luminous yolk

2012-01-25T10:26:00.003-05:00

Letters from the Outside, #54

I love the blue nights of a late second quarter Moon. The days fluctuate wildly from mud to several below. The tree has been unornamented and waits a proper Viking funeral between the shed and the wheelbarrow. The calendar ticked imperceptibly into a new solar year, one gifted with an extra day to help even the odds. I have always been fascinated with the idea of being born on The Leap Day, aging technically one year for everyone elses four. The tide reaching its flood to full and drawing me along with increased fervor and industry, a welcome friction from what seemed some interminable desert of entirely barren and mesmerizing dunes.

A dry, balmy day sees me down the road in one less layer than I probably should be, ignorantly exuberant in the alien weather. Its when im walking that I feel what it must feel like to be human, as when im dancing I feel a spirit coalesced into flesh. The sunlight changes everything; when it runs to earth unencumbered everything is bathed and unified, and when the wind veils it in dense parades of vapor each piece into self-focus recedes, moving through the aperture of our awareness from the Source. Miracles are germinated likewise in the great plains of Soul and rise through us, true phenomena, channeled Light.

The wind roars on the far side of the valley and the Sun runs a golden crust along ours. The cells dilate, the heart buoyant momentarily. A vertebra from the deer whose bones I wrote were turning into road offered itself to me today, spared somehow from the mower and general decay, transverse processes elegant and intact, the body an evident valentine heart shape and the arches especially long, fine and curved, as to resemble wings. Its a fine sign after shattering the inherited crystal bowl, whos loss was so deep I didnt realize it for a few days afterward, and I havent yet released myself from the regret. There is snow at last to last to spring, cold as cold can be around here but it cuts down on the mud, which has its own devoted season, or used to.

Im writing this bit on the day we've set aside in celebration of a man reviled while alive (better him than palefaced slave-holders and white perpetrators of genocide) and I was writing to a friend about a frank o'hara poem going on about “...the idea of an undercurrent, real, true, meaningful things happening just beneath our distracted reality facsimulation...the quotidian struggles, the titanic, original forces. how the meta and the physical overlap to create the shifting, shitting spectre of man...

...i tend to view the physical world, its denizens, as transubstantiated symbols. blood and body, bread and wine. you, i, the ocean rising into clouds, the cornfields with their countless sweet embryos. its all something else, something greater,” and I remembered a quote by the good reverend himself: “Everything that we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not see.” Heavy on the aldo leopold and william james lately.

Already half-way through january, four months to see through til the last frost date, but even that is receding toward the equinox. Tuesday night the wind is roaring and I cannot sleep. These, the kind of nights my soul craves a-roaming, wrapped in the brown cloak and shod in the seven-league boots, standing and striding by turns through copses and meadows, mingling in the powerful magic of heavy weather. There is much to learn on a night like this.

In my dream I dreamed it was my birthday, and I was loved. A ways from shore a little rowboat made its way along to land and the people disembarking, once estranged, again opened their hearts to me. And a channel and a sweatlodge and im ready to turn my lead box into a hollow bone. The more it opens, I feel the creature-fear rising, and this fear assures me im on the right track. The fear calls for a great flood of Light to clear the space, to dissolve the fear into love, a vital transubstantiation. But rebirth is no less a struggle than the first.

Well, the snow didnt stay, and the damp desolation seems unnatural and grim. Ill take hard -going in the deep duvet of the late-january snow over the cold mud and colorless skies of some weak nuclear winter.

I was blessed to be in some woods when there was a good cover of snow and I followed the soft arrowheads of rabbit tracks and they led me down the hole. Hawks and crows crying out over and in among the high bare branches sketching out old Raven in a Navajo blanket, facing west. Unclosed just that little bit, and my whole center of gravity rolls like a raindrop to the tip of a long lanceolate leaf and pauses there and offers the view from a telescope the other way around, small and far away until its returned to the Earth, blending with everything. Only the roads retain enough cold to keep the snow on them. Everything is pale and frozen and exposed, the hard wind funnels through the valley and roars across the highground.

