Drilling into the body of the mother
Always searching for their energy
The energy that fuels economies
moves our planet
We are made dependent
enslaved by greed that brutally
Murdered
competing technologies They Drill
and Drill into the Earth
Like Rapists
And we
watch
Standing idle
because we must?
Oil
Filed under Angry Girl
Jim
Jim
Your stay was brief, intended for pleasure;
And time for dalliances is always short.
But you made it your business – made it an art,
While it lasted it was Your expression of soul.
It would have done to give your name to a holy book
Reviled as you were, prophet-son
Chastised for worshipping nature and beauty,
Your song was blasphemy in the ears of the deaf.
Your fire strained against the inside of your skin,
Full to splitting.
Eventually it broke as these things do
and loosed you to the sky, where you belong, really.
Pleasure never lasts and truth is eclipsed by fear
So you took your leave
As guests do when they no longer feel welcome
Come again, Jim.
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Filed under Poetry
Two cents (or more, depending on the interest rate)
There’s a lot of good advice out there.
Be all that you can be: Be productive, maximize profits, work hard and play hard. Twitter can help you market yourself. Start a blog. Volunteer more, accomplish more, earn more, know more, be more skillful, buy more, network more. Be available on a mobile device, multi-task, have a can-do attitude, no matter the job or the circumstances.
Who would think, with so much good advice in the world, so many books and articles, so much twitter, any one of us could be troubled, depressed, lonely, mistaken, or – horrifyingly – achieving less than our full potential?
While I’m busy focusing on the 10 things I’m told matter most, all of the fluid is leaking out of my brain.
This is because the key to my happiness, and I know this, is self love (Not self indulgence, which is easily confused with self love). If I could honor those feelings and hunches I have, even when my brain is telling me another path forward makes more sense or has more potential; if I could calmly seek situations that don’t compromise me; if I could be unfailingly polite and kind, treating others as I would wish to be treated; if I could remember to share myself with the people who love and need me, and know better than to open myself to people who don’t or can’t; if I can do those things – be self loving, not compromise my sanity, consistently – for one whole day, that will be a really good, profitable day. And it would be a million dollar day if I could do all of that with some silent time thrown in for good measure. I might hear birds sing or the wind blow. I might catch the spring peepers.
I know, that’s been done. It’s passe. But just the thought of conjuring happiness so simply makes me, well, happy.
No twittering, no self marketing necessary.
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Filed under Musings
Russian Literature
Pushkin on society and the individual in Eugene Onegin (Johnson Translation):
Is it that we’ve become officious
and prone to censure in our thought;
that fiery souls’ headstrong enthusing
appears offensive or amusing
to the complacent and the null;
that wit embarrasses the dull;
that we enjoy equating chatter
with deeds; that dunces now and then
take wing on spite; that serious men
find, in the trivial, serious matter;
that mediocre dress alone
fits us as if it were our own?
X
Blest he who in his youth was truly
youthful, who ripened in his time,
and, as the years went by, who duly
grew hardened to life’s frosty clime;
who never learnt how dreamers babble;
who never scorned the social rabble;
at twenty, was a fop inbred,
at thirty, lucratively wed;
at fifty, would prolong the story
by clearing every sort of debt;
who, in good time, would calmly get
fortune, and dignity, and glory,
who all his life would garner praise
as the perfection of our days!
Pushkin was an Incredible poet.
I was thinking, in response to this passage (likely this is the affect he intended) that if we aspire to mediocrity for the sake of comfort, acceptance, even admiration (a pity, that, but I suppose out of context, creative brilliance is nearly blinding), it may be that for some the small sacrifice of the soul, of one’s creativity, is the price. (Oh, drat! Where did I leave that dream of myself lying about … ?)
Not for everyone, though. There are the managers among us, people who thrive on arranging, categorizing, doing. So sublime in competence, so seemingly self-assured in the execution of things business, social, boundary related. Alas…
it seems there is no comfort or welcome in the world for the artists – except amongst themselves. Odd-balls is the technical term, I think …
… it’s true that the socially able among us, the serious-minded masters of all that is important in politics, of all that is “right” and profitable, when faced with a swelling tide of passion, a brewing poetic tempest, a brooding raincloud spattering unswept pavement … are sometimes caustic, jealous, disdainful.
