Gratitude List:
1. A purposeful work life.  Even when it feels overwhelming, the hard work is all to the greater purpose of developing confident and thoughtful communicators.  And even that has its own greater purpose, which is to help nurture this group of soon-to-be-adults into a deeper knowledge of how they will belong to the world, how they will make their lives their own. This is a privilege that fills my heart.
2. Grandparents who help to take care of the children while I get some of the extra work done.  A safe and caring and fun place to be, to make memories.
3. The hello part of the hello-and-goodbye cycle
4. Rain and mist
5. I don’t know quite how to word it, or how to express why I am grateful for it, but there’s something about grief that grabs my gratitude at the moment.  I just finished Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior, and it triggered some deep grieving for me.  Like the main character in that book, my own (now many years past) grief over pregnancy losses is bound up somehow with the grief over lost species and the panic I feel about environmental loss.  During the brief months of my first pregnancy, we celebrated the tender and fragile hope that perhaps the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker was not actually extinct, but making a life in the swamps of Arkansas.  My hopes for the survival of the Ivory-Bill and the monarch butterfly and the several species of African rhinoceros crumble less precipitously than did my dreams of that first pregnancy.  Still, the grief settles in a similar place within me.  Like my friend Natasha, who spent a large part of a year of intentional grieving (The Year of Black Clothing) for all the environmental and human costs of our modern way of living, I want to give the grieving space inside me, let it do the work that it has appeared to do.  Whatever that may be.

May we walk in Beauty!

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This one just happened yesterday as I was walking out of school.  I don’t know what it’s about, exactly.

Because the moon.
And why not?
You knew
the moon would be the answer.

You knew the way the sky
would crumble underneath
her silken gaze,

the way the stars
would tumble through her dreams.

***

It feels a little unfinished.  I suppose the drive home is not always conducive to the writing of poetry. . .

Gratitude List:
1.  Everyone’s photographs of fall trees
2.  Good literature
3.  Coffee
4.  Breathing
5.  The turning of the year.  I must admit that this is the hard turning for me, which for the past ten years has been eased by the slow and gentle movement into the darkness that comes when the farm season is over.  With the rush and constancy of school, I am finding it challenging again, this shift into darkness.  All will, of course, be well.  But I must (as perhaps you must too) remember to take the journey to the darkness gently, to find spaces for good strong breath, to hold my people tightly, and be held.  This is a good time, no matter how it may challenge my spirit, a time which has lessons for us, dreams to share.  I must be sure to make my spaces for contemplation amidst the cheery clamor of the daily.

May we walk in Beauty!

this cat is purring a poem
gently in my ear
the rhythm only a whisker away
from being pure doggerel

but then he changes up the beat

 

Gratitude List:
1. First Quarter grades are finally ready for posting.  Just in time.  Oh, I have learned so much about time management.  I thought I was being wise, but I think I can really tweak my next semester to be much more efficient.  Sometimes you just need to get around that first lap to understand the lay of the course, to see how you need to plan the run.  I have learned so much.  Suddenly, though I am weary, I feel full of energy and excitement for the next lap.  This one, I am going to manage so much more efficiently.
2. That red-shouldered hawk with the gingery breast who sits in Neighbor John’s walnut tree for hours at a time while the sun warms her feathers.  She sits so still, and close enough that I can see the black and white checkered pattern on her wings and the red on her shoulders that gives her her name.
3. The way this cat clings to desperately to me when he sits on my lap. But it makes it really hard to get up and get anything else done.
4. Watching the 9th graders catch fire for writing poetry.  We have to study the poetry of other people, too, but they’re having so much fun writing their own that I want to do that the whole time.  Watching their eyes as they read out something that fell together in a quick exercise, when they realize that meaning is born from the juxtaposition of random words or ideas, the repetition of a phrase, or the sudden coming together of similar sounds.
5. Tonight I will sleep and sleep and sleeeeeep.

May we walk in Beauty.  May your sleep be deep.

