Easing into the New Year

Winter is the Best Time by David Budbill from While We've Still Got Feet (Copper Canyon Press)
Winter is the best time
to find out who you are.

Quiet, contemplation time,
away from the rushing world,

cold time, dark time, holed-up
pulled-in time and space

to see that inner landscape,
that place hidden and within.


I love soup and sweaters, long books and even longer nights, the way the stars sparkle like ice in a winter sky and the blinding sun reflecting off a crusty layer of newly fallen snow.  Winter is the best time.  And in this threshold time between the first day of Christmas and the last, I often find myself  quiet contemplation time that David Budbill mentions in his poem. 

Often the occasion for my contemplation is the turning of the year.  My days of making resolutions and indulging in too much champagne are behind me.  Now I prefer to spend the days leading up to New Year's Eve reflecting on the year that has past and looking forward to the year that is on the horizon. 

This year, I'm leading my first ever "virtual" New Year's Eve retreat.  It's a way for people who are looking to move mindfully into the new year to do just that . . . reflect upon 2012, take some time to be open to the present moment, and vision for the future.  There are reflection exercises, questions to ponder and of course, plenty of poetry to guide you on the journey.  I'll also be sending periodic e-mails to participants Sunday morning through Tuesday afternoon with additional poems/prayers/questions and we'll have a virtual check-in/sharing time on Facebook at 2 pm on Sunday and Monday for any who want to share their experiences in community. 

If you're looking for a different way to begin this year, I invite you to join us!  Click here for more information or to register. 

Carpe Libris - The Winter Edition

IN THE BLEAK MIDWINTER by Gillian Clarke from Ice (Carcanet)
trees stand in their bones
asleep in the creak of wind
with snow on its mind.

Come spring they'll need reminding
how to weep, bleed, bud, grow rings
for cruck, or crib, or cross,

to break again in leaf.
The heartwood's stone, grief
of sap-tears frozen in at the root.

While trees are dreaming green,
ice unfurls its foliage
on gutter, gate and hedge,

ghost-beauty cold as snow,
like the first forest, long ago.


Snow isn't just on the mind of Mother Nature here, she's making it manifest.  The freezing rain that hit the leaves in the backyard with its staccato rhythms when I first awoke has now been transformed into an ongoing dusting of snow that's sugaring the ivy and settled in the crook of the cherry tree next door.  It's a perfect day to cuddle up with a good book and a pot of tea and while I'm eager to brew a pot of one of the new brews I got for Christmas and settle in with a cozy mystery, I have work to do so that will have to wait till later this afternoon. 

In the meantime, the weather got me to thinking about my winter reading list.  I didn't fare so well with my summer reading list but that hasn't stopped me from developing a winter one.  Hopefully giving up my Netflix subscription will mean I'll actually get some, if not all, of these books read before the spring equinox rolls around. 

So here's what I'll be reading in the upcoming weeks . . . .

 Ice by Gillian Clarke
This is a slim volume of poetry that I picked up when I was in Wales a few weeks ago in my poetry haul from a bookstore in Bangor.  Gillian Clarke is a Welsh poet who may not be that well known to US audiences.  I love the idea of a collection of poems that was inspired by the landscape during a particular season, especially when that season is winter.  I'll confess I've already read all the poems in this book, many of them more than once, but I'm sure I'll be returning to it as winter deepens. 

Likewise, Winter Hours:  Prose, Prose Poems and Poems by Mary Oliver on the list. 

For straight up non-fiction, I'll be reading Adam Gopnik's  Winter:  Five Windows on the Season and Bill Streever's Cold:  Adventures in the World's Frozen Places.  Gopnik's book is actually a series of five,  hour long lectures he gave across Canada as part of the Massey Lectures.  While Gopnik's work focuses on the season, Streever's book looks at the biology, history and geography of what many most associate with winter-- cold. 

Finally, for fiction I have Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago and Pullman's His Dark Material's trilogy on my night stand.  I've long been a fan of the movie Doctor Zhivago but have never gotten around to reading the book.  Actually I have a lot of Russian novels on my nightstand with the hope we'll get a good snowfall that will leave me housebound long enough to work my way through War and Peace and maybe Anna Karenina in between rounds of shoveling.  But given global warming I may have to move further north for that to be a part of my future so Pasternak will likely win out over Tolstoy this winter.  I got Pullman's trilogy when I was doing my doctoral studies and would pull it out each December and read the same few chapters then realize I had books for school I needed to read my early January so I'd put it aside and the next year repeat the process.  This year I'm finally going to get past the point where Lyra meets Iorek Brynison . . . or else.

 

So how about you?  Do you have any wintry books on your reading list for 2013?

 

Poetry as a Closure to What Cannot Be Closed

Try to Praise the Mutilated World by Adam Zagajewski (translated by Clare Cavanagh)
Try to praise the mutilated world.
Remember June's long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of wine, the dew.
The nettles that methodically overgrow
the abandoned homesteads of exiles.
You must praise the mutilated world.
You watched the stylish yachts and ships;
one of them had a long trip ahead of it,
while salty oblivion awaited others.
You've seen the refugees heading nowhere,
you've heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when we were together
in a white room and the curtain fluttered.
Return in thought to the concert where music flared.
You gathered acorns in the park in autumn
and leaves eddied over the earth's scars.
Praise the mutilated world
and the grey feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns.

Like so many, I've been struggling with my feelings about what happened on Friday in Connecticut.  Unlike many, I've refrained from posting anything on Facebook or Twitter and wasn't even sure I was going to say anything about it here this morning.  I understand the need some people have to talk about tragedy in a public forum:  the media for whom recapitulation and conjecture is part of their job, political and spiritual leaders who are called to offer words of compassion and wisdom, all those individuals who feel anger, fear, despair, isolation and turn to others for reassurance. 

