Birthing

I've got a couple poems forming in my mind's embryonic fluid but it's not time to birth them yet...soon. For now it's enough to feel joy as each new word flutters into existence.

In moments like this, I turn to other writers for company and inspiration.

From Proust's Swann's Way:

"When I saw any external object, my consciousness that I was seeing it would remain between me and it, enclosing it in a slender, incorporeal outline which prevented me from ever coming directly in contact with the material form."

From Annie Dillard's Holy the Firm:

"Esoteric Christianity, I read, posits a substance. It is a created substance, lower than metals and minerals on a "spiritual scale," and lower than salts and earths, occurring beneath salts and earths in the waxy deepness of planets, but never on the surface of planets where men could discern it; and it is in touch with the Absolute, at base. In touch with the Absolute! At base. The name of this substance is: Holy the Firm."

From Forrest Carter's The Education of Little Tree:

"Granma said that the spirit mind was like any other muscle. If you used it it got bigger and stronger. She said the only way it could get that way was using it to understand, but you couldn't open the door to it until you quit being greedy and such with your body mind. Then understanding commenced to take up, and the more you tried to understand, the bigger it got."

From Linda Hogan's (Chickasaw Indian tribe) story "The Feathers" found in Reinventing the Enemy's Language - Contemporary Native Women's Writings of North America:

"There is a still place, a gap between worlds, spoken by the tribal knowings of thousands of years. In it are silent flyings that stand aside from human struggles and the designs of our own makings. At times, when we are silent enough, still enough, we take a step into such mystery; the place of spirit, and mystery, we must remember, by its very nature does not wish to be known. There is something alive in a feather. The power of it is perhaps in its dream of sky, currents of air, and the silence of its creation. It knows the insides of clouds. It carries our needs and desires, the stories of our brokenness. It rises and falls down elemental space, one part of the elaborate world of life where fish swim against gravity, where eels turn silver as moon to bread."

Wisdom from John Muir

John Muir, Platinum Print, c. 1910, National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

I admire John Muir. Always have. Watching Ken Burns' "National Parks" documentary made me feel as if I was with Muir in the Sierras, in Yosemite and Alaska, in the West...taking time to stop alongside wildflowers and inquire about a particular flower's day...breathing in the air that hugs old growth pine...rambling along trails and off trails, led by a boundless enthusiasm for all that IS.

Here are some of my favorite quotes from him. Enjoy.

"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe."

"There is in some minds a tendency toward a wrong love of the marvelous and mysterious, which leads to the belief that whatever is remote must be better than what is near."

"If my soul could get away from this so-called prison, be granted all the list of attributes generally bestowed on spirits, my first ramble on spirit-wings would not be among the volcanoes of the moon...My first journeys would be into the inner substance of flowers, and among the folds and mazes of Yosemite's falls."

"Let children walk with Nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity, as taught in woods and meadows, plains and mountains and streams of our blessed star, and they will learn that death is stingless indeed, and as beautiful as life...All is divine harmony."

"The mountains are fountains of men as well as of rivers, of glaciers, of fertile soil. The great poets, philosophers, prophets, able men whose thoughts and deeds have moved the world, have come down from the mountains--mountain-dwellers who have grown strong there with the forest trees in Nature's work-shops."

"Clusters of peaks stand revealed harmoniously correlated and fashioned like works of art--eloquent monuments of the ancient ice rivers that brought them into relief from the general mass of the range...Nature's poems carved on tables of stone."

I woke up laughing this morning

It's in the wee hours of the morning, and I woke up rather early thanks to the rumbly engine of a car outside my window. This is not why I woke up laughing. I laughed because the engine also woke up a bird (affectionately named Bentley the Bachelor Bird) that lives above my apartment, encouraging it to begin a passionate 5 minute chirping diatribe against said engine. THIS is why I woke up laughing.

I imagined it grumbling about the neighborhood (chirp, chirp, CHIRP), the ridiculousness of some engine noises (CHIRP!), and why in heavens name were people up so early anyway...on a THURSDAY (CHIRP! CHIRP! CHIRP!).

It made me giggle and I am still giggling but also slightly envious. After chirping off, it managed to fall back asleep but I'm up...for good, methinks. 'Tis okay...it's the first day of a new month and I'll be up to welcome the first rays of sunshine.

