It’s too soon to find them in bloom. They’re mostly two feet tall at best, thus far, and not nearly ready to flower. And the sky is overcast today. Quite grey and a little bit dark. Any sunflowers would be hard pressed to find the sun and smile at it.
The thing about sunflowers is, they believe in the sun even when it’s not visible. I do, too.
Windows and doors
Are metaphors—
But also real
Gateways.
So: are Yours?
How open to change?
How closed in fear?
Do you throw them wide
When a friend
Comes near?
You can bar the way
And lock out
All storms—
But have you
Barred Chance in all
Its forms?
Are your windows sealed
To stop the rain
So tightly that
No light can gain
Entry anymore?
Is your door of steel
Holding off
New joys
For fear you’d feel?
Throw open the sash!
Swing wide the door!
Adventure is what
This life is for.
The road is long; the way grows faint,
But with a song and no complaint,
I’ll walk it more at peace and ease
If you will shore me up, and please:
Your love for me is deep, I know,
Yet sing me to sleep and let me go—
A path unclear as nighttime draws
Me ever near its end, because
I’ve had full count of wealth and known
Such joys a fountain might be thrown
Beyond its rim in rushing streams,
So if grown dim, the way holds dreams
Enough to lead me happy hence,
And I’ll not plead in self-defense:
Though ever deep your love, I know,
Sing me to sleep and let me go—
Into the night that never ends,
Where dark is light, and waiting friends
And quiet rest and graceful peace
Draw every guest to sweet release
How-e’er the strain of verses went,
With this refrain as Testament
And Will: Deep is your love, I know;
Sing me to sleep and
Let me go—
Red sky at morning: Sailors [Shepherds], take warning!
Funny, isn’t it, how we become so attached to our superstitions and assumptions about our daily experiences and expectations. If we put too much stock in signs and portents, isn’t there just a little bit of a chance that we might do the safe and predictable and wrong thing and end up so very much smaller and less interesting than we might have become had we taken a chance? Seems like it might be ever so much smarter to take a chance at growth and improvement and looking for enlightenment, don’t you think?
Lightening Upward
Nothing do I covet,
nothing lack and
nothing seek–
except the serendipity of Light
that cuts the darkness open,
transforms blackness
to less bleak,
and with its glinting stars sweetens the night,
that makes my thoughts reach higher,
afire indeed
to reach the peak,
enlightened now, and gladly there alight.
Imagine! There could be some lovely opportunities and surprises in store for us all if we open our eyes and look for whatever light can leak through into our ordinary, dim and easily influenced expectations. At the very least, why not choose the challenging and positive and exciting interpretation when those old signs and portents show up again?
Red sky at night: Sailor’s [Shepherd’s] delight!
The Ides of March have passed once more, untroubled. Caesar falls but is replaced by another king, another president, another boss–and the world continues to rotate with a placid, almost stolid steadiness. Even Internal Revenue has accepted our tax return.When the seasons flow and while night and day continue to trot after each other without cease, the sky withholds and then sends down her rain, her sun, her snow–though all of this is change, it’s change in which we all comfortably believe, a future we feel safe to say we can predict. Prognosticators and seers and soothsayers have always wanted to believe–wanted us to believe–that they could cast the runes and fortune-tell what is to come. And even on the wings of simple faith, these are bound at times to be fulfilled. What we trust will come to be will be–when it will. The answer, an answer, always comes.
But what if the answer is not what we had hoped? How if we have built our plans on something we expect, the future we assume or even long to be? Lovely as the concept seems, small few are truly able to go about our day after the fact, chirpily singing ‘Que Sera, Sera‘ with sanguine calm.
I’ve always had a little bit of fatalism about the whole thing–if Life ever throws me something I truly can’t handle, why then it’ll kill me, won’t it, and such things won’t matter to me when I’m dead. That’s a little fatuous and silly, of course, and no comfort at all when I think things are pretty awful.
All I can really say that keeps my armor fairly intact then is that if my faith in general is bound to what I’ve seen and my confidence that it will continue or return is that so far Life’s been kind to me. So far, what has happened has always led eventually to good and pleasing things in my world. As winter follows autumn and is supplanted next by spring, as day and night keep dawning and turning over to dark, one after another, I trust that the fallow times of my life will be pushed away by cycles of productivity. That weariness will be refreshed by energy; dread will be reversed by hope. That sorrow will return to joy and chaos or misdirection will remember its path or will find a whole new way.