My usual response to crisis or tragedy, however, is silence.  Not a silence born of denial or disconnect, rather a silence that emerges from a need to search for Light to illumine the darkness.  If I reach for words too soon, it extinguishes any spark I might find. 

Rumi and John of the Cross have both said that silence is the (first) language of the Holy One and it is to that language, one that as an adult in exile I've had to relearn, that I return.

Eventually, when I feel that words will fan the ember and help the flame grow, I turn to poetry.  The pauses for silence in the lines, the economy of language that gives each word import, the imagery that evokes emotions that are often too knotted to name-- poems are my bridge between conversation with God (silence) and conversation with others. 

Zagajewski's poem that I chose for today can be found in The Art of Losing:  Poems of Grief & Healing, edited by poet Kevin Young.  This collection of 150 poems is an invaluable resource for anyone for whom poetry resonates in times of grief and sorrow. As Young says in his introduction,  "  . . . I think it is in grief that we need some reminder of our humanity-- and sometimes, someone to say it for us.  Poetry steps into those moments when ordinary words fail;  poetry as ceremony, as a closure to what cannot be closed."

Yes Galway Kinnell, how many nights must it take?

Another Night in the Ruins by Galway Kinnell from Three Books (Houghton Mifflin Company)

1
In the evening
haze darkening on the hills,
purple of the eternal,
a last bird crosses over,
‘flop flop,’ adoring
only the instant.

2
Nine years ago,
in a plane that rumbled all night
above the Atlantic,
I could see, lit up
by lightning bolts jumping out of it,
a thunderhead formed like the face
of my brother, looking down
on blue,
lightning-flashed moments of the Atlantic.

3
He used to tell me,
“What good is the day?
On some hill of despair
the bonfire
you kindle can light the great sky—
though it’s true, of course, to make it burn
you have to throw yourself in ...”

4
Wind tears itself hollow
in the eaves of these ruins, ghost-flute
of snowdrifts
that build out there in the dark:
upside-down ravines
into which night sweeps
our cast wings, our ink-spattered feathers.

5
I listen.
I hear nothing. Only
the cow, the cow of such
hollowness, mooing
down the bones.

6
Is that a
rooster? He
thrashes in the snow
for a grain. Finds
it. Rips
it into
flames. Flaps. Crows.
Flames
bursting out of his brow.

7
How many nights must it take
one such as me to learn
that we aren’t, after all, made
from that bird that flies out of its ashes,
that for us
as we go up in flames, our one work
is
to open ourselves, to be
the flames?

I was hoping to post a poem by a Welsh poet today but I stumbled across this poem by Galway Kinnell and it stuck. It's not that I haven't read some new-to-me wonderful poems by Welsh writers this afternoon and evening. Owen Sheers, who was recommended to me by not one, but two separate people during the course of casual conversation today, has moved me to tears several times in one slim book of verse. I finally had to stop reading because I was too overwhelmed and he deserves more attention than I can give him at 10:30 pm-- sorry Owen. Perhaps tomorrow when I stick close to Gladstone's and focus on reading and writing.

I think the Kinnell poem struck me because I like to believe I've learned that I am to be flames but lately I've had a hard time even pretending to be a flickering spark. I was hoping something in my interior landscape would shift being in the Welsh landscape once again and I'd find myself opening up but so far that hasn't happened. Granted, it's only been about 36 hours. Maybe there are subterranean shifts happening, a fracking process I can't sense causing imperceptible fissures and one of these days-- hopefully before next Tuesday, I'll awake and think, "A ha! Today is the day I can just be." I feel like I want to force or rush that process but I realize that it's just that-- a process.

Before I left home, I re-read my notes from a phone conversation I had with poet Ruth Bidgood last time I was in Wales. As I mentioned in a previous post, one thing we talked about was the symbiotic relationship between photography and poetry. Ruth said that sometimes a landscape has a lesson for us that we can't quite grasp at the time and only discover later, from a distance. Her photographs, she said, help her capture whatever that ineffable quality was that she was feeling and aid in the discovery process later on. I find the same thing happens with me. My poetry falls into two categories--- poems that come out of an experience of meditation or prayer (as I've written about before) or poems written about a place that I've often captured in a photograph and returned to in order to help translate a memory.

Today as I was wandering around Chester I realized I was taking photographs as a matter of rote, primarily for information and documentation rather than inspiration and appreciation. I can't say any of the images below will inspire a poem in the future, nevertheless, here are a few images of my journey thus far . . .

Ruins, Basingwerk Abbye

More of abbey ruins

Roman Wall surrounding Chester

The hydrangeas are still blooming in the
remembrance garden at Chester Cathedral!

Christmas Market- Chester
Don't worry Campo Santo Stefano in Venice,
your Christmas market still has my heart.

Plant based diet on a sabbatical-- mulled wine and wild boar burger for lunch . . . 

and coconut lime cupcake and mint tea a bit later at the Mad Hatter Tea Room in Chester.
Can you tell I didn't eat anything but a piece of toast yesterday?
I made up for it today.

Planes, Trains and Poetry

The Journey of a Poem Compared to All the Sad Variety of Travel by Delmore Schwartz

A poem moves forward,
Like the passages and percussions of trains in progress
A pattern of recurrence, a hammer of repetetive occurrence

a slow less and less heard
low thunder under all passengers

Steel sounds tripping and tripled and
Grinding, revolving, gripping, turning, and returning
as the flung carpet of the wide countryside spreads out on
each side in billows

And in isolation, rolled out, white house, red barn, squat silo,
Pasture, hill, meadow and woodland pasture
And the striped poles step fast past the train windows
Second after second takes snapshots, clicking,
Into the dangled boxes of glinting windows
Snapshots and selections, rejections, at angles, of shadows
A small town: a shop's sign - GARAGE, and then white gates
Where waiting cars wait with the unrest of trembling
Breathing hard and idling, until the slow~descent
Of the red cones of sunset: a dead march: a slow tread and heavy

Of the slowed horses of Apollo
- Until the slowed horses of Apollo go over the horizon
And all things are parked, slowly or willingly,
into the customary or at random places.