We love you.

2012-01-24T14:38:00.001-05:00

TRANSPORT from Noah Kalina on Vimeo.

2012-01-18T17:46:00.001-05:00

2012-01-04T18:31:00.000-05:00

for golden boy, at seventeen.

(birthday, michael stipe).

2011-12-28T14:06:00.002-05:00

Letters from the Outside, #53

An honest november chill sets in. You can feel, in the all-night glare of the new christian rec center (Im pinned down on all sides now by incessant electric lights, the cross and old glory) the snow pressing against the black bottoms of the clouds that cover our moon. The last logs of last years stovewood go into the licking heat of the hearth and tomorrow we go to get a fresh facecord. This morning taking out the recycling I am blessed by the sight of a big beautiful fox trotting down your driveway.

Late thursday afternoon the snow comes in fat flakes falling fast into night, four inches of winter briefly blessing the valley and followed by what feels entirely like spring -- warm and wet and gentle and after a week, in the last few days before december, a cold rain that aspires again to snow but has held off for the weeks since I last worked on this letter, balmy and bitter by turns but devoid of snow. Now counting up through the first week of december, the night is warm, the buffed blue overcast sky reflected pewter against the broad deep creek that runs through the valley toward the lake. The wind is only in the tops of the trees, fingertips up a vertebral ridge.

I bought fifty pounds of sunflower seed from the farm down the road and walked the blue dog over the bridge to deliver, with much stealth and good wishes, a lunchbag of the stuff for Sister Mother, a great friend and admirer of the birds. With the cat population as it stands around here, I cant claim to carry four stars from them, but try to repent with suet cages and black oil silos. So good to see the goldfinches go gray, the more marvelous an infusion of Life through the feathers in the spring which we seemed to have borrowed a few weeks from in early december – damp air and the muddy ground, one expected crocus and birdsong. But then just cold without the snow, bitter and bone-deep even out of the wind, the culvert water too cold even for the dog, and chargers of ice on the puddles at the side of the road.

Finally today, a few days before the Solstice, there comes snow. Snow never fails to help me feel better. The glass glitter globe dr. zhivago romance of the whole thing, my reindeer herding d.n.a. thrumming, the deep need to ramble through some lonesome woods and disappear into the sleeping world. Traffic on the walk can be heavy, and most certainly jarring. It works against the desired contemplative reward of my ambling and, standing there still with the dogs pulled up against me, considering the rocks and sticks and whatnot on the verge as the hrududus barrel within feet of us, our motley knot, I think well, if it hits us, itll be quick.

And how excellent it is to come in from the cold with red cheeks and bright eyes and have a little lunch and sit by the woodstove and write to you, knowing that this time next year you will have been three months again my good neighbor, in the flesh.

The pasture has gone from brown to grey, with only cut hay and fen reeds shining golden before and behind the bare black sketch of trees in the riparian way. The Chestnut leaves sound like bones and bamboo windchimes while the eye slides around over the imperceptibly shifting blur of the sky. Something about me here, pinned at the bottom of the wheel, when the world holds its breath before the strong winds of springtime stretch the muscles of light over the bones of winter, brings me inevitably into a torpid and viscous melancholy which only now, the eve of Solstice, sees me rising through.

I dust diligently, of all unlikely things, and bake the rest of the cookies cut in the shape of a heart, like the ones on a card, a valentine. I do Suns and Moons and Hands and Hearts for the most part, whatever holiday we're in.

I dust off all my chunky bead necklaces flocked in beggars velvet from lying on the dresser exposed and they glitter tucked into a little box for proper keeping. From the array im chosen by a bone Maori Koru, offering the bright beginning of a fiddlehead fern, a spiral dance perpetually returning to its point of origin, a soul engaged in change and awakening.

