Birds Nesting Near the Ocean

Soul, if you want to learn secrets,
your heart must forget about shame
and dignity.

You are God's lover,
yet you worry what people are saying.

The rope belt the early Christians wore
to show who they were, throw it away.

Inside you are sweet beyond telling,
and the cathedral there,
so deeply tall.

Evening now, more your desire
than a woman's hair.

And not knowledge,
walk with those innocent of that,

faces inside fire, birds nesting
near the coast, earning their beauty,

servants to the ocean. There is a sun
within every person, the you
we call companion.

--Rumi
translated by Coleman Barks
from A Year with Rumi

 

The seeds of all my seasons come together

in a soup of something I could once taste

but hold now in my mouth like water. They grow up

out of themselves

 into a recipe that has it all--sweetness

contained in kernels that distill its qualities perfectly:

white corn in late summer,

hot from fire and swimming in some kind of honeyed brine that tastes like weathered wood

and nothing I know the name of,

a leftover solstice mix fierce and slow with underpinnings of rot and adventure,

a flavor of singe and lakewater,

of a wet moon and its spell.  It carries too

 the haunted pucker of October,

the crispness of fallen forest in fall. A mystery,

sliced in half when I wasn't looking

 and offered with one hand out

and one hand hidden.  Pepper plays with it well

and coaxes it into almost giving itself up.

When I try to figure it out it almost vanishes.

 It tickles like I imagine the folds of snowflakes' edges would,

a tumble of melting angles in my throat.  Most times too

it leaves behind a faint residue of spice---shyer than nutmeg

and wilder than something like paprika. I can't name it

but it has its own way of warming me.  An electricity of brine,

gentled by the ways I get to know it.  This soup has in it also

the seeds of spring, of cool things

breathing water as they birth. It

 wants to be raw but simmers. I don't season it

but wait instead for it to let me know what it needs.

Sometimes it's cream to cradle it and make it younger,

to soften it up. It might be a twig of rosemary,

 nipped from the tree by the train tracks.

or it could be the greening up of wild young onion,

raised up from feral earth and made clean. Other days I've sensed

a flush of rosehip, too sweet for words, like the hymn

 I found myself humming at dusk in April as a child.  I've needed it

for days now but can't seem to pull it together. There's nothing

written down for me to go by. I try things out

and they almost work together but when I go to taste them

they turn into strangers and there I am again

with that drink of simple water, limned by none of the grit

and gruel I'm used to getting. I cradle it against my tongue

for a time and then swallow,

moving it past my teeth in a cool flush of emptiness,

a chalice of shadow that replaces all my hungry spots with coolness

in a surprise move of transubstantiating grace,

my only season

this heart's beat of dwindling sun

and autumn wind.

l.k. sorrells 2008

Yesterday was Halloween and the best one in many years for me. Halloween is in some ways my favorite holiday; I enjoy the whimsy and play of it almost as much as I did as a child. I haven't thought about it all that much this year though, being even more busy than usual with work. But yesterday was great. Ron and I had bought a big old orange pumpkin at one of the local grocery stores Thursday night but had decided we didn't feel like fooling with it then. I went off to school yesterday morning and held my once-a-month "vocabulary hangman" team tournament. This is a raucous vocabulary competition that the kids love. I know that Alfie Kohn says don't use competition in the classroom and I usually don't but the kids love this and so do I. so yesterday was full of shouting and makeshift Halloween headdresses and Lifesaver gummies and Hershey's candy corn kisses. My eighth graders aren't allowed to wear costumes but it was a "hat day" so creative headgear abounded. One student had a towering furry scarlet Viking hat that seemed to have been created just for him. we had a great time. Then when I got home to Jasper we went for a walk downtown. Between 4 and 6 the merchants and many of the centrally located residents of our little town hand out candy to trick or treaters. It's an absurdist sort of thing and I'm not unaware of the commercialism that comes into play with Halloween but it was a perfect golden and blue fall day, just slightly cool, and the streets were packed with parents and little kids dressed like firefighters and ballerinas and ghosts. I took a few pictures and had fun watching the happy faces of the kids. We walked past the old houses just off Main Street and waved to the people sitting on their porches. The spirit of generosity and hospitality and openness that I always associate with my own memories of Halloween abounded. We watched an ultralight buzz past the pines and talked politics a little. Decided to stop talking politics, stopped for awhile and talked about our childhood Halloween costumes, and talked about it a little more. For me part of the festive energy of yesterday was this huge joy I feel in what I think, hope, and pray is about to happen with the election so it was okay. When we got hungry we went out for supper at a new local restaurant, 61 Main, which is situated in an old brick shoe store downtown and used to be a funky little bar and grill that served mostly burgers and wings. It serves local produce and eggs and has sort of a ‘slow food' approach to dining now and the food is fresh and wonderful. Amazing tomato bisque and the best carrot cake I ever had anywhere. When we finished eating we went home and carved our pumpkin while listening to a Halloween playlist I put together: Calexico, The National, Enigma, Sade, Neil Young. Ours was a very thick pumpkin so carving it took awhile. We had put together sort of happy crescent eyes and a triangular nose and a wide spiky-toothed grin. I love carving jack o'lanterns-getting my fingers in all that sticky fragrant goo, the distinctly autumnal aroma of pumpkin innards, separating out the seeds for roasting, setting a little votive candle inside when I'm done. This pumpkin came out perfect and we named him Todd. I don't know why, but it fits. He has a wicked grin. We were actually too tired to stay up and watch Something Wicked This Way Comes as we'd planned but that was all right. Todd's grinning at me from the deck even now and the playful threshold energy of All Hallows is still with me.

