Wide sky

You could write a poem about a day with a wide sky; a day enlivened by the wind of the breathing Earth.

But maybe the day itself is a poem? A poem that you live, and afterward try to capture in words. Sky so wide with possibility; a beautiful blue page across which to drift your thought clouds. 

.   .   . 

I read a recent post from author Rebecca Solnit. She came across a man pruning a flowering magnolia tree, collected what had fallen to the ground, and carried it home. She wrote, we are all battered magnolia blossoms right now, who want to be gathered up and seen. 

It felt deeply true, truer than facts, true in the striking way that belongs only to metaphors. 

Certain metaphors send a jolt of recognition through us. Yes, we think, that's exactly how it is. Why didn't I see that before?

We can all think and create using metaphors, of course; this is one of humanity's gifts. But perhaps to develop this gift, we need to notice what is in front of us, be open to its teaching, and listen to what arises from within us in response.

Seen through a certain lens, our daily lives are poems. Tales. Myths. Rich with unexpected connections, symbols, signs, analogies, associations, archetypes, characters, metaphors. 

Through metaphor, we can understand the connections that are already here, waiting for us to see them. 

We can create connections between experiences that initially seem disconnected...a faceted narrative that we can turn this way and that, reflecting our lives back to us in a new form.

We can make meaning out of what we dismiss as meaningless. Frame difficult realities so they are easier to bear, and add untold depths to our joys and sorrows. 

It is up to us. A wide sky can be seen as nothingness...or, it is our most expansive, unbounded selves, unfolding into the cosmos, as far and as wide as our souls and hearts can imagine reaching. 

The lines written inside us

No one but me by the fire,

my hands burning

red in the palms while

the night wind carries

everything away outside.

All this petty worry

while the great cloak

of the sky grows dark

and intense

round every living thing.

All this trying 

to know

who we are

and all this

wanting to know

exactly

what we must do.

What is precious

inside us does not

care to be known

by the mind

in ways that diminish

its presence.

What we strive for

in perfection

is not what turns us

into the lit angel

we desire.

What disturbs

and then nourishes

has everything

we need.

What we hate

in ourselves

is what we cannot know

in ourselves but

what is true to the pattern

does not need

to be explained.

Inside everyone

is a great shout of joy

waiting to be born.

Excerpt from The Winter of Listening from River Flow: New and Selected Poems © David Whyte

"We live in a time where each of us will be asked to reach deeper, speak more bravely, live more from the fierce perspectives of the poetic imagination; find the lines already written inside us: poetry does not take surface political sides, it is always the conversation neither side is having...."

— David Whyte

Surrender

Be crumbled.

So wild flowers will come up where you are. 

You have been stony for too many years. Try something different. 

Surrender. 

                                                                                          ~ Rumi

Frosts are slain and flowers begotten

This morning, the cottontails didn't want to leave the backyard. Two of them nosed among the dead leaves that I never raked last fall. One stayed, nibbling at the young dandelions, until mid-morning, while resting in the branch-shadows of the silver maple. A visit from the Easter bunny, and at my age!

And while I wasn't blogging, the spring happened. 

Of course, she's been happening for weeks behind a very convincing facade of winter...getting dressed in early green behind the standing screen of unrelenting grayness, trying the patience of even the most philosophical among us. (Except the Robins--rolls right off their feathery backs.)

Right now, the cardinals whistle many and madly, the goldfinch sings its long, busy song brimming with questions, buzzes and peeps, a nuthatch grunts at my unwelcome presence and between games of chase the squirrels eye my newly planted pansies. 

Far, far up in the sky over the river today I saw a Great Blue Heron flying to some secret wetland home. I spotted red-winged blackbirds perched atop winter-bleached marsh grass, trilling to brown-speckled females of their kind to witness their splendor. I saw a hawk speed by burdened with a stick for nest building. 

Now Lady Cardinal flutters in the lilac bush at my back, sometimes sounding the alarm and other times just alighting on a branch then flying off in disgust, as if to say, Still here, are you? Right then, I'm off. (Unaccountably, she's got a British-bird accent.)