The winter holiday comes and goes with the black roar of water on cliffrocks and the vast silence of night in the middle pacific. There is palpable relief as it passes, stepping out from the curb into the muscular whoosh of a speeding truck inches from its hot metal engine.

Yesterday one had to drive south into the hinterland foothills of unbounded pasture, cornrows and looming, alien windfarms to see a quarter-inch of snow in the furrows and beneath the trees. But today it swirls like the inside of a souvenir snowglobe and I leave the house only to bring in more wood for the stove, to let the cats and dogs come and go, and finally send this letter to you. I putter and muse, nurse a persistent illness, reflect on my freshly minted resolutions.

The light grows, 2012 is upon us, and I try and turn my face to time with an expression of love and wonder. But what an excellent year for liberation.

We love you.

2011-12-20T10:57:00.004-05:00

"i quit cigarettes cold turkey for about eight days and after that started rolling pipe tobacco and smoking it in my brown housecoat in the late morning next to the woodstove.

the neighbor in his little frontloader moving the earth around is, after three weeks of ten-hour days, a sound i have yet to get used to --

coming up from under everything else the incessant roar pricks my ear in this season of burning.

if i roll my own cigarettes, i rationalize to myself,

i smoke less for shorter durations and the fume is prettier.

there is also the fiddle factor, the aura of ritual, and the devils bargain.

i have not bathed in days.

i sit staring out the window, waiting for the light to change."

2011-12-16T15:34:00.001-05:00

the friday song.

2011-12-03T08:40:00.000-05:00

for gurldogg

2011-11-17T18:23:00.003-05:00

Dream Song 28: Snow Line by John Berryman

It was wet & damp; white & damp; swift and where I am
we don't know. It was dark and then
it isn't.
I wish the barker would come. There seems to be eat
nothing. I am usually tired.
I'm alone too.

If only the strange one with so few legs would come,
I'd say my prayers out of my mouth, as usual.
Where are his note I loved?
There may be horribles; it's hard to tell.
The barker nips me but somehow I feel
he too is on my side.

I'm too alone. I see no end. If we could all
run, even that would be better. I am hungry.
The sun is not hot.
It's not a good position I am in.
If I had to do the whole thing over again
I wouldn't.

2011-11-11T21:31:00.003-05:00

Letters from the Outside, #52

I used to want to know the names of the constellations. And then I realized that thats not who, or what, they are. Theyre what someone else saw, and thought enough of himself to want other people to see the same. I think they are more wild and lovely without our cultural imprints or mystical Arabic names. Now I want to know: which one do I come from?

And the next night a wide swath of western sky clothed in magenta, a freeze-frame of tone-negative northern lights, as if some great city over the hill was burning. It stretches in scraps toward the east, where I first spied it, thinking it the late moon rising in its wane. I stand out there and ogle, waiting for some arrival of a sign; the lonesome pilgrim standing in the dark and the cold of an intergalactic bus stop shelter. I find out later that, in fact, “Earths magnetic field was hit by a coronal mass ejection, enabling the Northern Lights to be seen.”

Well Blessed Be.

I get a Hail Mary phone call from Sister Mothers older daughter, because who else do you call at ten o'clock on a monday night for foreign films on dvd (to summarize and submit as a power-point presentation the next day) in this town? Happy to walk in the late october night under the far-burning stars, Jupiter huge and heartening in the east, then come home to the wee warm hoosie and work away at the pair of fingerless mitts im crafting for Tamlin (from lovely stuff made of recycled plastic bottles in “Forest Floor” green). Impromptu pilgrimage to our Lady of the Waters and up the hill in all the wrong shoes, bees and butterflies, shale altars and sunlight in the meadow.

Working all week, driving east into the newborn morning, the sky is salmon colored, a pale, smoked pink shot with impossible rose and the cloud-shrouded blue sky of day. But the nights are clear, the stars are close and bright, and at dusk the waxing half-moon rides low and level, traveling west. An odd warmth for november after late octobers date with snow. I can still peg laundry up in the evening and have it dry by the next afternoon.

