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.

(note: definitions are quoted directly from the dictionary)

Social. 

Worker. 

Social. Of or relating to society or its organization. 

Social. Of or relating to rank and status in society. 

Worker. An employee. 

Worker. A person who works in a specified way. 

As a social worker, I am very familiar with theories of human development, among them the theories of ego development. I have known, or rather, I have learned, that humans in infancy are incapable of differentiating themselves from the people and events in their lives. For the first time in my life, I heard this described as an inability to compartmentalize. It is funny that the word ‘compartmentalize’ has been brought to my attention recently by a close friend. He may argue that we suffer by compartmentalizing our lives. Here is our work, and there is our family, and here you can play, and there you must be quiet, and here is me and there is a worm.  

Ego development. Human development. We come to this world, thinking beings, believing that we are somehow connected with every event and every person. But after a few days or months or years have passed, the idea of associating ourselves with this world, without distinction, becomes absurd.  Now I recognize, as a social worker should, that this disassociation is a protective factor. But then, I have never (in theory) been a proponent of disconnecting from what is emotionally difficult. Because we are alive. We are filled with life. We are foolish, us humans, but we are here, and we should fully experience that emotionally. At our best, we give word to the feelings of others, allow for a second of connectedness, wherein there is no disassociation from human to human or world to world or life to life. At our worst, the idea of associating ourselves from this world is something to grow out of. But we are food for worms. Where's the sense of ego in that? 

Social. Needing companionship. 

Social. Living together in organized communities, typically with different casts, as ants, bees, wasps, and termites do. 

Worker. A person who works hard. 

Worker. In social insects such as bees, wasps, ants, and termites, a neuter or undeveloped female that is a member of what is usually the most numerous caste and does the basic work of the colony. 

Life lines and extinction

A discomforting thought poked me in the head the other day; an unwelcome awareness that I have an ancestral line that dates back as far as can be imagined. I have had ancestors alive at any point in time. The simple testament of my existence declares that by blood has been here through the ages. People I can credit my existence to were breathing in the1960's, the 1930's. They crossed an ocean and settled in the US. Even fought a few wars here. And before that, I am sure they fought battles in Europe. They were on one side or the other of a revolution. Changed religions. Built things that have long since disappeared. And quite probably a few things that have not. They were carving out a life somewhere while Jesus walked the Earth. They were part of the movement away from hunting and gathering to agriculture. They were a part of evolution as we know it. They had to have been. Because I am. And to survive it all is both astounding and horrifying. 

I watched a match burn down. The fire slowly moving towards my fingers. It was beautiful and gave me pause. But just like human innovation, it soon consumed all that sustained it.  

I drifted off in a meeting today, undoubtedly with that vacant look on my face, the hallmark of boredom, or so I've thought. I came back to reality feeling a little sheepish, trying to decide whether my mouth was hanging open, and immediately began to criticize myself for not being able to engage the material. Each time I drift off now I try and trace my distraction to its root. And each time, I find that I veered off shortly after hearing something interesting. Thought provoking, in fact.

I recently heard that our brain sleeps a lot during the day. I knew that while we slept our brain went through cycles, but I did not know that those cycles continue through the waking hours. I notice these slips in and out of consciousness when I am reading and go a few pages before realizing I have no idea what I've read, or pulling into the driveway and having no recollection of the journey, or sitting in a meeting and realizing I am thinking about rabbits instead of progress reports. While our bodies continue to function unconsciously, we lose conscious thought.

As we are able to look at the functioning brain in new and exciting ways, neuroscience is teaching us that sleep plays a function in processing information. We cannot remember what we have learned the day before without sufficient sleep the proceeding night. I read a study before that suggested that dreams are survival tactics - dogs run in dreams because they are learning how to survive the challenges of their day. Humans dream they are naked so they know how to get out of church when that happens. I don't know. The ideas connect in my mind - daydreams are opportunities throughout the day to process what we are learning.

So there I am, sitting in a four hour meeting, paying attention with the best of them, learning good things, when suddenly I have drifted off into some fantasy. I am ok with that. Children use play as a way of making sense of their world. It stimulates their brain and creates the necessary synopsis to grow and develop. I think play time is just as crucial for adults. We need play to make sense of our experiences. We drift into fantasies of saying something brilliant or chewing someone out or running away to Thailand, or bunnies, and something about the process and the white noise and turning off conscious thought and control helps us incorporate what we have been learning.

What I really want is to not take myself so seriously. Learning takes humility. It takes letting go. Maybe it takes a jaw ajar during a meeting. I want to have grace with myself. At my best, I am an untamable mystery.

Retreat

There is a beautiful gazebo across from our yard. Everyone who visits comments on the beauty of this gazebo. They ask who owns it and how often they use it. No one ever uses the gazebo. It was intended as a spiritual retreat. It is a retreat for the groundhogs I chase from my garden. Today, though, I saw a brilliant orange passing through the trees and into the gazebo. Our neighbor’s relatives are in from Laos for a wedding. One, a monk, found his way to the gazebo. It made me realize that quiet rest and contemplation are practices. They take practice.

What the duck?

Ducks gather by the crick running through my back yard like travelers gather by the pool at a resort. Only the ducks are not vacationing. They are being ducks. I wish I were a duck. 

I saw the remains of a duck by the side of the road, torn to pieces by something. I guess that is the price you pay for sitting by the water all day instead of building walls around yourself.

The other day I sat looking at the gathered ducks. There were three distinct groups. Since most of the female ducks are sitting on nests, the largest group consisted of lone males, glistening green at the top like bottles of champagne. One male sat off from the group with a female duck. I have heard that ducks mate for life, and this site filled me with romantic thoughts of my partner with his own fancifully feathered head. The third ‘grouping’ was a single duck – female. She sat alone between the others. Separate. I look at her and imagine the blanket of feathers and duck parts by the side of the road. I wonder if she lost her mate.

