Ann Pope Potter

Waking Up

2012-02-09T22:43:00.001-05:00

Where I live, the earliest daffodils are not the tall, stately yellow trumpets of garden magazines. Here along the rural state roads, the early risers are their short, stubby and tough cousins. In sheltered patches of old abandoned homestead gardens, oblivious to the seesawing weather patterns that bring frost and windchill one day and shirt sleeve weather the next, they have been showing their bright faces for weeks now. Months before the red bud and dogwood the Real World is already waking up. The time for rooting and renewal is drawing to a close.

There is something hopeful and promising about the sight of bright yellow daffodils returning year after year in gardens long forgotten. They seem to be a reminder that despite all our own entanglements and failures there is still a deep unquenchable push towards life and second chances. They come from old stock, planted long ago and their roots are strong and deep. They are not glamorous or delicate. But they are alive and willing and full of determination. They have rested from the long dry summer and now are awake and ready for life. Perhaps their modest beauty is a celebration of the truth that no matter what we have weathered, all around us in the most unexpected places, life waits for us, ready and eager to begin again.

Captured for a Moment

2012-01-25T10:22:00.001-05:00

For most of us by the end of January, the rain and cold of winter has settled in and made itself comfortable. The Real World has a tucked in feeling that as we barrel in and out of the busy days of our lives is so easily overlooked. But there are times, when the insulation of our artificial world doesn't quite seal us in. You know the moment. Leaving our homes bright with light, or the office meeting deadlines full of the busy work of the day, we put on our coats and head out. The door opens, we step out and suddenly we are transported into the world of winter. But this time, rather than dash for the car or the train, the air on our face feels clear and fresh. In the dark we see the shape of the trees beyond the parking lot and we sense the existence of this vast other world wrapping itself around us, inviting us to pause and look more closely. Already deep in the ground, the roots of living things are strengthening themselves in preparation for Spring. What a beautiful thought. Perhaps we too, can allow ourselves some rest and a bit of time to wander around inside of ourselves. We have deep roots too.

2012-01-18T07:00:00.001-05:00

It is surprising how often I run across trees in this condition in the woods. At the end of their lives they have been whittled down by hungry birds and animals in search of insects and the steady encroachment of decay, to one last sinew of their trunks. I call it the heartwood, that innermost piece of the tree itself and the strongest, left standing while all around its base lie the layers of its life. The quiet power of the tree reminded me not of how we will all decline, but about the resilient heartwood found in all of us, the source of our courage, stamina, willingness, and boldness. The place within that is unabashedly devoted, hopeful and encouraging, waiting to be discovered and used to help us build the life we seek.

"There is plenty of wood

for everyone

and you

Go ahead now

May you find

in the waiting wood

rough unspoken

what is true

or nearly true

true enough.

John Stone, "Whittling: The Last Class" from Music from Apartment 8

2012-01-11T12:23:00.000-05:00

There seem to be two kinds of days in winter: bright, sharply clear ones and dingy dark ones. Of course, that can be said about every time of the year, but in the winter, against the bareness of the landscape, they seem to fall in one of those two piles. Weather is a powerful metaphor for our own lives isn't it? Some days we feel so certain about our direction; full of clarity and purpose. Others find us brooding and worried and despondent with no prospects. Sound familiar? Those dark days, those are the ones we have to watch out for. When they sneak up on us, we feel ambushed. Yet, there are other times, when we ease ourselves into them, that they provide a space for reflection and even rest. The natural world rests in the winter. A good thing to remember when we are feeling low is we are part of that world originally. Its rhythms have a wisdom we often forget and some days we need to fold our tent and join it for a refresher course.

A rag rug of a landscape this morning---

remnants of dirty snow,

torn strips of muddy stubble field.

Behind the yellow windowshade of dawn,

is an enormouse, sunny room,

my grandfather's older brother, Lou,

wearing a woman's apron, blue and white,

bends stiffly away from the loom

upon which he's weaving the day

and rummages through his bag of scraps.

He needs one with a spot of green

to show me down here on the gravel road

stepping along in my winter coat.

Ted Kooser "Winter Morning Walks: one hundred postcards to Jim Harrison"

Setting Out

2012-01-06T12:26:00.003-05:00

Like it or not, here we are off and running into the New Year. Despite the struggles we found last year, they are behind us. Even if we are still wrangling with them, our deep connection to the turning of the natural world stirs within and conjurers up hope. After all these years I have come to believe that hope has its roots in our struggles. Deep within us we know that what we wrestle with has purpose and meaning. Yes, things can get worse before they get better, and in that interim we may find ourselves feeling lost and fearful. Yet, day after day, the sky brightens in the morning and we are given another page of life to write. Don't give up. Be gentle with yourself--compassionate and devoted to your being, your dreams, your hopes. Set out, fortified by what you have experienced. Life is built and lived as we go and the juiciest bits are found on the road, not at our destination.

"I love all beginnings, despite their anxiousness and their uncertainty, which belong to every commencement. If I have earned a pleasure or a reward, or if I wish that something had not happened; if I doubt the worth of an experience and remain in my past--then I choose to begin at this very second.
Begin what? I begin. I have already thus begun a thousand lives."
Rilke, Early Journals

Last Things

2011-12-30T14:33:00.001-05:00

Here we are, once more in the last sighs of the year. There is much to think about and consider: what we dreamed of and achieved; what we never expected that laid us low; those times when despite all odds we prevailed; and most remarkable of all-- when we benefited from an act of grace. Now is the time to "find meaning in the remainders' as a dear friend remarked and reflect over all these moments, letting go and forgiving not only others, but ourselves and filling the plans we make for the coming year with gratitude for all we have experienced. Important last things before we close this door and walk on with the gifts we received from all of it.

Peace and Blessings

Be Comforted and Glad

2011-12-24T17:06:00.000-05:00

"Is there anything that can take from you the hope of being someday in the God you are helping to create in each attentive act of love?

Please celebrate this Christmas with the earnest faith that He may need this very anguish of yours in order to begin. These very days that are such a trial for you may well be the time when everything in you is working at Him, as once you so urgently did as a child. Be patient and without resentment, and know that the least we can do is to make His Becoming no more difficult that Earth makes it for spring when it wants to arrive. Be comforted and glad."

Rainer Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, December 23, 1903

Christmas Blessings

As It Should Be

2011-12-07T00:30:00.000-05:00

The year is winding down. December too soon it seems, is upon us. Late in the day, I went out on the deck to watch the dark arrive. It comes so suddenly in the winter. Have you noticed? I was thinking about Thanksgiving, how much I enjoyed my family, about the changes coming in everyone's lives, the simple richness of living. The house pulsed and glowed with the jumbled up togetherness of all of us. My generation is now older, our children's lives no longer the center of ours and the gentle give and take of children leaving home, starting their own lives, alternating holidays gave rise to a sweet poignancy.

As I stood in the early dusk, I noticed something glowing white in the brown leaves of the flower border. I walked around and found the first blooms of a winter lenten rose I had planted the year before. The lovely bright faces of its blooms seemed a timely reminder that the call of life is forward towards growth. Roses, long associated with love, are an even older symbol for the manifestation of healing and love at hand. Their blooms at a time when all the rest of the earth is dormant remind us to look for new birth in our own lives. I thought of all the people I love, who like me are living their lives, preparing for Christmas each in their own way and I smiled. It felt good deep down. Just as it should be I thought, as I went in to turn on the lights.

Where We Give Thanks

2011-11-23T09:00:00.000-05:00

The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what,

we must eat to live.

The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the

table so it has been since creation, and it will go on.

We chase chickens or dogs away from it. Babies teethe

at the corners. They scrape their knees under it.

It is here that children are given instructions on what

it means to be human. We make men at it,

we make women.

At this table we gossip, recall enemies and the ghosts of lovers.

Our dreams drink coffee with us as they put their arms

around our children. They laugh with us at pour poor

falling-down selves and as we put ourselves back

together once again at the table.

This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella

in the sun.

Wars have begun and ended at this table. It is a place

to hide in the shadow of terror. A place to celebrate

the terrible victory.

We have given birth on this table, and have prepared

our parents for burial here.

At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow.

We pray of suffering and remorse.

We give thanks.

Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table,

while we are laughing and crying,

eating of the last sweet bite.

Joy Harjo, "Perhaps the World Ends Here" from Reinventing The Enemy's Language

You Can't Have it All

2011-11-16T08:58:00.001-05:00

But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown hands
gloved with green. You can have the touch of a single eleven-year-old finger
on your cheek, waking you at one a.m. to say the hamster is back.
You can have the purr of the cat and the soulful look
of the black dog, the look that says, If I could I would bite
every sorrow until it fled, and when it is August,
you can have it August and abundantly so. You can have love,
though often it will be mysterious, like the white foam
that bubbles up at the top of the bean pot over the red kidneys
until you realize foam's twin is blood.
You can have the skin at the center between a man's legs,
so solid, so doll-like. You can have the life of the mind,
glowing occasionally in priestly vestments, never admitting pettiness,
never stooping to bribe the sullen guard who'll tell you
all roads narrow at the border.
You can speak a foreign language, sometimes,
and it can mean something. You can visit the marker on the grave
where your father wept openly. You can't bring back the dead,
but you can have the words forgive and forget hold hands
as if they meant to spend a lifetime together. And you can be grateful
for makeup, the way it kisses your face, half spice, half amnesia, grateful
for Mozart, his many notes racing one another towards joy, for towels
sucking up the drops on your clean skin and for deeper thirsts,
for passion fruit, for saliva. You can have the dream,
the dream of Egypt, the horses of Egypt and you riding in the hot sand.
You can have your grandfather sitting on the side of your bed,
at least for awhile, you can have clouds and letters, the leaping
of distances, and Indian food with yellow sauce like sunrise.
You can't count on grace to pick you out of a crowd
but here is your friend to teach you how to high jump,
how to throw yourself over the bar, backwards,
until you learn about love, about sweet surrender,
and here are periwinkles, buses that kneel, farms in the mind
as real as Africa. And when adulthood fails you,
you can still summon the memory of the black swan on the pond
of your childhood, the rye bread with peanut butter and bananas
your grandmother gave you while the rest of the family slept.
There is the voice you can still summon at will, like your mother's
it will always whisper, you can't have it all,
but there is this.
Barbara Ras

Sometimes

2011-11-09T13:29:00.001-05:00

Sometimes, I am Startled Out of Myself,

like this morning, when the wild geese came squawking,

flapping their rusty hinges, and something about their trek

across the sky made me think about my life, the places

of brokenness, the places of sorrow, the places where grief

has strung me out to dry. And then the geese come calling,

the leader falling back when tired, another taking her place.

Hope is borne on wings. Look at the trees. They turn to gold

for a brief while, then lose it all each November

Through the cold months, they stand, take the worst

weather has to offer. And still, they put out shy green leaves

come April come May. The geese glide over the cornfield,

land on the pond with its sedges and reeds.

You do not have to be wise. Even a goose knows how to find

shelter, where the corn still lies in the stubble and dried stalks.

All we do is pass through here, the best way we can.

They stitch up the sky, and it is whole again.

Barbara Crooker, from Radiance

Delight

2011-11-02T13:21:00.001-04:00

"Listen, whatever it is you try
to do with your life, nothing will every dazzle you
like the dreams of your body, "
Mary Oliver, excerpt from "Humpbacks"

The leaves are turning more slowly this year around the lake. This week the zenith of color passed and now the poplars are almost all bare. The deep reds of the oaks have moved on to dark burgundy brown. The yellows have deepened into mustard and ocher. Soon a morning will come for the big 'let go' when the woods are full of swirling leaves on their way to the woodland floor.
Once years ago when I lived in the city I opened my door to soak up the magic and beauty of the leaves falling in the woods across the street. It was a beautiful clear morning, the street was quiet. Standing in the warm sunshine I heard my name called and there, two doors down, stood my neighbor, soaking up the radiance of the moment as well. We laughed and exclaimed over the beauty falling around us. It was a moment of complete delight.

We are born knowing about delight, but the whirl of modern life have distracted us from our ability to access it outside the world of things. Things do amuse, but I wonder if they have the capacity to feed us the way delight is meant to do. Delight awakens us to a sense of beauty and wonder that feels good deep inside us. We are opened to experience joyfulness in being alive in the world. What we are seeing, feeling, touching experiencing feels rich and satisfying, even opulent. We find it in a sudden smile, an unexpected caress, a splash of light across the garden, the faces of our little ones when they giggle, the leaves drifting down like cast off wings everywhere around us even though we know a hard afternoon of raking is on it's way: "and there it is again--/beauty the brave, the exemplary/blazing open." Lift up from your burdens, just for a moment if you can, and let some in.

One Heart

2011-10-26T04:13:00.002-04:00

I had the opportunity earlier this week to visit the bee hives of some new friends. In their retirement she enjoys her skill as a master gardener; his hobby has become bees. It was a warm day and the bees were swirling in and out of the entrances busy collecting pollen from the plants in their beautiful garden. I learned how the hives work and saw how much devotion is required of a beekeeper to protect the harmony and health of the colonies. As the trays were pulled out already heavy with honey and teeming with bees, they glowed in the afternoon light, and the beekeeper's slow and careful movements as he worked the hive conveyed a reverence and respect for this parallel world. He quietly explained the life of the hive ending with the remark that each and every bee had only one purpose: to support the success of the hive in which they lived, working tirelessly together, to ensure that goal. There was a pause and then I said: "You mean, they are of one heart?"
"Right" he replied.

While we know a great deal about the lives of bees, there is still much about our world and each other that we do not. Perhaps our insatiable desire to know and control everything is balanced by having something unknowable and mysterious surrounding us to temper and burnish the human drive to use knowledge for power instead of deepening. I don't know. What I do feel is a great need to recapture wonder and reverence and respect for all the worlds, not just the ones we have made, if the health of all is to be ensured. And as I left that day, I was thinking that maybe the way for that to happen is to be reminded more often of what the bees already knew: it will take one heart.

2011-10-19T16:13:00.000-04:00

It was only a patch of wild muscadine, but the late morning light falling across it's tangled arms transformed it into a glowing mound, revealing it's true beauty. We so often overlook the good, the beautiful in living. Our days, so full of worries and anxieties, things to be done, rarely leave the moment to look again. The trees have labored and held on through the scorch of summer. Like us, they face everyday, the unknown. But they prevail and through their courage, bring glory in the fall, warmth for the winter and hope again in the spring. See the tall beauties, everyone a queen or princess: look again. And so are we all.

"We have no reason to distrust our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors. If it has an abyss, it is ours. If dangers are there, we must try to love them. And if we would live with faith in the value of what is challenging, then what now appears to us as most alien will become our truest, most trustworthy friend. Let us not forget the ancient myths at the outset of humanity's journey, the myths about dragons that at the last moment transform into princesses. Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act just once with beauty and courage. Perhaps every terror is, in its deepest essence, something that needs our recognition or help." Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Ripening

2011-10-12T14:54:00.001-04:00

It's hard to think of Fall without imagining the gathering in of a harvest. In spiritual growth, this is often the most difficult moment-waiting for what seems to be an endless period when nothing seems ready to harvest in our lives despite all our attention and care. Just as in nature, a farmer can sense the crop coming to fullness, but the exact moment is never truly know until one morning walking down the rows or standing under the trees, tasting and feeling, the right time arrives. It is the same for us. The day comes when we discover we are living our lives differently.

The ripening process of the human heart and spirit, just as in The Real World, cannot be rushed. Each day in the growth process is necessary. We must feed and water and nourish ourselves with devotion, ward off unwelcome marauders and patiently wait until the mysterious process is accomplished within us. Only then are we able to reap the gain of our inner work and manifest it into the outer world. And then, just like the ripened fruit, our harvest will be rich with the juices of who and what we really are.

2011-10-03T21:44:00.000-04:00

Lord, the time has come. Summer was abundant.
Cast your shadows over the sundial,
across the field unleash your winds.

Command the final fruits to ripen.
Grant them two more southern days,
bring them to fullness and press
their last sweetness into the heavy wine.

And today, once again, a new morning: bright, with close, rounded clouds that frame expanses of the immeasurably deep sky. Agitation in the treetops. In everything else, restfulness. Windfall of apples. The grass softly invites you to walk out of the house...There are so many days here, none like any other. And beneath all their differences is this great similarity: the gratitude in which they are received.
Rilke, Book of Images, Early Journals

2011-09-21T09:03:00.001-04:00

Down near the bottom                                           of love, and love
of the crossed-out list                                             is no less practical
of things you have to do today,                               than a coffee grinder

Between "green thread"                                         or a safe spare tire?
and "broccoli," you find                                          Tomorrow you may be utterly
that you have penciled "sunlight."                             without a clue,

Resting on the page, the word                                but today you get a telegram
is beautiful. It touches you                                      from the heart in exile,
as if you had a friend                                              proclaiming that the kingdom

and sunlight were a present                                    still exists,
he had sent from someplace distant                        the king and queen alive,
as this morning--to cheer you up,                           still speaking to their children,

and to remind you that,                                          --and to any one among them
among your duties, pleasure                                   who can find the time
is a thing                                                                to sit out in the sun and listen.

that also needs accomplishing.                               Tony Hoagland, "The Word" from Sweet Ruin
Do you remember?
that time and light are kinds

So Many Moments

2011-09-14T08:38:00.001-04:00

After a long season of heat, August has finally burned itself out and the first full moon of Fall has brought with it blessedly cooler temperatures. Welcome September. Markets now are full of late season produce, the first pumpkins, gourds and apples. Mornings have a crispness that lifts the spirits. The great wheel of the year is shifting its gears down and we all turn our focus with it, surrendering summer to our memories. Suddenly the children are bigger and need new clothes, the yard needs raking, and there are all sorts of schedules to be kept. Life picks up a new pace and we move on.

In the gathering dark I walked down to the dock to watch the moon rise, thinking as I went of all that has happened this year. The quiet stillness of the water, the huge yellow pearl seemed more than ever to witness the inevitability of change. So much happens to us, so many moments we hardly notice, and others that flare so intensely they change us forever. Yet life sweeps them all together as we fill up and then empty out with the passage of time, still creating, like the moonlight across the lake, beautiful radiance from all of them.

Every year

everything

I have ever learned

in my lifetime

leads back to this: the fires

and the black river of loss

whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning

none of us will ever know.

To live in this world

you must be able to do three things:

to love what is mortal;

to hold it

against your bones knowing

your own life depends on it;

and when the time comes

to let it go,

to let it go.

Mary Oliver, "In Blackwater Woods".

Exactly Where

2011-09-07T11:29:00.002-04:00

May today there be peace within. May you trust God that you are exactly where you are meant to be. May you not forget the infinite possibilities that are born of faith. May you use those gifts that you have received, and pass on the love that has been given to you. May you be content knowing you are a child of God. Let this presence settle in to your bones, and allow your soul the freedom to sing, dance, praise and love.
It is there for each and every one of us. Prayer of St. Theresa

Small Things

2011-08-31T09:11:00.001-04:00

Off and on through out the summer I have been witness to what I call a "spider conference" just outside the glass doors from my studio. Every few weeks while watering the flower pots on the deck, I have looked up and seen a cluster of 10 to 15 grandaddy long legs along the edge of the roof. What are they doing? Why do they always cluster along the same strip of roof line? Why always about the same number?

There is much about the workings of the Real World we have no knowledge of, much less an understanding. Yet it continues to impact our lives in profound ways. It is true with our own inner Real Worlds. There are powerful places in all of us that are often overlooked or hidden by us as we try to conform to the cultures in which we live. Getting to know ourselves requires life long devotion. We are often more willing to spend time and energy trying to decipher others than we allow for ourselves. We need to remember when we refuse to acknowledge parts of ourselves, large or small, because we believe them to be unworthy or we are ashamed of them, we are not doing the real work of our lives. The seeds for our growth and deepening are sown into all the struggles and less admirable ways we deal with the everyday experiences of family, work, rest and play. Our work is to wonder about them.