Im faring better this year than last, I think. Working helps, filling the day with someone elses business, being useful, and contributing to general funds. Standing in the glorious chill of nine p.m. November, I look up, as I am wont to do, at the Stars and the Moon and now Jupiter, which always cheers me, and I think, as I am wont to do, “I am alone.” a sudden and crowding presence like having a ream of paper made of charged Light let loose over your head, this fluttering, comforting, reassuring clairsentience of Presence. And then a kind of exorcism, retching into the forsythia for awhile and afterward, a clear, clean feeling, and the return of my sense of smell. An unusual calm, and the words, “I am arrayed with angels.”

I know more now about what I need to do, even though last nights dreams went unrecorded and gone. A hard frost this morning, but theyre still talking in terms of sixty degrees around noon. The houseplants are crowded for adequate light. I am thinking of giving aloe as a gift to whoever would accept one. Seven daughters all in one pot, spotted and stunted and doing their best.

I roast a squash, bake an apple crisp, finish letters long overdue. What a change in the way I feel, this serenity, spaciousness. It may not last, but ill be grateful for however long it stays, pages of Light, messengers of my Belonging. I feed the woodstove, throw a frisbee for the blue dog, take photos of the garden in her ravaged beauty, and pull seven fine beets from the ground.

The Lavender and Parsley still spry, the Calendula still sporting fine flowers (whose last petals need plucking), the Mugwort green, but everything else a black and skeletal remain bearing seedheads for the birds and next springs resurrection. Full Taurus Moon and I cant sleep, so I go outside and sit in the last of this long stretch of fine weather, the light of which, even obscured by clouds, is bright and the bare cuneiform branches of the Oak trees speak of coming rain, and then, if the voice on the radio is to be believed, of snow

which comes a few days later for one fleeting moment, thin dry bits of frozen dust that spangle the dogs back and arent enough to merit a shaking off.. I bring the old wooden chair in, whose resurrection is a winter goal.

Too many losses and regrets like the dead leaves rustling and whipping around except there is no joy in this pile I rake inside my head, and jump into. Next day the sky is an old grey batting but I get away with another load of laundry for little sails on the line. The green leaves of the lilac tree seem to spoil winters quiet dignity, obstruct the script of twigs against distant hills. For it being the grim season I am doing alright, and am ultimately grateful for the struggle I am allowed. In my dreams I cannot find my sword, and I am tempted to think it will take another few lifetimes for me to earn it. We love you.

2011-11-11T21:11:00.001-05:00

for zuzu.

2011-11-04T18:37:00.001-04:00

the friday song.

2011-10-22T13:40:00.000-04:00

Letters from the Outside, #51

Its been too many moons since my last letter, and I apologize. Let me begin this late letter by wishing for a day next year as glorious as the twenty-fifth of september was this. After that it was october a week early, the wind blows and the trees turn, leaves falling in thin yellow slivers through the thick canted light. Dog trots through the tall grass dewspangled and deer trod. The wind has reclaimed his coldwater quality and the sun valiant behind a cloud-Pollocked sky only strong enough to melt the edges. I have “what shall we do with a drunken sailor” inexplicably looping through my head.

The woods are lovely, every aperture in me opening when I am with them. A blush of rust on the far hillside and the wooly bears are decidedly polarized from what ive seen of them, either pine or mahogany with no interruption from the other. I realized the Chestnuts are a pair of mothers and daughters, former flanking the latter, broader, fecund, old enough to ovulate. The slender branches of the maidens within bearing only leaves. An excellent example on someones part of land stewardship. I dont fill my pockets with the glossy nuts this year. I take one.