Occasionally in life there are those moments of unutterable fulfillment which cannot be completely explained by those symbols called words. Their meanings can only be articulated by the inaudible language of the heart.

- Martin Luther King Jr.,
Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech, Dec. 11, 1964.

I found this poem in an old issue of Ploughshares from 1998.


Invocation

You came to me first as dawn hauled up on ropes
of apricot above the blackened wall of white pine.

You came from the south, from the highest places,
came down from the mountain running.

You were announced by the crows, the shrill
calls of alarm from the uppermost branches.

You opened your throats in a high harsh singing.
I didn't know what you were and rose trembling

from the deck chair, stood breathless and still
where the woods surrounded me, gathered dark

and darker as if to stall the light.
You came down, two of you: one young and red-bright

the other old, rust streaked with gray.
You pretended not to know me and lay down

beneath a small granite ledge, lay on the fallen
needles, licking light into your fur.

You came to me because I have wanted you.
You came though I had asked for nothing,

because I was full as a river at flood tide
with sadness.

You came to me, rested, and then rose, first one,
then the other, and ran downhill into the morning.

You who assumed the guise of foxes, come again
as you did that morning on the mountainside.

And wasn't that you who came last summer
as whale boiling up from the waters of Jeffries Shoal?

Wasn't it you who came in September as wood duck
over the Stoddard marshes, who flew parallel to  my car window?

Come to me again as moose invisible on the night road.
Come the way deer steal across the field at dusk.

Come as raccoon, as coyote. Come carrying your burden
of blood and shadow---

come joyous and light with song, come in sleep,
in the unexpected reaches of the day. I am waiting.

Come red-tailed or black-winged; come fluked
and finned, come clawed and taloned,

renew my breath, come full of the mystery
I am only beginning to know.

--Patricia Fargnoli

I say to my breath once again, little breath come from in front of me, go away behind me, row me quietly now, as far as you can, for I am an abyss that I am trying to cross.

--W.S. Merwin

I heard Townes van Zandt's version of this on my I-Pod when I was out running last night. it's been in my head since.

Shuffling books around a little while ago I ran across Stephen Mitchell's anthology of sacred poetry, The Enlightened Heart. Opening it at random I encountered one of my favorite poems.

As kingfishers draw fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves---goes its self, myself it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me: for that I came.

I say more: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is--
Christ---for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces.

--Gerard Manley Hopkins

Writing and photography are probably the most important media to me but I haven't really been writing lately except for comments on student papers and such. been taking pictures but not as much as I was. that's all right. that stuff will happen again. it will come back around. the thing that I always do is create these little altars in my living space. they ground me, soothe and calm me. they're all over the place: on my hearth, on my grandfather's old desk in my bedroom, on tables and shelves, even around my computer. right now I'm looking at a soft gray sparrow feather, a funky blue rhinestone brooch in the shape of a heart, an acorn, a pair of silver Celtic knot earrings, a sandalwood mala, a Sibley page a day bird calendar, a couple of pens, a lime green bottle cap from a Sol mate soda, a tiny hunk of peridot, and a little stuffed walrus named Chester. I have more elaborate tableaux in other places. they shift from time to time. feathers and hunks of rock are good for this as well as other organic objects, like nuts and pine cones and the shiny holy husks and scarab bodies of deceased beetles. buttons, thimbles, and little old toys are also great as well as little glass essential oil bottles and pieces of interesting fabric. and of course shells and candles and seeds and incense burners. I'm also one of those people who loves calendars. it's not so much that I'm obsessed with time as that I like to see the passage of the seasons and the various holidays and the images and words they're paired with. I have a Zen calendar I like now and that's part of one of my altars, along with a little furry lion and a handmade Tibetan blank book I got from the Tibetan monks when they were in Marietta with Francine Reed. there's a Dalai Lama calendar over on the little gray worktable by the glass wall. it sits next to a small stack of birding books, a brandy snifter that catches the light nicely, a little ceramic bowl I made, a silver triskel brooch, and a little green wooden mouse made in Germany. Today HHDL counsels me to look at a situation from a distance, so that it will seem less overwhelming. and the Sibley calendar here in front of me shows that the bird of the day is a scarlet tanager: large, with a relatively long, heavy bill. It often appears crested but it is not.