 

I'm on my way to Wales this evening thus the departure from Mary Oliver Monday to offer up this lovely little poem about the journey of a poem.  I find it interesting that the title and poem can be interpreted in many ways . . . is it the journey of a poem that is being written?  Or the journey that a reader takes when encountering a poem for the first or even fifty first time?  I like to read this literally.  I picture the journey of the poem itself:  written on a piece of paper and tucked in a pocket to be carried on a hike, in a book with others that have been tucked into a carry on bag and tossed into an overhead compartment, resting comfortably in the mind of a traveler and turned to for a bit of conversation as the landscape unfolds out a train window.

Interior of Gladstone's Library

There's something about traveling to Wales that is so tied up with landscape and poetry in my mind that poem/journey/landscape form a kind of tangled trinity. It has me wondering how this trip will impact my own writing.  Although the days are delegated to pilgrimage work, I've set aside the evenings for writing.  I'm also looking forward to discovering some new (to me) poems and poets as I browse the shelves of Gladstone's library, so stay tune this week for more poems and perhaps even some pictures.

 

The Space in Between

Lotus by Ruth Bidgood
Bryn, the round hill,
dips to a valley that accepts
others:  a place of joining.
No wind carries up
Conversation of rivers.
Old sheepwalks, hardly grazed,
Stretch to the verge of forest.
On this grey day
no smoke rises:
from the one gaunt house.
 
Surely the silent utterance
of this place is ‘Emptiness’,
its time ‘Never’?
Yet it is said
That not leaves, not petals,
but the space at the center
of the heart’s lotus
contains everything.

                                    Here
rivers out of sigh
have their rhythms,
like blood through the heart.
Stillness throbs with the flow
of unperceived lives.
 
This is a place of joining,
whose silent utterance is ‘Abundance’,
whose time is ‘Ever.’


A week from today I'll be in Wales.  I can't tell you exactly what I'll be doing,  but if it keeps raining there like it has been, chances are it will involve curling up with a cup of tea and a good book in this room:

or getting lost in my writing at a desk somewhere in this room:

 

Ostensibly, I'm going over to do some pre-scouting of some of the sites we'll be visiting in May on the pilgrimage I'm leading for Washington National Cathedral.  The recent floods in Britain might mean a little less hiking to neolithic stone circles and wandering around abbey ruins and a little more time spent sitting quietly inside ancient churches and old cathedrals. 

 

Earlier this week I was stressing  about not begin able to get everything on my "to do" list done during this trip.  Then I realized that the idea of having a to do list is itself counter-intuitive to pilgrimage.  Checking off sites is a trip for tourists.  For pilgrims, the journey is about creating space-- being in the landscape, settling into sacred places, opening up to the space, both literally and metaphorically. 

 

So that's what I will be doing next week.  And somehow it seems like a perfect way to enter into the first week of Advent, traversing a dark winter landscape,  looking for glimmers of light, listening, waiting.

 

 

Measuring Specific Gratitude

SOME THINGS THE WORLD GAVE by Mary Oliver

1
Times in the morning early
when it rained and the long gray
buildings came forward from darkness
offering their windows for light.

2
Evenings out there on the plains
when sunset donated farms
that yearned so far to the west that the world
centered there and bowed down.

3
A teacher at a country school
walking home past a great marsh
where ducks came gliding in --
she saw the boy out hunting and waved.

4
Silence on a hill where the path ended
and then the forest below
moving in one long whisper
as evening touched the leaves.

5
Shelter in winter that day --
a storm coming, but in the lee
of an island in a cover with friends --
oh, little bright cup of sun.

 

Alfalfa Fields in St. Denis, Seurat
 

I was looking for a poem on gratitude to post for this Thanksgiving week Mary Oliver Monday when I came across this little gem.  What I particularly like about this poem is its particularities.  So often when people talk about the things for which they are grateful they paint their canvas of blessings with large brush strokes-- family, friends, health, freedom, community, creation.  In this poem, however, gratitude is conveyed in precise points of color like a painting by Seurat or Pisarro.  Viewed together as a whole, they make up the portrait of a lifetime of awareness and gratitude.

I've been thinking about these particular moments as measurements of specific gratitude.  If you're like me, you probably learned about specific gravity in high school but chances are you don't remember much about it because unlike figuring out percentages (which comes in handy when hitting the seasonal sales at Lord & Taylor), determining the specific gravity of an object is a skill you've yet to use in life. But somehow it's an idea that seems relevant to this poem.

If I see my daily life as the standard material, particular moments become the substances being tested.  On days that I'm at my most dense, some of the lighter moments in life don't even break the surface.  I don't notice the sea of stars in the clear winter sky.  The encouraging words of a friend go in one ear and out the other.  I take for granted the warm bed I climb into each night.  But at other times the color blue of the autumn sky stops me in my tracks.  Witnessing a stranger offering a helping hand to a neighbor moves me to tears.  I savor every sip of a good cup of Earl Grey.  Gratitude settles in my soul like led sinking in 39.2°F distilled water.  

Haymakers Resting, Pisarro

Maybe then, it isn't so much those moments being measured as my life.  I don't know the scientific term for testing my own density on any given day but in spiritual terms I think it's called awareness.

 

Things I do when I should be working on my NaNoWriMo novel . . .

