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breaking the surface 

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It’s hazy and hot here today, a rare bit of humidity.  We’re sitting by the lake, which is rippling under the easterly wind, small tiles of light that catch and reflect the color of sky.  It’s quiet and empty of people.  Just water, wind, trees and sky.  It’s deeply nourishing, soothing.

I fell into deep emotion this morning.  Felt deeply the rub of life’s paradoxes.  The pressure of responsibility and the truth of powerlessness.  It was good to cry and be held.  To let the pressure find release and equalization.  It’s impossible to resist that need anymore.  Pressure must be equalized.  Resistance is futile.

It’s good to be loved.  To be held in what arises.  To come and sit by a lake in the summer breeze and watch the fish feed.  How they break the surface like light.

Poem

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Borne Aloft like the Seed of Grace

Wind. Delicious, supple as a kiss,
as a shirt lifting. Like the one loved
and lost, tossed from where it dried
on the fence. In spring, green
cotton ruptured by ribs of grass.

Time slides around the sun, moon. Sky
arches, a great pelvis birthing this life.
Open your door. God flows in,
fragrant and flagrant as the lover
you’ve awaited. How the child arrives,
on waves of breath.

Bare yourself. Become the seed,
the song, naked in the lap of love.

Poem for Our Mountains

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Beauty Broken Whole



These mountains you love so much?

Disruptions, ruptures.  Once they lay

quiet beneath an inland sea, placid

and flat, soft, smooth sand.

Then the earth heated and shook, 

tore at its breast like hands

that broke open fissured ribs 

until its molten core poured out.

All a shifting and grinding, thrusting

like trust or truth, like what is buried in

you, dear heart.

The Path Back to Embodiment: A Journey through the Washita Massacre

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When I was a seeker and then after in a state of transcendent awakeness, I embraced the analogy that life was like a movie and that we were both audience and projectionist. That “truth” was seeing life as mere image from which we are or can be completely detached.

I remember as a teen watching the film Little Big Man, a devastating depiction of the massacre at Washita where Custer and his troops ambushed and murdered an encampment of Cheyenne who had been turned away from shelter at Fort Cobb. I embarrassed my cousins by wailing uncontrollably during the scene of the attack. It was, after all, only a movie.

Tonight, 45 years later, the trauma I experienced as a 15 year old was reawakened by another reenactment of the Washita massacre, this time on the small screen. For all its contrivances, the 1993-1998 series, Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, invested a great deal into its depiction of the lives of the Cheyenne people and other plains tribes during the time of their persecution, dispersal and diaspora late in the 19th century. Over the first three seasons, the lives of Cheyenne characters were lovingly cultivated, including Chief Black Kettle who signed two government treaties and who despite regular deception by the white government thought that the cavalry would not attack his people without provocation. In a two hour episode, the show depicted the events leading to and the devastating aftermath of the Washita massacre. Among the men, women and children shot dead by Custer’s men were characters including Black Kettle and his wife who over time felt known to me, blossomed into three dimensional beings by actors who captured their essence and by Cheyenne advisors who made sure that the depictions were authentic.

There was no wailing this time, only a deep heartache brought on by the smoldering tipis and the bodies of the dead. Watching the characters of Dr. Quinn, her fiancé Sully and his Cheyenne “brother” Cloud Dancing wander like wraiths through the desecration was excruciating. It was not “just a movie.” It was as real on an emotional level as anything I’ve lived in this present life of heartache and suffering.

In the 45 years since my tender initiation into the truth of how the west was won, the lives, histories and survival plight of our native people have drawn me to my own known truth. Life is full of suffering, dehumanization, institutional racism and genocide. Human fear, greed and self-service have wounded the life force of all beings. Alongside beauty is always horror.

What purpose is served by attempting to transcend this fact? Inasmuch as life is a grand illusion “signifying nothing,” it is also a lived experience of these bodies that are born, that are highly sensitive and vulnerable to the caresses and buffets of the world, the crucible in which we are annealed, refined and stripped down to our essence. For myself, I far prefer my ability to feel the truth of image, the reality of perception, than to sit back at a safe, untouchable remove, like, as Sylvia Plath called them, “the peanut crunching crowd” of transcendence.

Tonight, my whole body heart is broken open by man’s unkindness to man and by the awareness that I am both perpetrator and victim, both the beneficiary and the loser in the epic history of the rise and fall of life on Earth. There is no more enlightening knowing than that.

Broken-hearted River

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It’s been a while since my last post. The wild ebb and flow of life has kept me otherwise occupied, but today, there’s a melancholy yearning in my heart that brings me back.