At noon in the western sky, the waning crescent moon powerful and lovely from even so far away. Thirteen crows give the benediction and the leaves estranged from their source lie heavy on the ground. The switch is off. I walk into thick mist cogitating on Druid Oak rites and set off five fine doe from the high, wild rosebushes. The cattle are a henge through the pasture of mist. The rills run loud and hard, the Apples of Avalon shrouded. I stand and listen keenly to octobers incantation to split the husk and scatter the seed, and then to sleep.

Indian Summer comes, days flirting with eighty degrees, and we celebrate The Anniversary of My Latest Arrival in pilgrimage to the conservatory, the flame speckled koi and the vanilla scented orchids and the staghorn fern. A room of hundred year agaves and pin phalanxed cacti keeping tender fingers from the sweet water inside. I feel my soul battery recharged, absorbing the humid high oxygen easy breathing of all this pure green growing behind glass. Two tiny Tortoise and several scattered congregations of Box Turtle in the burbling rock ponds. A prevailing sense of peace and sanity we carry with us on a walk through Holly, Magnolia, Hornbeam, the winsome Autumn Crocus and a thousand magical enclaves under the old trees, in small rolling rooms of manicured grass and light and shadow.

A visit to the marble Neptune, offering wanderers the scallop sign, all roads returning to the Ocean, all jagged fragments of some greater glass sphere softened in the turning tides at this foreign shore of Time until we are incorporated, the sand itself for others to leave their fleeting footsteps in. Old graves disintegrating into geology. At the chinese restaurant my Crisp Oracular Dessert proclaims, “If I bring forth what is inside me,what I bring forth will save me.”

Resurfacing work between the two little towns turns the road into miles of Pennsylvania Turnpike, the hypnotic challenge of lined pylons.

After a few days of glorious seventy-degree swansong, October takes on the sodden mantle of November. Damp and chill as I revel in, my woolens and my seven-league boots, the comforting cool humidity, the long evening, the season of my most recent incarnation and today the advent of my thirty-ninth tour around the Sun. A fine day by all accounts, the sky speaks of coming rain but today a little wind and sun, a walk down the road with hawks keeping close to the ground, preserving their precious energy on low branches scanning for wee rustling beasties searching themselves for provisions with which to survive the coming season. The dark spreading margins of our incrementally abbreviating days send us out of the house into inkwater mornings and home again through an already encroaching dim. The morning clouds are apricot or periwinkle, the creek rushes high from all the rain and, like time and angels, passes through us toward the Ocean or the Sky, sounding just like the wind winnowing whats left of the leaves on the trees. The Oaks will be last to lose their brown leather leaves, but this year everything got cut-off, caught off guard.

I reaped one small pumpkin, self-sown from the compost pen. The gardens overgrown with Tulsi and an array of field weeds, a seasons worth of tomatoes returning to dust. I did observe that, having not purchased any Mennonite seedlings this year, and despite the extraordinary wet, and the fact that that sort of thing lives in the soil in perpetuity, there was no blight. The Cleomes are a fragile dream and Tithonia saturate saffron Faerie crowns. Im still picking Calendula petals, and the Monkshood has bloomed, as the Bleeding Heart withers to reveal the Rhododendron daughter, deep green and waxed for winter. We Love You.

2011-10-07T19:03:00.002-04:00

the friday song.

2011-09-30T07:21:00.003-04:00

its the birthday of W.S. Merwin.

For the Anniversary of My Death

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day

When the last fires will wave to me

And the silence will set out

Tireless traveler

Like the beam of a lightless star

Then I will no longer

Find myself in life as in a strange garment

Surprised at the earth

And the love of one woman

And the shamelessness of men

As today writing after three days of rain

Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease

And bowing not knowing to what

-W.S. Merwin

2011-09-17T18:18:00.001-04:00

the saturday song.

2011-09-15T09:47:00.001-04:00

2011-09-14T21:02:00.000-04:00

for zuzu, through our duration.