1. Check e-mail
2. Check Facebook and like a link
3. Check the BBC news home page to see if any top stories have changed in the fifteen minutes since I last checked it
4. Surf the Internet looking for information on nineteenth century American children's fashions/whaling ships/plumbing/popular novels.
5. Make a winter reading list, including the books Winter and Cold
6. Drink lukewarm Earl Grey tea
7. Scrape  wax off the inside of the glass container so my eucalyptus spruce candle lasts a smidge longer
8. Stare at my vision board and think about redoing it since it's obviously not inspiring me to write
9. Clean out and reorganize my computer files
10. Read a few poems by David Budbill
11. Bake vegan apple spice scones

 In case you need to procrastinate as well, here's the recipe for the latter.

Apple Spice Drop Scones
2 c. flour
1 Tbsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. salt
1/4 c. sugar
5 Tbsp. shortening (I used Earth's Balance)
1/3 cup apple sauce
1/3 cup nondairy milk (I used coconut almond)
1-2 tsp. cinnamon
1/2 tsp. nutmeg
1/4 tsp. cloves (yes Jeff, ground)
1/2 cup chopped walnuts

Preheat oven to 450 and put cookie sheet lined with parchment paper in oven to heat.  Mix dry ingredients together.  Dice shortening and rub it in the dry ingredients with your fingers, a fork, or a pastry blender until crumbly.  Stir in the apple sauce then add enough milk to make a sticky dough that still holds its shape.  Add spices to taste.  Stir in walnuts.  Take the cookie sheet out of the oven and drop dough by spoonfuls onto the hot baking sheet.  Bake for about 12 -15 minutes (will depend on how big they are how long they take) until golden brown on the edges.  This should make anywhere from 8 - 12 scones depending on how big a spoon you use. 

Wheezing and Ticking

AUTUMN POEM  by Mary Oliver

In the last jovial, clear-sky days of autumn
the mockingbird
in his monk-gray coat
and his arrowy wings
flies

from the hedge to the top of the pine
and begins to sing — but it's neither loose, nor lilting, nor lovely —
it's more like whistles and truck brakes and dry hinges.

All birds are birds of heaven
but this one, especially, adores the earth so well
he would imitate, for half the day and on into the evening,

its ticks and wheezings,
and so I have to wait a long time
for the soft, true voice
of his own glossy life

to come through,
and of course I do.
I don't know what it is that makes him, finally, look
inward

to the sweet spring of himself, that mirror of heaven,
but when it happens —
when he lifts his head
and the feathers of his throat tremble,

and he begins, like Saint Francis,
little flutterings and leapings from the pine's forelock,
resettling his strong feet each time among the branches,
I am recalled,

from so many wrong paths I can't count them,
simply to stand, and listen.
All my life I have lived in a kind of haste and darkness
of desire, ambition, accomplishment.

Now the bird is singing, but not anymore of this world.
And something inside myself is fluttering and leaping, is trying

to type it down, in lumped-up language,
in outcry, in patience, in music, in a snow-white book.

Statue of Diana in the garden at Hillwood

I've always loved this particular fall poem by Mary Oliver.  I think it may even be the first of her poems I ever read.  It is certainly the one to which I most often return most often, and each time it greets me like a wise, old friend who  always has just the right words of advice or encouragement. 

The past several days I've been struggling with my writing-- feeling very much like it's all wheezing and dry hinges.   I've been looking for things to grease the wheels of my imagination.  A Friday wander around Hillwood helped a bit, as did being outside raking leaves in the sunshine for several hours over the weekend.  This afternoon I have a massage scheduled, which always helps loosen words and ideas knotted in my brain as well as my muscles.

But what I realize I need to do after reading Mary Oliver's poem this morning is to look inward, re-settle myself and then trust the true voice of my own glossy life to come through on the page . . .

Carpe Libris - The NaNoWriMo Edition

 So what is NaNoWriMo some of you may be asking?  Well, NaNoWriMo is short for National Novel Writing Month.  Each November intrepid writers from around the world (despite the word "national" in the title) pledge to write an average of 1666 words per day in order to have the makings of a 50,000 word novel by the end of the month.  Sarah Gruen's Like Water for Elephants began as a NaNoWriMo project as did Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus.  This year after a story idea came to me in a dream over the course of two nights, I decided to give it a try. 

I'll confess I'm not meeting my daily word quota so far. I wrote recently about how writing poetry is a different practice for me than writing essays or stories.  Well, I've discovered that writing a novel requires a different rhythm as well.  My two hour daily commitment is great for my non-fiction work but just isn't cutting it for the novel.  It's only been a week so hopefully I'll settle into a good rhythm soon.  Until then, here's what I've been reading to prepare for NaNoWriMo writing.

In the Heart of the Sea:  The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex by Nathaniel Philbrick
This is one of those books that sat on the bookshelf for years and every time I came across it I'd think, "Oh I want to read that one day."  Well, last week that day finally arrived.  Somehow a book about a whale attack seemed like it might make good hurricane reading.  That, combined with the fact that the novel I'm working on is set in a 19th century New England fishing village, made me go downstairs to pull it off the shelf so it could do double duty as entertainment and research.

Philbrick's book tells the story of the ill-fated whaling ship, Essex, the inspiration for Melville's Moby Dick.  Although I haven't read Melville's tale, I find it hard to imagine it can be any more harrowing and fascinating than the real story.  From the very beginning of its voyage, the ship seems to sail from one challenge to another-- a novice crew, inadequate whaling boats, damaging storms, a leaking hull, mounting tension between the first-mate and captain. 

Then things really get bad.  In the middle of the Pacific Ocean, thousands of miles from the coast of South America, a perturbed 85 foot whale seems to deliberately ram the ship not once, but twice, the second time causing irreparable damage. The monster then swims away, never to be seen again.

