1.3.15 Amara: The Right Place, and The Right Time

     Amara stands with me in the kitchen, looking about, impatient, irritable, disdainful. Getting her sealegs.

      She questions me, challenges ; is alive with retorts, as I watch and see beneath her tremulous waves. As my view becomes clearer and her brackish  23 year old backlash more understandable.

     “Hey”, I say, “ Can you just settle down a little? I get that you’re angry and lonely and sick of a lot of things. But It’s just me, here, wanting to be with you, and get what it is that is going on, for you.”

     She looks aside, a quick moment of regret passing by her rough guise, shifts on her  hip,  arms crossed tight on her chest, tough ; as she leans on the counter,  looking at me once again, this time with a small bit of consideration.

     “It’s just been hard. I’ve always been the one. To ante up, you know? To take charge and pull it together. All sheep and no wolves. I got stuck being the frigging wolf. Do you even get it?”  
     Behind her hazel eyes, I see the smallest of tears, as she quickly looks away, shakes her hair over her face a bit, right on the edge.

     And I do. I’m watching and I’m seeing beneath, the way we can sometimes when we’re young, and even more so as we grow older and learn learn what lies there under so many behaviors and  noises and posturing and anger and vehemence. We learn that all that stuff is smoke, and if we wait it out sometimes, why, it settles. If you get to have the right place, at the right time.

     So I pray this is the right place, and I do what I can to make it the right time, with my heart and my prayers and my openness to peer in to whatever of her she is willing to show. And see in there to what  she is not. With respect. Boundaries.

     And there she is,  hurt,  mistrustful,  harmed, and valiant. All the vitriol simply  the fumes of some courageous valiance.

     Not hate, not meanness; not dangerous, nor spiteful.

     Simply courage, strident and desperately cued to a life that has not been kind.

     So I stand with her. We talk about things. She asks questions, slowly lessening her animosity, her defensive jibes. I just stand there and begin to really see her, the young one, upon whose shoulders so much has been laid.

     And my awareness informs our simple conversation, about safe things and simple things. My ease and caring slips in, through her barbs and fences and warning systems, to where she very well might live, there, inside.

     And we stand in the kitchen, watching out the long line of cat-nose-smudged windows ,as the light from the setting sun flickers over the tops of  trees at the edge of the field, making them golden for just moments.

     As the moon shows its illuminated aged self, high in the sky.

     As the sunset travels silently across the land, and then is gone.

1.3.15 Nourishment: A Story

I once heard on NPR a story read by a writer, a woman from the south, who spoke of having several siblings and a mother who had not been nice at all. 

The mother lived with one offspring, then another.

The narrator was on her way to pick up her mother , to live with her for awhile, and was staying overnight at her brother's.

This sibling was single, and the mother did not call him by his name, but instead had for years called him some derogatory name , referring constantly to his ‘worthless’ singlehood.

As the sister and brother were having a glass of wine that evening, the mother called down from upstairs, distressed , due to a toenail on her foot that bothered her.

And so the son went up, trimmed the nail carefully, and helped his mother to bed, returning downstairs to finish sitting with his sister.

At that moment, the narrator realized that her mother had never been cared for . She had never ever been cared for the way she was cared for now, in old age. Had never been as peaceful; never as happy.

Not that she was easy to live with. Not that she was civil, or kind.

Yet, the offspring had managed to give their mother
that which she had been unable to provide for them.
That which she had never received, herself.

Many of us learn how to do this, as we grow older.

To provide for ourselves that which we were not provided with.
To provide for our parents or our children or cared ones that which we
had never received.

Sometimes, we are blessed with a friend, or a partner, or an offspring, or even a parent, who does provide these things. Love. Patience. Caring. Nourishment.

These are not a given in life; not for an ant or a bear or a tree or a person, nor you or I.

Instead, they are a blessing. A gift of such import, whether we learn to create caring ourselves, or have the grace to be the lucky beneficiaries.

1.2.14 In The Dark Night Sky

The moon is high 
and the moon does not lie
as it shines above
in the dark night sky

1.2.15 The Things He Remained Unable To Be

All afternoon long the next door, not-too-close neighbor had been banging away with his gun, shooting at who the hell knows what, possibly having a grand old time in a manner that is so antithetical to me i can hardly imagine the motivation nor the gratification. I mean, think about it. Where the hell did all those bullets GO into???? 

Not the coyote, who he tries and tries to hunt hunt hunt and kill kill kill. The stable monogamous couple who kills no sheep nor chickens nor cause any trouble whatsoever. Possibly the meager surviving squirrels from the coyote appetite? I think not.

Or maybe the soft slow moving possum i met out in the compost the other night? No. Or the trees, standing and living, taking root from dropped seed, and then surviving, standing tall and making their way through drought of summer and frozen days of winter, communicating with elegant complexity with all of their kind?

More possibly. I mean, who are these fellow humans, who venture forth and plunder what they can? I have no answer, no considerations, nor any estimation of their ways , nor what it may be like to be them.
Oh, I had a father, who would come home from work, enraged, after bellowing like a bull at people in his business, then preen himself at my few visits, at how auspicious his powerful grasp of them was. 