Osmosis

i'm outside
taking this great biological ground of mine
for a walk.

the landscape blurs in its banality.
rush, rush, rush.
yuck.

i do not want THIS.

what i want is to get THERE
but THERE is inside -
contained neatly within my body's protoplasm.

i wake. i sleep. i step. i move.

my feet feel the jungle beat
the cosmic heartbeat
the rumble tumble pulse
of cellular reverberations

i am pushed through the transparent membrane
and PLOP
i am the outsider come in from THERE.

the ground is blanketed by winter moss
and i want to roll around on frost
that crackles and splinters beneath me.
taste the manna on the ground.

i cry.
arrival, it seems.
give us this day our daily wish.

Stagnation

click
click
click

i pound into the concrete
with three-inch jack-hammer heels
and diffuse disappointment
of another day spent on a wheel that refuses arrival.

a shitty frequent traveler program,
i decide, as the

tick
tick
ticking

of the second hand reminds me
that as time moves
so must i.

Lessons from the Small

Salamander

in santorini i notice a small salamander resting in the crevice of cooled bricks.
it is brown and green and gray and seems content in its rest.

taking advantage of its immobility, i lay on the floor,
stomach adding heat to tile,
and investigate.

i am freckled by the sun.
is this enough camouflage to disguise my presence
or do my eyes give me away?

likely the latter.

i try to slow my blinking
but it is hard to stop my body's automaton response
honed over 32 years.

the salamander is uninterested with me
and my one-sided babble of inquiry.
why do i feel the need to hear my voice?

rays of sunshine reach me and i grow tired of trying so hard.
i fall into waking dreams of
folgers coffee containers holding anxious amphibians
and of newly learned greek superstitions surrounding fire and these creatures.

i blink and my companion is gone
and i learn a simple lesson
of the wisdom of gathering heat to move
and of surrendering to stillness in the meantime.

Travels in the Wine Dark Sea: Greece

Parthenon, August 2009

"...whose land have I lit on now? What are they here--violent, savage, lawless? -- or friendly to strangers, god-fearing men?"
~ Homer, Odyssey, 13.227-29

I dream of olives now that I've returned from my travels in Greece. Olives and tzatziki and Mavrotragano wine. My Converse sneakers still hold dust from climbing Santorini's volcano and pebbles from trekking to Homer's Tomb in Ios. It seems wrong to disturb these stowaways before more walking naturally displaces them.

Ios, August 2009.

"The highest point a man can attain is not Knowledge, or Virtue, or Goodness, or Victory, but something even greater, more heroic
and more despairing: Sacred Awe!"
~ Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek.

What wild sensuousness is Greece! Never has a country made me feel so much in such truncated time. Total elation and awe to sit at dusk and take in the Acropolis and witness its entasis for myself. Losing myself in Athens' overly heated labyrinthine streets and feeling the deep effects of the Meltemi winds. Sailing choppy Aegean seas with vigor and child-like glee. Tasting and tasting and tasting: salty air, perfect olive oil, sweet crepes and bitter Retsina. Listening to Italian vacationers' non-stop revelry, the whir of motorini and ATVs, donkeys braying in cool night air, cruise boats bleating last calls in Santorini's cauldera. And the color, it is useless to try to describe it. It simply IS.

Imbibing Santorini's sunset, August 2009.

Odyssey

careening cliffs and departure --
i wheel into the cement vortex
and watch birds circle in the updraft.

seven there
moving with unfamiliar motive
and i feel a compulsion to point to the sky
and shout out interpretations:
"portent!"
"message from the gods!"
"sacrifice!"

but there is nothing with which to acknowledge these signs
but words and they feel inadequate.

what to do?

i reach into history and sit,
imagining temple priests reading entrails and offering explanations
through the smoke and the smell which homer never describes.

i drink wine.

and like odysseus,
i follow the gray-eyed goddess home.

Oia, Santorini, August 2009.

Barnacle

i push my kayak to the cliff
and examine the barnacles which cling to the salted rocks,
establishing residence there.

this frontier existence begs study.

do they sputter for breath with each wave?
i pull my ear closer to investigate
but hear only the sea's rhythmic drone and sigh.

encrusted, calcified, persistent.
rough to my hands - sharp and determined shells.
hard to chip away so i don't try,
seeking to remain above the line of life's cruelty.

not often but lately i turn myself
to the rock hard chest of a lover
and cling hard during the certain uncertainty of life,
gasping as i go but resolute to survive
in this breath and in the next.


Sunset, Santorini, Greece 2009.

copper speckled light finds me
and i burst to dance and come out of myself.

one snap here and my foot stomps
in an alien rhythm of expression.

snap, snap.

i have no choice but to move
and to wheel and to follow
the mandolin in one
continuous splendiferous motion
of stacatto movement.

opa!