Unlike Melville's tale which focuses on Ahab's pursuit of the whale,  Into the Heart of the Sea is more about what happens after the ship sinks, how the crew members who survived managed to do so.  Philbrick bases his story  not only on written accounts from two of the survivors, first mate Owen Chase and cabin boy Thomas Nickerson, he also weaves in elements of physiology, psychology, history, and marine biology to create a lush narrative that is truly a page turner.

Miss Fuller by April Bernard
Last year when I thought I was going to participate in NaNoWriMo with a different story idea, I was doing a lot of research on Louisa May Alcott and her family.  During that time I came across the name Margaret Fuller and looked her up as she seemed to be an intriguing woman.  You gotta love a woman who stands up to Louisa's father, Brosnan, who was evidently something of a jerk.  I remember thinking after I read the Wikipeida article on her that her life would make an interesting story so when I came across Bernard's brief novel in the library I had to add it to the stack of books I was already balancing in my arms. 

Sarah Margaret Fuller Ossoli was an American teacher, journalist and women's rights activist who was part of the circle of writers and transcendentalists that included the Alcotts, Emerson, Thoreau and Hawthorne.  She spent time in Italy reporting on the revolution where she met and maybe married, maybe didn't, Italian revolutionary Giovanni Angelo Ossoli.  The couple eventually were forced to flee Italy.  On their way back to New York with their two year old son, the ship in which they were sailing ran aground just off Fire Island.  Despite being only a short distance from shore, the family didn't survive.  Thoreau was dispatched by Emerson to go attempt to recover the bodies and it's that incident upon which Miss Fuller, a fictional version of the story is based.

In addition to searching for Fuller's remains, in Bernard's tale Thoreau is also looking for a manuscript, letters that Margaret has written telling the story of her life in Europe, a story that is allegedly so shocking and scandalous (although tame by 21st century standards) that the person to whom the letters are addressed refuses to take them from Thoreau when he does find them.  Rather than destroy them, he puts them aside and in a fit of feverish delirium, reads them one night and immediately regrets his decision.  The letters are later left to Anne, a sister the author has invented for the purpose of her story and who serves as a narrative framework for the novel. 

While this character of Anne and her role seemed forced and was the part of the book that didn't work for me, I did enjoy Bernard's writing and found her insight into the relationships between Emerson, Fuller, Thoreau and Hawthorne interesting.  Also the description of the shipwreck and how the locals responded to it left me wanting to know more. I was left feeling, however, that the real story of Margaret Fuller was much more intriguing and inspiring than the one Bernard's imagination created.


Bird by Bird:  Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott
The reason I haven't been able to get into a good rhythm of writing for NaNoWriMo is that my inner editor, who is usually content to sit quietly in a corner until I ask her for advice, has decided to look over my shoulder this week.  Every time I type a sentence I hear her voice asking, "Are you sure that's a jib sail?  Maybe you should look it up." or saying, "Don't forget to show not tell.  Why don't you go back and rework that paragraph." 

At this point I just really need to focus on getting the narrative out of my head and onto the page so she's not helping.  I've tried telling her to take a hike to no avail so I finally pulled out my well worn copy of Anne Lamott's book and am reading the "shitty first draft" chapter each day before I write to remind myself my goal now is to do just that--- write, not edit. 

Evidently I'm not the only one with this issue.  I recently started following Lamott's Twitter feed and it's reassuring to see how many times she Tweets about having to remind herself of the same thing. Of course, as I was raking leaves on Sunday I listened to a BBC World Book Club podcast  where Peter Ackroyd claims he never edits-- he just sits down and writes basically a finished product that doesn't need many, if any, revisions.  I just hope my inner editor wasn't listening. 
 

All Who Will Hearken

OCEAN by Mary Oliver from Red Bird:  Poems (Beacon Press)
I am in love with Ocean
lifting her thousands of white hats
in the chop of the storm,
or lying smooth and blue, the
loveliest bed in the world.
In the personal life, there is

always grief more than enough,
a heart load for each of us
on the dusty road. I suppose
there is a reason for this, so I will be
patient, acquiescent. But I will live
nowhere except here, by Ocean, trusting
equally in all blast and welcome
of her sorrowless, salt self.

I'm in love with the ocean as well, although I'm ashamed to say I haven't visited her in a long while.  I was close last month and next month I intend to get a healthy dose of ocean air when I'm in Wales.  But this past week I've been reminded of the danger and uncertainty that those who love the ocean and live close by her often endure.  Although the DC area came through Sandy relatively unscathed, I've been thinking this week about those who weren't as fortunate.  It's easy to romanticize the natural world until something like a hurricane comes along and reminds us that awe can entail a profound feeling of fear as well as admiration. 

People often talk about the Celtic love of nature as one of the things that attracts them to that particular expression of spirituality.  While the Celts did have an affinity with nature, particularly as they looked to creation as the first book of revelation, it wasn't in a naive or idealistic way.  There was always an awareness that that same tree you were hugging one minute (or in the case of the Druids, worshiping among) could just as easily fall on you the next if a strong gust of wind came along.

Over the weekend, I was browsing my well-worn copy of the Carmina Gadelica and came across this poem which eerily echoes the events of last week.

POEM OF THE FLOOD
On Monday will come the great storm  
Which the airy firmament will pour,
We shall be obedient the while,
All who will hearken  . . .

On Tuesday will come the other element,
Heart paining, hard piercing,
Wringing from pure pale cheeks
Blood, like showers of wine.

On Wednesday will blow the wind,
Sweeping bare strath and plain,
Showering gusts of galling grief,
Thunder bursts and rending hills.