The door that closed is only redirecting me, however slowly I go, to another passage. And where that goes may well be the very fine and happy place I thought I was aiming toward to start.
Naturally
Following the steps of Nature, in my time I’ll go to sleep
and slough off my human stature, an appointment I must keep
whether soon or late or sudden, whether willingly or no,
taking nothing, I am bidden, as to dust–beyond–I go,
to a deep cellular cellar, shut from day and gone from night,
simple mote or something stellar, eternally both dark and bright;
I’ve no grief at this my bedding down to death as time requires,
but will go with no regretting to new lands and distant fires–
or to deep chasms’ silent spaces, nothing moving, nothing moved,
nothing touched by ills or graces or by sweetness I once loved,
for my thoughts will too lie resting, speechless, dreamless, all release;
all exemption now from testing, seamlessly wrapped up in peace–
So I’ll leave you, soft, in quiet
naturally inclined to sigh
with something of
relief, a sigh yet
not of sorrow,
when
I die
Reawakening
Winter now is past, forgotten swiftly as the melting snow,
as the things that children know slip away in quilted cotton
while they sleep: tomorrow, calling, beckons them to newer days
and to pleasures yet a haze on the edge of nighttime’s falling–
sorrow dissipates, as ices rimming rivers melt apace
in spring’s warm return to grace the Earth with all her sweet devices
Love, awake! The gentle keening of the season’s herald bird
is from barren branches heard, calling them to leafy greening,
calling from the snows of death all who have lain sleeping, dormant,
seasoned with dark winter’s torment,
to return to life
and breath
I’m sorry to say I’m not cut out to be the savior of the planet. I’m not even very good at saving coupons or saving your reverence. There are lots of saints and superheroes better suited than I am to rescuing goodness, health and happiness. I’m just pleased with myself if I can get the recycling out on time for pickup, fix the wiggly leg on a chair so I don’t have to get a whole new chair to replace it, pull up about six weeds about twice a week. My part in world betterment will always be a smallish one.
But I do have a part in it. I’m ready and willing to play it. One little thing that is on my list of preferred universe-improvement techniques is to work on gradually including a bit less in my daily eating habits and freeing up those calories for people who actually need them more. Ideally, I’d like to find a few ways to see that those people who actually need them get them as well, whether it’s because I feed them myself with my cooking or my modest attempts at micro-mini-farming (I expect to successfully grow up to eighteen vegetables in this season alone), or because I support causes that are better equipped to feed them through charitable or communal means.
Another dainty little improvement I am willing and possibly even able to make in the condition of the quality of life as it exists on this planet is to find more ways to make less waste. I am researching how to capture both the rainwater falling on and the grey-water produced in my house for reuse and distribution in the garden. In Texas, that’s not just a potential money-saver but if drought conditions like last summer’s return or persist, a potential life-saver. But it shouldn’t be too terribly hard. The water’s there. It just needs to be corralled and redirected to where it can be most useful. It’s a natural adjunct to the aforementioned dinky farm-let of a garden with pint-sized patches of vegetables, plus a greater devotion to native, drought-resistant and wildlife friendly plantings that should, over time, reduce the whole yard’s dependence on additional water, provide a bit more natural cover and food for the local bugs and beasts and birds, and ultimately, require less maintenance and far less artificial or chemical intervention to preserve it all in vigorous health and beauty.
My self-improvement plot is mighty simple by comparison even to these extremely modest proposals. I’m just going to try to give in to my less-than-ideal motives and personality quirks less frequently than is my native inclination. I’m going to push myself to consciously and conscientiously do more of the nicer and better and more productive things I am capable of doing, more of the time. Beyond this I’m not certain I can go–but my plans being undersized as they are, I hope that I have just that much more chance of making my individual pin-prick of a difference for the better in my portion of creation, however puny, circumscribed or insignificant it may be. Better by far than not making the attempt. Reality is overwhelming and bemusing enough. Why not work on tweaking it one sweet, precious atom, if I can?
This is where I landed. Where can I fly from here?