And I would sit in amazement, wondering from where he came. And he would tell me with such cheerfulness that at the end of work days, making a great deal of money and screaming at many people, whomever he could, in the process, and then feeling very fine about it indeed, he would get out his DDT in his spray bottle, and go about attacking evil invasive Dandelions. In his yard. 

Yes, when he told me this, I kept to myself my sense of pathetic shock. That he would glean satisfaction from attacking and killing stationary plants, whose medicinal benefits both to his lawn and his person he had no interest in.

And later, when he procured for himself Hodgkins Lymphoma, and directed a lone sibling, of six, to tell noone, the sibling told all, of course, for what a ridiculous thing to set upon an offspring with whom you have bothered to develop neither bond nor meaning.

No, he who filled his world with DDT, whose half life exceeds so many things on earth it is shocking, far exceeding his own unprecedented odd life, his own odd ways of perpetuating rage and salacious death upon tiny living things.

It is he who in that strange way became one of my greatest teachers, by all the things he remained unable to be.

1.2.15 when the going gets tough: can you dance? can you dance?

1.1.15 Sometimes Your Long Day

Sometimes your long day
slides into the night 
And while the
wind-scraped windows 
disturb you as you try to 
find that complex dark path 
far into the relief of your sleep 

All is forgotten and little remembered
Time grows elusive as the
sustenance of love and moments and life
weave to bind you here once again

12.31.14 For the New Year

''''

With the end of the year in mind, and coming rapidly into view,  I walked the darkening Pine Forest, frigid air stiffening fingers and knees. 

As the pup raced and the sunset shone upon the beginnings of frozen waters, I was awash with these things. And here is what answered me:

Here is to you. 
To your comings and your goings
To your stalwart dreams and your early morning awakenings.
To those hopes that may never be realized, 
may their preciousness of what your days have held in the past find your embrace in your coming year.

Here, then, is to your irrefutable strength of spirit,
wisdom of mind, sturdiness of heart, 
resilience of body, and buoyancy of faith.
Let there be light and laughter in your days, 
and restoration and sweet comfort in your nights.

12.29.14 " As a writer, even as a child,"

“As a writer, even as a child,” Joan Didion writes,
 “I developed a sense that meaning itself
 was resident in the rhythms of words 
and sentences and paragraphs, 

a technique for withholding whatever it was 
I thought or believed behind 
"" an increasingly impenetrable polish.”

12.29.14 This Becomes Solace

When stuck in bed, transporting to other places at other times; remembering the cold wind brushing across your face, not a person around, the pup splashing in the waters, and then racing about the shore, as the muscles in your legs experienced that pleasure of use and strain and vital movement of blood, as you meandered into the woods, free from  paths... This becomes solace.l

12.28.14 Old Barn of My Days

The barn was old, quiet. Situated at a forgotten junction. Locked up . A few rolls of hay pressed into the shelter of the indented front area , where, years ago, as I walked from my crappy VW, enormous regal German Shepherd by my side, to my UMass classes; no notion yet of real jobs or birth giving or serious falling in love , I would see the beautiful faces of various horses looking out of their stalls, down the open halls, or being led to places across the then two lane road, to graze or ride or run free. And of course , then , the two of us would stop by, saying hello to every single one. 

But that is over now, the magnificent new facility for the University built as I left the school, as I grew my family, as I grew real jobs of comfort and joy. 

Across from the peeling boarded up building was built another, that mirrors the exquisite form of it's roof, it's structural cavalades; an architect seeing the wisdom behind the original design. 

But that is over now, the magnificent new facility for the University built as I left the school, as I grew my family, as I grew real jobs of comfort and joy. 
Across from the peeling boarded up building was built another, that mirrors the exquisite form of it's roof, it's structural cavalades; an architect seeing the wisdom behind the original design. 

So now we have the elder form, abandoned, and the echo of its beauty, in a complex nearby, that has architecturally gone on to crossbreed with several new buildings and complexes, all small songs from this original , now aged form.

And yet now and again, before they were done with the elegant building ,with its turrets and twirls, cut deeply into hard reddened wood, before I had three-but just one small one, we would come by the morning after our nighttime books with stories of city horses and country horses. 

Not being a horse person, yet a person who loves and yearns to understand all living beings; who was determined to bring my small ones to all sorts of places , and introduce them to learning ease, everywhere at home; 
we would go by the next day , and step into the sweet pungent darkness to say hello to one bright eyed intelligent creature after another , 
the soles of our sneakers silent , as we proffered carrots and stroked silken muzzles 
and murmured those constant quiet phrases just as you do with small people; 
hand in hand, I with my young one, ever inquisitive, going by again and again.
So that now, on a blustery quick-and-chilled November morning, I pull the car over. My children grown. My beloved job left far behind. My body querulous , my time my own. 

I circle the old darling, glancing at the boarded up windows, seeing the quiet lives of the c reddish vines, as they create their own tangled masterpieces now; for now is their time. 

Bright leaf and stem, tangled like a rich hued brocade down the midline of a long forgotten window , 
as it's dusted glass glazes and reflects the light from the overcast day; 
the thrill of the years , as wild vines contrast against the powder blue painted walls someone at sometime chose with delight, 

perhaps not imagining this moment of creation we have before us now . 
The deserted. The let free. The self-determined evocation of life that brings to us great creation, in and of its own yearning , and irrepressible spirit to live where it may.