It’s late afternoon.  I have an hour or so before I have to go back to work for a Board meeting.  I drove to Blue Star for a latte and then drove down to the river,  picked my way out to a little spit of land where the water is rushing by shallow, cold, rocky. Everyone seems to have had the same idea today.   Scattered  around the river are clusters of people, a man with his toddler son, an old woman with her dog, people in singles, pairs, small groups basking in the river’s presence.

The river is a balm.  Throughout the day, I’ve felt a small dense pressure in my heart.  It is free from story or cause.  Free from any particular worry.  Rather it feels like a conduit to a deeper layer of my humanity, a sort of heartache of living, of aliveness.

No matter how deeply I fall into awakened consciousness, this heartache is always there.  It’s like this river rushing, thinning, opening, always moving from source to sea to rain and snow and back again, passing through stalk and leaf and fruit.  Today it blossoms here inside me, bursting forth with a persistence that cannot be ignored.

Nothing can stop its course.  Nothing  plug its source.  The hole from which it springs is eternal, human, precious.  I’m grateful for its waters that bathe me in such tenderness and tenderize me with with its relentlessness. Long may it ramble.

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Anatomy of Bloom

Full moon tonight lights

receding snow spread 

along river’s edge.

I walk the thawed slope

of hill among shadow

shapes and rush

of water that leaps

like my heart.  Weeks

to spring. Love’s flight

lifts like flush tulip

sepals, red as blood

around the nestled

bud: petals, stamen, pistil.

From the frost loose soil

green stalks will thrust

the cup of color. Awakened

by this turning from winter’s 

sleep: Perfect. Complete. 

Ode to March

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It’s a perfect March day here today.  Pale blue skies with large cumulus clouds gray tinged on the bottom.  There’s wind alternately gusting and cresting.  Shaking the pines and whipping dust around so that I have to squint my eyes.  It calls forth the Brontes on their moor.  Wherever I’ve lived in North America, the Maritimes, the Mid-Atlantic, the northwest, March has brought with it a body memory from childhood, or from many childhoods lived, dreamed, imagined, over and through time.

The town where I grew up in the sixties in South Jersey had a large open green space with baseball diamonds, swings and slides, a copse of whip-branched bushes that formed a warren of hiding places along an outer perimeter of the field.  It lay between the high school (later a middle school) and two blocks of homes that backed up to it on Baldwin Road and Pomona Avenue where I lived.  

I memory, it’s always March in that field, or somewhere in the liminal  pre-spring days of February through April.  My hatless hair is windblown, my nose running, lips chapped.  There’s a melancholy specific to gusty, light-shifting days of mud and snowfringe.  It’s an aloneness that is at once familiar and comfortable, and aching with expectation.  

In grade school, I led my imaginary pony Mick by the halter across the four block field.  When I was in seventh grade, there was a boy one day under March’s dour gray sky riding a brown and white pony.  He went to Catholic school a grade behind me.  We used to meet there on weekends, and he let me ride the pony around the field.  He sent notes to me between rides via a neighbor who was in my class.  Once he sent a solitary silver cufflink, which I saved in my jewelry box for  years.

When I drive along the river road here some forty years later, these pre-spring days when the horses still in their shaggy winter coats hang their long gentle faces over fences, I feel the chilly, weak-sunned air of childhood on my skin, the pony’s bare back and fuzzy flanks beneath me.  When the wind lifts and the sun sends snow back to earth, and earth to mud, I am returned to that time.

When I was in graduate school getting my MFA one of my friends took me to task for using March as a metaphor.  It was not universal, he said, this “March” of which I wrote.  

And yet, I believe that there is a March meme.  A bare limbed and blustery sort of delicious melancholy, a rembrance, so to speak, of things and times past.  It’s a meme of transition, of expectation, of something raw, thawing and budding from your secret and mysterious heart. 

It’s a boy on a pony, or a girl walking alone on her way from school.  Sun shifting in and out of clouds.  Shadows and whispers, what has happened or will or will not.  It’s secrets in the bushes, blunt naive gropings toward something just out of reach.  It’s a bursting forth after which nothing will be the same.  

Or maybe it’s only me, only my own  memory of solitude and longing scuffing its feet in the muddy earth looking for clues to my Self.  Maybe it’s something wild in the blood.  A solitary link to what’s still out of reach.   

Friday, February 13: River Awakening

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I’m lying in bed looking out my east facing window where the morning light illuminates the first red flowers of the geranium on its ledge. The sky is a mix of eggshell blue and grey-tinged clouds over the hill emerging through the melting snow.