"If you ally yourself with nature, with her sheer existence, with the small things that others overlook and that so suddenly can become huge and immeasurable; if you have this love for what is plain and try very simply, as one who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor: then every thing will become easier for you, more coherent and somehow more reconciling, perhaps not in your conscious mind, but in your innermost awareness."

Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Shade

2011-08-24T03:36:00.000-04:00

By the last weeks of August each year the summer furnace is on full blast. Everything is starting to dry up, shrivel up or give up. Humans included. We are all just worn out by the relentless heat..But despite all our sticky, sweaty weariness, off in the woods it's quiet, the light is filtered and cooled as it falls down into the midst of all the tall beauties. It's what they do best--smoothing out the hot fierce light of living into shade and rest for all the creatures of the Real World-- including us.

Each One

2011-08-17T12:44:00.000-04:00

And we, each one, are all the soils---
weed-choked and stony, deep and fertile--
and, each one, all the worlds.

We are each seed from the hand of
'The Father of lights'.
Seeds of light falling through the empty space
at the heart of the star which is everywhere
and in all things.
from Parabola

Tall Beauties

2011-08-10T02:13:00.003-04:00

After a month without rain, the long awaited summer cycle of afternoon thunder storms finally arrived. For weeks,dark blue violet clouds full of wind and lightning had been swelling up in the west most afternoons only to rumble and flash and move on without emptying themselves along this end of the lake. But at last, deep in the night whatever precise atmospheric conditions that needed to happen arranged themselves and the rains came. The ground was baked solid, and the water sheeted off, gushing down the roads, sluicing out new ravines and washing away the tenuous grip of everything weak and unprotected. Towering old trees, weakened by age, their heartwood riddled by decay as well as strong vibrant ones sheared off by lightning and wind, fell with every storm, taking down power lines and altering the line of the horizon. The sound and smell of the rain was wonderful, as were the renewed songs of the tree frogs and cicadas, but the relief was tempered by the cost in hardwoods as all across the ridge, the tall beauties fell. Laying in the dark, the lightning popping like old flashbulbs, the thunder snarling in the torrents of rain, it felt as if the woods was being beaten down by the very forces meant to restore them. It was frightening.

There in the dark I could not help but think how all across the world, it feels the same way. Generations of drought in governments and political systems, in food resources, financial responsibility, personal integrity, human rights,and natural stewardship have gathered into terrible dark storm clouds. We need the rain, but it is being brought to us in a storm that is altering the landscape of our lives. It is frightening, because real change involves letting go of what we know and moving forward without the knowledge of what lies ahead. The air is thundering with voices that can only talk of what is wrong and will fail. There is danger and pain in the forces of the natural world and the manmade one. But let us not be seduced by the chronically fearful who are so captured by blaming and rigidity they would have us fail to see the enormous potential for growth and realignment; for possibility and wholeness; justice, parity; to imagine what good can come. Now is the time to be hopeful, resourceful, constructive and fair; to bend and stand back up, to hold tight to the beautiful and creative and genuine, and in every way we can muster, to be ready to return with strength after the clouds open and the rain has fallen.We are not being beaten down, we are being called to grow.

"Not
tenderness, not longing, but daring and brawn
pull down the frozen waterfall, the past....
What blazes the trail is not necessarily pretty."
Mary Oliver, from "Skunk Cabbage"

Maybe

2011-08-02T17:48:00.001-04:00

She was struck by lightning a good while back and hung on for a long time, but finally the severe winter and the long dry spell won out and she surrendered. That wasn't a surprise. Eventually we all do, despite everything we do to pretend we won't. Then the morning arrived and driving by traffic began to slow because rather than take down the tree completely, the owners decided to do something very different with her once graceful leafy arms. It seemed to be a reverential act; a tribute to a long steady life of shade and company and beauty and gracefulness. Let us all pause to wonder if our own lives will make such a beautiful skirt around our knees.

"Maybe death

isn't darkness, after all,

but so much light

wrapping itself around us--

as soft as feathers--

that we are instantly weary

of looking, and looking, and shut our eyes,

not without amazement,

and let ourselves be carried,

as through the translucence of mica,

to the river

that is without the least dapple or shadow--

that is nothing but light--scalding, aortal light--

in which we are washed and washed

out of our bones."

Mary Oliver, excerpt from 'White Owl Flies Into and Out of the Field"

Becoming Good

2011-07-29T11:16:00.002-04:00

I came across a dead water snake in the road this week. From the condition it was in, I wondered if it could have been dropped by a hawk. It was certainly a vivid reminder of how the natural world operates. There everything is taken for what it is; which means the fox who stole the baby birds for supper, the snake snatched up by the hawk, the lightning, are not judged as being bad for doing what they are born to be. Being good in the natural world is being true to whatever you are and your place in the order of things. Goodness is not niceness and prettiness and safety. Goodness is authenticity and wholeness.

As we have moved further away from meaningful connection to the natural world, we have interpreted goodness less and less on this original concept. Instead, outside the merit of consequences and accountability, we have fallen prey to defining our personal value or goodness by a host of criteria that are artificial: things, color, abundance, and especially culture, politics and religion. We have lost touch with the original, more complete and powerful affirmation of genuine goodness: the capacity to live our lives attuned to who we are and in relation to the rest of world. When we artificially measure each other we choke off tolerance for difference and uniqueness and stoke the fires of discord and control. Rather than be accepting of the nature of other people, their cultures, and beliefs, we have made the assumption that because it is not the same as ours, it must be inherently dangerous.
This is not a discussion about not having consequences for hurtful actions, but wondering why we have separated ourselves with so much fear. There is room in the natural world for everything to be what it is, living side by side, in tune to their own rhythms. We are the only ones who are so afraid there isn't.

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....
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.
Mary Oliver, "Wild Geese"

Wonderfully Troubling

2011-07-20T13:49:00.000-04:00

"The world is more magical, less predictable, more autonomous, less controllable, more varied, less simple, more infinite, less knowable, more wonderfully troubling than we could have imagined being able to tolerate when were young." James Hollis

"Skeeree"

2011-07-13T13:19:00.001-04:00

Coming upon this arresting creature on the road this week set me to thinking about all things scary. Spiders are definitely on the top ten list for many people. It also reminded me of the reaction a dear friend told me about recently when her little grandson saw some battle scene paintings. His response was emphatic and clear: they were 'skeeree' Nana--SKEEREE!

People are afraid of all sorts of things. The world is very beautiful but it is also very scary at times. Watching the squirrels on the deck as they creep right up beside my chair, I know I am not on their scary list along with the fox or the hawk or some of my neighbors with BB guns. We have our own lists in our daily lives, but unlike the other inhabitants of the Real World, humans also carry another kind of skeeree around inside. Its is the fear of not knowing what happens next.

By the time we reach the second half of life, if we have been paying attention, we will have learned that no one really knows what comes next. There will have been enough failures and disappointments and heartaches--in other words a rich and meaningful life-- to teach us we are incapable of always knowing what life will bring. Now all the energy spent to make things turn out a certain way, to orchestrate and control because we believed that we would make us safer and less scared seems so unnecessary. Age and perspective help us look back and realize the life changing impact of the things we could never have imagined for ourselves when life arrived unannounced. Not having all the answers, just moving along watching to see what unfolds is not as skeeree as we had been led to believe. There really does exist a plan much larger than our own. When that happens something deep inside of us lets go and sighs back into itself because finally it comes to us that the only thing we really needed to know all along was we can navigate life and and enjoy it as it arrives each day.

A Wholesome Shape

2011-07-06T15:24:00.000-04:00

By July, summer is traversing its zenith. The constellation Sirius has positioned itself in the heavens to announce the impending arrival of 'the dog days'. Crops and gardens are teeming with produce. The woods are full of vines, wildflowers,the sounds of baby birds and young animals navigating the trees and leaf carpeted ground.Several times already I have surprised baby fawns on my morning walk Even the nights are full of life: crickets, tree frogs and cicadas sawing away, the local geese squabbling and owls hooting. My raccoon babies and the possums, regular visitors to the food scrap pile, sometimes have a heated discussion over who has prior reservations. The Real World is bursting with the power of life. This is when the woods threaten to overtake the house and a good chainsaw and pruning shears become an asset.

One of the pleasures of living in a beautiful locale is the opportunity it provides for my guests sink into reverie when they come. Early morning often finds them curled up in a chair in a quiet corner of the house or out on the deck with a cup of coffee practicing what I call the long stare...that unfocused gaze of looking out that also allows us to look within. Seeing this happening always affirms to me how essential and healthy it is to stop and consider the powerful events in our own lives which are bursting with the same intensity of living. I have often thought of this ruminating as a kind of inner life pruning. When we live at full throttle, eventually we need to slow down and clear out some of the debris living has created. And just like pruning, the best way to do that is not to just shear off the tops of things, but to reach in carefully and select the right limbs to cut back that will provide room for sunlight and new growth and create a wholesome shape.

"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 unfinishable story
and you are somewhere in it
and it will never end until 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."
Mary Oliver, excerpted from "What Can I Say"

To Trust Our Sadness

2011-06-29T06:42:00.000-04:00

"Consider whether great changes have not happened deep inside your being in times when you were sad. The only sadnesses that are unhealthy and dangerous are those we carry around in public in order to drown them out. Like illnesses that are treated superficially, they only recede for a while and then break out more severely. Untreated they gather strength inside us and become the rejected, lost, and unlived life that we may die of. If only we could see a little farther than our knowledge reaches and a little beyond the borders of our intuition, we might perhaps bear our sorrows more trustingly than we do our joys. For they are the moments when something new enters us, something unknown. Our feelings grow mute in shy embarrassment, they take a step back, a stillness arises, and the new thing, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it all and says nothing."

Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

The Best Remedy

2011-06-15T10:04:00.002-04:00

"The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere they can be quite alone with the heavens, nature and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be and that God wishes to see people happy, amidst the simple beauty of nature. As long as this exists, and it certainly always will, I know that then there will always be comfort for every sorrow, whatever the circumstances may be. And I firmly believe that nature brings solace in all troubles."
Anne Frank, from The Diary of Anne Frank

Anchorage

2011-06-08T11:08:00.002-04:00

Providing anchorage is something the Real World is especially talented at doing. When we allow ourselves to connect to the natural world in meaningful ways, we are attaching ourselves to a source of ballast we can use to keep us steady in the ups and downs of living. A quiet walk, a few days away can give us the change of scenery we need to be able to view ourselves more objectively; to find time to sort through some of our insides and imagine how to go about living our lives differently. And even if we do not readily reach a place of resolution or discern our next action, we are still nourished by the beauty of place.

Vacations are the modern equivalent of the ancient ritual of time apart. Older cultures recognized the value and necessity of reflection. Their acceptance of this need was a cultural anchor for everyone, something our world is sorely lacking. We live instantaneously and have been lulled into believing that everything should happen right now. Think for a moment how many times we have heard the media and talking heads in the wake of a disaster only hours old begin to ask when things will be back to normal? That probing has always disturbed me. Life does not ever go back. It builds on what has happened and goes forward. Creating something from the debris of what is left behind requires time and devotion. When we are reeling in the aftermath of turmoil whether it be within or without, what we need most is something steady to provide support and solace as we work through the meaning of what has happened. Perhaps when the moment arrives and we find ourselves beside the ditch wondering what to do next, we might remember it is the Real World that can always be counted on to be waiting with open arms.

Ditch Therapy

2011-05-31T09:09:00.001-04:00

Country roads have ditches. One of the small pleasures on my morning walk or wanderings along the back roads, is to see what is growing in them. You never know what you will find.

Most of us know the road of life also has it ditches. And yet aren't we always surprised when we run off into one? As hard as we strive to stay up on the paved roads of our plans and agendas, everyone eventually has something happen that lands them in the ditch. Even when we do manage to avoid them ourselves, we can be run off our road of choice by people and events and circumstances out of our control. Why IS that? Some of those might not be too bad, maybe enough to make us only briefly jump in the ditch to get out of the way. But sometimes a mac truck wheels around the corner and we get propelled 50 feet off the road into a ravine. Even worse are those times when we had a feeling we needed to watch out, but would not believe what we felt. The ditches we land in the aftermath of those kinds of situations have broken glass and poison ivy. You know, so that even when you do manage to crawl out, there will be a lingering reminders you might have avoided what happened if you had only paid more attention to the road signs.

So what's to be done? There we lay, disappointed, beat up, bruised, probably frightened and certainly disheartened. What's the point? The last thing we want to be hearing is that life is full of changes in direction. But, there we are in one of the few places we are humbled enough to take a good look around at ourselves, our lives, the world and our place in it. This means our dreams, our hopes and our failures. And while we are down there we have a real opportunity to face up to what is and isn't working and make the hard choices . It means we are going to have to make some changes in how we go about our lives. It is the ultimate, ungraceful but highly effective, wake up call.

There are a great number of people in the world in ditches right now for lots of terrible reasons not of their own making: jobs, the economy, politics, religious strife, famine, disease and wars.Add to this our own personal struggles and it is easy to feel powerless and despondent But maybe now more than ever, in the midst of all this upheaval it is important to remember that down there in the poison ivy, the litter and the briers the Real World grows some of its most wonderful wild flowers and creates havens for all kinds of wildlife and insects. When we are thrown into ditches, whether of our own making or not, we need to hold tight to the truth that we always have a choice. What happens next can be a positive creative act. There is hope and promise inherently available when we let ourselves face what we need to do. It's not all litter and briers and poison ivy. It's also possibility, opportunity and a chance to build a new life and a better world. Something to think about maybe, next time you find yourself there.

Two Points of View

2011-05-25T09:23:00.000-04:00

Abandoned homesteads are not an unusual sight in rural areas. Over the years, simple clapboard farmhouses are left behind for all sorts of reasons. There is an old home place for sale nearby which is slowly disintegrating into it's original elements. Over the years I have watched as the modest garden planted and tended so long ago by the woman of the house continued to bloom despite the steady encroachment of the wilder world. In some mysterious form of swap, when the grasses and shrubs began to crowd in usurping the gardens original boundaries, volunteers from the garden began springing up along the ditch by the road. Man made boundaries are meaningless in the Real World. It was a heartening sight to see their brave little faces. Even the usual 'no exceptions' county maintenance road crew skirted around them.

This Spring the garden reached the point where it was obvious the plants put there so long ago would finally be swallowed up. I felt a tug at my heart each time I drove by. One morning I could stand it no longer. The property had been derelict for years I rationalized. No one cared about that garden anymore, much less all the effort of caring and tended by the woman who planted it so long ago, so I gathered my short shovel and trowel and clambered up the hill to the front yard of the house feeling guilty for trespassing but doing it anyway. The wild privet was up to the roof, the grasses thick with crickets and butterflies and hidden canes of blackberry. But when I reached what was left of the garden, I found profusely blooming, clump after clump of rose companion, each tall silvery spire crowned with the most unbelievably intense magenta star. I sank my shovel into the loamy soil intent on my mission to save a few clumps when suddenly a hard gruff voice called out from the road: "Do you have permission to do that?"

Be still my heart. I stopped and looked up at the man standing there, who had seen me on his morning walk. A thousand lies went through my head and then something in me came alive. "No I do not", I said as I straightened up, "but this little garden that some woman planted years and years ago is going to be leveled and forgotten when this land sells. I am saving some of these plants." I stared him down. " Is that okay with you?" There was a moment while he considered and then, he walked on. I quickly finished and as we say around these parts: skee-dattled.

A few days later I stopped again, this time though along the edge of the road below the house. The digging is much harder and rockier but I was feeling remorseful and these plants were on the road right of way. As I wrestled with the briars and rocky soil, out of nowhere a car pulls up and stops. This time it was a woman. I stood up, ready to give my excuses, when she rolled down her window smiling and said: "You know, I do that all the time. I even went up into the garden of the homestead. You know the woman who put in that garden must have loved plants. I could not bear to let them get swallowed up."

Be still my heart again--but this time for a different reason. She introduced herself, shared some recent plant finds and drove off, as a new friend.

Yes, I know there are laws about trespassing but this was not an act in defiance of them. This little adventure is about something far more important. All over the world there is fighting over who gets to own what, when the truth is none us will ever be anything more than renters. The great challenge of our times is for us to realize that we all have a right to be here, that there is so much worth saving and caring for all around us, ourselves included and that whether or not that happens may all come down to our point of view.

Fresh Eyes

2011-05-11T09:10:00.000-04:00

When you live in a place for a long time its easy to no longer see what is around you. Sometimes it takes being away from the overly familiar to return fresh eyes to us. That happened to me recently after spending time along the coast. Driving up the winding road to the house on my return it seemed to me that I had never seen the woods so green and lush. The next morning, the leaves of the oaks outside my window were breathtaking. I had ceased to see how beautiful the woods really are.

There is a time in all our lives when we need fresh eyes. Wrestling and worrying with the same problems day after day, captured by the scripts we have created to deal with them, eventually we lose perspective and initiative. More importantly, we often lose our creativity-- that mysterious ability to connect to our intuition and open up to a new approach in our actions or attitudes or both. Human will is a mighty instrument and we use it just as often to hold us back as to carry us forward. It requires a fresh viewpoint every once in a while to stay balanced.

Travel has always been the great provider of opportunities to gain perspective. We allow ourselves to get out of the routine of our lives; we let go of the scripts we have written for ourselves and branch out, maybe even grow a few leaves while we are gone. But it can happen in other ways. Sometimes a loving conversation can produce a much needed insight or an occasion to see what the lives of those around us are like can inform our views about our own.. But the easiest of all may just be slowing down long enough to be lured away from the usual by the loveliness of the natural places around us. The effect is the same: to help us let go of our grip on how we have decided we have to do things and consider how we might not, or even better, might could. Somewhere in the vast space between those places the beauty of the world is waiting to help us see how that can happen.

A Failure of Imagination

2011-05-04T08:01:00.000-04:00

I've been visiting along the coast of South Carolina for the past week. The weather has been spectacular--cool and breezy. The huge spring storms that wrecked havoc across the mid Atlantic states have only scoured the humidity from the air here and intensified the blue of the sky. The marsh and coastal woodlands are full of songbirds and the first batch of fledglings are already starting to come to the feeders. My sister's caged finches are trumpeting the hatching of the first two of their four eggs. The babies are so tiny they can only be distinguished when they open their mouths or wiggle their little feet. It is very moving to consider how something so small can survive, much less have a place, in the fierceness of the world.

Wandering these lovely islands I kept thinking about how much beauty there is around us, yet threaded through it all is the reality in both the Real World and the world we have made, that sooner or later we are all held accountable: to ourselves, each other, and the earth.. The events of the last few days and months are evidence of the consequences for governments and individuals which have forgotten this truth. In times when the settling up is taking place, it becomes even more important to remember that no one on either side is ever exempt. There is no room for joy in justice.

On one barrier island shoreline last week I came across two couples quietly watching the waves in the late afternoon. Our later years are often a time when we turn our energies towards giving back; seeking to balance out our own fierceness by creating lives more full of beauty and love and gratitude. How that balance can be manifested is the great work for all of us, but as I considered what that means, I ran across these wonderful lines, and I was heartened. Perhaps, you will be too.

"In my dream the angel shrugged and said "if we fail this time, it will be a failure of imagination" and then she placed the world gently in the palm of my hand."

Pursuit

2011-04-20T10:00:00.000-04:00

I awoke this morning to the sound of the crow alarm. They had discovered a young red tail hawk in its overnight perch and they were zealously mobbing it. Most of the time this lasts just a few minutes and the sleepy owl or annoyed hawk is driven to take flight and flee. Today was a bit different. There were twice as many crows as usual it seemed and so the sound of their ' caw, caw, caw' was loud and close, but the hawk was not being easily intimated. Its roost above the water was just beyond my window so as I pulled myself from sleep to the crow's fierce cries, I could see them swarming through the spring leaves of the trees. They were in a frenzy of pursuit, chasing the hawk, who was just as determined to hold it's ground, from tree to tree. Back and forth, around and around, in and out of the tree tops they went in the early light of day. The lake surface was gleaming, the sun's light concentrated by the encroaching black of thunderstorms moving in from the west.