It's a rare Easter Sunday here that children's floppy-brimmed hats don't get traded for woolen ones after setting foot outside the front door, but here it is. A gift. Finally we have our second nice-nice day of the spring. Nice-nice meaning 60+ degrees + blue sky + mild zephyrs + NO SNOW. 

And oh, how much sweeter it is for being so long in coming, so wistfully anticipated. This is something the folks in California will never, ever know. (We tell ourselves, in consolation.)

Trying to buy off the squirrel with nuts. It worked.

Our old desktop PC gave up the ghost of Internet access, so I write to you with gratitude from the first laptop of my very own, fresh out of the box and smelling of Appley goodness. The keys feel silky to the touch, the softly-silvered metal caresses the undersides of my wrists...to paraphrase one of my favorite bloggers, it's Sunday and I'm in love. 

Now I see from my chair in the backyard that Ms. Cardinal has landed in the wild-leaved Witch Hazel shrub I brought home from the garden store yesterday, an impulse purchase after reading a chapter about this November-blooming native full of medicine in Robin Wall Kimmerer's amazing book, Braiding Sweetgrass. 

More on the wonders of this book in another post, but suffice it to say if you feel any glimmer of interest in 1. plants 2. women's ways of experiencing the world 3. indigenous peoples in relation to the land 4. taking personal care of the earth 5. the relationship between human people and the rest of the natural world's peoples 6. poetic, luminous prose (an overused phrase but so well-deserved in this case) 7. motherhood in the broad sense, then YOU MUST READ IT.

How blessed we are by spring. The soft and humid air feels as if it is healing us of winter inside and out, and all the world gets busy again, going about its important work of building a home, finding a mate, raising a family...bursting from the seed, sharing one's gifts with the air and the earth and all that move upon it. Inspiring even for this woman, who has somehow made it through to many, many Blossom Moons in her life. 

For winter's rains and ruins are over,

And all the season of snows and sins;

The days dividing lover and lover,

The light that loses, the night that wins;

And time remembered is grief forgotten,

And frosts are slain and flowers begotten,

And in green underwood and cover

Blossom by blossom the spring begins.

—Algernon Charles Swinburne

For my love

Snow is like a heart: An impressionable surface of deep-struck patterns, a hider of secrets, a wild shapeshifter, a master of disguise.

Each heart has its own geography...bright and shadowed lands, jumbled gleams swept by unseen winds, fed by mythic rivers. 

This silver-pale sun is still fire enough to light us toward spring, my love. 

Every word of every tongue is

Love telling a story to her own ears.

Every thought in every mind,

She whispers a secret to her own Self.

Every vision in every eye,

She shows her beauty to her own sight.

Every smile on every face,

She reveals her own joy for herself to enjoy.

Love courses through everything,

No, Love is everything.

How can you say, there is no love,

when nothing but Love exists?

All that you see has appeared because of Love.

All shines from Love,

All pulses with Love,

All flows from Love--

No, once again, all IS Love!

~ Fakhruddin Iraqi

Winter in three parts

Part 1.
I was surprised to find the magazine “Men’s Journal” in my mail today. I checked the label. Maybe my husband had developed a heretofore-unknown-to-me interest in articles like “How to Trim a Beard” or “The Truth About Herbal Supplements.”

But no, the carrier had delivered it by mistake. It was meant to go to a gentleman living a block away. And how disappointed he would be if he had no magazine to read on these frozen January nights, which is what would happen if I just chucked it in the recycling bin.

So I pulled on the jacket, the boots, the mittens, the hat with faux-fur-lined ear flaps, and the infinity scarf (for the infinity winter), dodged the cats hovering around the door, and ventured out into what Minnesotans fondly refer to as “the tundra.”

Thirteen degrees. (That is -10.5556 degrees to the rest of the world.) Bright sun lancing off the fresh fall of snow. Cold, cold wind from the north, the direction in which I was walking. A brisk and beautiful day, actually, with all the diamond brilliance of deep winter above and below, if you could just raise your face from out your scarf for a moment to see it.