Gratitude List:
1.  Gull feathers, gulls.  More than any other bird I know, the gull shows its developmental stages incrementally, and I can never tell who is who, because the plumage on one species may have five different stages.  Except the great Blacked-backed Gulls–they have all the plumage variation, but you can’t miss them for size.  We’ve seen dainty little terns, a pair of oystercatchers, several flocks of sanderlings flying in formation through the spray of the breakers, and a migrating flock of ten thousand swallows, stopping for a day or two on the dunes to refuel before they fly on.  We’ve seen a monarch or two, and I am hoping we just missed the main body of their migration.  Sometimes when we’re here for our September days at the beach, we’ve seen several an hour.  Last year, the dragonflies were migrating through when we were here, and I lost count of them.
2.  Playing on the beach with Christopher Robin and Galileo.  Galileo throws himself into the waves, body and mind, commenting on the feel of the force against his body, comparing the difference between a wave that is breaking as it hits him and a wave that has already broken.  He pays attention to the feel of the force of the undertow sucking at his feet while the next wave crashes over him.  He especially loves when two waves come right at him at different angles and he is caught in the corner between.  His attention to the physical and mechanical forces at work only increases his wonder and delight in the experience.
Christopher Robin is all light and air and dream and magic, wanting to stand out in the water as far as he can bear, holding tightly to his dad as the waves crash in, “Hold tighter!  Hold tighter!”  Or he catches hold of one of us as we stand watching the waves come in, “C’mon!  Let’s go-let’s go-let’s go!  See this!  Look at this!”  And my heart is hurting just ever so slightly because I remember that at the end of the Winnie the Pooh books, Christopher Robin leaves the Hunderd Aker Wood, and that small bear is bereft, and I think how probably that small bear was also A. A. Milne himself, and is me.  (It is good that I found a job for this fall because I think I would be sort of mopey and sad right now otherwise.)
3.  Forts and castles in the sand.  The boys spent the day digging their massive holes and setting ramparts about them.  The waves took them in a matter of half an hour at the end.  Me, I made a many-turreted Gothic cathedral with fine fairy arches.  We watched to see what the waves would do at the end.  One wave.  One wave took it down and left only a vanguard of shivering foam and a garland of bladderwrack, and no sign whatsoever that a castle had stood there moments before.  We are all sand castles, perhaps, or words scratched in the sand, here for a moment and then gone in a breath, yet hovering somehow, in the memory of the molecules that made us up.  So fleeting and enduring we are.
4.  Returning to all our favorite places.  This motel and its pool and the the towns here on the 7-Mile-Island are a memory place for the boys, and they remember now from year to year all the things we do.  Our trip is truncated to a single weekend this year because I am working, but we’re still able to pack in quite a bit of fun, and several of our favorite eating spots.  Take-out from Nemo’s Pizza yesterday (sausage pizza and a fried flounder parmesan sub), supper at Tortilla Flats yesterday (Navajo Tacos with Coconut Butterfly Shrimp, Shrimp and Scallop Fajitas–we skipped the Jersey Tomatoes with Fresh Crabmeat appetizer because the portions here are so enormous), and we’ll have breakfast at Uncle Bill’s Pancake House this morning before we play some more in the ocean or pool, or head back home–depending on our whim.
5.  Mentors everywhere.  I am so grateful for all the life experience of the people I know, you who have been parents and teachers and farmers and poets and writers and wisher and dreamers, and how you have been willing and gracious to lend a listening ear and a piece of requested advice when I have needed the extra support.  Blessings on the mentors.

May we walk in Beauty!

I had to write this little tanka after a challenging conversation this week.  I suppose it isn’t as simple as this says it.  But perhaps it is.  I can have sympathy for the anxiety of the people of Israel in the face of Hammas’s break of cease-fire.  I can long for the safety and peace of the Palestinians, to live in their own homes with their olives trees, unmolested.  But we have seen repeatedly how taking up arms to try to solve this problem does nothing but destroy the lives of innocent civilians.

What good will it do
to say I am on this side:
Israel or Hammas?
Either choice appears to be
the side against the children.

 

Gratitude List:
1. Sage.  The color, the plant, the scent, the magic.
2. A letter of encouragement from a former teacher.
3. Listening to your story.  Telling you mine.
4. The way the food the earth provides perfectly nourishes our bodies.  That symbiosis.
5. The anxious piping of a young red-tailed hawk from over in the the locust grove.  She is telling my story, too.
Oh, little wing-friend!  I, too, fear to fledge.  But won’t our flight be glorious?  Oh so glorious!

May we walk in Beauty!

Experimenting with form.  This is a bref double, a French form.  No one seems to agree exactly about the rhyme scheme, except that there need to be three rhymes.  Rhymes a and b appear twice in the first three quatrains and then complete the couplet.  Rhyme c ends the first three quatrains.  Let’s see what happens.  (I am choosing o try axbc, xaxc, bxxc, ab).  The children are starting to stir upstairs, so this is a toss-off.