On Thursday will pour the shower,
Driving people into blind flight,
Faster than the foliage on the trees,
Like the leaves of Mary's plant in terror trembling.

On Friday will come the dool cloud of darkness,
The direst dread that ever came over the world,
Leaving multitudes bereft of reason,
Grass and fish beneath the same flagstone.

On Saturday will come the great sea,
Rushing like a mighty river;
All will be at their best
Hastening to a hill of safety.

On Sunday will arise my King,
Full of ire and tribulation,
Listening to the bitter talk of each man,
A red cross on each right shoulder.

Although I've read the prayers and blessings collected by Alexander Carmichael countless times over the past twentyplus years (I picked up my copy of the Carmina Gadelica on my first trip to Scotland in 1989), I don't recall reading this poem before.  After I finished the last verse I found myself disappointed.  I wanted a better ending, something more hopeful when it got to the Sunday stanza,some reference to the waters of chaos leading to creation or some nice, Celtic-y reassurance that the Lord of the elements will quiet the storm and bring peace.

I looked in the footnotes to Carmichael's text for some explanation of this poem but there wasn't one, which is a bit unusual.  The notes in the Carmina Gadelica are often more interesting than the blessings themselves as they tell the story of how the prayer was both received and used in context, as well as explaining some of the more obscure references.  Unfortunately with no help from Carmichael nor from Google, I'm left to my own devices to figure out what this poem means for me, which is actually true for any poem when it comes down to it.

So for me, the key is in that next-to-the-last line, "Listening to the bitter talk of each man."  Being removed from the situation it's easy for me to want that better ending I mentioned above, but from what I've seen on the news broadcasts and heard on radio interviews with those in the hardest hit areas, what many want is the reassurance that they haven't been forgotten-- that there is someone to listen to their pleas for help.  And maybe that's the first and best thing we can do for those in crisis-- listen.   

_________________________________________________________________________________

Of course, for those who want to do something more practical, there are several worthy organizations you can support with your donations.  The American Red Cross, Episcopal Relief and Development, and the Global Ministries of the United Methodist Church.   The latter two organizations work world wide and will support relief work in all areas affected by the hurricane. 

Dark Clouds and Slow Rain

TODAY by Mary Oliver from Swan:  Poems and Prose Poems (Beacon Press)
Today is a day of
dark clouds and slow rain.
The little blades of corn
are so happy.


It's been raining steadily since last night as hurricane Sandy approaches the east coast.  I've had my window open since the rain began, listening to the rain drops play their staccato lullaby on the golden leaves that carpet the yard.
The wind is just beginning to pick up a bit and soon I'll have to batten down the hatches but for now I'm enjoying the sounds of the rain.  Its rhythm is calling to me to go back to bed with a cup of tea and a good book. 

And who am I to ignore the invitation of Mother Nature? 

Standing Open-Mouthed at the Temple of Life or Happy Birthday Denise Levertov

PRIMARY WONDER by Denise Levertov from The Stream & the Sapphire (New Directions)
Days pass when I forget the mystery.
Problems insoluble and problems offering
their own ignored solutions
jostle for my attention, they crowd its antechamber
along with a host of diversions, my courtiers, wearing
their colored clothes; cap and bells.

And then
once more the quiet mystery
is present to me, the throng's clamor
recedes: the mystery
that there is anything, anything at all,
let alone cosmos, joy, memory, everything,
rather than void: and that, O Lord,
Creator, Hallowed One, You still,
hour by hour sustain it.

I had a different poem picked out for this morning.  If I had been industrious and written this post last night, as I thought about doing for . . . oh, about the first five minutes after I got home from my meditation gatherings, you probably wouldn't be reading this Denise Levertov poem this morning. 
But no.  I procrastinated, as I so often do.  And then I lost my motivation to do anything but take myself off to bed with a good drink and a mindless mystery.

So when I woke this morning and learned via The Writer's Almanac (the e-mail version, you know I don't get up early enough to hear the 6:35 am broadcast on WAMU) that today is the birthday of one of my favorite poets, I decided to post something by her instead of what I had planned.

I've been trying to figure out what exactly it is about Denise Levertov's poetry that resonates with me.  In doing so, I came across an essay on form she wrote for Poetry magazine in 1965.  In it she writes,

But the condition of being a poet is that periodically such a cross section, or constellation, of  
experiences (in which one or another element may predominate) demands, or wakes in him this    demand: the poem. The beginning of the fulfillment of this demand is to contemplate, to meditate;    words which connote a state in which the heat of feeling warms the intellect. To contemplate comes    from “templum, temple, a place, a space for observation, marked out by the augur.” It means, not   simply to observe, to regard, but to do these things in the presence of a god. And to meditate is “to   keep the mind in a state of contemplation”; its synonym is “to muse,” and to muse comes from a   word mean­ing “to stand with open mouth”—not so comical if we think of “inspiration”—to breathe in. 

So—as the poet stands open-mouthed in the temple of life, contemplating his experience, there come to him the first words of the poem: the words which are to be his way in to the poem, if there  is to be a poem. The pressure of demand and the meditation on its elements culminate in a moment of vision, of crystallization, in which some inkling of the correspondence between those elements occurs; and it occurs in words. If he forces a beginning before this point, it won’t work.

Entrance to the temple of Bacchus at Baalbek
I stood here open mouthed and amazed but
didn't write a poem about it . . . yet. 

It seems to me what she is describing here is akin to Lectio Divina, the spiritual practice of holy reading.

 Experience, Meditation, Poem = lectio, meditatio, oratio



Just yesterday I was wondering why I can sit at my desk for two hours and write the first draft of an essay or a chapter or two of a story yet I can't bring myself to write poetry during my daily writing time.  It's not that I don't write poetry, it's just that when I do, it does come from that place of standing open mouthed after a period of meditation. 