On the way home, I saw a Pomeranian wearing a white-and-red doggie coat dash out into the intersection, all the while barking at the wheels of a giant blue dump truck that was trying to make a turn. The little dog so small, brave and foolish. He came to no harm. The driver kept his foot on the brake until the dog’s person came puffing up and nabbed him. Pom scolded and held tightly in his person’s arms, smile on my face then and even now.

It takes a while to feel warm again after going out. I switched on the heating pad to bring my toes up to room temperature as I sat writing. But after a while, I felt the westering sun reach through the window to cup my elbow, then stroke its warm golden fingers along my arm, like the hand of a friend.

Part 2.
January’s sun is low in the sky. Any cloud not directly overhead looks damson-hued, colored like sunset all day long.

The other night, snow was falling as I drove home through the park, whirling down from the misting gray clouds like fairy handkerchiefs. And the song went: White snow, black branches, gray sky. The elemental story, the original lullaby, the essential shapes of the winter, all singing cold, sleeping songs like water rippling, fire burning. Did you know that cold burns like fire?

Tonight, the full moon shines in the east, exquisitely wreathed by gauzy cloud, softest pearl edged with opal. That aurora whispers of hypnotic snowfalls soon-to-come in a language the night birds seem to hear. I see them—first, a mass of black crows, then mallards silhouetted against the murk, winging southeast along the corridor of the Mississippi River, flying with the prevailing winds.

Part 3.

So you must persist 

in asking where my heart goes

all the long, cold night. 

Like following trails left by birds

who vanished with yesterday’s sky.

—Japanese poet Kōhō Kennichi, 

    translated by Sam Hamill

How it falls

ON THE DAY OF THE BEAVER, a day when the winds were calm, I tried paying attention. Maybe for the first time, I saw how maple leaves fall stem-first, spinning around their own axes like golden goblets then landing upright for a moment where grasses are thick.

I paid attention to the course of oak leaves. Burnished and glossy, heavier than maple leaves, they drift through the air on their backs...swinging to and fro like small pendulums marking time.

Deeper into autumn, on a day when the Lords of the Winds gusted mightily, I paid attention as the leaves flew sideways like fleeing birds, driven far from their trees instead of heaped at their roots.

As I lay on my back on a leaf blanket, paying attention, my eye was drawn again and again to this particular oak tree. It was so beautiful, with its speaking contours, the contrast between its bold branchings and bronzed leaves, which flashed like spangles against the sky. Reminding me of the woods through which the Twelve Dancing Princesses progressed on their way to their mysterious nightly revels: a forest with leaves of silver, a second with leaves of gold and finally, closest to the enchanted castle, a wood whose leaves sparkled with diamond dew drops.

The authors whose works I have been reading suggest that that particular tree was speaking to me, which is how it drew my attention; communicating with me in the way of a tree person to a human person. Color is a kind of speech. Sound and movement, as well. They can inform us about weather, season, health of the tree. But is there more to interpret? What else was being communicated?

While I am used to sending feelings (and words) of praise and gratitude to trees, is that is as far as the reciprocity extends? Perhaps the images and associations they spark are more than just my own mind at work...maybe it is more mutual, a kind of conversation between my mind, my intuition and the other beings around me? Co-creating the world?

I am not entirely certain how to receive that which a tree may want to tell. But it likely begins with cultivating a state of openness, and...paying attention.

Priscilla Stuckey in Kissed by a Fox writes, that though the typical American knows how to work or make use of the land, "Far less often do we stop to merely gaze at the land, open-eyed--to watch it, as students, over time....Knowing where we are takes attention. Sustained looking. Seeing. Becoming rooted in the place we live, whether bright desert or blustery mountain, dark woodland or windy shore."

She also writes: "Though many modern people express a longing for lost wildness, what I think we are really missing is personality--the integrity of place. A relationship with the unique piece of Earth where we dwell, an ability to see its deep character."

And: "Among my people, children are taught to read books; among some other peoples, children are taught to read trees."

My musings: For a person who has not been taught to read trees, watching a leaf fall to the ground and noticing the way in which it falls is one small way of paying attention. It is part of learning to be literate about the personality and ways of an oak or a maple, the winds, this particular land, and its non-human inhabitants.

