Author: Julia

Posted on

Magic Eyes

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

and Heaven in a Wild Flower

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour.

—  William Blake

 

One day late last fall, I spent the afternoon with my friends Sarah and Jordon.  I picked them up at their home, and we went for a walk under a canopy of trees, next to the local creek.  During our walk, Sarah and Jordon gave me gifts of leaves and acorns and pine cones, each one more impressive than the next.  “Oh, look at this one!  I love this color! You can make a leaf bouquet!” Sarah informed me, handing me a leaf, and then another, and another, until I had two handfuls of discovered beauty. “I love this one,” she would say, unaware or ignoring that my hands were full, believing me capable of carrying limitless autumn beauty in ten fingers.  “I love that one too,” I said, because I did.  Not dead leaves, but molted treasures, each one had at least six or seven colors, textures to discover, autumn’s flowers, a universe in a leaf.

Jordon gave me an acorn cap, and authoritatively told me that it could be used as a drinking cup, if I took it home and washed it.  He was very precise in his instructions.  I believe he wanted to give me something useful, something practical, something enduring.  He likes to give me rocks, also.  Flowers and leaves fall apart.  Rocks and acorn caps, not so much; he seems more inclined to give me rocks, pieces of shimmering asphalt found on the road, and, on this trek, pine cones and acorn cap cups.  Whereas Sarah enjoys beauty, Jordan’s utilitarian, concrete and practical.

Sarah disagreed about the acorn cap’s usefulness.  “No, there are bugs in the crack, you can’t do that.  Bugs live in there.”  She said with an older sister’s experience.  To which Jordan answered, “That is why you wash it, and all the bugs come out, and then you can use it for water, you have to wash it out,” he said with emphatic desperation, and a roll of the eyes.  Sarah disagreed.  Jordon persistently gave instructions for how to overcome the hidden bugs problem.

This discussion went on for sometime, back and forth.   To drink from the smaller than a thimble size acorn cap, or not to drink from the smaller than a thimble size acorn cap, that was the question — until a more important issue than hidden bugs in acorn caps caught their attention.

We came back to my place, made some art with glitter glue and watercolor crayons, signed and dated the masterpieces, delivered the works to their mother, then went up the hill to watch the sun play through the clouds and over the mountains.

The clouds were dense and dark over the White Mountains, heavy with water, and where the clouds broke light shafts lit parts of the valley.  The sun was low enough to create intense, radiant beams through the clouds’ darkness, in a play of light and dark over the valley and mountains.

I’ve looked at this view tens of times for over a year, yet details I had never noticed emerged in the landscape, and for the first time I saw not a single valley, but tens of nestled valleys in and around the mountains’ foothills, the contrast between light and dark illuminating what was otherwise obscured to my eyes.  Sarah, Jordan, and I perched ourselves on the old stone fence at the road’s summit to watch the light move through the clouds and over the hills, bright rays dancing among the mountain’s wooded undulations that lay hundreds of miles away.

We went home, when the sun dictated.

Later that evening, I received an email from Amanda: “Sarah told me this evening, ‘Mom, I had the best day!’  I asked her why.  ‘Because I got to spend the day with Julia, got to do art with Julia, got to walk with Julia.’  There was a theme, there!”

I thought about my time with these children, this past year, some of which I’ve written about before.  Sensitive, kind, creative, and thoughtful, Sarah and Jordan have taught me new lessons on love, trust, and how easy and carefree life lived well is.

They see the world through magic eyes: autumn’s flowers, acorn drinking cups, and the ease of days spent in trusting companionship.

 

******

As a child, I never used dolls to play make-believe mother.  Bottle feeding and diapers held no interest.  A Chatty Cathy type doll — but soft-bodied and cuddly — is one that I remember fondly.  A doll that talked, and she had much to say when you pulled her string.  No surprise that she won my heart.  Her eyes went around and around, and she spoke about eleven phrases.  “My eyes are magic, I can see through anything,” was my favorite.  I wondered if she could see through my clothes.  I wondered if she could see through the walls and into the neighbor’s house, and then see through their clothes.  I doubted it, but I  adored the idea of magic eyes that could see through anything, an impressive superpower for a girl’s doll.