Here's a woman, brought by northwind, brought by northwind, pulled by waters, washed ashore by waves of oceans, drifted here on rising billows. When but I begin my chanting I'll sing seas to mead and honey, bottom gravel all to saltgrains sands of sea to beans uncounted. Just by once my girdle tying, just by once my shirt on taking, once by fastening my buckles, once my feet in shoes by thrusting. Rise, my nature, off the earth now, lift my sin from ground beneath me, lift my sin from ground beneath me, Fay from underneath the aspen.

2011-09-14T12:21:00.000-04:00

Letters from the Outside, #50

Autumn heralded in with chainsaws and the sound of acorns falling onto trucks in the driveway. Roadside bunting of Goldenrod flowers. I put on some Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and water the plants. I seek the sun like an old cat, sensing its wane, its growing scarcity.

September, traditionally treacherous month, melted butter on the ledge from which by my fingertips I hang. A sudden spate of social occasions, unexpected reunions of long yesterdays spectres. The project delievered I find myself reading again, and the walk. Perhaps it requires a certain frame of mind; an acceptance, or surrender, to things As They Are. Early september heat of what feels more like Indian Summer, sitting soaking in the light of a sun the wane of which we sense in our animal bones.

Ribbed crippled old dogs in the bed of feedstore pick-ups, a texas polka band on the radio playing “in heaven there is no beer.” my Tithonia blooms, and the Wolfsbane buds and everything so late to the party this year, theres no time left for ripening in the cycle. Theres a grief in me as old as I am, and it keeps me from attending to these letters of yours, for fear of filling the pockets of pages with stones. My strawberries are profuse with blooms. I find the cats at play with winsome prey and it steals my appetite, all the senseless suffering of the world condensed into this moment, which cannot be salvaged nor saved, and I turn away. It has rained and rained. The garden is mud and the bewitching smell of Tulsi, ancient and sweet.

Roadside Goldenrod, Jewelweed and Sumac in her red flocked fall coat, the ground thick with Hickory nuts, culverts running with rainwater and frogs, while I stand in a dense expansion of sunlight in the center of a circle one southward Monarch makes time to cast around me. The cows graze their quiet way in the shade of the windbreak til the tip of the peninsula thins into a shady grove, and follow the sun across the creek to haybales and evening home. I unpin my hair and let the wind have his way with it. In the sky, a rainbow serpent, or a swan. The farther I go the closer I come to understanding how finely-tuned I was when I was born. How years of abuse and neglect have left a callous as ugly as it is numb. How does one exfoliate a soul?

The old woman plants a patch of black-eyed-susan where the plastic lamb used to be and replaced the mirrored gazing ball with one of driveway oilslick dragon tchotchke hues. Fairy cathedrals of Cleome in the garden where one of the relocated roses offer pink rannuncular assemblages of petals, regressed back toward some ancestress hardy and more fragrant than the rarified hardware store hybrid it arrived as. The moon a pearl in a bowl of fog, and the nights are not yet cool enough to keep the crickets from their recitations.

A day of revelations, Full Pisces Moon the sunlight warm goldenrod honey bright butter colored waves along the shore of the road miraculous backlit hawkweed the wild dappled Apples, pregnant bellies of orchards of seed, Chestnuts gestating in their seamless spiny pods and the smell of Concords. Foxgrapes ripen on the vine. Offerings to the Pine, second station of Mary, and I gather dense resin in a maple leaf, and in surrender am offered this significance: Pathkeeper. So I ask for guidance to find that Path and tend it true.

I am sitting outside in the late morning sun and can still feel the weight of my walking bag against my body. “You arent carrying that bag anymore.” Grant me the strength to put down the satchel of ghosts. To reclaim my open heart and my soul. The past is not a place we can ever go again, it is a purgatory, and thief of the living. Hold onto Wisdoms souvenirs and let the wind and rain and sun scour the rust away.