The immediate rewards to paying attention to this other-language: a sense of peacefulness, calm and well-being. A few moments of restfulness from the brain chatter. Slowly I am shifting a small part of my way of being, from interior, ruminative, dichotomous and feeling apart to one more observant, receptive and "part of."

This keeps me feeling young...young, as in, the world fascinates and surprises me. As in, there is more to the world, Horatio, than is dreamt of in my philosophy.

Maybe it is as Mary Oliver wrote, and I did not have ears to hear it until now:

"Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,  

the world offers itself to your imagination,  

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -- 

over and over announcing your place  in the family of things." 

Season of the Crone

HERE, ON THE doorstep of Samhain, veils of mist blur the edges between the end of one thing and the start of another. It has been that way all day; light rain dripping onto yellow maple leaves, then hanging suspended in the soft, damp air, hovering between heaven and earth.

Twilight falls. The mist grows deeper, spread over the land like the finest silver cloak, sifting down through the atmosphere. It beckons me.

Come. Let us speak to you, it whispers. This is a language you know in your bones. This is a borderland you know in your dreams and have known from the womb..

I feel close to the Crone these days. Not only in the turning of the year, but in the seasons of my own self, the power gathering for some purpose I cannot see. The Divine Feminine wants me to notice her. She speaks through the spider's web, the autumn mist, the living lines in my face. She speaks through the cycle of seasons, myth, symbol and story.

She speaks of the boundless fertility of the earth and her seasons of rest. The cycles of the watching moon. The Three Fates who spin the thread of life, measure out its length, and choose when to sever the thread. The Three Weird Sisters, in and out of time, straddling reality and the supernatural. Between the worlds.

To me, names like "witch" and "crone" seethe with power. Wisdom. Mystery. They invite me into a sisterhood as old as time.

I live in a bungalow, in a city, far from the countries of my ancestors. Far in time from the Old Ways. Yet, somehow...I feel akin to the witch-crone in her cottage. She lives somewhere inside me, of that I'm sure. There are the cats, after all.

Maybe our society's version of the crone in the cottage is the old woman who lives with her many cats...or the old woman who feeds the pigeons, or the old woman who scolds children and talks to squirrels, or the old woman who picks up litter in the park? Not necessarily evil, just...odd.

That is why this passage jumped out at me from a lovely book I just read:

"There was a movie I loved with all my childish heart: Thomasina. The title character was a cat that died and, with the help of a woman thought to be a witch by the townspeople, returned to tell stories of its nine lives. I never tired of the movie, for I identified completely with the unusual woman who lived deep in the woods, taking in hurt animals and healing them with patience and love. In my heart, I knew I would be a strange woman just like her someday."

Love that strangeness in yourself. Listen for the voice of a shape-shifting enchantress, who sounds like falling mist and looks like the fierce clutch of an owl's claw on its prey. I have a feeling this is a good time to hear her--witch, goddess, crone, hag, sorceress. Like a force of nature, like the turning of the year, she is more than we can put one name to.

Catechism for a Witch’s Child

When they ask to see your gods

your book of prayers

show them lines

drawn delicately with veins

on the underside of a bird’s wing

tell them you believe

in giant sycamores mottled

and stark against a winter sky

and in nights so frozen

stars crack open spilling

streams of molten ice to earth

and tell them how you drink

a holy wine of honeysuckle

on a warm spring day

and of the softness

of your mother who never taught you

death was life’s reward

but who believed in the earth

and the sun

and a million, million light years

of being

© 1986 J.L.Stanley

Wild as the wind

We release the birds on the equinox.

It is a day of tossing winds, a fresh coolness blessed by a scintillating flood of warm, golden light.

Evidence of the acreage's history as a farm shows up in rusted implements grown over by grasses. Old pasture. Empty barn, tumbledown fences.

And then there are the outside enclosures, where the rehab birds gain the strength to fly away.

Black wings circle overhead. A crow who had been released a week earlier is coming back to the enclosure to look for food. On this equinox, he is still in limbo, in transition between two worlds...no longer living fully within the world of humans but not yet entirely committed to the world of crows.

We gather in a circle by the lake. Girl children in gaily colored jackets take turns positioning themselves around the small basket cages set on the ground. One cage at a time, the girls lift the unfastened tops.


