In a Green, Fringed Fling

"Every year a given tree creates absolutely
from scratch ninety-nine percent of its living parts.
Water lifting up tree trunks can climb one hundred
and fifty feet an hour; in full summer a tree can,
and does, heave a ton of water every day. A big elm
in a single season might make as many as six million
leaves, wholly intricate, without budging an inch; I
couldn't make one. A tree stands there, accumulating
deadwood, mute and rigid as an obelisk, but secretly
it seethes; it splits, sucks, and stretches; it heaves
up tons and hurls them out in a green, fringed fling.
No person taps this free power; the dynamo in the tulip
tree pumps out ever more tulip tree, and it runs on rain
and air.

John Cowper Powys said, "We have no reason for denying
to the world of plants a certain slow, dim, vague, large,
leisurely semiconsciousness." He may not be right, but
I like his adjectives. The patch of bluets in the grass may
not be long on brains, but it might be, in a very small way,
awake. The trees especially seem to bespeak a generosity
of spirit. I suspect that the real moral thinkers end up,
wherever they may start, in botany. We know nothing
for certain, but we seem to see that the world turns upon
growing, grows toward growing, and growing green and clean."

Annie Dillard
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Bob Dylan - Positively 4th Street

Let's see is this one gets there...

Henri Rousseau
The Dream
1910, Oil on Canvas, 6' 8 1/2" x 9' 9 1/2"
The Museum of Modern Art

Reading Rilke (again) and oh so grateful for his words

Last night, I read this passage to my sweetest A.

She is so looking for answers right now and so struggling
to remember specifics, but she is also much better
and much more herself.

And Rilke came to mind as she was speaking, so I read
her this from Letters To A Young Poet:

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and
try to love the questions themselves...Do not now seek
the answers which cannot be given you because you
would not be able to live them and the point is to live
everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will
then gradually, without noticing it, live along some
distant day into the answer.

I promised her I would mail her a copy of the book, along
with another book I would like her to have: Life's Companion:
Journal Writing as a Spiritual Quest. The author quotes
Rilke often, as well as others whose words have so moved
me in my life--Dante, D.H. Lawrence (makes me want to go
dig out his short stories and reread The Odor of Chrysanthemums),
Whitman, Anne Frank, Frank O'Hara, Joseph Campbell, Kafka,
and Carl Jung, to name a few.

It would behoove me to brush the dust off my old dog-eared copy
and start journeying again. I think it's part of the human
experience--a part we tend to ignore for various reasons.

********************************

I am grateful I got some decent sleep last night. It makes all the
difference.

**************************************

What I am thinking about today:

You have to go past the imagined image of [the sacred]. Such an
image of one's god becomes a final obstruction, one's ultimate
barrier. You hold on to your own ideology, your own little
manner of thinking, and when a larger experience of God
approaches, an experience greater than you are prepared
to receive, you take flight from it by clinging to the image
in your mind. This is known as preserving your faith...

I don't have faith; I have experience. I have experience
of the wonder of life.

Joseph Campbell
The Power of Myth

Paul Klee
The Goldfish
Oil and watercolor on paper, mounted on cardboard
19 1/8 x 27 in.
Kunsthalle, Hamburg

I can see a lot of life in you


For my dearest A:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0eSQArSrKE


and one for M, who feels that two can be as bad as one:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-aBYzqJ0L28&feature=related

*************************

Too much happening to get my bearings straight. Been on the road--
not for pleasure this time.

Wait and see. That's alll that can be done.

Wait and see.

The Things That Save Us...

each day, particularly at times like this:
one of my dearest in danger, other loved
ones the recipients of more bad news, but the blue
blouse hangs there still and the garbage
was picked up this morning, and Wes went
to school, and I drank coffee and ate some
almonds. All of that, this Monday morning,
temperatures in the low 60s, brilliant blue
sky with wispy clouds, the air feeling like fall,
my feet pounding the pavement.

Yes, we just keep moving on, even after
words that shock and sting and numb us:
overdose, bad trip, inoperable, radiation,
chemo, excision, reconstruction, rehab--

we keep walking the dog, feeding and providing
water for the cats and dog, changing the litter
box, washing the clothes, cooking, eating, washing,
reading, sleeping, waiting for the phone to ring,
picking the phone up and calling when it doesn't
ring.

The beautiful and intoxicatingly good triple layered
pound cake I made Saturday night--whipped cream
cheese and whipping cream on each layer, followed
by a layer of raspberries, blueberries, and blackberries
which had been soaked for an hour in a cup of sugar
and one cup of Grand Marnier. The top finished out
with most of the berries. Almost too lovely to want
to cut.

The tortellini soup filled with foods to keep us healthy--
to keep us strong--for we must stay strong. Diced
sweet potato, diced onion, diced celery, grated fresh
garlic all sauteed in olive oil. Vegetable and chicken
stock, garbanzo beans, basil and thyme from the herb
garden, shredded chicken, kosher salt and pepper,
spinach and cheese tortellini, some fresh scallions
to top off each bowl, hot crusty ciabatta bread with a
homemade dipping oil. Some asparagus bundles
wrapped with prosciutto and oven roasted. Yes.

Yes, we must cook and eat and have some berries
with Grand Marnier, and wait for the phone to ring.

And this is all I can make of it right now, this the best
my mind could do yesterday:



The Blue Blouse

It's been hanging there for days, slow
dancing with the breeze, its turquoise
and certitude comforting in this time

where everything I know is in upheaval:
someone I love in the hospital choking
down charcoal to empty the stomach

of its ruinous contents, someone else
I love struggling with the outcome
of conclusive proof, and yet another

one I love uncertain about which path
would lead to healing--invasive measures
or acceptance. Exhaustion clouds

my mind; a floater determined to sit
upon my eye clouding my vision makes
me restless and unwilling to spend

time writing the words of life unfolding.
This late afternoon, I rely on the blouse
and the weeds overtaking my garden

to keep me level, to take me inside, where
all things are real, even those most beautiful
and those so ugly one would like to forget

the power inherent inside, the inability
to ignore or appreciate one extreme
or the other, the way the body takes

control as the mind weaves her web.