What a familiar scenario. Haven't we all been either the hawk or the crow? Aren't there times in all of our lives when we feel that we have every right to be where we are and everyone around us thinks we do not? And, haven't there also been moments when we are filled with zeal in our pursuit of what we feel to be a very real threat to our way of life or dreams? Back and forth we go as well.

In the language of symbols, hawks are seen as messengers. It's cry was a signal to heighten awareness and be open to receiving a message, to 'be--aware' of how a given situation is seen from the distance of perspective. Crows are revered in many cultures for their wisdom. They are the keepers of the sacred law which is not the same as human law. Their appearance was a signal to remember there exists a higher order of right and wrong beyond the range of human law from which true integrity arises.

Tomorrow begins the most holy days of the Christian Easter. This powerful event is full of hawks and crows in every stage of development. It is the universal story told in every faith, of human beings grappling with zeal and perspective, struggling to understand the possibility that there could be a law beyond their own human capacity to create, and with the message that human life might have a much wider and broader meaning than we have allowed ourselves to ever consider. Back and forth, back and forth, both sides wrestle as events move everyone towards the opportunity for transformation.

I am wondering this morning, that perhaps this is the great work for all of us. We want our world to be perfect and we have separated ourselves by the means we feel that can happen, while all around us we are being called to fall back, to look up and beyond. In the grip of our determination and pursuit we are not able to see the opportunity for transformation is encountered through a mystery we may not control or delegate or enforce on anyone. Something to wonder about perhaps in the coming days.

Easter Blessings

Fallen Beauty

2011-04-13T10:37:00.000-04:00

When the dogwoods move from what I love to call the 'star stage'-- their blossoms only miniature versions of the bloom to come-- and open up into the milky white 'moons' of their full blossoms, then Spring has established its hold on the woods. So when I went out to walk earlier this week and discovered the wind had broken off an old slender dogwood at it's throat, and left its beautiful canopy spread out across the gravel of the drive, I was saddened. It was an old dogwood, already only a whisper of its former self, but it continued each year to bloom, a wonderful splash of white along the curve of the driveway.

I stood over the fallen beauty and struggled with what to do next. The tree top was still partly attached and I could see the degeneration in the trunk that had made it susceptible to the force of the thunderstorm. There was no chance of it surviving the break. The logical tidy thing would be to get my saw and finish the job. I sighed and went on with my walk. Maybe later.

Later came after lunch as I walked down to the mailbox. Passing the fallen beauty again, I marveled at the lush blooms. It seemed oblivious to its fate. It was simply carrying on, enjoying the attentions of the bees, it's moons now turning to keep their gaze heavenward. I went back to my other tasks. Days passed. I clipped a few small limbs and brought them into the house to add to my wild azalea and sweet shrub arrangements.

The night before the arrival of the bulky garbage truck I reached down into the mass of blossoms and pulled them away from its path, thinking my act of mercy might finish what the wind started. Despite it's ancient state, I could feel the trees fierce attachment to its trunk. It seemed to groan slightly, as if it were being turned in bed. I thought of my own mother, in those last weeks of her life, who kept her own face turned heavenward, despite all our gentle turnings. Like the dogwood, her slenderness masked the strength of the life left within her. I knew then I would wait on to cut the dogwood. This was its final spring and to me it was important to allow it to complete this last beautiful act which in my eyes, had been made even more exquisite by the work of the storm.

It is the same for us isn't it? Aging, illness, suffering--our lives are full of it. Every day brings all kinds of death and endings, some easy, even welcome; others only with great sorrow and after a long holding on. We learn early to endure, but we should not forget, there is a powerful force in all of us that knows life is far more than enduring; a pulse inside every one of us that can, if we allow it, create the beautiful and precious in the most terrible and heartbreaking of circumstances. It is a strange and mysterious gift, this fallen beauty, but it alone has the power to make meaning out of living, to turn our gaze upward from the white moons of the dogwood spread across the gravel at our feet and feel again, the fierce attachment within us to what is there.

Lightning and Miracles and Lightning

2011-04-06T11:37:00.001-04:00

Ah, the whimsy of Spring. A bit like adolescent hormones isn't it? One day the air is warm and promising, the next cold and dark. It seems as if there is a struggle between the deathlike grip of winter who does not want to retreat and springs potential for new life. Back and forth they go through the months of March and April, taking us with them as our own spirits lift and fall. This week a fierce wave of weather moved through the south. Late in the night high winds toppled sleeping trees as the sky above the lake was illuminated with flash after flash of lightning. It felt like winter's last stand.

In the long tradition of the hero's journey, there inevitably appears some last encounter to be endured before he can make his way through the lightning and thunder of the underworld and back up into the light of the world. It arrives when the hero who has already endured and prevailed many trials, is the most vulnerable. The famous 'dark night of the soul'. These are the hours when regret and loss of faith swirl and try to suffocate. This is when sorrow seems the most overwhelming, suffering meaningless, all choices untenable, and all efforts wielded in vain. There is only awareness that despite every thing achieved so far, nothing is decided. In those moments if he is to truly be a hero, he comes to the understanding that whatever happens next is no longer in his power to control. This of course, as the stories affirm to us, is when the magic sword is discovered, the angel appears, or the lost key is found. Only then, does the miracle happen.

There is a great cry in our world for miracles right now. Change, much of it frightening in its intensity and outcome, is everywhere. Nothing seems sure. Everyone believes their way is the right way. We are all watching deep in the night, the lightning flashing, as the thunder rolls and trees fall. And, fear? Fear is everywhere: for personal safety, for a future, in many places in our world, for tomorrow. We are realizing on many levels, the limits of our power and it is I believe, a very good thing. We are learning to see things as they are-- not as we think they should be. We are learning to accept lasting change is the child of suffering and hardship; that solutions arise not from force of will, but from being courageous enough to sit with the untenable; acknowledging the reasons for the existence of all involved, until the tension between the two creates the moment for the miracle. We are living in a powerful, momentous time in history, but we have always been moving toward it. This is the way of the world. Change sweeps up all the parts of life we don't want to think about much less deal with and asks us to take a good look. If we don't, then it rubs our faces in it. We have come once again, to that place in our journey where it is time to surrender our singular solutions and devote ourselves to accepting we may not know what the solutions are. It happens in each of our lives, in our families and neighborhoods; in our governments and across our imprint on the natural world. Over and over we are being invited to surrender our preconceived way things should be and admit that while we do not know the shape of what is to come, we are willing to stand and endure the agony of waiting, until the miracle is made manifest.

Resurrection Fern

2011-03-30T01:59:00.003-04:00

A trip to visit newly retired friends on the Georgia coast this past week was a welcome respite from the lingering gray landscape of the lake. The warm air and smell of the ocean and marsh felt like an embrace. The world of marsh and shore restores me unlike any other place.

One by one over the last few years my close friends have started retiring and reshaping their lives for the years ahead. It has been a wonder to watch the different ways each have dealt with the choices involved to close down one way of being and begin opening up to another. If you have worked for decades and juggled a life of friends, church, and family, coming to a full stop is no small event. Even those who are not retiring are downsizing and simplifying.. Its as if they hear a mystical trumpet call announcing the time has come to pursue the aspects of life that were stored away while work and family took precedence.

The house my friends chose borders the marsh. At the edge of the yard a beautiful live oak tree full of resurrection fern leans out over the marsh grass, a plant that earned its name by turning brown and dormant during dry spells as it was doing now. Looking at it covering the heart and arms of the tree I thought about how beautiful it would look once the rains arrived and the tight crinkly brown fronds transformed overnight into dense green fern.

I've been thinking about that resurrection fern a good deal since I came home. It is a powerful image for these later life years. Just like that fern something dormant in us does wake up at the trumpet's call because deep down we know it is announcing not the end of our usefulness but the coming of rain that will resurrect us from an old life and propel us into opportunities for a completely new one. It signals the end of the driving need of the first half of life and in the gathering stillness clears the way for us to discover all that energy has changed us. All that living and working has been preparing us for what we choose to do with the time remaining. Despite the challenges that remain in our lives, many of us find ourselves freer and more aware of who we are than ever before. And even if we are bewildered by the freedom, we still have the distillation in us of having lived and tasted life. Something long quiet gets called back to life, just like that fern. If we are willing, we can turn and see the shape of our lives. There is still time to use what we have learned and let that enrich the parts of ourselves we have never explored: the talents and passions we put away in order to make our way in the world. Here at what we thought was the end, we get another beginning and if we accept it, our lives become a blessing to us and to the world in ways we may not ever have thought possible.. Opening my email after I returned home I learned the rains had moved in after I left. The live oak at the edge of the marsh was now covered in a luxuriant green blanket of fern. I smiled and smiled. Something to think about.

Whirling Blades

2011-03-16T12:36:00.001-04:00

Climbing that long hard hill this morning I thought back over how hard it was to make the decision to have the road back to the house paved. My Dad had the road cut to build the house back on the ridge above the water. It kept the house secluded and surrounded by the neighboring woods and created a wonderful retreat. He maintained himself with a backhoe but after his death keeping it up become more and more difficult. Also, if there was snow or ice of any real substance, then the steep hill on part of it could be impassable for days. So, after lots of thought, our family decided to deed over the once private road to the county.

Now when the weather is bad, they come and gravel and ice, other folks have moved in to the surrounding woods and what was once wilderness has become tamed. It also means that a couple of times during the year the country road crews arrive with the bush hog cutters to trim the sides of the road and the limbs over the power lines. Years ago the men climbed the trees and chainsawed out the limbs--a slow and arduous task Now there is this incredible spinning blade right out of a horror film that shears off all in its path. It has been a difficult result of our decision to absorb.

Walking along the road this morning I looked up to see the sheared scars on the trunks of the pines and hardwoods bordering the road. I am pragmatic enough to understand it was a necessary sacrifice, but I couldn't help but think of that Elton John song from Lion King--the line from the Circle of Life which runs: "some people sail through their troubles, and some have to live with the scars." We all have experiences that reflect that line. Looking back over our lives, many of us will have vivid memories of being sheared back, cut off at the trunk the way those white pines were along the big hill. There are few words to acknowlege and honor the experience it seems is an essential aspect of living. We will run up against events and relationships that will ask us to sacrifice what we thought was a perfectly good part of ourselves for something beyond our understanding...even something that we may intellectually know is for the greater good of ourselves and others. But the shearing off, the peeling away down to our trunks...that can be horrible.

The world this beautiful Spring morning, feels more tenuous and fragile than ever. What is happening? Where are we going? The whirling, shearing blade is merciless and relentless. I was thinking about this as I turned and started back down the hill Our world is so very beautiful and we have suffered so much in the decisions we have as to how we live in it....in our own lives, our families, our governments and nations. At the curve in the road I looked off to the side, and there were the delicate blooms of the service berry, their white faces graceful and modest. In the wide stretch of gray tree trunks, it stood alone, luminous. The quite simplicity of its beauty lifted me from my sadness and awakened my faith. Yes, it is true there is much about living we will not understand, but in my heart, I will continue to believe that what comes to us, even the whirling blades, carries more than destruction and scarring. We will always have the choice to take what remains and make something meaningful and beautiful and better from what is left behind. Let us take heart and prevail.

Too Early Timing

2011-03-02T09:42:00.001-05:00

It seems too early for Spring, but despite my calendar, it is here. Two weeks of temperate weather in mid-February has triggered the wake up alarm on nature's clock. Buds are swollen on the trees, the bulbs are up and the sun arrives accompanied by birdsong again.

After a long hiatus I have started back walking. Not having navigated the 'big hill' in weeks I've had to get used to pacing myself as I make the climb. The area here has changed so much in the last 15 years. There are many more homes now and the road which was dirt and gravel for so long, is now paved. As I was coming back last week from my walk, I noticed a long angular branch from an oak that the utility men had dropped when cutting back the trees. It had a beautiful shape and since I had already brought in some forsythia to force, I thought I would see if the swollen buds it carried would open.

We all recognize that life is about timing. There is our human concept of it, the time we try to buy, sell, save, speed up and in countless other ways allow to dominate the worlds we have created. Some of that is simply about the orderliness of existence but a great portion is a complicated perception we have about how we believe we need to live our lives. Inevitably there comes a point when we are faced with the truth that we cannot always make events occur when we want. We miss our flight. We forget to go online and pay the bills by the due date. Our meeting runs late and the daycare charges us overtime. Even though we may feel Spring has arrived too early, here it is. Even though we may have wanted a contract at work to be completed by now, it still isn't.. Even though we may have sought every possible program for a troubled child and she still cannot step back into the healthy flow of life. Even though we saved a lifetime for retirement and then wake up one morning to discover it evaporated overnight while we were dreaming. Or, the terrible moment when we learn the chemo isn't working or there are no available donors before it will be too late.

I took the long graceful branch of oak and placed it in water on the living room hearth. Coming and going from my studio I soon quit noticing it until after a few days in the quiet of afternoon tea I looked up to see its curve now filled with the delicate tangerine of blooms. There is much about living that is mystifying and overwhelming and yet there is still so much richness to life that continues to exist despite the disappointments and failures we experience within the worlds we build for ourselves. Looking at the tender faces of the oak blooms I thought of how hard we all work--pouring ourselves into our dreams, our families, our jobs and how each of us in our own way has experienced timing that seems so out of joint, so determined to work against us. It is not unlike this early spring, one day it's only 40 degrees at noon and then overnight its 70. Our coats are too heavy, the garden is calling, time and us feel out of joint. It's hard to be off our schedules, blown off course especially when we are trying so hard to stay on course. But as the beauty of spring begins to unfold around me I manage to find some lighter clothes in the back of the closet. I start slowly mastering the big hill again and I find myself taking heart. I am reminded one more time, that when our plans go awry, and most especially when we are left desolate in that wake, there is a timing to life not held in our trembling hands and to which we must submit even when it hurts us. Even when we cannot imagine any good to result. I am learning again, when that happens, there is still going to be somewhere waiting, an oak branch that we needed to see bloom.

Not Your Favorite Breakfast

2011-02-23T07:56:00.003-05:00

Rounding the bend recently I came upon three familiar hunched over shapes breakfasting over the remains of a fresh roadkill. Vultures--nature's undertakers. We've all seen them going about their grisly business and probably looked the other way. These were so caught up in their work I had to stop the car and wait for them to reluctantly flap away. I see vultures often now on the road or circling in the sky . The increase in development around this end of the lake has brought more roadside casualties with it. In the city I used to see mostly opossum, the occasional squirrel. Here I've seen those, as well as raccoon, beaver, owls, hawks, coyote, rabbit, deer and most recently, skunk. It saddens me.

Despite our modern distaste for their essential role in the balance of nature, vultures have a symbolism that would surprise most people. For obvious reasons they represent purification and the cycle of death and rebirth. To encounter them in a significant way was considered confirmation of a new relationship between the volatile aspects of life and the fixed eternal energies of the cosmic world. But they also represented a promise that the suffering at hand was temporary and necessary even if not understood because a higher purpose was at work. To come upon them at their work was to witness something mysterious and holy.

We have all had vulture moments in our own lives; those times when we have grisly but necessary work to do. Perhaps when we had to fire an employee, cope with the ravages of disease, face an unexplainable loss or speak the truth when everyone would rather it not be acknowledged. There are other grisly moments less public when we turn inward and own up to the less than attractive parts of ourselves we would rather overlook, or face the truth about our own natures. These are only a few of the life changing moments that despite being unsavory to us are ultimately about paving the way for change to create an opportunity for a new way of being. We may not come to our tasks as zealously as the vulture greets his breakfast on the road, but our understanding of the need for the vulture's work is just as essential. Living is a constant process of death and renewal. All our lives we will be asked to clean away the used up, unnecessary, completed parts we shed in our growth towards maturity, wisdom, compassion and love. Each part we shed was valuable in its own way to the whole of our lives. To see life's experiences in this way is to honor the existence of a greater purpose at work. When we nourish ourselves with what we have learned and try to live our lives differently we move closer to this great mystery. That is nature's way and God's. It is an important lesson for us. We will all one day be used up, but no matter what we believe awaits us, if the vulture has been an honored friend, we can step into this last wonder, grateful for all that has come to us and also thankful our lives have left nourishment for those who follow.

Forcing Forsythia

2011-02-16T05:50:00.053-05:00

For now it appears the Groundhog's prediction of an early Spring is true. The harsh weather of the last few weeks has finally been replaced by the arrival of warmer days. The moon rises in the late afternoon sky that lingers now past 6:00 and temperatures hovering in the 60's during the day have begun to awaken the trees and plants of the surrounding woods. I've always thought that when the landscape looks its most desolate and withered, the air softens, buds swell and Spring arrives. There's a term paper in that last thought isn't there?

I'm one of those people who believe there is always something beautiful to be taken from the woods to create an arrangement inside. This time of year I look forward to clipping the branches of the forsythia and spirea, bringing them in where the warmer temperature of the house can seduce them into believing it is time to bloom. When they do, they add a much needed bright note to the bare branches and cedar that dominate my winter gatherings. Nature has an exquisite, often unknowable process of timing that supports an even more complex and stunning universe of ecosystems. When things bloom too soon or too late much can be lost, and while I don't believe I should reconsider whether or not I force a few angular branches of forsythia, I am thinking about the lessons of timing this offers to us.

If we are open to it, aging brings the ability to understand living has reasons for what is in store for us and it needs some room to manifest what they are. A hallmark of maturity, of participating in life as it comes to us, is tethered to an acceptance that parts of our lives should not be forced. It needs breathing space to create an opportunity for us to see how events are connected and meaningful. That means in the waiting we may have to hold the tension of living with paradox--our desires may be in direct opposition to the reality we are experiencing. As much as we would like to force things into being--most especially the way we want--the most precious things require time to unfold. There is that wonderful line, "Remain open, there is more going on here than you know." It is true. Maturity, wisdom, broadmindedness, understanding arise in us as we wait, and that most inexplicable mystery of all: relationships, are deepened. How things start out, isn't always how they end. And yes, some things, LOTS of things, do get better, given time to ripen. Now there's another good word...and certainly something else to ponder as you think about what may be unfolding in your life right now....

Pigeon-toed Emperors

2011-02-09T09:07:00.001-05:00

There is something troubling the geese. Usually I hear them calling in the early evening as they gather together and head towards their evening nesting place. The sound of their harsh honking is comforting, signaling to me that its also time for me to leave the demands of the day behind. But lately I have heard their alarmed cries several times during the course of the day followed sometimes by the sight of them reeling around the curve of the ridge on this part of the lake.. They are not a large flock, averaging about eight or ten thanks to the steady attentions I imagine of the fox and coyote.

Geese are not particularly admired in the contemporary world. Their fondness for golf courses and public water spaces is considered a nuisance. They are loud, arrogant and bossy and their droppings create a terrible mess where they congregate. Few people know that geese were a powerful symbol to native peoples. Filling the skies with thousands of waves of v-shaped formations as they migrated each year, they represented the sacred connection of living things to an awesome majesty beyond their capacity to fully understand. As huge numbers of them gathered in answer to some mysterious call, they reminded humans of their own yearnings. They were a signal to take leave of less important aspects of life in order to be able to answer the call of something beyond the work of living. There gathering numbers were a reminder that the example of one, can create a path for others. When they filled the skies it was considered an invitation for those watching, to consider what they needed to follow in spirit.

I don't know what is troubling my flock of geese. I do know there are times in our own lives when we are dogged by our troubles and find ourselves lifting up over and over in search of a solution or safety only to discover they are both short lived. Living requires constant attention--but perhaps the message here is so does being. I am wondering this morning that in those times when we cannot settle, find ourselves reeling around the horizons of our own lives, perhaps what is happening is part of our being is awake and calling to us, urging us to notice something deeper about our lives that needs our attention. Spiritual quests are not just for storybooks, they are meant to be included in the pages of our lives. Now that's something to think about next time you see that pigeon toed emperor strolling across the grass down at the park isn't it?