The House Sparrows zip off into the trees quick as a thought, and sit preening their gray feathers.

The American Robins fly off in three different directions, trailing their characteristic, chuckling whistle.

The mourning doves whir slowly over the heads of the onlookers. They seem confused by this sudden change in circumstance. One lands on a lady's shoulder. Another touches down on the large camera lens of a man photographing the event. These are shooed gently on until they flap up into a nearby tree.

But one mourning dove--cage open to the sky, urged to fly--would not leave.

She was not ready.

I lift the gossamer milkweed seeds into the wind and set them free. They float over the grasses and tiny, bee-buzzed asters; catching on withered stalks or unfurling indefinitely for all I know, all the way into November, where they will freeze hard to the ground until winter's scouring hammer cracks them open. Thus tested, they will wait in the dark, in the ice, in the cold. Until they are ready.

The hours unspool in the wind and air as the planet spins beneath our feet. Twelve hours of light, twelve hours of darkness.

Seeds harvested. Seeds planted.

I think of this poem. And I wonder: Is it time?

How did it escape me that we were walking in Eden

plucking ripe apples on the equinox

one foot in darkness, the other in light

strolling down a country road in the Days of Awe?

How did I fail to faint with wonder

when our sister the snake waited for us

halfway across the road, stubborn in her staying power

seeking the safety of the grass only when we'd passed?

When will I learn that life is like a dream

full of strange and curious wisdom, wild as the wind

and just as liable to slip through our fingers

when attention wanders from the precious present?

When will I remember that no one sees it all?

We need one another to make the dream real,

to rise up in joy and in power, rubbing

against one another until we shed our skins.

—Joan Borysenko, Ph.D.

Putting down roots

I hear leaves drinking rain;

I hear rich leaves on top

Giving the poor beneath

Drop after drop;

'Tis a sweet noise to hear

These green leaves drinking near.

—W.H. Davies, The Rain

So the rain falls and falls in this late Spring, feeding the amber waters of the rushing Minnehaha Creek, running high in its banks and carrying paddling ducks downstream on a much wilder ride than usual.

Between rain showers, I've cleared a bit more space on the south side of our house and tucked in clumps of native flowering plants dear to bees and butterflies: Hoary Vervain, Aromatic Aster, Yellow and Long-Headed Coneflowers, Butterfly Weed (for the monarch butterfly caterpillars, which feed only on milkweed), Prairie Phlox, Anise Hyssop, White and Purple Prairie Clover, Elm-Leaved Goldenrod, Virgin's Bower.

All perennials, so it will take a while for them to get established and begin to flower, especially with the cloudy, cool weather. I feel a bit like a just-planted bit of flora myself, feeling my way back into my native soil, spreading my root system, deciding which direction to grow.

Kew Gardens in May

Though it is nine days into June, the maple seeds still hang in clumps, helicoptering down and sprouting at will. The peony buds still swell slowly, ready to burst into bloom with a week of sun. The brief flowering of crabapples and lilacs petals all washed away in spills and squalls of raindrops.

Prairifire Crabapple we planted last spring

My young north boulevard tree, a Prairie Gem Pear that replaced an ailing Ash, just welcomed two vigorous  new Ussurian Pear cousins, courtesy of the City of Minneapolis Forestry Division. Despite its name, this species hails from Asia and is not native to Midwest prairies.

But it does flower in spring, and if can't be local, it is at least ornamental--and small enough to live under the power lines without getting butchered by the utility company.

To further dive more deeply into a Minnesota frame of mind, I just read Letters from Side Lake: A Chronicle of Life in the North Woods by Peter Leschak, who has lived for nearly 40 years in a log house he and his wife built on a parcel of land in Lake Country. (Which is what Minnesotans also call "Up North," to distinguish it from the rest of a very lakey state). 

If I had any romantic illusions about the idea of "living off the land," they have been dismantled. But there is a lot of territory between living off the land and living closer to the land, in search of older traditions made new, and that is the direction in which I am being pulled. Feel free to suggest any readings that may have inspired you on the subject, I am eager to soak up more.