I hang laundry, patch a blanket. I pick tomatoes, cucumbers and squash, walk to the crossroads where the wind blows and the leaves fall and the dog trots through the tall grass dew-spangled and deer-trod. In her dream I am as I am, petticoated in earth and sunset and the dusky lustre of winegrapes against greek leaves and tendrils set in wood or sugar green. A house of marvels and laughter escaping forbidden from the heavy door, out into the wondrous, waiting world. These dreams are a gift, little candles in the window sitting vigil for the wandering soul.

I bake a hotmilk cake, oatmeal cookies, and then put together a stroganoff for supper. By eight the yard is dark, and the rain comes with a bolt of lightning which turns the darkness around us inside out to white. The Calendula petals dry, the Blackberry cordial brews. I should have picked that Tulsi on the full of the moon. I am as I am and Great Goddess when will I stop apologizing?

Grateful I am evolving, my satellite soul traveling the spiral of All That Is, unfolding to a flower and ripening to a seed in endless cycles akin to infinite others and entirely significant, always forward, never straight.

We Love You.

2011-09-06T09:31:00.002-04:00

steven jesse bernstein.

"...her mood disappears and is replaced by a wet church steeple...angels roasted on porcupine quills..."

this ones for ripton.

"...He read poems from a stage with a live rodent in his mouth, its tail twitching as baseline punctuation. He tried to cut his heart out in order to hold it in his hands and calm it down. He once urinated on a heckler and tended to throw things: beer bottles, manuscripts, drumsticks, his wallet, a sandwich."

2011-08-28T18:06:00.000-04:00

Letters from the Outside, #49

Chicken roasting, Lammas bread rising, I sit on the threshold after a fruitful, feverish Zuzu Birthday Project session and listen to the lovely sound of our garden drinking in the steady, gentle rain. Mad weather, oscillating wildly between sunshine and shadow, thunder rolling around the edge of a cerulean sky buttressed bright with clouds. The days have been full of rain, and the nights cool. So the tomatoes, like the corn at the crossroads, are where july should have found them. And without light or heat, these tropical fruits wont ripen, or grow. The cabbages, however, are flourishing, waxing moons of pleated leaves that catch the night rain in their skirts, and the dew.

Some notes from the road: O.D. On the sidewalk where I started, they strap him to the gurney and stand around the garbage can shooting breeze. Anabaptists headed south for harvest of their own farms, and I change seats after the smell coming off the stubby, rough-handed man across the aisle hits me, and my heavy bag fortuitously fails to detonate a plastic ziploc of spew someone was thoughtful enough to seal. I thought it was really interesting that because of these Plain Folk, who eat slabs of velveeta on generous wedges of iceberg one woman keeps in a old blue suitcase, the bus would not be offering a movie on the overhead screens.

Filthy haunted restrooms where everythings strictly drip-dry. The one driver who took nine or ten swings at backing out of the gate before we moved along into open spaces, curly-headed faun clouds in a sky people are photographing with their phones. The unmolested woods of Sovereign People territory exuding comfort and sanctuary. Border Patrol, dead serious and self-contained, one hand on the gun. The little Amish girl babbles Deutch and licks the windows.

Light on the lake water that comes from a sun, red as a freshly forged nailhead shattering in the cool of the thruway treeline and filling the bus with a steam of darkness. A teen preacher in the seat behind me, whispering scripture and doctrine in a honed, hypnotic liturgy that shrinks the world to the unlikely pair of us and I invoke the names of Lilith and Mary while he spits his chew into a plastic pop bottle.

Seems less a bus station than a disaster relief area, drawn, exhausted people wrapped in tattered blankets, shuffling in slippers, clutching plastic bags of what they managed not to leave behind. Two in the morning a woman and child herded off by tall, blank-faced men in neutral suits into the black-hole anonymity of a witness protection program. Or so im told by a number of these purgatory dwellers, and my own story soon gets back on board and slides quietly away into a greasy neon night. I visibly startle a lanky looming Jamaican with my use of the word, “patois.”