2011-02-02T09:27:00.001-05:00

The huge storm barreling across most of the country created only fog here in the south. Soon after sunrise the lake began to disappear into its quiet embrace and by mid day it was no longer visible. As I drove into the city even the expressway's straight no nonsense look had been transformed, the fog creating a beautiful mysterious tunnel. I smiled wondering if the early morning commuters imagined they were not really going to arrive at their desks on the other end, but somehow through the magic of the fog arrive in a mysterious new world.
Our world at this moment is full of upheaval. Events thousands of miles away are not unlike the huge storm here--both are changing the lives of thousands of people. Where they and us will end up after the tumult of the political storm has an eerie kinship to the fog drifting across the ridge of the lake.

Living involves storms and fog. One day life is as it has been for years and then it seems out of the blue everything changes. We pour ourselves into our jobs and relationships, working so hard to make our way only to have it all washed away no matter how hard we try to keep afloat. Sometimes even though the change is joyous, we still feel the tremors of fear. Change creates all kinds of feelings a great many of which we can't understand until much later. We want the security of the knowable and will do anything to keep from going out into the unknowable fog.

Earlier this week at the market I bought flowers-- tender pink tulips. I was in a hurry and busy loading up the checkout belt.. The flowers rang up first, and moved on towards the young man waiting to bag them. I love this market, it is full of beautiful food and folks from all over the world. Having finished unloading my cart, I turned and saw the young bagger holding the pink tulips, his face alight, eyes shining. "Look", he said in his beautiful accent, "they have the faces of newborn babies!"

Be still my heart.

Perhaps when our world feels unsafe, when we are frightened by our own storms of change and challenge, feeling shrouded in the terrible fog of uncertainty, perhaps we can remember this moment. I have no way of knowing what this young man's life had been like before he stood at the end of the checkout lane bagging produce. I would feel sure though he had weathered a good share of change and hardship in order to be there. Life asks that of everyone. But he had weathered whatever he had to in order to end up where he now was, his eyes shining, holding in his hands the promise that waits for all of us on the other side-- a chance for a new life.

Translucently Awake

2011-01-26T09:31:00.000-05:00

There is a beautiful moment in waking that happens just as we are crossing over the bridge from our deep sleeping self and before we slip back into our physical selves and the world. I heard it described once as the place where we are translucently awake. We still carry the rich experiences of our dreams as the morning light calls us to our daytime lives. The journey back takes only a few seconds and when we arrive on the this side of the river there is a little space we inhabit at the end of the footbridge between those two worlds. We are awake,still dripping dream fragments as we are reborn into ourselves in the arriving day, a new page of our lives still untouched.

The sun climbs up on the horizon in much the same way, filling our windows with morning twilight long before it arrives, the soft half light racing ahead and quickening the instinctual anticipation of light in all living things. For a brief time the world remains quiet and still, for even the demands of the day are still captured by their own attentions. Its as if the whole world is waiting and listening, paused in the doorway of dawn's ephemeral sanctuary . We are simply being--only ourselves--not a wife, or husband, sister, brother, friend, or child or any one's enemy.

In a world which grows more complicated by the minute, this time is a precious resource. We are all so tired. Many of us wake unrested, short of sleep, our bodies weary from the burden of our responsibilities. It is often all we can do to get out of bed and get started. But perhaps some mornings as we are crossing over that bridge from the night, before we even try to open our eyes and put on the leash of the mind, we might let ourselves linger at the doorway of that sanctuary on this side of the bridge and listen. There in the translucence, fresh from the embrace of our dreams, we are open to hear our own quiet truths, our deepest wishes. Who knows what we may hear?

What We Wish For

2011-01-19T07:00:00.103-05:00

I woke deep in the night to the peculiar sound of raccoon jabber. For those unacquainted with this dialect there's no use trying to explain. What actually woke me was probably not their intense conversation but the sound of them having it on the second story window sill of my bedroom. The large plate glass windows let in the reflection of moonlight against the melting snow and so it was easy to see all three of them perched along the narrow 3 inch window ledge. It was pretty obvious to me that the conference involved whether or not they could figure out how to leap from the ledge to the enticing bird feeder hanging out from a pole just below it.

Watching them so excited and hopeful made me laugh out loud which set off a flurry of scurrying back and forth in surprise. They are so appealing. It's hard not to see them as human, with those little faces and tiny hands that reach and touch everything like young children. They could smell the seed in the feeder but they were young and not experienced enough to know whether or not getting it was doable. The squirrels have tried over and over to no avail, climbing up to the window ledge and hurling themselves out only to slide off the large plastic baffle on top. The thought of those fat little raccoons trying that made me laugh even harder and that sent them scrambling down the side of the house. I snuggled down and went back to sleep, glad they had given up.

Despite all the encouraging talk about reaching out for what we desire, the hard truth is we all have things in our lives that we want so much but just cannot seem to figure out a way to have. Its awful when it is so close and yet still not for us. Certainly some of those things are material, but the ones that create the deepest longing are those that aren't--the opportunities that slip past, the disappointments following a herculean effort on our part, the challenges we face that have no solution no matter how many times we hurl ourselves out hoping to overcome all obstacles by our sheer will. It is little comfort initially but a deeply conscious act at those times, to see events in our lives like those of the natural world, as having an intent beyond just our satisfaction. We move closer to our real selves when we acknowledge they carry within them the hard edges we need to learn something just as essential to our nourishment as food. It is not the way of the world to get everything we want. At some point we are meant to understand that what looks like failure and defeat is really the field sown with surrender and trust and faith and a different set of directions. Life doesn't want us not to leap out in search of what we want, but to be able to accept there is a reason, which we may never know, for why we do not always receive what we seek when we do. Those times when the door closes and locks, the leap misses, the problem is truly unresolvable, and countless other moments like them, are when in our quiet waiting we are vulnerable to grace. We may not recognize its presence for a long time, but one day after much more living, we may look back and see the path it created when we relinquished our grip on the reins of our lives. You can't miss it--look for the miracles.

Reaching Out

2011-01-12T07:00:00.001-05:00

The heavy snow and ice of the past few days has made foraging for food harder for all the wild creatures living here around the lake. A few nights ago, Fanny and her three baby raccoons arrived just after snowfall to make their usual rounds of the deck and found very little to scavenge. Her little ones were still naive enough to press their paws against my hands on the glass doors as I knelt down to see them and I was heartened that there was leftover cornbread to toss out for woodland manna. Everything here has settled into a deep stillness broken only by the calling of the crows. Usually so standoffish and independent, the shortage of food has lured even them closer to the deck where they eye the feeders and scraps I have put out--not yet daring to actually come on up to feed, but arguing and whirling around among themselves in some deep crow discussion about whether or not they should.

I sympathize with the crows. Whenever we endeavor to branch out from our usual way of being, there is a lot of anxiety and discussion pro and con about the worthiness and wisdom of our choices. There is a part of us that so wants to feel assured that the path we have chosen is the right one, the safe one, the best. One of the biggest lessons age brings is the understanding that we will never know. We are asked to take life's invitations much like those young raccons--with trust and acceptance that what we want, what we would like to choose, is the path to follow. There will be no guarantees, we may encounter hardships and challenges, but the longing we experience can be trusted. The New Year, despite its frozen beginning, is a wonderful opportunity for new paths. Maybe this year we will come down out of the whirl of indecision, and reach out for whatever it is we truly desire.

News and Resolutions

2011-01-05T07:00:00.002-05:00

Good morning friends! I hope everyone is settling into the New Year well. For those who stop by often, you will notice that my blog format has changed. There will be a few more changes over the coming days and months keyed to the seasons and a different posting schedule. I will also begin posting once weekly, usually on a Wednesday, to give me more time in my studio. As we all turn our energies towards this new year I wish for each of you time to rest and be with your loved ones, and most of all, the opportunity to be about the things you love. Ann

********************************************************************************
January 1, 2011
Here we all are at a fresh start. We get one everyday, but somehow we feel especially hopeful at the beginning of the year. Our traditions have created the ritual of resolutions to cast off the past and look forward to being a new way in the future. What a wonderful concept--being a new way in the future. It reminds us that we are not our past; we are what we envision ourselves to be, now. We cannot control or even know what all will come to us this year but making thoughtful resolutions expresses our intention and belief that we can open ourselves up to being present with whatever arrives in a different way.

It's a quiet morning here on the lake. Rain moved in last night with the New Year and it is wonderful to be snuggled in enjoying the quiet. Soon, there will be the aroma of peas and greens and the traditional oohing and aahing over the Rose Bowl floats. I am thinking this morning about how very complicated all our lives are, but also in that complexity how rich and amazing. Astonishing things happen to us everyday and the coming year will be no exception. Here now is our pause at that threshold. Let us all count our blessings, let go of the past and move forward with grateful, open hearts. Happy New Year.

Whatever harm I may have done

In all my life in all your wide creation

If I cannot repair it

I beg you to repair it,

And then there are all the wounded

The poor the deaf the lonely and the old

Whom I have roughly dismissed

As if I were not one of them.

Where I have wronged them by it

And cannot make amends

I ask you

To comfort them to overflowing.

And where there are lives I may have withered around me,

Or lives of strangers far or near

That I've destroyed in blind complicity,

And if I cannot find them

Or have no way to serve them,

Remember them. I beg you to remember them.

When winter is over

And all your unimaginable promises

Burst into song on death's bare branches.

Anne Porter "A Short Testament"

New Beginnings

2010-12-26T22:48:00.000-05:00

There is a wonderful lull that arrives after the Holidays. The intensity of shopping, gatherings and year end have eased. I don't know about you, but I always thought the most wonderful part of the Christmas season was Christmas Day night, everything finally done, a glass of champagne in front of the fire...total relaxation. Even with New Years still to come, the pressure of gift giving is over.

That's something to ponder, isn't it?

I will be taking time off from posting until January 1st. Until then, I hope all of you have moments to relax, enjoy your loved ones, and count your blessings.

An Invitation

2010-12-01T06:36:00.001-05:00

The moon luscious and full only a few days ago, now rises deep in the night, it's luminous orb drained away to only a sliver of itself. Soon, even that, like the year, will melt away into darkness. Much has happened to each of us and not all in equal measure over the year slipping away. In the aftermath we often forget what does remain equally given and available to all--- the landscape of the world in which we begin the new year. When we are in touch with it, aware of its existence around us, we are connecting to the real world, a place we are meant to be a part of and which is able to sustain and nourish and illuminate the fierce and stunning experience of our lives. This real world contains gifts far more precious than the physical wealth we have taken from it. For the month of December, I invite you to join me each day as we celebrate what is freely given to all of us.

2010 December Journal

"Gifts from the Real World"

All things Ann, now under one roof: visit www.annpopepotter.com

News and Updates

2010-11-27T08:56:00.000-05:00

Change is on the way!
Beginning December 1st

My online Nature Journal--annpopepotter.blogspot.com
My art portfolio--annpopepotterpaintings.blogspot.com
Archival editions of India Photo Journal, 2009 December Journal
The 2010 edition of December Journal, "Gifts from the Real World"

will all be available at one new location www.annpopepotter.com

All Things Bright and Beautiful

2010-11-25T00:05:00.014-05:00

"To be worthy of the astonishing world, a sense of wonder will be a way of life, in every place and time, no matter how familiar: to listen in the dark of every night, to praise the mystery of every returning day, to be astonished again and again, to be grateful with an intensity that cannot be distinguished from joy."

Kathleen Dean Moore, Wild Comfort

Wishing you a Thanksgiving full of gratefulness and joy.

My daily December Journal, entitled this year "Gifts from the Real World" begins December 1st.

Marinating

2010-11-20T20:06:00.002-05:00

Tired and hungry, late in the day,impelled
to leave the house and search for what
might lift me back to what I had fallen away from,
I stood by the shore waiting.
I had walked in the silent woods:
the trees withdrew into their secrets.
Dusk was smoothing breadths of silk
over the lake, watery amethyst fading to gray.
Ducks were clustered in sleeping companies
afloat on their element as I was not
on mine. I turned homeward, unsatisfied.
But after a few steps, I pause, impelled again
to linger, to look North before nightfall--the expanse
of calm, of calming water, last wafts
of rose in the few high clouds.
And was rewarded:
the heron,unseen for weeks, came flying
widewinged toward me,settled
just off shore on his post,
took up his vigil.
If you ask
why this cleared a fog from my spirit,
I have no answer.
Denise Levertov "A Reward"

Well, I did not mean to stay away quite this long. After months of regular posting I decided during a particular busy period, to skip a few times. I was working more intently on my painting and I had felt I had reached a dry spell with the on line journal. It was a welcome break, but before I realized it, I had been away 6 weeks. Over the years I have realized that when I let go of an aspect of my life, it usually means that I need some time to marinate. That's a great word isn't it? It means a long slow soaking, letting go of some things so there is more opportunity for what is going on inside to make itself known. Living by a lake is a wonderful place to do what my friend Faye always called 'the long stare', the translation of which is simply letting your mind and spirit have more time to drift and roam. We direct our energies so much in daily life and have little left over for the kind of roaming that implies. On the surface it seems wasteful and non productive which of course it isn't. There is a great deal of 'tenderizing' going on inside; lots of important work getting done that allows us to return to life with fresh enthusiasm and creativity. I know it certainly does for me.

SO! as part of the results of my own marinating, I am launching a new website that will carry my art portfolio, this blog and some interesting articles and links all gathered under one domain. You will still be able to access this blog directly, or you can enter through what I jokingly refer to as "all things Ann" on my website. I am hoping to have it up and running by the end of the month. And after much thought I am planning to repeat the end of the year project similar to last year's December Journal but with a different flavor--you know, on account of all the marinating...

If you have time after you get the turkey on, stop by on Thanksgiving.... Ann

Holy Listening

2010-09-26T13:04:00.002-04:00

The erratic climate these past few years has taken a toll on the woods. The drought is over, but steady weather patterns have not returned and it is the trees, who until recently have managed to withstand the stress, which are now displaying the cumulative effects of too much dry and too little wet. Over the summer several of the older giants have relinquished their green canopy of leaves and now stand as gaunt skeletons with rusty crumpled hair. The deck and surrounding gravel paths are littered with their dark shriveled leaves.

I have always loved the trees. Gazing up into their branches over the years has become a comforting and settling experience akin to prayer and meditation for me. They have an innate majesty that draws me in. Rooted deep into the earth with their arms in the sky they represent the balance I seek to achieve in my own life. Their size humbles me and helps me remember my place in the world. But it is their ability to simply be there, witnessing to whatever I feel inside, to hear my thoughts or words without judgment, that endears them to me the most. While we come and go about our lives, building up and tearing down, they remain rooted where they are silently watching.

Witnessing is a powerful gift. I sometimes wonder if we are drawn to television reality shows because of our culture places so little value on the human need for this 'holy listening'. This spiritual side of human nature longs to be seen, to connect with the divine inside of us and its source. If we live in a culture that does not openly honor that, we look for it in all sorts of other places: food, shopping, drink, chemicals, unhealthy relationships, fanatical religious constructs and even by trying to create it in TV shows. In the short term they appear to work because all these things have the power to numb our longings for connection. But because they are not genuine they are not interested in listening. That is an experience that exists only in an atmosphere of acceptance. We encounter it in the intimacy of friendship and healthy relationships, standing before a piece of art that moves us, listening to music or reading poems and writings which give voice to our feelings, in the confessional sanctity of our religions or therapists, in the beauty of the world all around us and most profoundly, when we witness to the voice of our own deep selves.

It began raining last night, slow and steady. This morning listening to the sound it makes on the leaves and deck it is easy to imagine the roots of the tall ones drinking it in and then following the wet as it soaks down deep into the ground. Perhaps we can remember to do the same for ourselves.

Whoever you are: step out in to the evening
out of your living room, where everything is so known;
your house stands as the last thing before great space:
Whoever you are.
With your eyes which in their fatigue can just barely
free themselves from the worn-out thresholds,
very slowly, lift a single black tree
and place it against the sky, slender and alone.
With this you have made the world. And it is large
and like a word that is still ripening in silence.
And, just as your will grasps their meaning,
they in turn will let go, delicately, of your eyes…

Rilke, "Entrance"

Across the Border

2010-09-19T16:47:00.004-04:00

"I have searched frantically for contentment for so many years in so many ways, and all these acquisitions and accomplishments—they run you down in the end. Life, if you keep chasing it so hard, will drive you to death. Time when pursued like a bandit—will behave like one; always remaining one country or one room ahead of you , changing its name and hair color to elude you, slipping out the back door of the motel just as you're banging through the lobby with your newest search warrant, leaving only a burning cigarette in the ashtray to taunt you. At some point you have to stop because it won't. You have to admit that you can't catch it. That you're not supposed to catch it. At some point, … you gotta let go and sit still and allow contentment to come to you." Elizabeth Gilbert

I recently celebrated my sixtieth birthday and officially joined the growing ranks of those who have crossed over the border of 'middle age' into the nameless prevailing limbo of 'sorta old but not completely old yet'. Thinking about all that brings a smile as well as some reflection. Certainly my perspective has shifted. I don't feel old; but I do remember being 30 and thinking that the people I knew that were my age now definitely were old. Now what I hear most often is the feeling time is no longer a luxury. Whatever illusion we may have had about having enough of it, or controlling it, can no longer be sustained. The phrase 'if not now, then when?' becomes a meaningful slogan for obvious reasons.

Here at the lake on the eve of the Fall Equinox, preparations for winter have created a surge of activity. Hawk training 101 has reached a fever pitch. The woods are full of scavenging birds intent on stoking themselves for the imminent start of migration. Acorns and leaves have begun their descent to the ground and the squirrels can be seen carrying fresh leaves to their treetop nests. Living accelerates as the real world begins to slow down for winter. In comparison, modern life has learned to manipulate and control our environment in ways that have moved us away from the inherent timetable of the real world. We live constellated to another timing wound by an ever increasing talent to produce, which runs faster and faster, urging us to produce and seek even more and carrying us farther and farther from an understanding of our place in the order of things. And while we may feel powerful, especially in our youth, something in us can remain insatiate, often to the point of starving. We can arrive in the Fall of life and wonder what was it all for? We are not only tired but still hungry. What happens now?

As a new initiate I am learning as have so many who have gone before, there is something wonderful waiting across the border. Life is always recreating itself. It really isn't ever over. The ancient rhythms still go on bringing a change in perspective to replace the sense of elusive timing. The pursuing, hunting, getting part of living begins to relinquish its gnawing grasp and the manmade clock stops. We get back the chance to regulate our lives again by the original timepiece of our own hearts. Once past the border of middle age, in preparation for the winter of our lives, awareness arrives that what we have done however spectacular it may have been, is over, but who we are now, is what remains. That is our harvest. And, to our surprise, we might finally understand more than ever before, that now is the time to savor and share it to our heart's content.

At the Top of the Hill

2010-09-05T13:06:00.002-04:00

Geese appear high over us,
pass, and the sky closes. Abandon
as in love or sleep, bids
them to their way, clear
in the ancient faith: what we need
is here. And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye,
clear. What we need it here.
Wendell Berry

And when we least expect, after we had begun to believe the heavy summer would linger on forever, a morning arrives in September that is cool and fresh. The burden of the heat is lifted and the season begins its turn on the great wheel of heaven, taking with it our worn out summer selves, and leaving us with lightened hearts and renewal. Now on my morning walk the journey of the big hill is easier. The cool buoys my efforts where before I felt myself only ploughing the heavy air. The leaves no longer droop but lift and flirt with the sky in anticipation of their eventual voyage to the ground. For weeks I had tackled the hill head down from the effort of climbing. Now I find myself looking up into the sky at the top, seeing with clearer eyes the woods and grasses that line the road which is how one morning, coming down on the other side, I discovered this wonderful hornet nest. It was hanging chest high, not five feet off the road and I had been passing it for months while the hornets abandoned themselves to their work papering over their nest with a marvel of gray and taupe, ochre and cream.

There is so much beauty in the world and it is never more apparent than in the magical days when the seasons rise up in front of us, the old one fading away in the embrace of the new. Something deep down in our natural selves, hasn't forgotten we are kindred to this ritual opening before us. Something in us still hungers to abandon our lopsided focus on the man made world and seek out our home in the real one.