So maybe this is that ineffable in Denise Levertov's poems to which I relate, something akin to prayer that my soul recognizes, which it not only breathes in but also breathes out with a sigh.

A Breath of Fresh Air

WHAT CAN I SAY? by Mary Oliver from Swan: Poems and Prose Poems (Beacon Press)

Cong Forest, Ireland

What can I say that I have not said before?
So I'll say it again.
The leaf has a song in it.
Stone is the face of patience.
Inside the river there is an unfinished story
  and you are somewhere in it
and it will never end until it all ends.

Take your busy heart to the art museum and the
  chamber of commerce
but take it also to the forest.
The song you heard singing in the leaf when you
  were a child
is singing still. 
I am of years lived, so far, seventy-four,
and the leaf is still singing.

Another reminder about seeking out the wisdom of old holy teachers from Mary Oliver this morning.

Later this afternoon I will heed the siren song of the leaves and take a walk in Rock Creek Park, perhaps not into the forest but at least beside it.  There's something about walking among trees that cleanses my soul.  It dislodges the little bits of dirt that cling to my consciousness, like dried mud on a shoe.  I end up discarding the clumps and clods, almost imperceptibly, along the path. 

I could try to dig these out on my own, but it's so much easier and much less messier to get outside-- of my house and out of my head-- into a wide open space where I can let things go and just focus on listening to the leaves singing.

The Color Orange - Update on the Orange Prize and Your Monthly Dose of Vitamin C

Damn you Orange Telecom.  Although philanthropists such as Cherie Blair and Joanna Trollope have stepped in to privately fund this year's women's prize for fiction until new sponsorship can be found, they are also renaming the prize to . . . well, The Women's Prize for Fiction.   While there are limited rhyming possibilities, the Orange Prize did allow for other plays on the prize name such as the two in the title of this post.  The Women's Prize for Fiction?  Not so much. 

I can only hope that another corporate sponsor is found soon, in part to keep the prize going and support women writers, but also because I'll need another name to work with in the future.  (Calling Richard Branson.  I wonder what kind of conversations would emerge from having the Virgin Women's Prize for Fiction????)

Until a new sponsor and name come along, however, I will continue to post monthly reviews of Orange Prize nominees as Your Monthly Dose of Vitamin C.  So without further to do . . .

This is How by M. J. Hyland
What can I say about Patrick Oxtoby, the narrator and central character in Hyland's novel?  Ostensibly, he's a young man trying to make his way in the world.  The problem is, the way he sees the world and the way the world sees him are at odds with each other.  The reader doesn't necessarily realize this at first but the more I read Patrick's words and actions, the more I came to realize that something is off.  He thinks he's noble, others just think he's kind of creepy. 

I think that's part of Hyland's brilliance in developing the character of Patrick. Is he just clueless? Or is it something more, a diagnosable pathology such as personality disorder or a form of autism? Whatever his diagnosis, I found myself pitying Patrick-- as he tried to woo the waitress in the local diner, as he struggled with his feelings for the owner of the seaside boarding house where he lived (is she a mother figure or a potential Mrs. Robinson?), as he tried to fit in with the other lads who lived in the boarding house and, most keenly, after a rash decision has dire consequences. 

It quickly becomes apparent that Patrick doesn't have the emotional or cognitive capacities to fully understand the cause and effect of his actions and it's this realization that moved me from mere pity and feeling uncomfortable, and at times amused, at Patrick's awkwardness to a real sense of compassion and empathy for his plight.  There are no happy endings here, no resolutions but it was a story that stuck with me and made me think.

The Seas  by Samantha Hunt
One of the things I thought as I read This is How is that Patrick's story would have turned out much differently if his parents had gotten him a good psychiatrist.  The same thought occurred to me about the unnamed narrator in Samantha Hunt's story.  And until I started writing this, I didn't realize I picked two books, set by the sea, told from the point of view of quintessential unreliable narrators.  Take note, future novelists.  If you want to be nominated for an Orange Prize/Women's Prize for Fiction, write from the point of view of an unreliable narrator and set your book by the ocean.  The formula seems to work.

In the case of The Seas, the unnamed teller of the tale is a nineteen year old young woman, another misfit although in her case, she realizes she doesn't fit in.  She attributes this to the fact that she's a mermaid.  Or at least that's what her father told her a decade before, just before he walked into the ocean.  Never able to accept the fact of his suicide, she watches the sea and waits for his return.  And while waiting, she meets Jude, a much older man (can anyone say father figure?) with whom she falls obsessively in love. 

Unlike Hyland's novel, while The Seas is told strictly from the point of view of the narrator, we also get a glimpse into the lives of those who love this troubled young woman.  Her mother and Jude, in particular, are well developed characters in their own right whose stories are worth being told.

The writing itself is reminiscent of the sea, evoking the ebb and flow of waves in its rhythm,  Some have likened Hunt's book to a retelling of The Little Mermaid or the German tale, Undine but Hunt's narrator is more complex.  We see her struggle between reality and fantasy, adulthood and childhood, truth and denial, and perhaps even sanity and insanity but in the end Hunt writes in just enough doubt to make the reader wonder if perhaps there isn't a little magical realism going on in her story. 

Old Holy Teachers and Old Holy Ways

THE TREES by Mary Oliver from Evidence (Beacon Press)
Do you think of them as decoration?

Think again.

Here are maples, flashing.
And here are the oaks, holding on all winter
  to their dry leaves.
And here are the pines, that will never fail,
  until death, the instruction to be green.
And here are the willows, the first
  to pronounce a new year.