Perhaps I never played Mother to my dolls was because my mother worked, and I never watched her caring for kids.  It doesn’t matter.  What does matter was that in my imagination, dolls were players in a universe of characters that had nothing to do with motherhood.  My imaginative life was more like The Wizard Of Oz, a landscape of fantasy adventure in a faraway land, and sometimes  I allowed the dolls and stuffed animals to come along.

Sometimes.  I usually was happy simply acting things out in my imagination while drawing and singing to whatever music fascinated me that day.  The Wizard Of Oz, Camelot, Jesus Christ Superstar, Godspell, Tubby The Tuba, Doctor Dolittle, come to mind at the moment.  Thanks to Columbia House’s introductory offers, my mother and grandmother managed to collect most of the musicals, as well as Johnny Cash, Johnny Mathis, Frank Sinatra, and some classical music.  I hated Beethoven’s Fifth, then.  The opening notes frightened me, the banging sounded violent and hellish.  At a young age, as young as five or six, I managed to move most of the LP’s to my room, except for the Beethoven, though I don’t remember consciously doing this, and there were never objections.  I only remember that the records were always in my room, and that I was the only one who listened to them.  Because my most prized possession was the old gray plastic phonograph player, given to me by a family friend.

If my dolls weren’t for mothering, it’s because they were treasured ornaments in an otherwise bleak domestic environment.  A water pipe broke under the house, and for a couple of winters, perhaps three, because there was no money to move, water seeped in through the floors.  The hallway, bath, kitchen, and dining rooms were wet and cold, the cement entirely soaked.  The tiles lifted from the foundation, the pipes had been laid in cement, and the floor was so cold that shoes were mandatory.  Shoes, not slippers.  I was chronically sick with ear infections those winters because of the cold and dank.  The house was ugly and wet and cold.  Except for my musical sanctuary.  I lined my dolls up on my pink and white fraying bedspread, making sure their dresses were perfectly displayed.  Every doll and animal had a place, positioned just so everyday when I made my bed, in a precise and orchestrated play of doll and stuffed animal.  This early compulsion about objects in their place likely shaped my creative neurosis, the need to impose order on chaos.  They were unusually well cared for, because they maintained a beautiful illusion, and they did their job well.   Even Magic Eyes — who I don’t remember ever naming, I remember only her superpower — wore our play together well because of my aesthetic fastidiousness.

The dolls were more than ornaments, though.  I imagined they might think and feel, so they excited a preoccupation in the unseen and unknown: for a long time they were a mystery waiting for me to unravel.  I wondered with a singularly strange obsession if stuffed animals and dolls came to life at night.  Never during the day, of course, because they wouldn’t want to get caught.  Their possible night life haunted me for several years, and I repeatedly tried duping them into thinking that I was asleep, so that I could catch them playing.  I assumed they played.  I didn’t know, but I imagined them dancing while I slept.  Several times I set a yarn trap, so if they moved, I would be able to tell by the moved yarn.  Unless they fixed it.  If they knew I set the trap, they would fix the yarn, so that I wouldn’t discover their secrets.  I started talking aloud to them, pretending to do one thing while actually setting the trap, so they wouldn’t catch on.  Sometimes the yarn seemed to move, but I couldn’t be sure.  I resorted to bargaining.  I promised I would not tell anyone ever, if I caught them dancing or playing or doing whatever it was they did, while only half-heartedly believing it would work.  I did this several times.  They didn’t budge.  At some point, I gave up, because it was too much work.  I figured that they probably didn’t do anything when I slept, which made me sad, because I liked the idea of them coming to life, freed from their frozen drudgery.  I also decided that if they really were running around in the middle of the night, they were too smart for me, and I wouldn’t be able to trick them.

I thought them full of powers and freedoms beyond me.  So it seemed silly loosing anymore  sleep trying to win a game played against a doll with magic eyes.

 

*******

In The Marriage of Heaven And Hell, William Blake writes:

If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, Infinite.  For man has closed himself up, til he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.

Magic eyes.  William Blake wrote about magic eyes.  He believed in eyes that could see through anything, see the “universe in a grain of sand.”

Posted on

Thanks, And Happy New Year

Thanks to everyone who follows me on FB and receives my site’s updates.