In June of 2003 I attended a rather expensive weeklong workshop at the John Campbell Folk School, about an hour and a half north of here in Brasstown, North Carolina. it was a wheel pottery workshop and I was very excited about it. I bought books and fantasized about the beautiful curves of clay I'd lift into being. (One of the best books I found concerning pottery is Mary Caroline Richards' book Centering in Pottery, Poetry, and the Person.) It wasn't like that, though. I sat on the deck and listened to the musicians in residence play Orange Blossom Special and Fox on the Run on their banjos and mandolins, and I became a vegetarian for a year in response to the amazing food in the dining hall and the conversations I had about it and about eating consciously. I watched my roommate turn gourds into funky pieces of art and I struggled. I struggled with centering my pots in a way that was really unexpected for me. I did manage to create two decent looking little clay pots but they seemed to shrink into pebbles next to what the other potters created. Finally I sat down with the clay and put together two large-ish bowls of handbuilt clay spirals. They're odd and not terribly pretty but there is a clownish wild fun in them. Every morning at the Folk School we had coffee and hot tea in the big community room in the main hall and listened to the resident storyteller talk. I watched the movie Songcatcher in the library on a collapsing old velvet sofa with a small group of women who'd never seen it before. and the last night of my week at the Folk School was amazing. I went up to the free bluegrass concert in the barn and then down to the little general store on the corner, where the New Year's Eve party happens every year and the men of tiny Brasstown dress in drag to celebrate the calendrical shift. There was a group of young musicians busking out front and an older, more seasoned group inside. It was almost summer solstice time and the light hung around till well after nine. I remember watching the thin weary green needle of a fading mayfly as it rested on my forearm. An older woman and a boy of about twelve hung out with me and we talked about mayflies and banjos and bicycles. When I left I was kind of sorry I didn't have something prettier to take away but I felt no regrets about the week. I wasn't sorry I had chosen the pottery class. I had gotten to hear one of the potters from the well-known Gordy pottery family come in and whirl a pot up from the wheel. He wasn't there to lecture or work on pottery but to take a class in baking bread. I had met amazing people who were so patient and funny. I'd gotten messy in ways entirely new to me and had a thin blue-orange rime of clay under my nails when I left. I learned what I needed to and felt at peace when I went home. I often think about going back to take a digital photography class. I think I'll be better at that but who knows? I do know though that whatever lessons I need will be there for me no matter what.

Today I am affirming the need for conscious consumption in my life. a vow to purchase only what I need for a time. I have enough books to read for the rest of my life, more than enough music to listen to, enough funky secondhand clothing. I have enough. I don't need any more. this is not to say that I will never again buy a beautiful piece of art or magazine or cd but it is to say that for today I don't need to be a consumer in the way that I'm used to being. I'm not a person who buys a lot of expensive clothes, makeup, or shoes, but I do have my excesses. books and music primarily but also funky secondhand hats and pens and issues of the Iowa Review and incense. it's time to stop. I want to support the efforts of artists and artisans who produce their work mindfully and kindly, and I will. but for now I am leaning more fully into my relationship with myself and with my friends and family and less fully into the riptide of intellectual need that has been tugging at me these past few months. addiction manifests in any number of ways and consumption is one of the most common addictions. the seed of this decision has been growing for a little while now but for some reason it asserted itself very firmly earlier today when I was reading a writing prompt by Natalie Goldberg where she acknowledges one of the differences between obsessions and passions: obsessions are connected to suffering. I find that during Lent, when I stop buying any magazines, books, or music, I feel stronger and wholer and less distracted. I want more of that clarity and more of the strength, focus, and good humor I think this choice will bring me. I'll let y'all know how it's going.

Arriving Again and Again Without Noticing

I remember all the different kinds of years.
Angry, or brokenhearted, or afraid.
I remember feeling like that
walking up the mountain along the dirt path
to my broken house on the island.
And long years of waiting in Massachussetts.
The winter walking and hot summer walking.
I finally fell in love with all of it:
dirt, night, rock and far views.
It's strange that my heart is as full
now as my desire was then.

--Linda Gregg