Category: General posts

One of my earliest memories is about the way words, the way their letters form so many meanings in various combinations.  It’s been a lifelong habit of mind to play with words, taking them apart, pondering their origins, seeking the paradoxes they often contain. Like the state named connect i cut.  Or instability.  It occurred to me recently that when we think we are in stability, we are actually experiencing instability.

This, too, is a lifelong habit of mind.  The constant search for stability, for the bubble in the spirit level to hover just so, in a state of balance.  I’ve learned that the deeper my inclination toward a condition, the more profound the lessons that Being will bring forward to disabuse me of them.  It’s one thing to recognize intellectually that there is no stability and quite another to know it in the body, the belly, the heart, the very cells.

No matter how good or strong our intentions, we are not in control of outcomes.  I remember some years back teaching the Bhagavad Gita to college freshmen and grappling with Krishna’s teaching to Arjuna to “do without doing.”  Over time, I was able to inhabit a way of being that allowed me to act without attachment to the outcome.  But even this is only a stage in realization.  Outcome is a process.  It’s very name suggests its flux.  It is an out coming.  An on going.

Daily living is a process. Its very nature is unstable.  It is porous, fluid, untamable and unnameable.  All of our myths and much of our science point to this.  When one strand of Indra’s web is plucked, the reverberations travel through all of them.  When we identify a particle, it’s already a wave.  When we set goals and intentions to bring about a product, it’s like pinching smoke. Ideas, actions and intentions live in a realm of unpredictability–literally, they cannot be spoken before they are spoken. un–pre–dict–able.  The philosopher Martin Heidegger said in Poetry, Language, and Thought, “What is spoken is never, and in no language, what is said.”  It can not even be dict-ed, let alone pre-dicted.

This will either make sense to you or not.  I don’t know.  But I do know now the truth of it.  We are all surfers on the ocean of Being.  Sometimes we are the wave, sometimes the water.  We are both of it and in it.  Rolling, breaking, reemerging, Broken and whole.

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.

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. 

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.   

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.