Most of us receive too much email, and I’m grateful that you subscribe, no matter the plethora of junk you receive.  I’d like to think that my updates shine like diamonds that you can’t wait to pick up and be dazzled by, so that’s what I’ll let myself believe as we go into the New Year.

A hearty “Thank-you” for coming along with me  —  I appreciate the friendship and support.

Wishing you the best for 2015 — health and dreams fully lived, every day.

Posted on

Thanksgiving: One Year, Tens of Thousands of Words

Last year, I wrote an entry for Thanksgiving.

A prose poem, it described my visit on Thanksgiving morning by a group of wild Turkeys, who came down from the mountain behind my home, and hung around under my windows for a couple of hours.

They were magnificent creatures, and their arrival on Thanksgiving under my windows was for me as a mystical experience, for they connected me to things larger and wiser than myself.  Their appearance inspired a quick google into Native American legend and lore about these noble birds, and what followed was that I experienced the interconnectedness of land, history, and life’s collective consciousness, a broad, sweeping, and elusive reality.

I felt in awe of these birds who I saw as grand, teachers of a higher order.

As I remembered their visit this past week, I double checked when I wrote the entry.  I thought it must have been at least two years ago; two, maybe three.

No, just one.

I find what I have accomplished, learned, and created this past year extraordinary; more precisely, what I’ve made myself available to, and how its shaped me.  There’s no will involved, it’s willingness, and it’s a flow.  And there’s been more than a year’s worth of life lived these 360 plus days.

Last year, about this time, I was reeling from a broken heart, and the loss of a misguided love who I believed was the one; I had no idea where or how the book’s narrative would take shape, and I was at a loss for its future; and for all of my optimism, I still hadn’t learned to settle into the present moment.

I was still a creature of anxiety.

After countless miles in the mountains (an exaggeration, but a nice turn of phrase), tens of thousands of words (an understatement, because the hours tossed in editing are difficult to acknowledge), a summer of gardening, reconnecting to my visual art, a month-long fast, reading and listening to endless books on writing and self-development, nurturing relationships, hours and days in meditation, and learning to breathe and appreciate in stillness, life has done what it does: grown and proliferated and effortlessly opened itself.

 

*****

 

This past week, I thought about my first gardening this past summer.  I brought my pots in a month or so ago, and the basil and parsley and cilantro have eked out an existence in the back room, until I can afford a grow light.

The basil sits on the windowsill.  It’s leaves turn toward the diminishing sun, struggling for every minute of available light; the oversized tub of parsley that sits on the floor sends out long shoots, reaching for the window, determined to get what it needs, the light of life.  The cilantro, less so, because it’s slower grower and in a smaller tub, and its shoots are modest in their aspirations.

It’s an overworked metaphor for the soul, the plant growing in the light, I know.  But if you’ve never raised plants from seeds, watched them proliferate under the summer sun, and then seen them struggle for what they need and want, there’s an inevitable lesson: we are here to reach for the light that makes us grow.  It’s not metaphysics, it’s what it means to live.

To grow and thrive, we need our soul’s light, water, and fertile soil: and what makes one grow and flourish, may well be toxic to another.  This is the beauty of difference.  Orchids and parsley and asparagus fern don’t thrive in the same soil, sun, or watering conditions.   The conditions we need to flourish  aren’t  necessarily given to us, it’s our job to create the best circumstances for ourselves with what we have, and through our choices nourish our psyche, spirit, and body, until they work and grow together, day by day, as we turn our faces toward our light, the things that make us open ourselves to life, until we stand like a regal sunflower spreading its petals in late summer.

I’ve learned that life is simple, and thriving is our rightful nature as beings on a soul guided journey: to turn toward what inspires and nurtures, and then grow.

Writing tens of thousands of words has been part of my growth, part of my life’s light, writing until I hit my truths, the things waiting to get out, the discoveries sitting like dormant seeds.  As I work on life, the seeds start growing, and they find their way on the page.  The relationship between art and life goes back and forth, a loop that eventually dissolves the boundaries between inner realities and outer ones.  Eventually, in my mind, the distinction between inner and outer appears only as a convenient myth: everything is connected, and what I have understood as meaningless, isolated fragments wait for me to uncover their meaning and beauty.

