T.S. Eliot: Four Quartets

...The end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

Through the unknown, unremembered gate

When the last of earth left to discover

Is that which was the beginning;

At the source of the longest river

The voice of the hidden waterfall

And the children in the apple-tree

Not known, because not looked for

But heard, half-heard, in the stillness

Between two waves of the sea.

Quick now, here, now, always—

A condition of complete simplicity

(Costing not less than everything)

And all shall be well and

All manner of thing shall be well

When the tongues of flame are in-folded

Into the crowned knot of fire

And the fire and the rose are one.

We stand in the rush of a river
attempting to direct traffic

as if tin whistles hold any power

over the shrill of rushing water.

Let up your feet, Lawman.

Allow the current to carry you

where it will and not where you would.

You will be alright. 

Friendship and Spring

Spring breaks through like a Sunday morning.  Happiness collects at the corner of our mouths. Toes emerge from the woolly caves where they hibernated all winter long and stretch into the cool grass, walking bow-legged and tenderly on the winter-sculpted blades. A habit of long sleeves warms us quickly and no one dares complain. We share squinting smiles from our porch rocking chairs during the bright end of day while warm breezes dance away with our laughter into the postponed night. What could be better than friendship and spring? We may start a fire because at night it’s still winter, but we refuse to go back inside. Free now. Let’s stretch our wings and run down a greening hill, catching our laughter back from the wind, playing a game with gravity. We remember that we are children, young inhabitants of our mothering earth. Let the Goddess of our soul and the soles of our feet know our love! A joy within awakes when the sun kisses our cheeks and soaks deep into our thirsty bones. Let me put my arm around you, friend, and put yours round me. Let’s feast on all our eyes can eat from this hill top and all our hearts can hope for this season. Can this be our purpose today and tomorrow? To be together in work and play. To plant and cook and eat and expend energy without the dividing panels of a cubicle? Grey and senseless. No prick or chill. No life.

Road Kill

I generate a lot of ideas but act on so few, and follow through on even less. I hear that my grandfather was the same way. He would make grandiose promises that never came to pass. I am very excitable but have no discipline. Or that is how I've told the story of myself. But there is another narrative; one that says there is something alive and curious and wonder-full within me that too often gives way to expectation and practicality. I have such visions of artistic ventures that would help me make sense of engage things: the world, relationships, feelings, myself. I quickly abandon these cravings to the tedium of an 9-5. After all, how could I possibly begin to make sense of things without the money to feed my coffee addiction?

I was outside one day watching a squirrel be a squirrel, leaping through piles of fallen leaves, when it found itself on the road at the same time as a car. Delighted  preparations turned to confused panic. The squirrel's inner drive to store for winter now told it to pull its legs in tight and make careful movements. I thought all was well, but at the last moment, it seemed nothing but the tip of her nose met the final spin of the car's back wheel, and she fell limp in the exhaust of the mindless vehicle. Now I was looking at a squirrel no longer being a squirrel. All her preparations for naught. No more bounding in and out of leafs. No returning to a warm nest in the trees. No twitching eyelashes and snow dotted whiskers hibernating through the cold months. No warm thaw of spring. Dead. And for what? The hasty passage of a human in a gas driven metal transporter, transcending the slow, innate, patient cycles of the Earth.

I wanted to capture every moment like this on film. In anger I wanted to magnify it and show people what we leave in our tracks. But there was more to it than anger or even sorrow or shame. There was love, regard, solidarity, and concern. We are numbly rushing through time, indifferent of life. Maybe the squirrels open mouthed expression, as though still watching something slip away, would get our blood flowing again as it drips from her nose to our hearts. Probably not. There's a script for that. "Ew". "Weird".

This is (some of) the reaction photographer Joy Hunsberger  hears about her collection or artist Adam Morrigan receives about his show, Absolution and Redemption.  I see them as beautiful responses to human indifference or oblivion. An alternative. Engagement. Wendell Berry calls us to practice resurrection. Wake up. Come back to life.

The squirrel sat along the side of the road for a few days, a feast to the still-living as they make their own preparations for winter. The world practices redemption, reclaiming the fallen and atoning us of our sins in a grace and balance that governs a world so different from our judicial realm of scarcity. Why is my mind polluted with pre-stocked opinions and heady sense-making while a raven follows the air in front of her beak?


I have a recurring dream that I have forgotten about my child.  In the happier dreams I hold this child with great guilt at my neglect. In less fortunate scenarios I search for my forgotten child to no avail. I see the dream as a reminder; a call to return to what is important; to what I have abandoned or mis-prioritized.

A friend and I were walking by the railroad tracks one soft gray day when we saw a fallen owl on a bed of broken stone. The drizzling rain dotted her feathers which hung open. Abandoned eyes peered at us through a glossy film. Before and beyond her lie the tracks of human evolution. I felt the urge to bury her. In my mind it would demonstrate respect. But that idea of respect comes from a script that says the world is bad; that scavengers are bad; that death is bad and that the body of respectable beings should be "saved" from beast and bug; hidden away somehow from a visible transformation from the host we knew to a new life.