I wondered about the ducks. I like to think the single-mate notion has merit in nature outside of human invention. But does their social life mirror our own in any other way? Does the male duck sitting with his partner feel disappointed to be separated from the other males? Does the female partner feel guilt for the nature of partnership? Is she infertile? Does she feel guilty about that? Does the lone female feel lonely? Does she look at the partnered female with envy? Does she hate the other female? Does she hate herself without a mate to give her some reason not to? Do the males sitting in a group ever get tempted? Do they look longingly at the smooth brown feathers of both the partnered and widowed female duck while their own mates sit on nests, hatching their progeny? Or are they just ducks? 

Why can't we just say "easel"?

The words we unconsciously use reflect the society we have constructed. The words we chose can dismantle that society by making thought conscious again. 

Working Habits

Life is so prescribed, and increasingly so with age. There is an order to my day forged by centuries of civilization. To lose yourself to it is, simply, to lose yourself. A habitualized life maintains the status quo. The concept of seizing the day isn’t about being a go-getter at work; going above and beyond the call of civilized duty. It is about awakening to choice; to the opportunities in every moment to make your own way. This is very difficult to do in civilized society. It is impossible to do in a cubicle. 

An Integrative Life

For my birthday I received two bracelets – one with beads from Turkey, and one spun from grass. Looking down at my wrists was a strong visual of the ongoing tension I feel between exploring the world and setting deep roots to land and community. The tension is punctuated by my partner’s departure for Nepal in a week and our visit to a sheep farm last month. The idea of each path titillates me as I punch out a life in suburbia. But I strongly believe in living an integrative life. I know what it is to trek through Nepal, even though I have never been there. I know the stimulation of new sights, sounds, smells, tastes, oh how I love the tastes. I know the hospitality of others. I know the richness of new cultures. But life happens now. And right now, I can show that hospitality. I can incorporate rich traditions into my own day with incense and gongs and hugs and generosity. I can see and hear and smell and taste things anew with mindfulness. Likewise, I can know and care about what is in my backyard. I can experience the elements in an acre lot. I can work my body and grow my food and wash my clothes. I can invest in my community and get to know those around me and share life in little ways. I’m not saying I wont eventually follow a path to the Turkish beads or spun grass. I have heard that those who are faithful with little will be given much. But the much in my hands right now is this living moment wherein I can integrate where I have been and where I am now.

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up like a

raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore

and then run?

Does it stink like rotten meant?

Or curst and sugar over

like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sages

like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

--Langston Hughes

Debunking Perfection

I exposed my stomach the other day, and not accidently.


For ten years I have taken every precaution to hide my stomach. I had an agreement that when it looked a certain way I would let it see the sun again. But for ten years my ribs or curves or pesky belly-button hair has broken the terms of this agreement.


The other day when I went swimming in my sports bra, it was not because my torso took on an eerily Halle Berry quality. In fact, I weigh more this year than ever before, and the bulk of that weight seems to have manifested in my gut (a very unfortunate predicament for a 27-year-old who has been married for 5-years and has the eager attention of countless eyes on her baby-growing parts).


And so it was time. It was time to remove a cloak and attempt to debunk this myth that anything less than perfect must be hidden, or that there is perfection because anything less is never shared and seen.


It was difficult to so nakedly expose my imperfection; to take that imagined blow to my image. In fact, I regret it. But I hope to do it again.

Renee the anarchist

What do you get when you mix a police officer and a teacher? A very legalistic daughter.
I have worked very hard my entire life to follow the letter of the law and avoid disappointing figures of authority. But my accumulating years have emboldened me, and I have become a bit of a rogue. One 'rule' I have begun to blatantly disregard is (prepare yourself...) "Do not walk on the grass". This was a hard one to break, not only because I am always afraid somone will yell at me (In my all-too-well socialized mind, there is always some authority figure hiding behind every corner in my life, waiting to jump out and humiliate me with flashing lights or a banging gavel or a raised voice), but also because my entire life I felt as though tramping across grass simply to get somewhere more quickly was (1) lazy, (2) a criminal act against the living grass, and (3) disrespectful to those who tended the lawns. For a long time, this rule fit nicely in my understanding of right and moral conduct. In college, I learned that large numbers of people walking on the ground would push down the soil and make it more difficult for things to grow. But what I have come to realize is - it's grass! And barely! This stuff with which the college campus near my house is adorned chokes out life. And the chemicals and gasoline that go into its maitenance is appaling. I agree that the land beneath it is valuable. If I had any hope that the college would utilize it more responsibly, I would respect their pathways and rules. I have no hope.

Another rule that has come to mean very little to me is, "No littering". It is strange that my increasing environmentalism leads me to disagree with a rule like this. I am a child of the 80's, and raised in a flood of Earth Day, Save the Rainforest, and Captain Planet. What I did not understand about society's embracing of environmentalism was that it is mostly aestetic. Why not litter? We create so much trash in the united states, but it is invisible to most of us! Why not clutter our lives with reality until we are moved to create true change?

bucks

There is life in blood

and water, but when i work

i'm clogged with java

Hot and Cold

Hot and cold are different. One is hot. One is cold. But hot and cold are the same. Hot is a temperature. So is cold. Hot and cold do not easily mix. Most often, where one is, the other is not. When they do meet, there are storms of white light and booming voices blowing off air, hot and cold. They bump up against one another, knocking foreheads until one secedes and storms out. Though sometimes, in the sleepiness of an early morning, those already awake will see them getting out of bed together. And from their union - life.