They wait to find their place in my story arc, and this unfolding arc shows how one life relates to that great elusive life consciousness: a story connecting the individual to the universal.

In this entry, the waiting discovery planted itself last Thanksgiving morning.  The morning marked by the visit of eleven wild Turkeys, who I saw as master teachers, ancient souls visiting under my window, messengers offering me a totem of things to come.  “Abundance, fertility, nobility, awareness, connection with Mother earth, ” the animal symbolism website informed me.  Did I think a year ago that tens of thousands of words would allow me to discover more about love, life, and growth than I’ve previously known?  Did I expect that a summer of gardening and books and art and new relationships would begin nurturing parts waiting to come alive?

No.  I have lived more this year than any year before, creating, breathing, exploring, writing tens of thousands of words (in fact, hundreds of thousands), including a prose poem written a year ago, under the morning sun, and prompted by the visit of eleven magnificent creatures whose promises carried more weight than I imagined.

Tens of thousands of words later, a year having passed, and I recognize that I barely comprehend everything for which I should be grateful.  So I surrender myself to the feelings that ripple through me and travel into the ether: the joy of being alive and grabbing the scraps of happiness that float around me, catching one, letting it go, catching another, letting it go, hoping that someday I’ll see the big picture better, grabbing scrap by scrap, until the horizon’s filled with nothing but glorious scraps of bright colored tissue paper like happiness .

For I have another belief, one supported by science: as my gratitude grows, it spreads, and these feelings shape an incomprehensibly resilient and achingly fragile world, as water shapes stone.

Happy Thanksgiving.

May you see your meaningful totem, and honor its importance.

Posted on

Random Thoughts On Writing, Part II

“A word after a word is power.”  —  Margaret Atwood

Last Sunday, I completed a proposal, after a marathon of writing and editing.

I began my last editing go-around about 7 a.m., and apart from a couple of small mindless meals, a bath, a meditation, and then a brief nap in the early evening, these to clear my mind, in service to the proposal, I worked until about 11 p.m.

I don’t remember living that day.  I remember only sentence fragments running through my head, the cursor’s movements, and the endless revising until an idea was clear and well phrased.

This was just the last day, the last sixteen hours to get it in.  The days and weeks spent before, I haven’t a clue how many weeks I invested.

Here’s what I find amusing: I am certain this proposal won’t land a deal.

I am not undermining my work.  There were moments of stunning writing, and I reached an important goal: I am proud of this submission, gave it everything I had, and a little more.  I found themes, made connections, and the contours of something larger than I imagined emerged.  Creatively, I hit good notes, and I’ve catapulted myself into a better space, more confident, more focused, clearer about where I am going and what I need to do next.

Artistically, there were images, word choices, sentences that flew off the page from imagination’s ether in the way that writer’s hope to get, every so often.

But for its many strengths, I don’t believe this publisher will buy it.  Wrong story, wrong publisher.  I’m okay with that; I don’t want to bend my words into something not true.

I’m happy with whatever happens, and I don’t take that state of grace for granted.

I submitted the proposal electronically a little before midnight.  My mind and body fatigued by the work, and the feeling of failure, no matter how good a sentence or two may look after the fact, was overwhelming: when your audience isn’t present, the vacuum of uncertainty opens wide.  No applause.  No encore.  Just silence.  And you can love your darlings, briefly think them the most glorious creatures ever born, but the little darlings are more work than anyone can possibly imagine.  There’s an inevitable failure fatigue that comes after weeks of work, hundreds of gutted pages, and then the sixteen hour marathon, knowing that this isn’t the one, but you learned what you needed to.

There was something else I learned in the past weeks, or felt deeply for the first time: the writer’s vocation is nothing more than the most sacred sanctuary of their life.  It’s requirements are no less than those of marriage, parenthood, or priest: and like any of these relationships, to spouse, children, “God,” there are moments of indescribable joy and satisfaction, and moments of sheer emptiness and frustration.

But the commitment is worth it, for until the heart finds a thing that it loves more than itself, a place that banishes the ego’s pettiness and myopia, the heart will never soar as it was born to.