I am thinking this beautiful morning, of the longing in these lines by Wendell Berry. He yearns not for some miraculous cure to the tumult of the world by extraordinary means. Instead he believes our deliverance is contained in the simple prayer we be able to quiet our fear driven hearts, lift up our heads and see all that we long for, we can create. All that is required to manifest it, is for us to abandon ourselves to the ancient faith that knows our rightful place is among the wonders of that world and not above them.

Last Outpost

2010-08-29T12:32:00.002-04:00

The sounds of engines leave the air…
Gratitude for the gifts of all the living
and the unliving, gratitude which is
the greatest gift, quietest of all,
passes to me through the trees.
Wendell Berry, excerpted from Leavings (XI)

Mornings I take the shortcut over to the highway, the last house I pass always has three men sitting on the front porch. The house, a modest brick, is for sale. The men, who look to be in their 60's and 70's , are strung out across the porch with their coffee as if they were just passing time before the potential purchaser was due to arrive. Since it has been on the market for over a year now, apparently the potential buyer, whoever that may be, must not know they are waiting, not that it appears to be a cause of concern. The men lean back in their chairs gesturing to each other with their conversations and are often laughing. Sometimes one of them is out in the yard conducting the time honored male tradition of inspecting the grass or once or twice I have seen the youngest on that deeply revered male apparatus, the riding lawnmower. But no matter what their momentary pursuit. as soon as a car drives by they collectively glance over from the porch to take notice. Since the shortcut is known to lots of folks driving into the city to work, I have imagined that the men have figured out by now all the regulars from watching the same cars go by day after day.

As I pause waiting for the light I occasionally wave, which arouses a hearty response. I sometimes think about their view from the porch and wonder about their comments on the drivers and cars. I imagine them conjuring up short vignettes of life from what they witness while the cars wait for the light to change and built from the expressions of folks on their cell phones, wafts of music heard through rolled up windows, crying babies, sulky teenagers trying to look cool and distant because they aren't old enough to drive themselves to school or maybe missed the bus, or on the flip side, a car full of teens noisy and boisterous, the music LOUD and the cigarette smoke thick. I wonder if they worry about them the way I do. Of course there is always the ever changing array of automobiles to consider which I would think they would enjoy because they seem very much the type. But do they notice the tired shoulders of the Moms and Dads sucking down their coffee, listening to the news, and wonder if they are worrying about the day ahead and the mortgage? When they see the pokey hesitant driving of old folks do they wonder as I do, how in heaven's name they were able to get their license renewed?

Mostly as I drive by, I have a feeling of gratefulness. There they all are, waking up over their hot coffee and commenting on what I love to call the real world—the weather, the trees and fields, the people coming and going. After a while, the cars will come less often, the morning rush will be over and they will go about their day in the quiet. It feels a bit like the last outpost before setting out for the unknown World of the City. A last friendly wave and raised coffee mug that says, 'have a safe trip, we'll keep an eye on things till you get back'. And you know what? I believe they will.

A Patch of Woods

2010-08-22T11:07:00.004-04:00

I love you, gentlest of Ways,
who ripened us as we wrestled with you.

You, the great homesickness we could never shake off,
you, the forest that always surrounded us,…
Rilke, excerpted from 'Ich liebe dich, du sanftestes Gesetz'

After a good soaking rain, the crickets are full of delight this morning, singsawing their chorus from roosts in the trees that swells and ebbs to a rhythm only they understand. Here in the woods, the tinny sound provides the background music for summer. Even in suburbia, given just a few trees, they manage to take up residence in a proprietary sort of way as a reminder despite all our advancement, we are still part of the Real World.

Woods are a universe all their own and something good and nourishing happens to us when we spend time there. They buffer us from the daily onslaught of noise and chatter and offer us an opportunity to hear quieter sounds including those of our own hearts. Walking under their branches can provide a feeling of protection and shelter in those times when we feel vulnerable and lost. But the greatest treasure they bestow is the gift of sanctuary. Groves of trees were among the earliest holy places. When we step out of the ring of daily life, bruised and bloodied by the burdens of our cares, we find there a confessional corner of bark that can listen without judgment to everything we say and feel. With the crickets for a choir we can empty our troubled hearts, and begin to realize that what is underneath is more than a desire for solutions. We are homesick for something more lasting and essential that understands the mystery of our lives in ways we cannot. Something that can salve our wounds with the assurance that what we are experiencing does have purpose and meaning. There in the shifting leaf light, the quiet air, we can spend time off the ropes of life with God however we envision that numinous entity to be. In return through the communion of our prayers, in the sanctuary of leaf and trunk and bark, we are offered renewal enough for yet another round when the bell rings.

It's here in all the pieces of my shame
that now I find myself again.
I yearn to belong to something, to be contained
in an all-embracing mind that sees me
as a single thing.
I yearn to be held
in the great hands of your heart—
Into them I place these fragments, my life,
and you, God—spend them however you want.
Rilke, Book of Hours

The Beautiful

2010-08-18T14:06:00.003-04:00

Shall we do without hope? Some days
there will be none. But now
to the dry and dead woods floor
they come again, the first
flowers of the year, the assembly
of the faithful, the beautiful,
wholly given to being.
And in this long season
of machines and mechanical will
there have been small human acts
of compassion, acts of care, work
flowerlike in selfless loveliness.
Leaving hope to the dark
and to a better day,
receive these beauties freely
given, and give thanks.

from Leavings, by Wendell Berry

The young red tail hawks have fully fledged from the nest and now classes in 'Hunting 101' are in full swing. Even wild things have school. The trees resonate most mornings with the young hawks' sharp adolescent calls as they fly back and forth between their parents, practicing diving and swooping skills on whatever moves down below. There will be lots and lots of misses before they are able to feed themselves successfully. Some will not learn well enough and will injure themselves or starve. In the meantime, the sound of their calls, so earnest and strong, lifts my heart. Once years ago at a bird outing, a naturalist remarked that when you see a large predator bird, you need to notice and appreciate its existence, for it is against enormous odds that it has survived. It had to be very, very good at what it did in order to meet the harsh standards of the wild. There cannot be too many predators, but there must be enough very good ones, to support the mysteriously intricate balance of nature. There gift to us was in their being.

There is so much about life we do not have power over. Like the hawks, we are all vulnerable to being swept along in the events of nature or history. Floods, earthquakes, wars and epidemics can change our lives forever. So can death, divorce, terrible sickness and loss. Then, this lovely poem reminds us, is when we most need to remember the 'assembly of the faithful', what Berry elegantly names 'the beautiful' continues on in 'selfless loveliness'. Life is never all one thing—it is all things, every experience-- and all of us, each different and unique-- and the wild fierce world. When we are heartsick and on our knees in the dust, after a ' long season of machines and mechanical will' in whatever shape it comes to us, this faithful assembly exists, as sure as the new flowers that come to a lifeless wood; reminding us as the naturalist did so long ago, to open our hearts and notice, so we can receive these beauties freely given and through giving thanks, make room for hope to return.

Dog Days

2010-08-15T13:09:00.004-04:00

"Await the birth-hour of a new clarity, keeping holy all that befalls, even disappointment, even desertion." Rilke

August is being true to its nickname 'dog days'. This is the time of year when most of the charm of summer has worn off. It's been hot too long, vacations are mostly over, gardens are on their last legs, and the leaves on the trees resemble hound dog ears for most of the day. Even though cooler weather is still weeks away, already there is a longing to move on and leave the summer behind. In the meantime, until the seasons shift and all is transformed, we must remain where we are.

Living in the woods has allowed me to closely watch how the trees change over the course of the year. Their exuberance and vitality as they set their new leaves, produce berries or nuts, house birds and animals, mirrors our own in the lives we lead. But watching them listless in the August heat languishing for Fall or covered with dripping cold in February holding on until Spring, does too. It is not unlike those places where we await our own personal transformations in our jobs and lives or in our hearts and souls. We would like for it to all arrive and make itself known, now, so we could get on with it, but like the trees, we must wait.

I find this Rilke quote comforting for all sorts of dog days and waiting times in life because he is reminding us that the ritual of waiting for clarity and understanding is in itself a holy act, even when it contains hardship. Rilke knew from his own life the wait contained not only the timing but also the alchemy for change. Until that mysterious process can be accomplished, we like our friends the trees, must remain where we are. Perhaps in the waiting we might remember: "Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness, for as much as he loves the arrow which flies swift and far, so does he love, also, the bow which is stable." Kahil Gibran

Wishes

2010-08-08T07:30:00.000-04:00

Yesterday as I stood in line at the checkout, I found myself noticing how many of the cashiers were older. Over the past few years I have seen more and more retirement aged people working all sorts of different jobs. When my turn came, I placed my few items on the counter including a couple of home furnishings magazines. The checker was a woman, probably in her late sixties with beautiful snow white hair and a kind and gentle face. She greeted me warmly and as she picked up the top magazine, her face wistfully softened over the beautiful picture of the interior showcased inside. For a moment, everything else was forgotten as she longingly said, "oh, those grand big homes." The ache of what the picture represented, which to her seemed far away and unobtainable, hung in the air between us. Here was her life, and in that moment you could tell to her it seemed very far away from the interiors of that magazine cover.

In the hustle of living, it is easy to forget that we are all fellow travelers, each with our own hopes and dreams and secret longings. There have always been those with more and those with less. That isn't inherently bad and life while it may not be fair, is still good. Each of us comes into the world to make a life and the diversity of those lives however modest, is needed. The difficulties come when those who have little or nothing feel helpless in their efforts to make their way, when it seems that the opportunities to see what you can do with your life, appear to be only for others. How we can achieve balance between those two end points for people everywhere; to help those who need help without destroying their capacity to feel proud and capable, is one of the great moral questions of this age. We can provide endless food and shelter and aid, but living also requires hopes and dreams that can only nourish and satisfy when they are brought to life by the person who cherishes them. Some dreams will perish, some lives will falter before the finish. But what seems essential to remember is that everyone's dreams deserve the chance to see the light of day.

"All the people like us are 'we', and everyone else is 'they'." –Rudyard Kipling

Turkey Talk

2010-08-04T11:37:00.002-04:00

…And right action is freedom
From past and future also.
For most of us, this is the aim
Never here to be realized;
Who are only undefeated
Because we have gone on trying;
We, content at the last
If our temporal reversion nourish
(Not too far from the yew-tree)
The life of significant soil.
T.S. Elliot, excerpt from Four Quartets

Last week on the way out from the house, I came up suddenly on a mother turkey and her young ones crossing the road. The chicks were past the baby stage and were still a bit unsteady on their long legs and big turkey feet. I stopped the car and waited for her to lead them safely into the brush on the other side of the road, delighting in the gangly necks of the little ones as they hurried to keep up. Then, to my surprise, the mother turned and came back out into the road by herself, stopped in front of my car and turned the full attention of her gaze on me. There in the quiet of the country road, we looked each other over. She seemed to be deciding something and after a few more moments of turning her head this way and that, apparently satisfied herself and returned to her brood waiting patiently in the scrub, leading them on deeper into the woods.
Thinking back over the scrutiny of the mother turkey I thought how much like her we are. Who knows what was going on in that tiny little turkey brain as she came back for another look at me, but haven't we all had those times when we have to go back for another look? And what about the times we march resolutely in one direction, having made a choice, and then after, find ourselves second guessing and lingering on the edges of another different choice? How often have we made a decision we felt best for others, but wished we might have done differently for ourselves?
Now it is pretty safe to say that probably NONE of this was coursing through the Mother Turkey's cerebellum. More than likely she was considering whether I was enough of a threat for her to present herself as a decoy away from her young. After all, I had stopped and was giving her the once over first. But it is a useful metaphor to think about. Our lives are built on choices and we are all linked together by them, for it is the nature of life that what we choose will eventually impact someone else. So we choose and choose, trying over and over to create a life that reflects most closely who we are, making our share of mistakes, circling around for second chances and always hoping to arrive at the end of the day,safely across the road on our way to deeper woods.

What Cannot Be Explained

2010-07-28T18:54:00.003-04:00

When you live close to the natural world, chances are you will experience mysterious events. Living on the borders of other worlds we barely understand, often presents moments in which the veil between the two slips away and there is a brief opening to see more. Many times what we observe isn't clearly understood, but nonetheless it leaves a sense of wonder behind. Long ago places where this happened were considered holy because it was believed that the mystery had chosen to reside in that place because its innate majesty and beauty honored and mirrored the mystery itself. Our human capacity to be awakened to this awareness is the threshold of our faith and religion. For thousands of years humankind has been attempting to explain and capture and understand the very same awe felt by our earliest ancestors in the presence of the numinous and unexplainable. Even though there are enormous differences in what we believe the mystery to be, our response has been universal: music, art, literature, poetry; seeking, questioning and wondering and then sadly, often fighting between those who believe what they see is the only understanding.
It is the nature of mystery though, not to be known. Like the human heart, it is unexplainable. There are times when we see into each other, those fragile moments when big pieces of who we are can be sensed and loved by others, but our complete self, the essence of our being, is utterly known only to what cannot be explained.
Recently, one of my guests pointed out this shape on the bark of a tree close to the lake house. We stood together taking in the amazing occurrence of the shape of an owl created by the shedding bark. This has been a summer of owls, an animal rich in symbolism and portent. How it happened to be there, or just happened to be noticed, is a mystery. But to my heart, it didn't matter. I took it in as a blessing.
Perhaps this is part of the need for mystery. Maybe by not being able to explain those moments when the veil is lifted, we are given an opportunity. When the moment arrives and we are open to it, maybe what we are feeling is the mystery seeing every bit of our hearts and accepting all that is there.

I am, you anxious one.
Don't you sense me, ready to break
into being at your touch?
My murmurings surround you like shadowy wings.
Can't you see me standing before you
cloaked in stillness?
Hasn't my longing ripened in you
from the beginning
as fruit ripens on a branch?
I am the dream you are dreaming.
When you want to awaken, I am that wanting:
I grow strong in the beauty you behold.
And with the silence of stars I enfold
your cities made by time.
Rilke, "Ich bin, du Angstlicher. Horst du much nicht."

Night Anglers

2010-07-25T10:01:00.003-04:00

The approach of evening is an especially beautiful time of day on the lake. Even with the heavy heat, when late afternoon finally rolls over and gives up its claim on the day, there is a tangible sigh of relief from the woods and even the water. The air lifts, even if still thick with humidity, the lake relaxes and takes on a smooth silky sheen. The heavy yellow light of the day is replaced by the pale pinks, soft blues and lavenders slowly darkening to ink. Lately as I turn out my light at night, I can see across the cove to the spot where the night fishermen have anchored and set up, the glow from their lights burnishing the water around them with pearly blue luminescence. Drifting off to sleep watching the angler's lights, I sometimes hear the soft sound of their laughter across the water and I am reminded again about blessings of the night.

A friendly dark, whether you are outside or simply watching it arrive over the empty supper dishes, brings with it an invitation to cross over from our daylight lives away and pick up the more intimate parts of life with ourselves and others at home. In the deepening tones we are reminded the purpose of night is for rest and reflection. The shelter of the dark buffers our vulnerability and encourages us to say things to each other we might not have been able to in the harsher white brightness of the day's gaze. There comes an opportunity to stop doing so much and be still; to tuck children into bed and read to them, being available in the dark to hear their dreams and troubles; to curl up with loved ones or be with our friends; to tell secrets and share confidences. But perhaps the biggest gift is the dark's message that all the striving and seeking we have poured into the day, for better or worse, is over. We are done. It can never be taken back or remade. We can do more or better or less, but that must wait for another day. Now, the dark whispers, release yourself and rest.

I love the dark hours of my being.
My mind deepens into them.
There I can find, as in old letters,
the days of my life, already lived,
and held like a legend, and understood.
Rilke, Book of Hours, Love Poems to God

Empty Nests

2010-07-21T15:11:00.003-04:00

"Be modest now, like a thing
ripened until it is real,
so that he who began it all
can feel you when he reaches for you." Rilke

The little wren babies are gone. A house full of weekend guests prompted me to move their nesting begonia further down the deck in hopes doing so would lessen the impact of more activity near them. When I checked on them at the end of the weekend, the nest was empty. After looking forward for weeks with excitement and anxiety about their fledgling period, the empty nursery was hard to accept. I couldn't be sure they had not been taken by a night prowler or fledged too early and not survived. Worse, I would never know.

There is a lot of heartache in not knowing. Our modern life is saturated with information designed to keep that from happening to us as little as possible. When disasters strike, big or small, the first criticism levied is why didn't we know this was going to happen? Lack of omniscience is considered a terrible shortcoming and there is often viciousness for those found wanting. The necessary delicate balance between the gifts of our capabilities to know and our ability to accept there will be times we will not, has been lost as technical advances seduce us into believing we can know all things. Despite this, over and over, life continues to prove this impossible.

We come into this world with the work of our lives before us. Even if we pour everything we have into our jobs, our families and relationships, there will come to each of us moments when we are left with an empty nest and no answers. We arrive at the core of living face to face with our real work and with a choice to be made. We can criticize and blame ourselves or others, allowing despair and cynicism to jaundice our outlook. Or, we can acknowledge the limits of our minds and open our hearts to compassion; trusting that even when we do not know, life is still unfolding as it needs to, for reasons which somehow require the beauty and vibrancy of who we are and what we do but not our knowledge. If we choose to yield to what we cannot know, we release ourselves to participate in the mystery of being a fully real human being. We discover in the empty nest we hold, that our hearts allow us to see the God invisible to our logic waiting there.

"But when I lean over the chasm of myself
it seems
my God is dark
and like a web: a hundred roots
silently drinking.
This is the ferment I grow out of.
More I don't know, because my branches
rest in deep silence, stirred only by the wind.

Rilke, Book of Hours, Love Poems to God

Wild Gifts

2010-07-14T14:21:00.013-04:00

"Your work is to discover your world and then with all your heart, give yourself to it." Buddha

The Queen Anne's lace and wild Black eyed Susan have been especially beautiful this year. Huge swaths of both these sturdy wildflowers line the interstate and the back roads of North Georgia. I have been stopping regularly along the road up to the house to cut them, enduring successive attacks of chiggers when I have forgotten to spray down before traversing the ditches along the roadside. The Queen Anne sheds terribly after a day or so, but watching the flowers fold up into intricate seed balls is worth it. On my early morning walk, or coming home late in the day, I am always heartened by the sight of them.

There is a special beauty about wild flowers. Beyond their simple loveliness, I think it is because we don't have anything to do with where they show up. They simply appear in the places that suit them best. On more than one occasion I have tried to transplant them to my back border. So far, they will have none of it. It's not rocky or dry enough and maybe deep down, they don't want to be put anywhere they don't choose for themselves. We are not so different. It is a vital lesson in self awareness to understand where we will best flourish and have the loyalty to get ourselves there. Maybe that is why the wildness in us still exists. When we devote even part of ourselves to what we love, we create beauty and harmony. Our lives achieve their own sturdy balance that heartens everything around us. Perhaps that is the reason to hold in high regard the natural blossoming that each of us carry within. Our world needs the beauty and balance of the gifts we hold inside.