They
are not skillful – rarely on time, barely present for the lesson. And they are often dissheveled, spattered with paint, puffed up in defense or depressed by the sheer force of expectation foisted on them by
the skillful, shiny sleeping with credit card companies and marketing people.
We are too dull to perceive
a brightly lit (drugged or mad?) watery-eyed (under-rested) , disjointed dreamy (unfinished), sympathetic (undisciplined) , deeply invested (immature) rendering
of some moment, place, being, perception … glimpse. Glimpses don’t pay much. They are so fleeting, nearly unmanifest, hard to market. They pay when, completed and polished until dull, you can mass produce them. Then they are like cartoons. Many glimpses in a row, taken together, in order they make a picture everyone can understand. Uniformly.
It’s all mad rambling.
This is my first time wading into the waters of russian lit and (in translation) I find them remarkably welcoming.
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Filed under Uncategorized
Eyeball Kisses
Five is unaffected
An ocean of desire and curiosity flowing through her small body
catapulting through the world in pursuit of
toads
candy
eyeball kisses
Not like butterflies or suction cups
Lips grasping my eyelid and planting a kiss there
There is no love like the trusting love of five.
All is new, all is need. And I am it’s object
artless and thoroughly invested, as love should be
a shower of tempests, a storm of independence and feigned indifference
alternating with a desperate petition for sustence, reassurance, and eyeball kisses.
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Filed under Uncategorized
The Grey Man
We both saw him.
It was a dark night in Chester, NH, no moon. We drove along a windy, hilly road flanked tightly on both sides by tall trees. We saw no other headlights – just ours, as we rounded bend after bend, climbed and descended hill after hill -driving together in Sue’s parents car to a party in a small town in southern New Hampshire. Dressed in mini skirts, makeup on, we were looking forward to a fun evening with our friends.
There weren’t street lights on the road we were traveling and the darkness was intense, it seemed to swallow the light our headlights cast, close in on the car. We drove, chatting to fend off the big darkness. The hills and bends in the road seemed to go on and on.
We weren’t far from our destination when we rounded a bend that dipped and curved to the right. Just at the bottom of the hill and on the right shoulder of the road stood a man and his dog. He stood, unmoving, staring into our headlights. His dog, too, stood stock still staring straight toward us; neither flinched as our car bore down toward them. The man was mesmerizing: his features were gaunt, the outline of his tired looking overalls and henley shirt beneath them, his short hair, all made his rural character obvious. He appeared to be a farmer, accompanied by a shepherd dog of some stature and with standard markings, sitting on his right. The stark, sharp lines of his face, his intense, glaring eyes, were clear- and all – the man and his dog – were a luminous, monochrome grey.
We veered to their left, missing them narrowly.
I knew in that instant that we were on his land.
“Did you see that?” I gasped, as Sue veered to miss him. I wanted her to acknowledge what we’d seen – and how strange it was.
“Weird,” was her reply. “Spooky.”
“I’ll say,” was all I could manage.
I began to shiver. We drove on, both shaken. A chill set in the car. “Who do you think that was?” she asked. “His clothes were antique-looking. I know a lot of people in Chester and I have never seen him.” She added.
I wouldn’t know, I did not know Chester. Her question gave me the idea, though, that the seeming spooky man might have been an ordinary citizen caught unawares in our headlights.
We hadn’t driven far, perhaps a half a mile or less, when the man appeared again – this time on the left side of the road. Not ordinary! Zooming along a little over the speed limit, we were afforded a good look at him again because he stood stock still, glaring into our headlights as if daring us to hit him. The moment hung in the air, dragging out, as Sue swerved again to miss him. The man’s dog appeared as it had the first time – on his left this time, though. The man’s face was angry and forbidding, his overall countenance menacing.