It is the quest of finding our deepest human self, and running with it until there’s no more.  Whatever that thing is, whatever it is that wants to make us die empty, and leave something in and for the world that says, “I was here.”  Running, writing, music, painting, teaching, gardening, whatever that thing that makes us loose sixteen hours effortlessly, while working ferociously.

So J. K. Rowling’s words struck me differently after Sunday, having just completed a fresh marathon of writing.  I’ve done writing marathons before, but this one was new, involved several layers of creative engagement, and comes with a renewed relationship to my craft.  Sixteen hours of nothing but words on a page, and not even realizing that it was sixteen hours, lost as I was in the words, sentences, paragraphs, story.

Readers rarely understand what writers do, the commitment to sitting only with one’s self behind the screen, or with a paper and pen.  It’s one thing to parent, it’s another to parent well.  It’s one thing to marry, it’s another to share life and love and laughter well, for a very long time.  It’s one thing to receive ordination, it’s another to serve well and selflessly.

It’s one thing to write, it’s another to aspire to write well, with everything in you, and create something from the heart and mind, a landscape of unknown design whose revelation comes one word at a time.

“They really don’t understand what we do.”

No, they don’t.

Posted on

Random Thoughts On Writing

I ran across an article this past week.  Stephen King tells a story about himself and J.K. Rowling.

They were both being interviewed, at different times, and after her interview, she stormed into their shared waiting room.  “They don’t understand what we do, do they?  They really don’t understand what we do,” with a few profanities sprinkled in, out of frustration, according to King.

King replied, “No, they don’t.”

The irony amused me, because neither King nor Rowling knows what they do, and they have said so.  This is not me pontificating like a know-it-all, this time; this is what they have said, in print.  No, they don’t know what they are doing.  They just do it.  They write.  They do it over and over.  They do it until it feels or sounds or looks like they have hit that thing waiting for discovery.

Over the past two weeks, I reread King’s stunning “On Writing.”  It’s a remarkable book, and I’ve never read a King novel, am not a devoted King reader.  But if there were only one book that an aspiring writer could choose to read, in a hypothetical universe where the starry-eyed-would-be-writer may take only one book on writing with them on the road to perdition,  it’s that one.

I’ve read a lot of books on writing, especially this past year.  It’s part of what I do, as someone who works with these strange marks, collects them in words, lines them up in sentences, organizes these sentences into paragraphs, believing that I am strangling meaning from marks, words, sentences, paragraphs.

When it comes to crafting meaning, I believe writing’s soul is best revealed in Brenda Ueland’s “If You Want To Write: A Book About Art, Independence, And Spirit.”

But the work, the psychology, the habit of writing, the muse’s mystery, to which there is no mystery, King conveys with shining skill.  When I write shining skill, read: “work.”  Because the reason he’s successful is that he writes every day.  He writes and writes and writes.  And he writes because he loves it.  He doesn’t write for the fame or the glory or the money.  He writes because, in his words, “I love it.  I fucking love it.”

King has never written anything for money.  Only for the writing, the words, the sentences, the paragraphs, the story.

And because he loves it, it’s all about writing, revising, writing, revising, listening, writing some more.

It’s all strange, and nobody who does it knows how it works.  I say this because that’s what they say.  They being the ones who do this thing called writing, the ones who do it really well, the ones who connect to things bigger than us all, and then bring those things to us.

I have these pages here that I’ve been working on relentlessly for weeks now.  Hundreds of pages, gutted, because it wasn’t going where it needed to, wasn’t singing.

King says, “Kill your darlings, kill your darlings.”

Endless hours, numbing at times.

I sacrificed the children for the greater good.  Art.  Clarity.  Story.  Meaning.  I’m not certain for what yet, but the darlings are dead.  In the age of word processing, there isn’t even a wastebasket full of paper.

But there was a moment after said death squad visits, that I returned to the page, a day or two later, after letting the survivors breathe, and I had no idea know where some of this stuff came from.  I know that I didn’t write it, I didn’t recognize a word.

There’s someone running around my apartment who has some skill . . .

I haven’t a clue where they are hiding.

 

Posted on

Words

3 a.m.

the iPod plays

monks chanting in Latin

and I think how appropriate.

I drift in and out

of sleep until 4 a.m.

then drag myself out of bed.