We are so familiar in western culture with the concept that we should never ‘judge a book by its cover’ or assume anything based on appearances that it astonishes me how often we still fall prey to such foolishness. We are so taken with externals and what we assume based on them that it’s amazing we’re able to function on a day-to-day basis without getting smashed like bugs under the weight of our own dimwittedness and the resulting misguided things we do and don’t think–more importantly, what we do and don’t do as a result of those thoughts. How many times do I have to wish I could re-train my presumptuous inclinations away from predetermining what I think of any given situation or person! In reality, what looks like either a foreboding or inviting doorway is nothing more or less than a closed door until I go in through it with thoughts and eyes wide open, to see what really lies on the other side.
I’m thinking of it at the moment especially, I suppose, having seen our pretty, healthy and cheery looking mothers have invisible health reasons both to undergo their surgeries and to worry and/or hurt enough to be willing to undergo surgery rather than just continuing to ‘tough it out’. Neither is a complainer, though thankfully they’re not big on hiding the truth from us beyond probably softening their descriptions of the various medical struggles they’ve undergone over the years nor are they avid players of the martyr game. So I think it’s safe to guess that most people would readily think both of them something nigh unto indestructible, and perhaps they are in spirit if not quite in body. Yet here they are needing to get ‘repaired’ from time to time. It’s a little like those industrial sites that to me look so beguilingly, alluringly palatial and mysterious and exotic the way they’re lit up at night but when in operation during the day are simply hard at work to keep the business intact, bits of their well-used machinery breaking down occasionally as they gradually work their way toward a point they can’t finally pass without reconstruction.
I’m also thinking such thoughts as I live surrounded by family and friends who struggle with innumerable unseen barriers to easy living, full health and happiness. There is the poor student who works long hours at both academic and full-time jobs to get through her education but is harassed for being a ‘spoiled fashionista’ because she looks so perfectly turned out in her work and school clothes. If anyone paid attention, of course, they’d know that the two perfectly kept outfits she wears on alternating days are ones she scrimped to save less than $10 each for from top to toe at a thrift store on her minimum wage income. There is the boy who is bullied by his peers as being a lazy wimp because he doesn’t go out for the soccer team, though any of them who asked might find out that despite his looking so fit he has severe juvenile rheumatoid arthritis and would be in mortal agony if he even went out for a practice. There is the ‘weird old guy’ down the street that everyone avoids, thinking him creepy and dangerous with his long hair and eye patch and spooky twitch, never bothering to get close enough to discover that he always keeps himself very clean and neatly dressed and runs a small watch repair business out of his house to sustain himself despite his torture and mutilation in his war-torn home country and being too much an outsider to get fine language training once here because people were too displeased with and put off by their imagined version of him.
Bad enough that we assume the worst about so many people and things and fail to discover whether there’s the tiniest bit of factual basis for any such assumptions. The worst is that we may never know what treasures lie within if we don’t make a real investigation. Besides all of those complications of health (mental and physical), circumstance (familial, economic, educational, political) or any number of invisible ‘companions’ that often make it simply miraculous that a given person lives what looks to others like even a marginally ‘ordinary’ life, most people have within them amazing and distinctive forms of unique beauty–talents, passions, depths of character, and just plain reserves of love welling up inside–that we should be avidly seeking to bring out in each other at every opportunity, not to avoid or repress or let be defeated by their personal barriers and boundaries. Least of all, to lie forever undiscovered because we looked at externals and assumed there was no such treasure hidden there.
So there we were with a couple of bashful vergers posted with their baskets full of lovely handmade nosegays meant to recognize mothers, whether present among us or not. This is the pretty little presentation the Bishop's wife kindly took out and handed to me to honor my two mothers and their mothers, too, as well I would.
If you have any affiliation with things or persons British, you likely know that today is Mothering Sunday. As the Bishop informed the attendees this morning at the Anglican parish where my husband choir-conducts, it matters not that there is an American counterpart holiday–by the time that President Woodrow Wilson got around to declaring such a thing official in 1914, this congregation had already been celebrating Mothering Sunday for a good 35 years thanks to its British roots, and Texas-located or not, they sure as shootin’ weren’t going to stop recognizing mothers on this official day right along with the president’s little add-on festivity.