Here.  Hold this, he said.
Then left the room.
And there she stood
holding his stuff, alone.

It bound her to him, you see,
this cord of obligation, this red
bond.  Hold my stuff. And he
was free as a bird.  She should have known,

perhaps, how it could come to no good,
how it would bind her to him.
And he would take no responsibility,
while her heart turned slowly to stone.

Next time she’ll break that thread
before it comes to blood.

 

Gratitude List:
1. When not-so-bad scenarios play out instead of worst-case scenarios
2. Shy boy excited to perform in his end of school-year program this morning
3. How the trees reach out to be noticed in this season–they’re just begging for attention
4. Chickpeas bubbling on the stove
5. People.  I like people.  Resilient, friendly, personable, curious, earnest.  (I know that isn’t the whole picture, but really, often people do rise to the expectations you have of them.)

May we walk in Beauty!

Sometimes I write because an obsession catches me, and I write not so much to offer my thoughts to the world, but to get it out of my system so something else can come.  That’s why I have written this poem.  Perhaps it’s part of what this poem means, too.  I don’t think it’s a cohesive whole yet.  But it’s got to come out so I can find space inside myself to notice something else, to write about something else.

This year he’s made himself so visible to me,
sitting low in the twisting fingers of sycamore
so the morning sun sets his feathers on fire.

Or clashing into the magenta hearts of dogwood blossoms,
preening and fluffing, stretching his wings
in the golden light of morning.

His flame licks from  greening branch
to greening branch and I am helpless.
My heart falls down.

Did Mary Oliver say that first? Or Rumi?
When I say my heart lies in pieces on the floor
I do not mean, The world is grey.

What is the name of this thing?
Perhaps it is amazement over-ripe,
gone sour, fermented to obsession.

It is a good wine, this.  A drug.
I hear him whistle from the trees:
Just one more look.  Just one.

I cannot feed my children.
I can write nothing but the word Orange.
I find myself on the porch, watching the branches

and wonder how I got there.
Were orioles common as robins
I’d be a simple failure at my life.

As it is, I spend my year longing
for these days of whistling flame,
for these mornings when my heart

is beckoned from its winter shell
and shattered on the rocks
like a thousand shining mirrors.

 

Gratitude List:
1. The silence that I had for a few moments this morning
2. Tiny wonders
3. Shattering and shining
4. My mother, who has given me so much, particularly the gift of noticing.
5. This fuzzy cat who is making it almost impossible to type.

May we walk in Beauty!

I brought my little prayer bundle inside today.  It’s been six weeks since I put it out in the elements. Perhaps six months would give it more time to be changed by the weather.  There’s been some transformation–the watercolors leaked beautifully over the poetry.  I will try to put it into some sort of art project before long.  I enjoyed having that little bundle out there, reminding me of the work I was doing on looking for a job that will be both exciting for me and supportive of the family.  In a lovely bit of synchronicity, I spent the day following a job lead a friend sent me, filling out an application and gathering my materials to send.  I spent the day happily imagining this possibility.

April is over, but I’m still coasting on the poetry wagon:

Like Alice’s Red Queen
I’m not too fussed about
imagining six impossible things
before my morning routine.

It’s the possibles
that wear me out,
with their fluttery wings,
their trenchant glances.

 

Gratitude List:
1.  Gold, gold, gold is the color of May Day!  Two bright finches on the green hillside in the morning rain.  The golden tulips opening their hearts in the rain.  Michelle’s magic dandelion picture, a village of a flower.
2.  Walking each other home.  Really, how would I manage without a little help from my friends?
3.  We got the tomatoes under cover before the worst of the hail came through.  A clatter on the window of the first hailstones, and Jon was out the door like a flash, running in his mud boots through the barrage.  I ran after him–I stopped to take off my watch and my glasses first.  When we’d finished saving the tomatoes and were back at the house, with the big ones bouncing on the grass, I shook hailstones out of my hair.  I had hail in my hair!  I changed clothes, and came downstairs to find that Joss had prepared a blanket on the couch for me to warm up in.  I felt so cared for.
4.  A good lead.  A possible lead.  Hope.  Imagining the possible.
5.  Homemade hummus

May we walk in Beauty!