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.
These are the words we dimly hear:
You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.
Flare up like flame
and make big shadows I can move in.
Let everything happen to you; beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don't let yourself lose me.
Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.
Give me your hand.
Rilke's Book of
Hours Love Poems to God

Watchful Eyes

2010-07-11T11:15:00.003-04:00

"Even when we don't desire it—God is ripening." Rilke

The baby wrens have hatched. If you look carefully you can see the eye of one of the chicks down at the bottom of the photograph. The nest is a domed pile of leaves with a tunnel entrance off to the side—a wren signature—so getting up close is a challenge. What's interesting to me is how quiet they are. I thought they would be chirping away when the parents arrive with food, but perhaps they are still too young. What does happen after each delivery, is the parent bird perches on the plant stand and loudly and exuberantly sings a few bars of the wren repertoire before taking off in search of more tasty morsels. I wonder why?
I've kept a close eye on that little wren nest-worrying over it in rough weather, carefully watering the begonia it is built in to keep from soaking the nest, barricading the plant stand with deck chairs to discourage marauders. I doubt the wrens noticed, much less understood my part of their parenting endeavor, but I like to think my watchfulness helped ensure the little brood's success.
Most days we are like the wrens, feeling completely capable at whatever we have to do, but there are times when we can feel very alone in our lives—even if we are married or in a relationship or surrounded by family and friends. Sometimes we may wonder about the purpose for all our hard work or struggles or constant striving. We may long to feel that beyond the scope of our lives, a presence watches. These are the moments when we are most vulnerable to the divine. In seeking more than our own power can provide, we awaken our awareness there is a greater power looking and noticing, quietly going about the borders of our lives, moving deck chairs, watering the begonias and discouraging marauders. Our human nature does love the dramatic rescue, but more often the most essential support we ever receive is far from the script of Mission Impossible. We simply fail to recognize or take it for granted because it is so ordinary. All the while we are scanning the heavens for the airlift helicopter, thousands of everyday gifts, whether we know it or not, are working together to create the framework on which we can build the miracle of our lives. Maybe that is why the wren sings.

For Each Other

2010-07-07T12:58:00.003-04:00

"And isn't that how life works? We take turns saving each other?" Dorcas, the postmistress, in Larkrise to Candleford

When we think about saving someone, it usually conjures up images of heroic, larger than life rescues, acts of extreme courage, or even self-sacrifice. Those stories are stirring and inspiring for sure, but most of us live very quiet lives. We wouldn't consider ourselves giving or receiving anything on that scale. But in reflective moments, most everyone can remember a time when someone else came forward to rescue them. Those stories while less dramatic, are still life changing: the teacher who encouraged a love of music, the neighbor who always reminded you how special you were, the stranger who offered assistance during your lowest moments and then walked on never to be seen again. In whatever circumstances the story unfolds, the meat of the tale is the same. Someone else steps into our lives and gives us what we need in order to find our way. It isn't everything we will ever need, but it is what is most necessary in that moment to sustain us, or redirect us or protect us. Through the actions of another, we are delivered from the circumstances that would wound or hold us back.

It's a good feeling to think we can handle just about anything. We like to think of ourselves as the strong ones, able to keep our lives under control, never needing assistance. It is the shadow side of pride of course, and therefore deceptive, for even if we don't learn how untrue that is during our lifetimes, the advance of age or serious illness will bring it home to roost. If we close ourselves off to the attentions of others, we limit our experiences profoundly. The potential for how we see and live and be in the world can be enriched by the actions of others. If we close ourselves off we miss the chance to consider other options, other viewpoints, other solutions and pathways outside the ones we come up with ourselves.

Life we learn, is about far more than existing. Living teaches us the beautiful moments, the parts that make it the most meaningful arise out of our understanding to be here for ourselves, we will also need to be here for each other. The give and take, the lifting up, helping out, loving back, caring for, reaching out, giving up, letting go, trying out, listening to, raising up are life. And we are meant to do it together.

Other Agendas

2010-07-04T14:02:00.004-04:00

"Let life happen to you. Believe me, life is in the right always." Rilke

When things go our way, it is very easy to feel that life is good. Having control over the events of daily life is a powerful feeling and we like to be in charge. When events don't go as we planned we often feel life isn't on our side anymore; that somehow we have mismanaged our lives and allowed circumstances to disregard our own agendas. It is our nature to want only good times and not struggles. It is easy to forget that we are here to experience all of life and not just the easy parts. An important part of becoming real to ourselves is the understanding we are deepened and enriched not only from all the good things that come our way and expand our capacity for delight and enjoyment but more significantly from living through the experiences we never dreamed would happen to us. The rough edges of life, the places where the ground wants to fall away or does, where we have exhausted our capacity to figure out what to do next, is where trust can always be found, quietly waiting for us. Relinquishing our own devices and accepting our vulnerabilities opens up a place in our lives for trust to move in. Its gifts are reassurance that there is meaning and purpose to what we face; that even when we are most afraid, most overwhelmed, there is always an opportunity for goodness to prevail. Trust helps us accept that sometimes the resolution to what we face may not be what we would have chosen or expected much less wanted. It shows us there truly is a power much greater than us at work in the world in ways we cannot fully realize or understand. Allowing ourselves to trust means we can finally understand we can relinquish our own knowing and still be safe anyway. It gives us courage to face a great truth about life: that when we are able to accept we may not know what comes next, we find that isn't necessary to go on.

A Different Plan B

2010-06-23T11:38:00.003-04:00

"Let time do its tender work"

There is nothing like a wren. If you need a lesson in blind optimism, hope in the midst of what appear to be insurmountable obstacles, you might want to consider the little Carolina Wren. No other species in the bird kingdom is as industrious, as exuberant, confident and willing to take risks. When they decide a nest location is right for them, then it doesn't matter if it is in the corner of a barbecue grill, inside a pair of work boots left too long in the carport or as I have recently discovered, in a favorite begonia on the deck. I have often wondered if they are simply too creative to settle for plain trees. They seem to relish daunting circumstances.

The heat has set in now for the summer. The air closes in on you hot and almost liquid when you step outside. Many birds are now on their second broods. Their forays to answer the hungry demands of their young are about the only movement in the woods. By midday, when the heat reaches its zenith, even the wrens rest.

There are times for all of us when we may feel we have more than we can handle. Most of us manage to be fairly optimistic, taking setbacks in stride, coming up with a 'Plan B', continuing on. But sometimes life rears up and will not cooperate. What we are facing may feel as smothering as the thick southern air. We may not know the best solution to the difficulties we face or perhaps we are experiencing more loss and heartache than we can bear.

In those moments it might be helpful to remember the little wren. Wrens know all about 'Plan B'. The male in his courting ritual builds several nests to woo the mate of his choice, offering her the ultimate choice. But the real pearl of wisdom isn't the 'Plan B 'nests. The real gift is in the heat of the day, when life is scorching, the wren rests. Later, when the sun eases its gaze and begins to think about the other side of the world, the very first trill of song you hear as it sets off in search of supper, comes from this bright brown flash of hopefulness. Perhaps we can do the same in our own scorching moments. By allowing ourselves time to rest and experience all our feelings; by treating ourselves with gentleness and compassion as they are being uncovered, we may discover that like the wren, when the burning gaze passes, and it will, we can emerge ready to take on life.

Falling Radiance

2010-06-20T11:10:00.007-04:00

"You know, when you're young,God sweeps you up. He holds you there.The real snag is to stay there and to know how to fall. All those days when you can't hold on any longer. When you tumble. The test is being able to climb up again. That's what I'm looking for." Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

One of the best parts about trees is watching the love affair they have with light. All day long they capture the sun in their leaves and branches and splash it down to the ground, the roads, the grass and us. Standing among them, looking up into their greenness drenched in the sun's white lightning is a blessing. Something in us instinctively seeks the light and the trees towering above us have an intimacy with it we yearn for; their uppermost arms soaking up the heat and brilliance, uncovering for us the beauty in ordinary objects caught by the falling radiance.

We will all have need in our lives to experience the power of humble moments. When our lives get tangled and closed up we long for deliverance and we would prefer it be miraculous. But that is not the usual course of life, or is it? What we struggle with is our work while we are here. In each of the problems we face is the food of our growth. But to keep us encouraged, to keep our hearts afloat, our lives will also have moments that nourish and encourage us. We may have yearned for rescue from our circumstances by some wondrous unforeseen event. In hindsight we see that what saved us was the kind and understanding smile from a close friend, a bit of peacefulness watching the evening sky, the silliness of our children or the frisky whip, whip, whip of the dog's tail when we arrived home. These kinds of moments don't pay the bills, save relationships or even get the brakes replaced on the car. What they do is perform a miracle in our hearts by reminding us what is beautiful, whole and delicious and worth the struggle to adapt and change and keep on trying. Rarely in the moment do they appear larger than life, but looking back we can see them for what they truly were: moments when we were caught in the falling radiance.

A Little Light

2010-06-13T12:46:00.005-04:00

"Rather he consoled himself with the fact that, in the real world, when he looked closely into the darkness he might find the presence of a light, damaged and bruised, but a little light all the same. He wanted, quite simply, for the world to be a better place, and he was in the habit of hoping for it. Out of that came some sort of triumph that went beyond theological proof, a cause for optimism against all the evidence.
"Someday the meek might actually want it," he said."Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

It is hard to hold on to optimism these days. Visiting with folks on the Gulf, listening to their frustrations and fears is hard but it is the still, quiet resignation that is the most arresting. People are deeply frightened for their livelihoods and their way of life. In the places where the oil hasn't arrived, the waiting to see if and when it will, is as bad as when it does. Not knowing has its own unique horribleness. The common thread yet to be gathered up for good use, is that so many people want to take action; want desperately to do something they feel is helping but find themselves stymied by lack of coordination, jurisdiction or direction.
Whether true or not, the situation seems pretty hopeless and we are all grappling with where to find a place to stand and believe in the wake of it. Some are simply adding their despair to the morass of what already exists. The media helps keep that pot boiling. There are others who are venting their anger and blaming. I get that part too. Anger as an impetus for a positive course of action becomes a formidable ally for good. But right now, what I am thinking is needed is something far more essential. Somewhere in all of this we have to dig around in the muck and get a good grip on some hope.
Being born is by its nature, an act of hope. To make a life and to live it, requires heart and courage but also hopefulness. Right now, we have arrived in that place where all the mechanical, action oriented solutions we have to life's problems have reached the limits of their capabilities. The big solutions are not working or have, like the oil dispersant, backfired.
So this morning, I am thinking about the value of what we don't know and finding solace there. The earth is a massive, living entity. It has rhythms and ways of balancing itself that we simply do not understand and up to now, have not respected. This oil spill reminds me of the willful child who finally having been allowed to run amuck too long, stands in stunned amazement when the legacy of his behavior finally comes full circle. We are that willful child and the earth is the landscape of our legacy. Our saving grace may be that besides being willful, we also have the capacity for change and hope. We can believe in the face of insurmountable odds. The intersection of those two positions might just hold the trans formative solution that saves us both. Sometimes when you feel there is nothing else you can do, you discover you overlooked what you had that was most required.

Raveled Edges

2010-06-06T17:17:00.010-04:00

Come away with me in the night
Come away with me
And I will write you a song…
Come away with me where they can't tempt us
With their lies…
So won't you try to come."
Norah Jones excerpted from Come Away with Me

Life is not always whole or graceful. It tends to run towards jagged edges even when it has a purpose in mind. Efforts to move from one way of being or thinking are not always neat and tidy much less clear sighted. Living involves fitful, sometimes desperate, bouts of stop and go. It may distill down as we grow older and even smooth out, but it will still contain the essential call to continue growing and changing along those unraveled edges towards wholeness both personal and collective.
Our world feels greatly unraveled right now. The oil from the rig is being slowly contained but much too late for the estuaries and beaches. In the sweltering humid air of the Gulf, hordes of rescue workers are doing all they can to save the wildlife that can be reached, while the enormous issue of what happens long term hangs over the scene like a pall. The magnitude of our inability to stop the long tendrils of the oil currents sliding with the tides onto the shores makes it difficult to remain hopeful when what we feel is helpless.
The call of wild winds and the sea to come away are legend. Perhaps this is the moment to remember the oceans, like the skies and winds have no borders. They call to everyone to expand the boundaries of their lives. We can proclaim our air space or sovereign waters, but the air and water simply keep on moving and calling as they have always done. In the Gulf right now we are being shown how true this really is. We don't own the water or the sky or the earth. We have only been invited to live here with them. These past weeks have made it very clear what the consequences are when we do not treat that invitation with respect. Our collective lack of foresight about energy use and resources has caused more edges it would seem than can ever be gathered back into wholeness. Out of all the sound bites we hear that lack in us remains the single most compelling reason to overcome our helpless feelings by remembering the nature of life is towards life and we are a part of that process. We have as much potential for life as we have for destruction. The wind is still blowing over all of us. The oceans continue rolling up on the shores, despite the oily snakes they carry. What remains to be done is for us collectively, to take their invitation to heart and grow and change.

2010-06-03T10:05:00.004-04:00

Freshly Mowed

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?"
Mary Oliver, excerpted from, The Summer Day

There is nothing I find more of an elixir for life than the tangy green smell of freshly mowed grass. It always conjures up sweet memories of summers growing up in the south; lazy days when time stretched out slow and golden. Grass cutting meant school would soon be out, we could start going barefoot and Dad would start making ice cream and frying fish. Now so many years down the road, remembering all those summers, I realize the deep restorative gift received by having those summer months to play outside, making up all sorts of games and adventures. Our modest little ranch house had a back yard that dropped off and ran a long distance towards a creek and it became a woodland wonderland. Summers were spent damming the creek, catching craw fish and building every imaginable kind of fort or playhouse. It was rich in the gifts of the world outside, not all of them pleasant: bee stings, broken arms, skinned knees, stubbed toes, poison ivy and mosquitoes bites, endless mosquito bites.

It is such a beautiful world we live in and we need it so much-- not just for sustenance of the body but also for the spirit. Recognizing and valuing beauty deepens our hearts towards ourselves and each other and draws our spirits towards their highest expressions. The enormous outpouring of feelings of anger, despair and grief over the Deepwater Horizon oil catastrophe is not only about the loss of jobs and income. Look at the sorrowful, frightened faces of the Gulf fishermen being interviewed. They know what many in their distancing from the real world have forgotten. What is being destroyed is not only a source of food and income but a place of great beauty that is as necessary to the human spirit as food. Every day the oil pours out into the sea is a reminder that we, collectively, have created this problem and that it will only be truly remedied when we all commit to re imagining how we live our lives. That is the great gift at the heart of this terrible disaster. Let us receive it. Tell me, what else should we have done?

Sacred Waters

2010-05-30T10:32:00.005-04:00

"To honor the sacred is to create conditions in which nourishment, sustenance, habitat, knowledge, freedom and beauty can thrive. To honor the sacred is to make love possible." Starhawk

We have had some torrential rainstorms and hail over the past few days that have created waterfalls cascading off the house and challenged the drainage capacity of the front stone courtyard. Watching the rain make water sheets across the windows of the house is a vivid lesson in human frailty.

The long awaited attempt to seal off and cap the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig leak failed last night. Watching the rain and thinking of the powerful force of the oil gushing out of the earth under a mile of water, I thought of the many people racing and struggling to stop this terrible event, the thousands of families along the coast impacted by the blowout, as well as the rest of our country. We are having to accept the fallibility of what we and the world have depended on for generations: American know how. Here is something we don't know how to fix much less control. It is a heart wrenching feeling.

When disasters befall us there is a tendency to want to place blame somewhere and on someone even if it is something human error has not caused. Our confidence in our ability to control everything, to know everything about our world has blown our belief in our power well beyond the range of its limits. Knowing how errors occur or where oversights have failed that are meant to limit those errors is helpful, but raging against each other turns our attention from a more important insight that surfaces each time our ability to control or manipulate the natural world slips from our grasp. We are being asked by the events at hand not just to discover where we failed mechanically, but also to examine the underlying relationship we have to the great world we live in that brought us to this endeavor to begin with. We are being reminded we do live in this world, not on it, and not alone but together. Our interactions with the natural world have long been complicated. In our desire to create better living conditions we have built dams and bridges and canals and lakes for thousands of years. The confidence and wealth our successes brought eventually led to our endeavors to travel to the moon and drill on the ocean floor. Many of those achievements have enabled a better way of life for millions of people. But these achievements cannot succeed as a one way relationship. In our dominance we often overlook the necessity for us to balance our needs with the health of the world in which we live. It is a terribly complex equation, which becomes more fraught with the growing populations of the world. There is no single right answer and times such as these underscore the perils we face unless we continue to dedicate ourselves to understanding and implementing a healthy synthesis between the needs of both.

The rains have passed for now. More is expected all week. In my heart I believe we will eventually cap the oil rig. We speak often of praying for peace among ourselves. Perhaps it is time to broaden our prayers for peace to include not only each other, but our beautiful world as well.

"The gratification of wealth is not found in mere possession or in lavish expenditure, but in its wise application." Miquel De Cervantes

Mosquito Lessons

2010-05-26T11:08:00.004-04:00

Most of us live within relatively narrow perimeters and enjoy a small life. There is beauty and satisfaction in that smallness, partly because the least significant of lives can still have cosmic proportions for the meaning and purpose they offer. Thomas More, A Life at Work

If you think you are too small to be effective, you have never been in bed with a mosquito. Bette Reese

Mosquitoes are the bane of Southern existence, followed closely by gnats. In fact, we even have an invisible boundary referred to as 'the gnat line' because the influx of their numbers increases mightily once you leave the cooler plateau of the Piedmont. In what I refer to as "BC" time (before air conditioning) the evening songs of crickets and katydids would be blended into the sound of the whirring attic fan. Sometimes added to it would be the dreaded high pitched whine close to your ear signaling the arrival of that terrible nighttime menace, the mosquito. Like a sniper, it would pine and wing around your head, the heat of your body drawing it like a magnet. There would be no rest unless you smothered yourself under the hot covers, or got lucky with a quick slap. A mosquito, doing what it does naturally, is a very powerful force.

There has always been a human fascination with all things bigger and better, but a good bit of recent research has begun to indicate what most of us already knew: we are at our best when we appreciate the small things in life. A few close friends rather than numbers of casual relationships, work that we are able to see an end result from our efforts, living in places where we feel a kinship and connection. These all require small boundaries of one sort or another and not necessarily all physical. Small boundaries allow us to focus in more closely and see more clearly what is before us and that careful attention, the art of noticing and caring about connections, is most lasting and significant on an intimate level. We can be carried away by political and religious causes, but the relationships we have with each other and our own lives remain the most essential.

It seems we start out wondering what we will do with our life? and approach the end asking what have we done? There is much food for thought there and an easy opportunity to devalue the significance of our accomplishments in between those questions. In those moments it may be helpful to be reminded the world is made up of all of us. All the little lives, going on everyday—working, loving, living as best we can, are truly the foundation of the world. Everything else happens only because of this strong and vast bedrock of everyday people building everyday lives. Ours are the most necessary part for life to go on and change for the better. The big sweeping events will come and go, but it is the small, carefully woven lives of all of us, that hold the fabric of life together.

What’s Comes Softly

2010-05-23T10:03:00.009-04:00

"I have a feeling that my boat
has struck, down there in the depths,
against a great thing.
And nothing
happens! Nothing…Silence…Waves…
---Nothing happens? or has everything
happened,
and we are standing now, quietly,
in the new life?
Oceans, Juan Ramon Jimenez

Even though there are official dates that proclaim the arrival of the first day of the seasons — based on the ancient turns in the heavens—the seasons themselves melt into each other without our awareness of the specific moment when that occurs. We simply awake one morning to find daffodils pushing up or look out into the evening and see flashes of lightning bugs, or feel the tang of cool air after weeks of heavy heat.

It's the same with our own lives. We become so captured by the short term, that the larger sweep of change occurring in us may go unrecognized until, mirroring the inevitability of the seasons, it arrives on our doorstep. Even though we may be constantly making plans about the future: tomorrow, next week, next month, when the kids go off to college, for the most part we are focused on the life we are living now. Then one morning, we look at our children and see instead grown men and women; or we realize we are only a year from retirement, or the parents we thought were immortal, are gently folding their tents. Just as it happens in the beautiful Real World, these things don't come overnight, but are built moment by moment until following a time table we cannot see, a fullness is reached and our lives too, shift into a new season. Some changes arrive in sudden events, but most simply arrive quietly as our children grow and leave, our jobs change and end, our bodies lean into a softer version of themselves. Even in the wake of the dramatic changes implicit in illness, death or divorce, or from moving, retiring, changing jobs, the arc of living keeps us moving. How we have adjusted or lived through what has happened to us is a reflection we receive only in retrospect.