I pour myself the green tea

made the night before

so I can think

while the world

sleeps.

 

I light a candle

and the thick sweet

smell of caramel

and bourbon-vanilla

burns beside my

simple writing sanctuary,

a couch where

I word by word

forge meaning

from memories

and see realities

kept invisible

until these endless days

spent wrestling in their

pain and perfume.

 

I struggle

to bend words

so that there’s

something like

monks chanting

a candle burning

or the infinite spaces

of quiet and redemption

shimmering effortlessly

at 4 a.m.

 

But words are like

insecure lovers.

No matter how much you give

they demand more

and their meanings

run away

at the moment you

believe them

finally true.

Posted on

You Get The Tiara When You’re Ready For The Tiara

Last Saturday was my birthday.

Friday night our local community store had an artisan night — we have small monthly parties, and local artists show their work, gain exposure, and there is plenty of free food, wine, and margaritas, all donated.  Artisan nights are a  reason for people to get together, mingle, spend time together, and local artists are stars for an evening.

A friend who lives down the street showed up to the gathering with a pretty teal blue and white gift bag for me.  Inside were two elegant boxes, “You can open them both now, or you can open one, and open the other on Sunday.”

I chose to open only one gift as this same friend, her daughter, and I had plans for a special brunch date on Sunday.

“Just one gift,” I said.  “I want to open the other when we’re all together on Sunday.”

She told me which box to open.  Inside was a tiara.  Not a plastic tiara, but a sterling plated tiara with quality rhinestones, with a well made hair comb for placing on my head.  Not a toss-away-toy, but the real deal.

Now, I’ve always disliked tiaras.  They seem to me to scream privilege, and a princess mentality that I have looked down on in quiet contempt.  I would never say, “I think those things are ridiculous,” rather, I held my self-righteous smug superiority to myself.  I would see pictures of women in tiaras, and turn my nose up.  “Why,” I would think, “would any self-respecting woman want to wear a tiara?”

I found out Friday evening.

I wore the tiara all night at the artisan party, and I made sure everyone saw it.  “See my tiara,” I said with a childish pride.   (Recent Harvard studies show that thinking young — age is an attitude — has positive effects on aging.  I turned the clock back 20 years Friday.)

There’s magic in putting a tiara on, in owning one’s specialness and saying, “I celebrate myself.  I sing about myself.  I shine.  I sparkle.  I glow.  I am wonderful.  I am royal and proud of it.”  Amanda plugged into was something deep and precious, and I was ready.

I pulled her aside, and told her that two years ago, I never would have dreamed of wearing a tiara.  “You get the tiara,” I told her, “when you’re ready for the tiara.”

I wore my tiara all night at the party, and I wore my tiara during our elegant brunch on Sunday.

So here is what I think about the metaphysics of tiaras, because I do believe there’s a metaphysics involved.

It’s not about personal superiority.  It’s about not shying away from the magnificence that we are all born with.  Being royal is our birthright, it’s an attitude of grace and confidence, not the birthright of a select few, and it’s something more profound than Disney princesses and beauty pageants.

The metaphysics of the tiara is best expressed by Marianne Williamson in A Return To Love:

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.  Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.  It is our light, not our darkness that frightens us.  We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?’  Who are you not to be?  You are a child of God.  Your playing small does not serve the world.  There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people don’t feel insecure around you.  We are all meant to shine, as children do.  It’s not just in some of us, but in all of us; it’s in everyone.   And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give people permission to do the same.  As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

Yes, there is a metaphysics to the tiara, and Marianne Williamson sums it up.

I spoke with another friend on my birthday, and told her about my tiara, how I felt, and how I thought there was something deep and karmic about this gift, how much fun I had, how light and wonderful the world seemed when I wore it.

“There’s magic in it, you can feel it when you put a tiara on,” she said to me, “in the practice of magic, the tiara has power in it.”  She went on to explain something about magic and head wreathes and their relationship to power and the tiara — the specifics eluded me, but it sounded like the metaphysics of the tiara.

A sparkling magnificence worn on one’s head that says, “I don’t play small.”

It’s a powerful life choice seen in a play of brilliant reflection, beauty, and confidence effortlessly worn.

You get the tiara when you’re ready for the tiara.