Anglophilic as I am, I’m hardly one to balk at keeping the faith with the old holiday myself, whether for stubbornness’ sake or for tradition, or for the beautiful British-ness of it all–though it originated as a Christian holiday, surprisingly, falling on the Sunday when one of the traditional texts began with a paean to Jerusalem, the ‘mother of us all’. But better than that, I happen to think that there are excellent reasons for celebrating mothers and motherhood as often and as publicly and resolutely as possible–two supremely excellent reasons to begin with: Elisabeth, who gave birth to me, and Joyce, who gave birth to my husband. I have two of the best mothers in the whole wide world. You can look it up; in any sensible encyclopedia or dictionary it will have a picture of the two of them in the entry explicating the heart and soul of the concept known as ‘Mom‘.
You could be forgiven if you thought from the accompanying photos of them that they had their work cut out for them with these two little melancholy looking shrimps of theirs but I assure you we, and our respective siblings, were all a supernal joy to raise from first to last. Okay, that part is pure baloney and bilge-water–but the point of course is how outstanding our moms were at mothering, and that part is utterly true. We were and are two incredibly fortunate humans, and we know it. No amount of roses and posies could possibly reflect the full spectrum of gifts that Joyce and Elisabeth have brought to both of our lives. But a sweet little nosegay with a brilliant deep pink rose is hardly amiss in the attempt.
I made my own little corsage, of course, as a drawing of exotic (i.e., nonexistent inventions representing) flowers, because mere effusions in prose can never say how deeply grateful I am to have two such dear and devoted mothers to love. I am particularly and acutely aware of this when both, who have had their own adventures of survival and not just in spouse-training and child-raising over the years, are currently recovering from surgeries. Nothing like having one’s mom undergo surgery, especially as both are doing, surgeries that are not their first, to remind us of how fragile life and wholeness can be and how desperately we hope for our chance of having them back ‘better than new’ and with long and healthy and happy years ahead of them. The signs are good, despite the inevitable miseries of recovering bit by bit, with the expected setbacks, that our hopes will be fulfilled. The only medicine I can offer is love, and that I do send them in unspeakable abundance, but since my mother had spinal surgery I’m pretty sure a big hug is not the most desired form of cure even if I were 2000 miles closer to her, and since my other mom is probably still bandaged up here and there a bit herself, the same 2000 miles nearer-my-mom-to-thee might just prove a little too abrasive as well. So from this safe distance I send e-hugs, ethereal kisses and two-dimensional bouquets and eagerly hope to see both of our mothers springing with good health in June.
I wish and hope that both of our beloved mothers will last even longer than a little drawing of a bouquet can before it fades like live flowers.
If you are a mother yourself–biologically or by adoption–or act as a nurturer and sheltering presence for anyone, I wish you endless bouquets as well. Without all of you, none of us would be here. Literally, of course. But in the wider sense, we owe an immense debt to the caregiving and protective and human-betterment instincts so often attributed to mothers and grandmothers and godmothers and aunts, and rightly so, but also gracefully and beautifully practiced by teachers and community builders and cooks and nurses and companions and shelter-builders of every age and nature who have the desire to make the world better for those who might not be able to make it sufficiently so for themselves. Thank you. Especially you, Elisabeth and Joyce. You are treasures beyond invention. I can think of no higher aspiration than that others should take their example from you.
Anticipation makes me itch. The weather forecast promises something rainy, maybe even a bit of a storm. The air is thick with it. The humidity hovers portentously and the breezes ruffle the small and silky leaves overhead and ripple around ankles, kicking up eddies of smaller kinds.
But no rain.
Will it come again? Of course it will. I say of course, but know that last year gave us drought. When do the mills begin to turn again? I listen, I watch. I wait. I go out and water the garden under a darkling sky, feeling in my heart if not on my skin a delicate moth’s-wing skim as though from mist. Not a drop on a leaf, my dears. Not a speck, not a butterfly’s tear. It seems . . .
The barometer will surely relent; the sky will weep; the mills will spin their tales once more. It will find me when it comes: I will be bent over garden beds, walking the front path out to the mailbox just to see. I will smile in the rain–just as I smile in the grey-cloud sun–waiting is something we all must do from time to time. I think it might not be so long before it rains again.
Art-Colored Glasses 