As we cleared the apparition I thought to check the rear-view mirror. There was nothing that I could see.
“Holy crap!” Sue shrieked.
“Not possible,” I started, “for him to have got ahead of us on foot …”
“Freaky,” she said. “did you see?” she stammered, “I could have hit him. Or it. Oh, my god!” she looked at me. “What do you think that was?” she concluded.
“I don’t know,” I said. “A ghost? all gray…. did you see the color?”
“Yes. transparent, and gray. I’m scared. I don’t want to get out of the car, now.”
“Me, either,” I agreed.
Okay, that’s it, then.” she said. “I’m going home. I know another road we can take out of here.”
Which we did, recounting the sight of the man and his dog, and sitting in stunned silence, in intervals. No party for us that night.
The grey man has remained a fixture in my memory ever since. Few days pass that I don’t remember him, at least momentarily.
My life rounded a corner that day because I understood how imminent a ghost can be. How real they are. It isn’t a thing I can ever un-know, now.
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Sublime
This morning the snow started to come in light flakes.
One.
Two.
and then the rest, swirling and hovering
I opened the door, expected it would be gray, forbidding;
It’s usual austere self frowning down and daring me to rebuke it.
But when I looked up to face it, the sky was glowing.
Sun lit the cloud that stretched cold above and around me, smiling down through the soaring ice
It’s halo soft, white … surely there, behind the falling snow.
Flakes fell
Went about their business unmoved by the sight. Unaware of the miracle taking place around them
With an approving gaze on me, I drove to the school, reassured by the sight of god. Or an angel.
I’ll never be sure which.
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January
If you stop to look, you might notice the sun’s slant is a little more direct; less low on the horizon. During the solstice days it slanted and slanted and never came overhead. Shadows in profusion.
But now it is starting to climb and Inga asks “Mama, when is it going to be spring?”
In years past I wished these short days and long nights away. Counted the days, the weeks, until the sun set after 5.
This year is different. Long, starry nights are permission to curl up by our fireplace and read delicious literature while the fireplace roars and flames smile at me through the glass. I read Ethan Frome, by Edith Wharton. I read Zeena, by Elizabeth Cooke, and I looked out at the moon, which was blue this last time. And I thought, with some regret, that the days will lengthen and the fireplace will be dark before too long. And we won’t be close together as we are, near the fire playing board games. We will expand in the spring air and spread out.
But not yet. It is still January and Imbolg is still 3 weeks away.
In the morning there are little bird tracks in the snow. Laurent tells me they are made by black-eyed Juncos. Little puffy dark birds. They leave delicate little prints in the round, frenetic patterns birds make. And this week two foxes in the snow. Two! Flaming orange, swift, graceful, and gone in a flash. Like magic.
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Filed under Uncategorized
August’s End
A breeze lifts the summer heat, bends ripening grass with its knowing kiss
blue skies slant, the sun’s eye now less direct
over chanting grasshoppers and cicadas
Soon the school buses will begin their rounds, dropping and picking their boisterous cargo
black-eyed susans fade, shrivel, nodding toward our wood pile
and a single pumpkin, rogue offspring of last year’s jack-o-lantern, ripens on a fence by the garden.
Soon the nights will be cooler, silvery, longer, and darker
but for now the heat remains
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Filed under Uncategorized
Flu
She sleeps
golden hair streaming on the pillow behind her,
tiny hand resting, innocent, quiet.
My youngest, spirit indomitable
brave in the face of fever
Facing down the swine that has come
Unwelcome to our house.
Her perfect skin is flushed pink with heat.
More beautiful, even, than the serene glow of good health.
Eyes flutter when I hover above her,
Feeling her forehead, listening for her breathing, reassuring myself.
Half of my life’s treasure there. The other half at school. Undaunted, unhaunted for now.
Thank you
for trusting me to care for you. For dutifully blowing your nose and drinking your water
when you don’t want to.
Perhaps tonight we will sleep sweetly.
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Filed under Uncategorized
Bespoke Herbals @ Backyard Botanics 