There are many feelings when a major aspect of our life changes: wonder at where the time went, amazement at the breadth of what we may have lived through, tenderness and poignancy and perhaps even sadness over the end of huge portions of our existence that we had dedicated ourselves to so intently. But the nature of life is growth and change—beginnings and endings. Mixed in with all our feelings about what is over, we can discover a new way of being is always arriving, even in the hardest and most painful shifts. What ends now comes with an invitation for something new. It may feel very different, but it carries its own richness and potential. Looking back over our lives offers an opportunity to see more of the overall shape of who we are, to consider what has mattered the most to us and hopefully to gather that understanding to carry with us as we turn our gaze towards what we can still do with the seasons remaining to us. A part of our life may be over, but the call to live remains.

"For age is opportunity no less
Than youth itself, though in another dress,
And as the evening twilight fades away
The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day" Longfellow

Quiet Walks

2010-05-19T10:50:00.007-04:00

" One way or another, we all have to find what best fosters the flowering of our humanity in this contemporary life, and dedicate ourselves to that." Joseph Campbell

On the way to dinner one evening in Paris, I came across this quiet side street with its view of the neighborhood church. It reminded me of a photo I took the day before out in the countryside of another quiet side street, this one a simple dirt road instead of cobblestones, and lined by beautiful old pine trees instead of little shops. Standing there that evening, watching the light fade from the sky and be replaced by light spilling from the storefronts, I drank in the gentle peacefulness of the scene. The hush in the air was the same as what I had felt standing under the trees on my trip away from the hustle of the city. Both places, vastly different, were still able to create a space for solitude.

These days our enormous technical capacity to stay connected with one another makes it more and more difficult to allow ourselves this important and essential experience. Gone is the era of letters and news taking days and months to arrive, and everyday life for many people being centered around farms with limited social contact. Now time alone to ponder is seen more and more for those select who have chosen a contemplative life instead of essential to our humanity. The ability to endlessly talk and surf and watch each other is powerfully seductive and we are by nature, social beings. But we are also by nature, spiritual and that part of our lives is nourished through solitude. The quiet wandering around we do with ourselves creates time to sort out who we are, what we love and wish for and how to weave our hopes and dreams into our everyday life. The greatest misconception about solitude is that it is a form of loneliness. Nothing could ever be further from the truth. Loneliness arises from a belief that we have been abandoned and is generated by a fear that when we are alone, we are with nothing. Solitude is appreciated and sought when we recognize we are never, ever alone. We are always present with ourselves. We have an inner companion, the self, that is endlessly loving and devoted to us our whole lives. To expand our relationship with ourselves, to know this companion within us, requires time apart.

Our lives are so full. As I stood that night on the cobbled street corner I found myself thinking that as often as life has a 'too muchness', it also provides ways for us to drain off that excess and regain our footing no matter where we live. I smiled and my heart lifted as I turned to go on my way, reminded one of those could be a solitary walk down a quiet street with ourselves.

Something More

2010-05-16T10:00:00.004-04:00

" The miracle of realizing that art and nature are literally one thing astonishes me each time it happens." Walter Anderson

Over the past two weeks I have seen some amazing vistas and art thousands of miles from each other. Returning home, it occurred to me that while airline flights can be long and boring, there is a wonderful gift to be had in the quiet time they provide. The vistas were of the Grand Canyon and the beautiful haunting hills of Sedona, Arizona. The art was in Paris. No two places could be more different, yet in the tranquil lighting of the plane trip home, I thought of how each of these uniquely different places had the power to move us with their beauty.

Human beings hunger for beauty, I think because the beautiful has the capacity to draw us closer to the wondrous and unknowable. Beauty carries holiness and awe within it. Since the beginning of our sojourn on this earth, we have set aside places in the great wide world because something within us has resonated to the exceptional beauty and power of the place. Being there transformed our relationship to ourselves, our lives and the world around us. We came away renewed. That spontaneous reaction is what births art. It is our human attempt to create in a smaller way something beautiful that will sustain us in the way we seek it in the world around us. With our paint and clay, our music and poetry and writing and drama, we are trying to express our recognition of our own potential for beauty in a world that often confuses and overwhelms us. It is our way of soothing our hunger for what it holy and profound. It is our way of saying we know there is more to being human than just our ability to stay alive.

There is a wonderful scene towards the end of the movie classic "Close Encounters" in which communication between the aliens and humans comes in the form of musical notes. In the film it's apparent the aliens know a whole lot more about music than we do, but in the essential moment, when the musical notes are repeated in tandem and then in unison together, the characters leave off being human or alien and become something more. Next time you gaze at a painting or hear music, or sit quietly in your house of worship, perhaps you will pause to feel what is awake inside of you and listening, waiting for that same kind of moment.

"If your heart catches in your throat, ask a bird how she sings". Cooper Edens

Dark Hallways

2010-05-12T07:00:00.001-04:00

By a departing light,
We see acuter, quite,
Than by a wick that stays.
There's something in the flight
That clarifies the sight
And decks the rays.

Emily Dickinson

With the arrival of warm temperatures the animals enjoying a dormancy during the winter months begin to wake up. Where I live that particularly means turtles. They start crawling up out of their earthen beds with thoughts of mates and nest making. I see one almost every day determinedly trudging across the paths around the house or be still my heart, across the country roads. I always worry about those. As we know, not everyone is observant…
Sometimes our own lives are similar to that of the turtle. We can close ourselves up tight in our shells and winter on. That is a good thing and often necessary when life is too much to handle. The trick is not to get attached to that behavior, to remember everything has a time when withdrawal must be set aside for action.
We have all heard the well meaning advice about God not closing one door without opening another. I believe that's true. But once in a while we go out the door of the place we are leaving and get caught in the hallway. There aren't always lights out there. Sometimes it's just dark. You may not be able to see right away where you are supposed to go next. For those of us not used to waiting (you know, the hare type) we get antsy and even frightened. I'm thinking as I watch this sturdy little terrapin navigate the second half of the driveway, that it probably is a good idea to take a hint from him and slow down a bit. Let our eyes get used to the dark and be patient. Once our sight clears we will be able to take a few steps forward. Slowly and deliberately, we will then be able to locate that next door and be on our way,(maybe even quick as a rabbit.)

Those Invisible Eyes

2010-05-09T07:00:00.000-04:00

Enlightenment provided by a group of 2^nd grade school children in honor of Mothers everywhere.

Why did God make mothers?
1. She's the only one who knows where the scotch tape is.
2. Mostly to clean the house.
3. To help us out of there when we were getting born.

How did God make mothers?
1. He used dirt, just like for the rest of us.
2. Magic plus super powers and a lot of stirring.
3. God made my Mom just the same like he made me. He just used bigger parts.

What ingredients are mothers made of?
1. God makes mothers out of clouds and angel hair and everything nice in the world and one dab of mean.
2. They had to get their start from men's bones.
3. Then they mostly use string, I think.

Why did God give you your mother and not some other mom?
1. We're related.
2. God knew she likes me a lot more than other people's moms like me.

What kind of little girl was your mom?
1. My mom has always been my mom and none of that other stuff.
2. They say she used to be nice.

What did mom need to know about dad before she married him?
1. His last name.
2. She had to know his background. Like is he a crook?
3. Does he make at least $800 a year? Did he say NO to drugs and YES to chores?

Why did your mom marry your dad?
1. My dad makes the best spaghetti in the world and my Mom eats a lot.
2. She got too old to do anything else with him.
3. My grandma says that Mom didn't have her thinking cap on.

What's the difference between moms and dads?
1. Moms work at work and work at home and dads just go to work at work.
2. Moms know how to talk to teachers without scaring them.
3. Dads are taller and stronger, but moms have all the real power 'cause that's who you got to ask if you want to sleep over at your friend's.
4. Moms have magic, they make you feel better without medicine.

What does your mom do in her spare time?
1. Mothers don't do spare time.
2. To hear her tell it, she pays bills all day long.

What would it take to make your mom perfect?
1. On the inside she's already perfect. Outside, I think some kind of plastic surgery.
2. Diet. You know, her hair. I'd diet, maybe blue.

If you could change one thing about your Mom what would it be?
1. She has this weird thing about me keeping my room clean. I'd get rid of that.
2. I'd make my Mom smarter. Then she would know it was my sister who did it and not me.
3. I would like for her to get rid of those invisible eyes on the back of her head.

HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY!

Hankering

2010-05-05T08:00:00.000-04:00

"The danger is not lest the soul should doubt whether there is any bread, but lest, by a lie, it should persuade itself that it is not hungry." Simone Weil

Each evening, usually around 11:00, Fanny, my local raccoon, makes the rounds of the back deck. Apparently the tracks for the sliding glass doors attract all kinds of tasty morsels, especially moths this time of year worn to exhaustion in their attempt to reach the lights inside. She makes a thorough search of every one, pausing once or twice to give me a far less inquisitive look than I give her. Like all the creatures of the natural world, she knows what will satisfy her hunger and diligently searches for it.

Everything in our world is hungry and all life, including us, is built around the attainment of it. In the real world there is an exquisitely balanced system of who eats what and who. We of all the life forms on earth are the only ones who are not a designated supper. The comforting part of that is the relative safety it provides. We don't have to be constantly on the alert for who wants to eat us. The challenging part arrives in discovering being at the top of the food chain isn't the free lunch it looks to be because out of all the life forms on earth, we alone appear to have hungers we cannot satisfy with food. We have to feed not only our bodies, but our minds and spirits too. This kind of hunger seeks meaning in life, a relationship with the numinous and love for another. When we are aware of this part of ourselves we transcend our humanness into its highest form by creating music, poetry, literature. We experience our faiths and all our feelings deeply and compassionately. We value beauty in all its myriad forms. We treasure the earth and each other. When we are not aware, when we do not see beyond our physical appetites, we slip back down into the mire of who eats who.

Knowing what we truly hungry for may be the most important awareness we develop in life. In the south we have the word 'hankering'. It means there is a little unexplainable yearning in us that wants to be fed. Sometimes it may only be for homemade peach ice cream, but sometimes if we take the time to diligently search for it, we can discover it is for something far more satisfying.

2010-05-02T10:20:00.004-04:00

"It is a joy to be hidden, but a disaster not to be found." D.W. Winnicott

The most important rite of spring is the ritual of choosing a mate. The delicate and intricate process of pairing is as varied as the species, but the agenda is the same: find a mate and reproduce. Everyone wants to be chosen.

We humans are the same, although our emotional lives are far more complicated than those of an ant or fox or bird and our rituals even more so. In the western world particularly, survival no longer depends on producing children to help farm or hunt. But that deep instinctual need to be selected remains. We want to know that we matter and often we believe that to be chosen by another is the only way in which our value can be affirmed. Some of us, for lots and lots of different reasons, have lost the natural instinctual understanding of our own worth. As we create our lives we keep discovering that an essential piece is always missing. Like a beautiful jigsaw puzzle we realize over and over that the one piece that makes the puzzle whole, is the one we cannot find. And so we look and look in all sorts of places outside of ourselves in our search to find it.

The leaves in the woods are now fully open. The air is lush this morning with the promise of rain and thunderstorms. Soon that expectancy will ripen and the rain will wash over the leaves and fading azaleas and the mountain laurel just about to blossom. Its arrival is a powerful witness to the forgotten truth we already have been chosen in the most important way-- by life. Our very existence says that we have been chosen to be here, now, in this life. If we did not have value, we would not be here at all. That is the law of the natural world of which we are a part and of the spiritual world we manifest. We are needed in ways far beyond our ability to comprehend, to help complete the world. Despite all our attempts to place ourselves apart, we still belong as much as all the rain and blossoms and creatures in the world. We are the missing piece we seek.

Oh, my dear heart,
my own dear heart,
full of hesitations,
questions, choice of directions,

look at the world.

Mary Oliver, from "The Singular and Cheerful Life"

Wild Azalea

2010-04-28T07:00:00.000-04:00

Hold to the truth you make
every day with your own body,
don't turn your face away.

Hold to your own truth
at the center of the image
you were born with.

Those who do not understand
their destiny will never understand
the friends they have made
nor the work they have chosen

nor the one life that
waits beyond all the others.

"All the True Vows", David Whyte (excerpted)

One of the treasures of spring in the woods is coming across a native azalea. This modest cousin of the widely recognized azalea, prefers the quiet woodland understory, stretching long gangley arms out which fill with clusters of intensely scented flowers in the spring. Sometimes referred to as a 'flame azalea' because often the flowers are a lovely pale orange, it is can also be a soft yellow or pink. Recently I have found them for sale in nurseries but they seem so out of place next to the flash of their hybridized cousins. I can't see them flourishing in subdivisions. They aren't made to conform. They need the wildness of the woods.

There is something very precious and important about wildness. The author in his forward to The American Boy's Handbook, writes that in dealing with the lives of little boys, it is good to always remember they are all essentially, savages. Most mothers would not need to be told that, and certainly that remark draws a knowing smile. But it also conjures up a small truth. Setting aside the need for schooling and manners and social graces, there exists in all of us something that is wild and free and unless it is nurtured, can be extinguished. We are lessened when that happens. We lose a vitality that is necessary to our individuality and our humanity. We lose who we are.

We are not azaleas, but sometimes our lives do become so hybridized and tamed for the sake of conformity that we lose touch with the original part of ourselves. We forget that wildness is not sameness. It is rich with difference and originality. Tolerance is achieved by integrating diversity rather than extinguishing it. Maybe the next time you are confronted with the maddening quirkiness of a colleague or friend, the exasperating habits of your seven year old, or you feel a longing for something familiar you can't quite name, you might let yourself wonder about what in you is still wild.

Nightstalkers

2010-04-25T00:04:00.002-04:00

I wake and spend
the last hours
of darkness
with no one

but the moon.
She listens
to my complaints
like the good

companion she is
and comforts me surely with her light.
But she, like everyone,

has her own life.
So finally I understand
that she has turned away,
is no longer listening.

All of us at one time or another, have periods when we cannot sleep. Life provides lots of experiences that can keep you up at night. One dear friend says her children call her 'the nightstalker' for her reoccurring restlessness in the middle of the night. I think that name suits the malady perfectly. I have my own theory about it. I think it is worst when the moon is waxing. Its power is legend to influence our hearts and minds. The pull it exerts on the tides of the earth also pulls on the life pulsing through us. I've watched it while rocking newborns, as it rises over oceans and lakes, while sitting up with the sick and the dying and on those nights when worry would not let me rest. Somehow being up in the night and seeing it's graceful shape, whether it is waxing full in expectancy or melting away in sorrow, I have felt comforted. And who among us has not at one point or another lifted our jumbled thoughts and poured them out under the moon's white stillness? Every life has nightstalker moments. The moon is only one of countless places in the great beautiful world outside where we can feel safe enough to pour out the contents of our hearts and leave lightened and strengthened to carry on.

She wants me
to refold myself
into my own life.
And, bending close,

as we all dream of doing,
she rows with her white arms
through the dark water
which she adores.

Mary Oliver, "Moon and Water"

A Beautiful Mess

2010-04-21T09:12:00.002-04:00

"The world is God's language to us." Simone Weil

The woods are in mayhem right now. Everything that can push up out of the ground, turn green, throw pollen or chains or bud sheaths is doing so. The cool air is yellow from the exploding pollen and is drifting with pale castings of every size, shape and description. It's absolutely beautiful.

Growing up, it was hard for spring to roll past without some type of major house project getting underway. My Dad, a man of unlimited talents, could make or do or fix almost anything, and Mom was an endless source of ideas. Spring often triggered in Mom an activity for Dad to be about the least of which she innocently referred to as 'rearranging the furniture'. It sounded simple enough, but it was really code language for what invariably turned out to be a huge clean out, room changing transformation, at the end of which we were all left somewhat wide eyed and not always sure about where we were sleeping.

Sometimes we also bring about mayhem in the process of creating or experiencing something new or different in our own lives. Changing often means we will be asked to endure a measure of chaos before we get the rooms in our lives arranged in the new way that suits us. There may be a good bit of throwing things out, outgrowing old expectations, pushing up through hard soil, as well as a bit of drifting, just as it happens outside this time of year. All the 'ing' phases of life: birthing, growing, changing are also code words for messy, chaotic and confusing. But after a while, we find our own rhythm and our lives sort out, just as the natural world does. Then, as in the great outer world, our new self smooths out, chaos recedes. And taking our hint from spring, we too can calm down, relax into summer and go on to bear fruit.

Beginnings

2010-04-18T09:18:00.005-04:00

"Beginnings are scary.
Endings are usually sad.
But it's the middle that counts the most.
You need to remember that when
You are at a beginning—
Just give hope a chance to float up."

--From 'Hope Floats'

The leaves on all the trees have reached the tender new baby green stage. Across the sky and silhouetted against the blue of the lake, their color is bright and shiny. By July they will be a languid dark green, weighted down by the intensity of summer's hot sunlight. But for now, they are a marvel of overnight growth and a welcome sight after months of bare gray branches.

Starting out is its own experience. There are opportunities for all kinds of first days. Starting a new job or finding oneself without one; coming home with a new baby or the quiet after packing that same child off to college; waking up after surgery or from the grip of a destructive lifestyle. Everyone has their own list and for most all of us, facing a change in our lives that is different from our norm can easily fill us with anxiety and apprehension. We get so focused on the negative voices we forget to see that mixed in with all the emotions rolling through us, there is also excitement and hopefulness created by what we are facing.

Lime green new leaves do not have voices to contend with and you can bet they don't have mortgages or retirement to think about either. What they do comes naturally to them even though the summer may bring drought, they may be eaten or infested or cut down for a subdivision and come fall will certainly be shed in anticipation of next year's batch. Of course we are not leaves, but that same natural instinct to grow and change exists in us just the same. Maybe we didn't arrive where we are by a choice we thought of as our own, but here we are anyway, back at another beginning. That's probably a good time to remember all these bright green leaves and consider what they do. Latch on to all the possible instead of impossible. Follow our excitement and instincts in selecting which direction we will grow towards. The leaves are seeking the warm summer sun. That sounds like a good plan. What in us desires the light of day as well? What calls to us despite all the new jitters and anxieties and worries we are feeling? What paths beckon even though they also ask us to risk? But most of all, remember what is most often overlooked in the scariness of beginnings. As soon as you start out, take that first step to whatever it is, the beginning is over and you are the on your way to the middle. The place where you fall into the rhythm of what is at hand. The place where all that you hoped for, can have the chance to come true. The place where you are no longer at the beginning, but on your way.

What the Cat Knows

2010-04-14T11:30:00.005-04:00

One of the gifts of walking is the pace itself. The act of moving slowly allows for time to see much more than is ever possible from the seat of a car. Walking is good for our bodies but the exercise in looking is equally as good for our spirits.

The road I walk along always has something interesting waiting for me. In the past I've come across fawns, and fox and once years ago, a baby bear. But I've seen sand hill cranes, hawks, vultures and herons flying above me; countless other birds in the trees, nests, turtles slowly, slowly crossing, black snakes and all sorts of fascinating, but nameless to me, insects. But the favorite part of my walk is noticing what is growing. This was particularly true this weekend, when I rounded the corner to start my climb up 'the big hill' and walked into the subtle fragrance of sweet shrub. A rangey plant of southern woods, it has long branching arms and pointed leaves that in spring produce a spiky petaled burgundy flower with a dense, spicy smell. When I was growing up in the city, our suburban house had a large backyard, part of which dropped off and went on towards a creek. Even there in those woods, we had sweet shrub. My memories of playing fort or house down by the creek are woven through with its perfume. It was such a little thing-walking along and suddenly smelling a familiar shrub—yet it held the power to awaken so much. Like our favorite cat lying in the sun on the forgotten Sunday newspaper at our feet, who stretches its long silky body towards us hoping we will come and rub it, the trees and fields and yards around us carry the same invitation. It is the gift that can be opened every day that can rest our eyes and hearts and perhaps walk out not only the kinks in our bodies but in our lives. Don't forget.

Susanna

2010-04-11T10:47:00.004-04:00

Nobody in the hospital could tell the age of the old woman who was called Susanna.
I knew she spoke some English and that she was an immigrant out of a little country trampled by armies. Because she had no visitors I would stop by to see her but she was always sleeping. All I could do was to get out her comb and carefully untangle the tangles in her hair. One day I was beside her when she woke up opening small dark eyes of a surprising clearness. She looked at me and said, "You want to know the truth?" I answered yes. She said, "It's something that my mother told me. There's not a single inch of our whole body that the Lord does not love." Then she went back to sleep.