I was ready.

Posted on

Moments Near The Lake

I walk down the road, turn to the right, and keep going until I wander into the decaying cemetery.  Passing by the worn stone markers, the past calls me.  I imagine the once living, feel their lives pull on my sweater, read their names, see dead flowers in pots and remembrances left to weather.

Time’s emptiness fills the area, interrupted by the impertinent truth that we never believe our days will end etched in smooth obsidian or worn granite: life marked by a name, two dates, sometimes a word or two.

I walk beside the motionless bones, still tongues, silent histories, interred stories once colored by memory’s palette, to enter a path hidden by tall grasses, leading to the lake.

I follow the path a mile or so.  Wet autumn leaves stick to my sneakers.  Maroon and yellow, remnants of spring’s green cling to my soles during my walk to the water’s edge.

I sit.  Quiet everywhere.  Clouds hang dense and low, they imperceptibly merge into the hills’ afternoon mists, a soft blanket insulating the day’s sounds,
except for a crows’ caw, and an unfamiliar melodic, staccato song.

A lone hawk flies overhead.

From beyond the hills, a small flock of wild geese fly in toward the lake, they yell in noisy abandon, skim the water’s surface, and then fly away, following their ancient route, a journey as old as the mountains, older than the trees.  A ritual older than worn gravestones, written in avian blood.

I sit.  Quiet, again.

I look over the lake, and the circle of surrounding hills.  Trees vibrant with death’s nearness take on magenta, gold, amber, red, orange, colors paint-like dappled over the rolling hills, as though a sleeping giant emerged during twilight, and with an over-sized brush, colored his canvas in flaming magnificence, in a glowing display of grandiosity and vainglory, knowing the show days are few.  I close my eyes.  My breath and body now fully live, oozing out of me into water, earth, air, crow caw.

In death I live.

Death surrounds me in splendor.

I sit and breathe.

I am lake, mountains, clouds, trees,
and a flock of geese, whose ancient blood
carries me beyond stone memorials
and into glory.

Posted on

Annigonol ydy un iaith

“Annigonol ydy un iaith.”  —  One language is never enough.

Sometime in the late 90’s, I hiked from the Isle of Anglesey, through North Wales, Snowdonia, and down the Pembrokeshire Coast path, with the Irish Sea to my side.  I explored miles of solitude and natural beauty and ancient relics and history, an experience that I will be expanding in an essay, for a planned collection.

For today, I offer the following to honor the Scottish independence referendum, for reasons that I hope will be clear by the entry’s end.

On the first leg of my Welsh journey, I stayed on Anglesey, a large island off the western shore, that’s a short ferry trip from Dublin, across the Irish Sea.  The island is a remarkable land, as are its people.  I stayed on a 550 acre farmhouse bed and breakfast, taking day trips from this rural, comfortable base.  Mrs. Jane Brown ran the bed and breakfast, and she was a model of charm, hospitality, warmth, and a library of history about the area and Welsh lore.  Mrs. Brown gave me the kind of oral history rich in color and texture that only a native could create.

Her generosity was singular.  Mrs. Brown and her daughter-in-law took me on several day trips to places that few outsiders could have or would have known about.  One trip was to a church used only few months a year, for when the tides change with the seasons, water surrounds the church the rest of year making the sanctuary inaccessible.  There are no public programs to change this.  Instead, the locals work with the way things are, they honor nature, this ancient space, and the mystery of the two together.  The doors open and close at nature’s invitation. When the waters recede, it’s a local pilgrimage that honors life, death, and change.  Archaic, I entered a world in which rituals from nearly a thousand of years ago remained unchanged, the rough old stones and worn wooden benches whisper stories that give themselves over for a brief time. Most of the year, this space protects itself from the outside world, with the rise of water around it.

The world I entered in North Wales, and particularly in Anglesey, was rare.  Strangers were friends in minutes.  I remember tea with Mrs. Brown, her daughter-in-law, and their distant relatives who lived in an old farmhouse, near the island’s border to the channel, and the Welsh mainland.  Mrs. Brown’s distant cousin embraced me, a modern American woman, and introduced me to the entire family, including the horses and sheep, an introduction followed by warm elderberry pie fresh out of the oven, which was a large stone hearth in the kitchen, hot black tea, and lively conversation.