East or west, February is one of my favorite months. Whether there’s snow or rain or sun, the promise of spring is evident. There’s a different bend to the light. Days are noticeably longer. Here on the east slope of the North Cascades, the days have been in the 40s melting snow and earth. Patches of long bunch grass poke out of our land like a hairy coat. Whips of new growth shine red and gold on shrubs and trees. Their leaves and buds will be months in coming, but their sheer radiant vitality is a showy bloom of its own.

Most notable here is the change in the river. With the trees still bare, it is clearly visible from above, forking and branching its way east. Throughout the year, it rises and falls with the seasons, gathering snowmelt in the spring, it gains volume of body and sound. For months at a time, it is my aural companion even these hundreds of feet above. Its song comes into the silence, softly at first and by late spring and early summer a constant crescendo of water music.

This week, it has picked up enough volume to make itself heard even in doors. It’s like a parade in the distance making its way toward me. What a welcome addition to the mix of incidental sounds in a landscape so generally devoid of the man made. As I write, snowmelt pings on the metal roof like rain. Flies buzz against the glass. Outside, the rooster crows. Beneath that is the paradoxical white “noise” of deep silence with its shifting pitches and pulses, the celestial music. And mingling with that esoteric sound, the river.

Poets and visionaries have sung of rivers in every language of every culture where water runs freely from mountain to sea. Rivers are our mothers, giving birth to our fragile civilizations through their rich flood plains and their essential gift of water. Of the four elements, water feels the most palpably feminine. Fluid. Drenching. Quenching. We swim in water fishlike before birth and float out of the womb on its tide.

To live on a river is a great blessing. It is a constant gift of wisdom. If you are lost, it will lead you. If you are parched it will refresh you. If you are in its way it will carry you, sometimes to safety and sometimes to harm. It is impersonal and cold and constant. It will forgive you your expectations and show you what is. You can have no better companion. Not even a tree can love you like a river.

Listen. It is calling you right now. Your name is its song.

A Valley Like This: Musings on Art in the Methow

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The barista is a soprano.  The Chamber Music festival is sold out a week in advance.  The neo-traditionalist funk band concert by the Duhks has a few seats left.  Shakespeare is coming to town, both Will himself, and a children’s production of As You Like It.  A 10 year old fourth grader playing Silvius showed me his first lines, and explained the plot with its gender disguises and love themes.

Mahattan?

No.  Twisp.  A town of 900 nestled in the North Cascade Mountains.

A relative newcomer here, I’m watching for openings in the culture stream, auditioning to read poems for the second annual Mother’s Day show called The Mother Experience Project.   I’m looking for an evening in April at the local playhouse to host a reading of William Stafford’s Methow River Poems, written nearly twenty years ago, half a dozen of which greet trekkers along the Methow River here.  There’s an art installation outside the Post Office, a defunct telephone booth that’s now a tiny “Art Library” where patrons can take or leave books.  I recently left a copy of my “first” book of poems, Elegy with A Glass of Whisky, that won the BOA Editions New Poetry America Prize in 2004.  There’s a copy for sale at the local bookshop, too, but I thought it would be fun to put it in the Art Library and see what happens.

I picked up my tickets for the Duhks at the Methow Arts Alliance, a tiny storefront along “The Courtyard” off Highway 20, between Poppie Jo Galleria, an ecclectic mix of women’s fashion, new and used furniture, and antiques, and Rey Emmanuel, the Cuban Mexican restaurant.  Their narrow office has windows on both sides and curtains dividing workspaces.  It’s chock full of boxes of supplies; the porch holds paintings of Methow Valley Super Heroes that will soon grace the fence line of the school where I work.  The Executive Director, Amanda Knox and I had a short but equally chock full conversation about poetry, art, and music.  One of their volunteers came in before I left; she’s involved in both the local salmon recovery project and the local arts.  Amanda and I had just been marveling at all there is to do here and the varied populace that fills the seats and halls–whether it’s the Merc Playhouse, a retrofitted hardware store, or the “Barn,” likewise repurposed as an art venue, the Community Center gymnasium, Confluence Gallery, or the Twisp River Pub, whether it’s a talk on grizzly bears, an art exhibit, “Trashin’ Fashion,” film, jazz, pop, an oratorio by a local composer based on journal entries of Boy Soldiers of the Civil War.  Not a seat in the house.

There is so much resonance in place.  Stafford said in his poem “A Valley Like This”

Sometimes you look at an empty valley like this,
and suddenly the air is filled with snow.
That is the way the whole world happened—
there was nothing, and then…

But maybe some time you will look out and even
the mountains are gone, the world become nothing
again. What can a person do to help
bring back the world?

