H. by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
blogged by thousandfold echo
Life continues; a new cycle begins. It’s the shortest day of the year. Imagine our ancestors noting the the diminishing of light and wondering anxiously if the sun would return…and it does! We are so used to “knowing” all this that we can grow so jaded and incapable of surprise and awe. But why not retain the ability to be surprised, delighted, bowled over by the wonder of Life?! And also to include Death in that cycle. One of my favorite passages from Walt Whitman (from Leaves of Grass, “Song of Myself”):
“What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?
They are alive and well somewhere, The smallest sprout shows there is really no death, And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it, And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.
All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.”
Looking through my files of photos, I found two that I remember as being surprising moments of serendipity, both of which are of birds. Birds are surprising. They alight and fly off at their own whim, so catching one on camera is a gift. The first shot is one I took with the little Lumix when a hawk landed in the maple tree right outside my bedroom window. To have this elegant wild predator just a few feet from my hidden wide-eyed face was a real treat. I had to take the shot through a dirty window, but still…
This second shot is one I took the first time I went to a State Park with my brand new Canon Rebel T3i in hand. Sandhill cranes were flying overhead, and I took a chance that perhaps with this new camera, I would actually get a clear image.
I spent the day in the 19th century, working at Old World Wisconsin, so naturally, I wasn’t allowed to be wandering around with a camera. I have to admit, though, I did square off my fingers to imagine a few frames. The sky today was absolutely breathtaking. Big cumulus clouds with flat, gray bottoms were floating around as if on parade. Looking up outside St. Peter’s church, with its 1839 bell tower and cross silhouetted against these clouds was like looking at a catalog of “INSPIRATIONAL”. I remembered back to the days when I was living in Los Angeles County, CA, feeling as if I would suffocate any minute. To look across the atmosphere to the horizon was like looking into a thick bean soup. Even looking straight up would remind you of watery hot cocoa. I longed to escape the valley and take off for clearer skies. I thought I could simply ascend the mountains and be in a brighter, cleaner, more natural world, but it wasn’t that easy. Everything is Owned in California. There is hardly any open land. We did get an invitation one weekend to house-sit for a retired couple who lived on Mt. Baldy. Their home was beautiful, furnished with antiques, quiet, nestled away from the highway in the pine trees. It was good enough. I took our nine-month old daughter in the baby backpack, my Canon AE-1, and left the smoggy valley behind. There is a photograph from that weekend etched in my mind. I’ve got on my beloved hiking boots, Susan is smiling in the pack on my back, my skinny legs are striding over a boulder. I was in the throes of postpartum depression; I weighed 98 pounds, and I was nursing. My husband’s buddies called me “Tits on a Stick” behind my back. I was struggling for survival. (photo added Jan. 20, 2024, see below)
Some years after that, I was living in suburban Illinois, and the skies opened up over the prairie. I would wander out to open land while the kids were in school and get lost in the clouds. I remember September 11, 2001, as a clear, sunny, perfect sky day. I spent the afternoon out in the prairie after having saturated myself in the news that morning. I look to the sky when I am confused. Back in the heyday of my Christian spiritual journey, I wrote this poem:
The Sky
Did I ever thank you for the sky
spread far around like an open field
piled high with moods and structures,
a playground for my soul?
This space above bids my thoughts expand
to climb the heights of an anvil-cloud
and teeter on the edge of a dazzling glare
or slide down the shafts of the sun,
To swim to the center of its lonely blue
Where I find no mist to hide me,
and lie exposed to the western wind
like a mountain braced for sunrise.
Or clad in the shroud of brooding gray,
it coaxes me to musings
far removed from the minutiae
that chains me to my life.
I search for light and openness
to shadow the bonds of earth,
exploring the vault of heaven
for its meaning and its truth.
Thanks for this cathedral speaking glory through its art.
Thank you for these eyes admitting You into my heart.
scillagrace 