One does not pay for such human, “cultural,” experiences, they are freely given when people share of themselves.

But here’s the setpiece of these hastily shared anecdotes, and why I offer them today in regards to Scotland:

Mrs. Brown fixed me a lovely dinner before I left, that included her entire family, with whom I had become attached, in two weeks.  Over dinner, they asked what I would be doing when I left, where I would go, what were my plans.  I mentioned my stint to hike up Snowdonia, then I would bus over to the coast and begin my long hike down the length Pembrokeshire Coast path, eventually taking the train from Carmathen to London.  “I’m excited about London, because of the free museums,” I said.   They chuckled.

I then said, in light humor, “Maybe I’ll bump into the Prince of Wales,” believing that I was connecting my London visit with them, even though they would be miles away, trying to tell them that I would miss them, and be thinking of them, still.

The table went silent.  I looked around, and suddenly the uncommon warmth that had been given to me disappeared, and there was a palpable void.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

Mrs. Browne, said curtly, “We don’t speak of him here as ‘The Prince of Wales.'”

“Okay.  I’m sorry.  But why?”  I asked, completely perplexed.  I had offended these folks who had been wonderful to me, had adopted a simple bed-and breakfast lodger as family during my time with them, and I hadn’t a clue about what I had done.

Then, raising her voice, as if to take a knife and change history in a single slash, “Because he’s not Welsh!”

Dumb American, I thought to myself, wondering how I could be so thick.

The tension dissipated, and we returned to Mrs. Brown’s lovely supper, and Mrs. Brown opened another bottle of Welsh made wine.  But I then understood that there were things not usually talked about with guests, and I also understood how deep the Welsh identity cut here in the northern parts, in the farthest reaches from England’s geographical influence.

The history made privy to me was Welsh history.  Not English history.  Not the history of the United Kingdom.  They were Welsh.  They had unique stories, and a unique understanding of the world, that they kept alive, passing down, giving freely.  The were Welsh and proud.  This identity was perhaps nowhere more clear than in the signposts written in Cymraeg.  The smaller the village, the less the need or want to translate.  You understand or you don’t.

Mrs. Brown and her family will most likely never see an independent Wales.  I’m guessing they are watching Scotland’s vote with deep personal pride, and a kinship with those who share an island with those who dictate a strained beast known as “The United Kingdom.”

“He’s not Welsh!”  I’ll never forget that moment, a moment that changed my too American perspective, and made my blood identity to my Scottish kin deeper, gave me more circumspect respect for the spirit of those who refuse the control of anyone’s history, no matter how quiet that rebellion.

Now, when I say, “I am a Guthrie, ” and remember the stories my mother gave to me about her family’s people, and their independent pioneering into the midwest, I understand something a little deeper and richer, thanks to Mrs. Brown.

 

 

Welsh Flag
Flag of Wales

 

 

Scottish flag
Flag of Scotland
Posted on

Clutter

Sheets of nearly completed mandalas and almost finished paisley print pictures and bright flower pictures needing more color cover the living area’s floor.

Pens and pencils and scribbled-in journals and half-read books are strewn in exquisite chaos across the rug, in a room lit by candles, scented by incense, serenaded by crickets and frogs and late summer breezes blowing through the doors, a music that will too soon fade into winter’s slumbering silence.

Behind the couch sits the dining table, the boundaries between it and the easel in the corner are indistinguishable, for the flurry of paints and torn art books and brushes and pencils and watercolor pads and tubes of gouache and brightly colored tissue paper create a scene worthy of an artist’s canvas, form and content merging in this cosmos of clutter.

I am less certain that I am creating art than living it.  Yet in the heart’s sphere, these beautiful atonal, asymmetric stacks of paper and paint and glitter and colored pencils dance in reverie, disregarding my too critical eye.  Because they show my heart finding its way, art emerges in these exquisite stacks of colorful bedlam, an exploration reminiscent of a nebula explosion.

I know at my life’s end, there will be more left undone than done, and I whet my spirit with that dissatisfaction.  Until then, I look at what some would call clutter, the maelstrom of a disorganized and unfocused mind, and I see life rise like great art into the evening’s quiet.