May I invite you to revise your thoughts about them?
Oh, Lord, how we are all for invention and
  advancement!
But I think
  it would do us good if we would think about
these brothers and sisters, quietly and deeply.

The trees, the trees, just holding on
  to the old, holy ways.

This weekend at the  seventeenth anniversary celebration for the Cathedral Center for Prayer and Pilgrimage I led a session on poetry as prayer.  As we read a few haiku and reflected on the lessons we saw in the autumn landscape, several people spoke about the insight they gleaned from trees. 

Evergreens in the midst of a decaying garden are a reminder of the constant nature of divine love.  The burnishing of leaves that is brought about by a decrease in sunlight illustrates how dark as well as light is necessary in our lives.  And how ironic it is that so many of us rejoice in the changing of green leaves into the brilliant foliage of fall, yet change in our own lives is so often viewed as something to be lamented or feared.

As for my reflections, I thought about how the cherry tree in my neighbor's yard has long been bare, while our dogwoods are a brilliant red and the maples are just beginning to fade to a pale yellow green.  All get the same light, the same water, are planted in the same basic soil, yet each embraces autumn in its own time, in its own way. 

Celtic spirituality points to nature as the first book of divine revelation.  I think this is part of the old holy way that Mary Oliver mentions. Trees are more than decorations in our landscape -- they are messengers, preachers, teachers, and perhaps even sacraments, offering us a glimpse of grace if we pay attention.

Getting a Fix for Free or In Praise of the Public Library

Hi.  My name is Terri and I'm a book-aholic.  My acknowledgment of that isn't anything new.  I've often described myself as a bibliophile but it wasn't until yesterday that I realized my love of books may cross the fine line from vice into addiction. 

I went to the library to return one book and came home with three more to go with the three already on the floor by my bed.  The library stack is next to two other piles of my own books and one of books borrowed from friends.  They're on the floor because there's no room on the nightstand or either of the two bookshelves in my room.  Nor on the two shelves I have in the basement.  There are also a few books in the back seat of my car, "Just in case . . ."  Some people, like my brother, have emergency preparedness kits that consist of water, granola bars, and blankets in their cars in case they get stranded in a storm.  I have a biography of Henry James.

Despite my love of books, I'm trying to be more frugal in my purchase of them.  My new rule of thumb is that I can't purchase a book-- electronic or otherwise-- unless I've read two and gotten them off the shelves.  But being an addict, I'm always looking for my next fix.  So as I looked through my stack of library books last night, trying to decide what to read before bedtime (yet another Ian McEwan won out), I was overcome by a rush of amazement and gratitude for the public library.

One of my favorite libraries - Gladstone's Library in Wales

Then again, I've always loved my local library.  Some of my fondest childhood memories are cozy recollections of choosing well worn, well loved books from the children's section-- The Country Bunny and the Golden Shoes, Blueberries for Sal, one of the many Madeline stories.  The first time I checked out a book from the adult section I must have been about 10 or 11.  I remember it was October and I wanted some seasonal reading but I'd read everything Halloweenish in the juvenile section.  Looking in the card catalog, I found a book on local ghost stories and checked it out.  As I wandered the tall shelves in the adult aisles I was entranced by the titles and colors of the cellophane covered spines.  I decided when I was older, I'd start in the A section and read every novel in the library. 

I haven't managed to do that yet, although I did begin the project at one point and soon gave up, realizing that while the library has a bunch of books I want to read, it also has just as many that hold no interest for me whatsoever.  But the great thing about the library is that it does encourage me to read books I wouldn't necessarily read if I had to purchase them for myself.  Sitting in my stack right now is what I think, based on the cover image and description, is a steam-punk mystery.  It's a book I would never buy for myself but seeing it on the shelf in the new book section I thought, "Why not?"

I realize that when I say I can get my book fixes for free at the public libraries that they really aren't free.  The budget of my local library system is funded by taxes.  The current figures per my estimate with the latest data available is that it costs each citizen of Montgomery County Maryland around $30/year for the use of the public libraries. 
Thirty dollars.  This is an amazing bargain when you think of it.  My library offers free internet service, electronic and audio books, DVDs, Cd's, story time for children, book groups for adults, lectures, author readings, concerts, cultural events, free WiFi for patrons, the wisdom and expertise of librarians both in person and on-line through a chat function, and of course books. 

So thank you public libraries, for feeding my addiction.  I'd be a lesser read person without you.

A Sort of Homecoming

WILD GEESE by Mary Oliver from Dream Work (The Atlantic Monthly Press)

 

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
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.


One time a pastor/friend was at a program with other churchy types where the presenter used a poem by Rumi to open up the discussion.  My friend said she turned to a colleague and said, "Ugh.  Not "The Guesthouse" again. . . "  Not that it isn't a great poem, it just was the go-to Rumi for so many contemplative circles and meditation groups, becoming so ubiquitous that it had lost its impact and meaning for her. 

As much as I love Mary Oliver, there are some of her poems to which I react the same way.  For a long time, "Wild Geese" was one of those but somehow after this past weekend I can read it again with fresh eyes.  Maybe it's because enough time has past.  Maybe it's because this weekend I sat outside watching flocks of geese and ducks fly overhead.  Or maybe it's because while sitting by the banks of the brackish Pamlico River, I was able to let the soft animal of my body love what it loves for the first time in  . . . well, years. 

Seaside in Northern Wales

There's something about salt water-- the smell, taste, color and life contained therein that always restores me.  It's like the .09% of my body that is salt quivers with excitement when I'm near the ocean. 

So many creation stories tell how humans were formed from earth, but I feel more like the salt doll in the Buddhist tale.  There's a realization that returning to the sea is a homecoming of sorts, a place of discovery and recognition where I'm able not only to let go of my ego, but also reconnect with the source of my being.