'Susanna' by Anne Porter

One of the hard things to accept about life in the woods is the tenuous thread by which living things within it cling to life. Never does that appear more precarious than in springtime when the monumental instinct to carry on procreation erupts across all the natural kingdoms and mistakes or misjudgments can be fatal. The laws of nature are built on survival of the fittest. Compassion only exists in its primitive state where the weak, by way of a fierce mercy, fall by the wayside. We have been able to provide more security for our lives than the creatures in the woods, but there are still times all of us find ourselves swept into the ditch on the side of the road feeling abandoned, helpless and left for dead. What is different is when we find ourselves in that desolate place, we have available to us the grace of compassion.

There are many stories of people who with dramatic, larger than life acts, raise themselves up beyond anything we could imagine ourselves doing. They may inspire us but to be truthful, the grist of our own individual life is formed day by day from our own joys and heartaches and beliefs about ourselves. Where the rubber meets the road for most of us, is not on a grand scale but right here on our own pot holed asphalt. There in our relationships, our jobs, finances and heart wrenching moments the truest but most often forgotten ally we have, is compassion for ourselves. In our forsaken places where we struggle and gasp, it asks us to reach through our judgments about the events at hand—who is to blame or at fault or made a terrible mistake—and to replace it with clemency. It asks us to open the prison of guilt and shame and finger pointing we have placed ourselves in and to hush the wailing voices of our pain and anger that continue only for their own sake. If we choose to listen, we can create the opportunity to get up out of the wreckage we have made and walk away with insight and understanding. Instead of draining ourselves off into a life in the ditches, we choose our capacity to deepen our awareness, to learn and change how we go about traveling down the road of our lives. We bless not only the frailty of all that we are but also our potential to create all we can become. We get up out the ditch and go on our way.

Spring Tune Up

2010-04-06T22:22:00.005-04:00

Each year, beginning with the traditional Spring Break of schools and colleges, millions of people pack up and take off for a vacation. And, no matter where we all go—ocean, mountains, desert, historical site, Grandmas-- the intent remains the same. We are looking for a place where we can let go of the daily grind and get absorbed into a landscape different from the one we left behind. Even if we love our work, there is still a need to periodically create space between ourselves and what we do. Taking time away is a decision that comes from listening to a voice inside us that we usually regulate to the last seat in the van. The one we answer most of the time with 'not now', 'maybe later' or on occasion, 'you want to do what?"

Vacations have become an accepted way of giving time to ourselves. If they succeed in that end, we arrive home refreshed and renewed from the healing and nourishment received from relinquishing our demanding routines and opening up for an agenda based entirely on pleasure and interests. Cervantes has a great line that sums up exactly what happens if we do not. "Alas, all music jars when the soul's out of tune." Giving ourselves permission to wander and putter, not shave, take a nap, play chase with our kids, have the second cup of coffee while still in our pajamas, is nothing less than a tune up for our souls.

Times are tough now and money is short all around. The need for time in which to rest and regain our bearings is greater than ever. The benefits are the same whether spent in your own backyard or across the country. And just like the importance of a tune up for your car, when it is neglected, there will be consequences down the road. Something to consider if lately the music seems not the melody you want to hear…

Waiting

2010-04-03T09:40:00.007-04:00

"I pray to the birds. I pray to the birds because I believe they will carry the messages of my heart upward. I pray to them because I believe in their existence, the way their songs begin and end each day—the invocations and benedictions of Earth. I pray to the birds because they remind me of what I love rather than what I fear. And at the end of my prayers, they teach me how to listen."
Terry Temple Williams

Winter on the lake is quiet and still. When the air softens and the light changes I find myself listening and waiting for that glorious morning when the songbirds return. The music of their calls seems to bless the renewal of the sleeping woods. It isn't truly Spring until I hear their songs.

It's hard to wait, yet much of living requires it. We wait for children to form in the womb, for true love to blossom, for a new opportunity, for our bad haircut to grow out, for scary test results. In Christianity, Easter marks the end of a terrible three day wait when the disciples awake to the realization that the ministry of Jesus was more than they had ever imagined. At Passover, Jews remember the long night waiting for the Angel of Death to pass over their ancestors when they were slaves in Egypt. Muslims trace their origins back to Hagar waiting for God to intervene and rescue her and her infant son, Ishmael, after Abraham casts them out. All religions teach us waiting is a vital and holy ritual with lessons and gifts. When we acknowledge there are those things which despite all our innovations and grumpy impatience, will continue to have their own unalterable time frame, we increase our faith and trust in what we cannot control. Holy waiting means that whatever is needed for fruition, whether in thought or form, is not in our hands. It seems to imply that a very necessary ingredient is not yet available and will not be until time has reached a full point, outside of our knowledge and power, when it will. Perhaps this is meant to help us see there is a great richness in that space where we wait. Sitting with our anticipation or depending on the circumstances, our dread, creates room for contemplation, for prayer, for decision making, or 'Plan B' scenarios in case the results carry with them challenges. Each waiting invites communion with ourselves and with what is greater within us. In those holy moments we get a chance to finally get all things said or thought; to catch our breath more than once and in the silence that follows, listen for a voice deeper than our own.

Winged Gift

2010-03-31T16:21:00.005-04:00

The story of the hungry caterpillar transforming into a beautiful butterfly is one of the many renewal symbols associated with spring. Most of us learned as children how the caterpillar eats and eats, then spins a cocoon in which it completely reassembles itself into a winged insect. The enormous effort required for that to happen often goes unappreciated. Even though the world is built on change, if it isn't happening directly to us, sometimes it is hard to comprehend the effort growth requires.

This past winter I got to see where vast numbers of monarch butterflies migrate to in Mexico. It was an incredible experience to witness what is estimated at 100 million of them clinging in huge clusters to the fir trees, fluttering in the air, landing on you and everything around you. Harder still to see the countless numbers of them littering the ground having fallen prey to birds and exhaustion or who knows what, as a result of their long exhausting journey to the cool mountain forests. Not all monarchs migrate and naturalists are still trying to understand why such large portions of them do. Mexico protects their migratory sites and carefully regulates access. After being there, I was so grateful that they do. In a world anesthetized at times by the constant stream of new technical wonders, it seems essential to protect what reminds us we are not the original wonder source.

Standing there that beautiful sunny day, I thought of how easily I had dismissed the powerful metaphor wrapped in the cocoon of the waiting caterpillar. Letting go of how we used to be, what we know is no longer true for us, or needs to be renewed, is easier to talk about than to do. Growth is not for the faint hearted . It requires appetite and persistence, patience and trust- especially when facing a decision that requires a journey with a mysterious outcome. The beauty of what I saw that day moved me to tears. Not only because it felt so good to know there were places where the abundance and rhythm of the natural world still existed but because seeing how a living thing, apparently so fragile, could launch off in the face of terrible odds and hardship in order to fulfill what it needed to be- seeing that gave me a gift that applies to all our equally fragile lives. It filled me with hope.

Songs of Comfort

2010-03-28T10:48:00.008-04:00

"But even in the darkest situations the human spirit flutters, sings, and sometimes soars. Something is us keeps us focused on a brighter day and a better situation." Thomas Moore, A Life at Work

I heard the unmistakable sound of tree frogs, aptly called 'spring peepers' last night. As I drifted off, I realized that the woods were full of their high musical notes. When they burst into their mating calls it is a sure sign spring is here to stay. In a few more weeks, their evening serenade will be joined by the bell tones of crickets, then lightning bugs flashing to their own rhythm and by the end of June with the sawing sound of the cicadas who round out the woodland chorus. Already the window pane by my desk lamp is the courting ground for moths flocking to the light. Each new addition arrives on some mysterious schedule dependent on an exquisite balance of temperature, daylight and moisture. In the night time sky the moon is waxing steadily towards fullness. It is still a few more days until it is complete, but already it is rising up out of the lake late in the afternoon and spilling its light across the water.

A change of season seems especially welcome this year. In these complex times it can be difficult to believe things can or will improve but then spring arrives and we see all around us that it can. The return of the peepers and the timing of the seasons can be a source of encouragement. Spring raises our hopes, as it awakens the world for another go at mating, building nests, feeding and raising young and seeing them fledged. Are we not much different? We have fancier gear, but we are still doing the same thing ourselves. When the peepers start their chorus, perhaps it is also meant to soothe our troubled hearts and worried minds. Perhaps they are reminding us that everyday living, even when we have very little, still has possibility and blessings. It is important to realize life is full of hardships but it is easy to be weighted down by that view and forget that when it is destructive, it is still creative. Winter is washed out by the rains of spring, summer's bounty provides for fall and winter arrives when we need to rest. There is a richness and beauty to life that cannot be erased. When our nests fail and we are in despair over our lives, that richness and beauty endures and our lives are bound up with it. Maybe tonight, you can step outside your door and be comforted.

Hopeful Daffodils

2010-03-24T09:15:00.007-04:00

March in the South heralds the ancient shifting of the seasons. After a long and particularly cold winter here, the days are beginning to warm up. The swollen tips of trees and bushes have turned deep purple and rose and a few early starters have pale leaf tips unfurling. White service berry and redbud dot the woods and roadsides. The daffodils are in full bloom, their bright yellow faces soaking up the sun and reminding us of where now long forgotten gardens used to be. It is a lovely gift to see drifts of them along the country roads where they have spilled out of long ago borders and are all that remain of old homesteads. When I have stopped to gather some I've found they are not tall and lanky like their sophisticated city cousins, who sport large petal faces with long trumpets. No, these are small, with sturdy little stems and modest countenances. Seeing a rush of them when everything else is rainy and cold is nothing short of uplifting.

Yes, Spring is all about rebirth and fresh starts. Unlike the turn of the New Year which is about planning, Spring is all about doing. As the world turns green around us, we find our own sap rising and with it, new energy to channel into our lives. After all the brooding and introspection of the winter, Spring brings an energetic release that moves us out of our interior spiritual and physical world and back into the stream of living. We get restless. We buy seeds, get new haircuts, take off our heavy jackets. Just like the returning birds and mating animals, we too can feel the deep creative urge to build a life. Spring is nature's expression of hopefulness and as it determinedly pushes up all around us, it strikes that same chord in us. It is a powerful demonstration that even when we feel there are no more opportunities, no possibility for change, no solution to our problems, we are still part of something larger than ourselves where there is still an unquenchable impulse for life instead of against it.

"For oft, when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon that inward eye

Which is the bliss of solitude;

And then my heart with pleasure fills

And dances with the daffodils."

William Wordsworth

2010-03-21T07:30:00.003-04:00

Through a Glass Darkly, then Face to Face

It's been two months now, since my return from India. During that time I have been processing all that I saw and felt and the windows of my studio are covered with post its containing words and phrases from my experiences there: chaos, sequins, saris, silk, dust, call to prayer, snake wires, inner worlds, lustrous and my most favorite- the light. A two week sojourn in any place does not make one an expert, but it does provide nourishment for introspection. The words on my windows are a small but powerful metaphor that sums up a great deal about my brief time in 'the land where all things are possible' where I found myself drawn over and over to the windows and doors. Many were old and worn, some historic and majestic, but all of them seemed to witness to the human curiosity to want to know what is behind them, to discover and understand the lives of people in new places and other lands. It seems to me that a journey to another place is much like looking through a window or going through a door. We leave the way we live to experience the way others do and by doing so, open ourselves up individually and to each other. When we come home we are full of tales of how odd or surprising or amazing those other worlds are whether in the next city or state or across the globe and often as not, how very alike. In these tumultuous times, I find that a source of great comfort.

As I close this series of blogs about my trip, I would like to leave you with a last little story. One evening as a guest, I watched two men in front of me heading for the clubhouse after a round of golf. One was Indian, the other American. I knew they had met that day for the first time, as partners for a tournament celebrating the birthday of the club. In India, it is considered an act of trust and friendship for men to hold hands. It is their version of the handshake, only more meaningful and you often see men doing so. As I walked quietly behind these two in the gathering dusk, the men walking along, talking congenially, I saw the Indian reach out and gently clasp the hand of his American partner, who with uncommon understanding, received it without embarrassment. In those quiet moments all three of us were standing at the windows of each other's life, looking in and seeing how much more alike we really are, than different. The simple and beautiful act shared by these two men expressed in deed more than words ever could, the power we all have to create a peaceful world. When I find myself despondent over the future it is to these kinds of memories that I return. Our times are not unique. I don't know if that is necessarily comforting, for don't we wish that life would somehow have improved? But I do believe we are slowly changing for the better. While there are many who believe that differences are to be feared, there are growing numbers who have the courage to reach across with a friendly handclasp or return a smile. Until that day arrives for all of us, little windows such as this sustain my hope for I believe lasting peace begins in our hearts and hands and not on a piece of paper.

Thank you all for letting me share my trip with you. I'll be returning to my regular posting format on Wednesday. I hope you can join me. Until then traveling mercies on all your lives. To see some wonderful last glimpses, please visit the India Photo Journal site to the right.

2010-03-10T07:30:00.003-05:00

Lakshmi and the River Ganga

One of the special gifts of traveling in a country with a different culture, is the opportunity to witness unobtrusively, what are considered ordinary events of daily life but which to the observer may seem quite the opposite. This happened to me one morning on the banks of the Ganges River(Ganga in India). Our group had walked down to see the Ghats, or stairs, that provide access to this river considered sacred throughout India. As I had grown accustomed to seeing, there along its banks daily life was unfolding: people were bathing, swimming, getting their hair cut, purchasing goods-taking care of all the necessities of life. Suddenly a large flatbed truck pulls up to the sound of loud chanting. The flatbed contained a tall straw and mud plaster statue of the Hindu Goddess, Lakshmi, The chanting was coming from about 10 young men, dressed in school uniform, complete with oxford shirts and ties, who were there to release the flower decked statue of the goddess to the waters of the Ganges as their supplication for her blessings. Their leader led the chanting as they leaped from the truck and proceeded to hoist Lakshmi onto their shoulders and carry her down to the water's edge. The fervency and camaraderie of their endeavor electrified the foreign bystanders but was taken as a matter of course by the local populace. The man getting a trim had to move over briefly for the statue to pass, but then quickly sat back down so his barber could finish up. No sooner had Lakshmi been properly launched than another group arrived with another statue to offer up, albeit a much smaller one. We learned afterwards that the statues are biodegradable, and are usually allowed to float only a short distance down the river before they are retrieved. The mud casing can be easily removed once they are wet and the straw reused for another deity.

Lakshmi is the goddess of wealth and fortune in the Hindu faith. To see pictures of her launching onto the waters of the Ganga, click India Photo Journal, to the right.

2010-03-07T07:30:00.003-05:00

Flower Power

There are highlights to every trip. I was fortunate to have many in India and among those was my morning tour of the wholesale flower market. Flowers, especially marigolds and orchids, are an integral part of the daily religious life of Hindus. It is their tradition to place fresh blossoms on their home altars, those at their places of work, as well as the ones in their temples or street corners or erected for festivals. I have been in wholesale floral markets before and the buzz of activity and the abundance of flowers from all over the world is breathtaking. The huge Indian market I visited in Calcutta was completely different. There was no huge refrigerated building but a vast network of dirt lanes and sheds lined with huge piles of fresh flowers, petals, and leaves on cloths and plastic. The flowers arrived not in air freight boxes but wrapped in huge bundles of soft sheeting from the surrounding villages in the predawn hours where many of them had already been carefully strung into long necklaces of blossom heads or made into 3 or 5 leaf fans. Our guide walked us carefully through the market as we dodged men hurrying through with massive stacks of flower material piled on their heads or loaded on the front and back of their bikes. Shop owners haggled to fill orders for flower shops as independent street vendors scurried to select their merchandise for the day. We stopped time and again to see how carefully the various blossoms were strung into chains and to hear the fascinating significance behind the selection of each flower. There are no set rules of worship in the Hindu faith. It is very much an individually interpreted religion but the use of flowers as a means to express devotion and reverence is universal. The special moment arrived for me towards the close of the flower walk as we stood in the midst of the blaze of yellows and oranges and reds, and our guide turned and said: "If you want to understand the inherent non-violent nature of the Hindu religion, one has only to ask oneself: How can someone who buys flowers everyday to dress the altar in their home, at work, at their temple, be anything other than non-violent?" I completely understood.

To enjoy more of the colors of the flower market, click on the India Photo Journal link at the right.

2010-03-03T07:30:00.005-05:00

The Gifts of Rest

About half way through my stay in India, I left the crush of Calcutta and took a day long ride on a house boat to the Sundarban Tiger Reserve at Sajnekhali. Getting to the boat required a heart stopping 3 hour ride in the back of a hired taxi in the predawn hours, the better part of which I tried not to look at what we were nearly missing. The reward for my blind courage was more than enough, for after days of noise and pollution and dust and walking, walking, walking, I emerged from the taxi into the moist cool air of the river.

As the group settled in, the boat captain and his crew welcomed us with pride and a hot Masala, an Indian tea with spices and milk. Later at lunch, he served up a simple meal of bakti, the local fish caught that morning, basmati rice and fresh cucumbers, onions and fried eggplant from the local village fields. It was delicious. For the rest of the day our group sailed quietly down the river stopping only when we reached the reserve to climb the watchtower and survey the horizon for tigers and elephants and then returning again to the boat for the gentle journey home as the sun melted behind the river cypress. We listened to the various guides talk about the landscape and animals, talked quietly about politics and culture, but mostly we sailed along, drinking in the quiet and the rest.

The ride home seemed much less stressful, probably because we were so relaxed. Looking out the window in the gathering dusk, I saw village after village of locals gathering together in little shops lit only by a single light bulb or more often, by small oil lamps. They were talking, laughing, getting haircuts by candlelight, roasting food, the children playing on blankets, the bright colors of the women's sari's and the tablecloths still glowing despite the fading light. I felt as if I was being given an intimate glimpse into everyday Indian life, but even more, into the deep nature of humanity to seek the company of each other at the close of day. The moon was only a sliver. It was a dark evening, and as our car passed, the headlights were the only real light on the road that even after dark carried people on foot and loaded 2 and 3 to a bicycle, home. As we sped past, I watched the curtain of evening we only momentarily parted, sweep back across the landscape behind us, returning to darkness all that remained in our disappearing wake. Rest is for everyone.

2010-02-28T07:30:00.004-05:00

Work in Progress

The large numbers of unskilled and illiterate people in India have created an economy with a massive micro-leveled work tier. If Britain was referred to once as 'a nation of shop keepers', then India must be where they got the idea. In the cities as well as the tiny villages entrepreneurship flourishes. Great numbers of people do small parts of much bigger jobs and multitudes of one or two person businesses exist simply to supply the needs of the large numbers of people who live either on the streets or in shanty housing without electricity, plumbing or a means to store food. I have never been around a people so commercially motivated nor seen services so engaging displayed or hawked. Everyone has some little something they are making, selling or a service they can provide. Food is affordable and readily available. The streets are full of metal wok shaped bowls on bamboo stilts that contain tiny charcoal fires dressed with incense roasting vegetables or meat across which marigold blossoms and petals are decoratively scattered. Creating shelter is an art form stretching the western mind to the far extremes of possibility for location and materials. People live everywhere-under viaducts, right up beside the curb of busy highways, on their pallets next to their food stands, in alleys and in pitched tents next to the high rise buildings they are working on. There is a growing middle class in the cities and increased pressure for more housing and more commercial items. Western influenced advertising; Internet and television seem to be fueling that demand but on the whole the largest sector of the 1 billion people still live very meagerly and simply. In my conversations with the people I met I experienced a deep, quiet pride and dignity about their country's ancient and advanced culture, especially in comparison to the development of the Western World. Yet I felt there were also undercurrents of exasperation, even a sense of futility, not just for what they felt was a lacking in the world's opinion and understanding but for the challenges they face in trying to create lasting progress in such a large and diverse nation.

For more glimpses of the everyday working world, click on India Photo Journal at the right.