The Deer

By Mary Oliver

You never know.
The body of night opens
like a river, it drifts upward like white smoke,

like so many wrappings of mist.
And on the hillside two deer are walking along
just as though this wasn’t

the owned, tilled earth of today
but the past.
I did not see them the next day, or the next,

but in my mind’s eye -
there they are, in the long grass,
like two sisters.

This is the earnest work.  Each of us is given
only so many mornings to do it -
to look around and love
the oily fur of our lives,
the hoof and the grass-stained muzzle.
Days I don’t do this

I feel the terror of idleness,
like a red thirst.
Death isn’t just an idea…

When we die the body breaks open
like a river;
the old body goes on, climbing the hill.

What is perfection?

I know what women look like. This height and this weight. This bust and this nose. This hair and this gait.

I know what women look like and where they find their value. I sense it inside me, between the place

that screams, "You can be better than you are!" and that place that whispers, "Just give up".

I really only know what one woman looks like. Another height and another weight. Right now with a bruise

on her thigh where she hit the table, and a knick off her thumb from dancing up the stairs. And that scar

on her toe from a knobby-kneed six-year-old's barefooted adventure. The hair on her legs sticks up,

a thin dotting of tall grasses without color growing out of the cracked earth that is her shins. Her belly folds over

 about the same amount as her breasts, which peak out from her rib cage like elbows from a car window. 
She has a face that crinkles into a smile, tight with the tension of expecation that pulls from puppet strings 
somewhere between her ears. Her legs grow wider towards the top and begin to wrinkle

 like the gravity-defying trees in Thailand. And isn't this 
what women look like?

Like This

When I fell in love with a man, I found myself replacing that uncertain concept of G-d with his image in prayer. 
Invocations I have recited my whole life, simple proclamations like "I love You Gd", seemed directed suddenly at Keith rather than the divine. 
This frightened me when I considered myself a Christian, because it seemed the definition of heresy. 
This frightened me as I rebelled against my Christian upbringing, because it seemed the manifestation of patriarchy.

Now, I see that the only way I could hope to understand and love G-d or the spiritual is to understand and love what is natural; present; real. To love Keith.

Rumi:  

If anyone asks you
how the perfect satisfaction
of all our sexual wanting
will look, lift your face
and say,

Like this.

When someone mentions the gracefulness
of the nightsky, climb up on the roof
and dance and say,

Like this.

If anyone wants to know what "spirit" is,
or what "God’s fragrance" means,
lean your head toward him or her.
Keep your face there close.

Like this.

If anyone wonders how Jesus raised the dead,
don’t try to explain the miracle.
Kiss me on the lips.

Like this. Like this.


 

Murmuration

Late to the game, I have discovered the many wonderful videos of Starlings en masse. It is easy to get lost in the sensation it produces, whether it's awe or curiosity or anxiety or joy. When I came across the video, the pulsing cloud of birds brought to mind my community of friends. For a few years we have hoped to "share life abundantly" - the only words I recall from our mission statement as we sought to buy land together and form a legal entity. And we have come to share life together in meaningful ways. A meal here. A shared moment there. But with a goal in mind, a very clear picture of our ultimate destination, every step along the way has seemed to fall short. 

And so I watch the collective herd, tight one moment, and loose the next; flying to the left and then to the right; and then in every which direction. I get a familiar feeling in the open spaces within me; that feeling of bated breath I connect to community discussions. Close, but not quite. Almost, and then it's gone. Panic and retreat. A desperate grasp, relief, and then that helpless sensation of it slipping through our fingers. I imagine the individual birds chasing after the tail feathers of the bird in front of them. Confusion. Concern. Chaos. 

There is a quote attributed to the Buddha that says when the cloud transforms to rain it does not panic like us. Maybe this is true of all non-domesticated beings. I find assurance in natural patterns. I gain a new vision of the individual starling, caught in a motion so grand; so fragile; un scripted. The starling has no manner of seeing the full murmuration. I catch a momentary vision of my own life, my movements, my community, my world past to future, from the viewpoint of something bigger. I imagine these things spread across the sky like starlings. Not a destination. A dance. 

Some have called a murmuration a selfish herd. The theory is that each starling desperately competes for the center to avoid predators, resulting in a moving center. But some research has shown that this sort of collective behavior results in less predation for the entire herd. Maybe our community will never settle. But perhaps in our attempts to group we can evade the predators that would consume an individual. And maybe it will be beautiful to behold. 

Starlings in Winter

by Mary Oliver

Chunky and noisy,

but with stars in their black feathers,

they spring from the telephone wire

and instantly

they are acrobats

in the freezing wind.

And now, in the theater of air,

they swing over buildings,

dipping and rising;

they float like one stippled star

that opens,

becomes for a moment fragmented,

then closes again;

and you watch

and you try

but you simply can't imagine

how they do it

with no articulated instruction, no pause,

only the silent confirmation

that they are this notable thing,

this wheel of many parts, that can rise and spin

over and over again,

full of gorgeous life.

Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us,

even in the leafless winter,

even in the ashy city.

I am thinking now

of grief, and of getting past it;

I feel my boots

trying to leave the ground,

I feel my heart

pumping hard, I want

to think again of dangerous and noble things.

I want to be light and frolicsome.

I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,

as though I had wings.

"Starlings in Winter" by Mary Oliver, from Owls and Other Fantasies: Poems and Essays. © Beacon Press, 2003.