We have to watch it and then look at each other.
Together we hold it close and carefully
save it, like a bubble that can disappear
if we don’t watch out.

Please think about this as you go on. Breathe on the world.
Hold out your hands to it. When mornings and evenings
roll along, watch how they open and close, how they
invite you to the long party that your life is.

Art is one of the ways that we can “help bring back the world.”  Whether this Valley is filled with snow or disappears in mist, it is always touching those who live here, its mornings and evenings a constant show that translates itself into pigment, sculpture, music, dance, poetry.  “We have to watch it and then look at each other.  Together we hold it close and carefully save it.”  Both the Valley and what it produces are gems that warrant our curation.

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: RIP Danpo

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Today we said goodbye to our dear friend and life companion, Danpo. Danpy, as we called him, was a Tibetan Terrier just a few months shy of his 15th birthday. He spent the last year and a half living with congestive heart failure. Fortunately, there was medication that made the better part of that time fairly manageable for him. But like all living beings, his time eventually came to an end.

He was a great teacher, the way that all pets, certainly all animals, are great teachers. He lived every moment in the present. He found joy in the simple things. He gave and received love. And he left this life with grace and nobility.

One of the most challenging aspects of having a pet is the fact that they nearly always predecease us. They come into our care, usually, as helpless infants. Dogs grow quickly through the life stages, lapping us almost a decade to the year. Danpy came into the world the same year my partner’s fraternal twin grandchildren, today healthy adolescents still growing through their puppy stage with spurts in height, changes in their bodies and minds. While they still have six or seven decades to look forward to, adulthood, relationships, families of their own, Danpy, at their age, was a very old man with an old man’s illness and limitations.

We managed his illness the best we could. He got his pills twice a day, doses fluctuating to meet his symptoms. When he tired of cheese to disguise their medicine, we switched to liverwurst. When liverwurst failed, we switched to canned dog food. When the canned food finally ceased to help the medicine go down, when he turned his face from the pills that were keeping him alive, the message became clear. It was time for him to leave us.

It’s extremely difficult to make the decision to end a pet’s life. If we’d kept pushing the pills down his throat, he may have held on a little longer. But well before we got to this stage, we knew it was time to help him pass. An appointment was made, the final realizations faced, the tears and heartache endured.

Euthanizing a pet often feels like playing God. Who are we to make the decision to end a life? And yet, if we are sensitive and attentive to their subtle communications, our pets will often help us to know when the time has come. With his final vet appointment thirty-six hours away, this morning, Danpy’s symptoms worsened with heavy wheezing and labored breathing. My partner called the vet, and we took him in.

His passing was like his living. A little stubborn, in his own way and time. The intramuscular sedative was slow to work, and the final injection as well. We held his head, hands on his small chest and felt his heart beating, beating, beating, slow, fade and stop. He was at rest. We bundled him up like a papoose and carried him to the car, to his bed and set off for the two hour drive to the pet crematorium.

It’s early winter here. There are a few feet of snow on the deeply frozen ground. Burying an animal at home, interring Danpy up the hill by the family dog Chica who passed not long after they moved here, was not an option. The only truly suitable choice was to put him in the car and take him to be cremated.

It was a moody overcast day here in our valley. And it was a blessing to have the time to integrate the loss of our dear pet. We drove along the Methow River to just before where it meets the Columbia, and there we paused, where we have often stopped on the long drive from here to most everywhere. We took Danpy’s collar and walked down to the frozen edge of our river for a brief ceremony of goodbye.

We called in the elements and directions and commended the spirit of our beloved one to the air, water, land and fire. We thanked Panchamama our mother Earth and the great sky that holds everything in its grasp. We thanked the great river of the first people, and putting his collar around a river rock, we cast it out through the thin ice where it broke loose and fell into the current pulsing along, Methow to Columbia to the seas.

From there, we met the highway and drove the rest of the way to our destination. It was a quick and kind transaction. A bighearted man with a shaved head came out and lifted him from the car, bed, blanket and all. We kissed his furry head and said our final goodbyes.

There are those who might scoff at all of this love and grief and ceremony for an animal. But there are those of us who know that the great spirit inhabits every form of Being. There is no reason in denying its truth. If we attend to this life, then we will be met by the divine nature in everything that inhabits this world. And everything is our teacher.

The greatly beloved American poet Mary Oliver has said it so succinctly: To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal, to hold it against your heart as if your own life depends on it, and when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.

Goodbye Mr. Danpy. Petit Prince. Little Noisette. Blacky. Petit chien. Buddy. Teacher. Friend. May I go as gracefully as you have gone, down the trail, over the snow, into the beyond.

danpy