Knoxville the absolute nadir of this 80's Bowery-era add-a-bead haul, if you dont count the smell of the Chattanooga station, which persuaded me to take my chances in the rocketing porta-potty at the back of the bus. A woman performs her morning prayers somewhere behind me, “Thank you, jesus” audible at regular intervals, matter-of-fact. I have not eaten for six-hundred miles and the turkey croissant I eat in a manner reminiscent of hyenas at an impala carcass in Atlanta is nothing short of miraculous. Thank you, jesus.

The kid sitting behind me plays with my seat and clicks his footrest rather dramatically one setting at a time before releasing it to strike with a clang against the base of the chair. He tires of this folly, and contents himself with kicking at the back of it and rocking the entire seat back and forth, those first tentative parries with an stalled vending machine. I read a street sign for Beaver Ruin Road, and know im getting closer to where the Rosemary is a grand Faerie Queen garbed in green needles and flourishing in this climate to the size of foundation shrubbery. Where the Scuppernong arbor is a dappled chapel of serrate leaves on woody vines and the ceiling vibrates with the music of insect friction and the one large garden spider waits in the center of a web three feet across in the corner, shaded and waiting.

There is a Fig tree and Angels Trumpet and a duck so heavy-bred for flesh it cannot fly. Where the sunlight is a tangible thing, atomized lead apron on your skin, and theres a loaf of Sunbeam on every table in every chicken joint in town. Where the muddy rivers glitter with mica and pyrite and theres armadillos now im told, drifting north with climate change, and the lonesome holy feeling of the georgia Pines. Where theres a woman who lives with her dogs and an English Sparrow where we walk the creek split road with a herd of cows retuning home at twilight and the pygmy goats traveling tetherless along the red clay track and I ate good barbeque and behaved badly, desperate for the shibboleths, the Unspoken Rules that only arrive with time, of which I hadnt any. We love you.

2011-08-17T08:48:00.001-04:00

well, here goes.

2011-07-30T09:01:00.000-04:00

the saturday song, for both of us.

2011-07-28T12:44:00.001-04:00

for Golden Boy, on his first Pennsic.

2011-07-28T09:54:00.000-04:00

Letters from the Outside, #48

A long stretch of hot bright days, the beds and garden get extra water, and then last night it rains and rains, lightning stitching hillcrests to the roiling sky around the valley, heralding another week of forecasted record temperatures.

I reluctantly pluck the Calendula heads from their stems to concoct an infusion, the Coneflowers rise to their prime, and the Delphinium have shed their petals to reveal the ripening seed, successfully primed by the seduction of violet skirts and pollen, intoxicating. One Tulsi self-sow by the French Melons, like a miracle. And the joy of discovering three Tithonia self-sows that should be two-hundred times their size by now.

The heat is foreign to me, this high, relentless heat and humidity that gives one the sensation of being slathered in glue-stick. I realize its a wee rabbit living in the bramble thats been at the beans, which, I just now realize, are of the pole variety, which I am not prepared for. Therapeutic weeding session reveals several Tulsi re-seeds beneath the beans.

And the sky lowers slowly and the grim rumble of the thunder that rolls slowly around the wet lip of the valleys wineglass like some distant and approaching doom, gaining that metal treble with proximity, the kiss of the cooler front, great green boughs whipped to a silver roaring and consummated in rain. The vastness is often dizzying, and im tharn in its midst.

Sunday, we returned to the waterfall where we were married, where on the very spot inexplicably grows in the middle of the streambed a tree, and swam like palsied dogs and sat under the falling water, letting it beat us clean. It even shed the amber callous of a second-degree burn I received by attempting to shift a conflagrant stump with my my naked phalanges. The world there is beautiful, all the stones have stories. I see, over many years, how someone, or everyone, has worked with the Earth toward a beautiful compromise, steps worn into precipitous ledges, and a sapling slowly grown parallel above it, offering assurance to the less nimble as the path reaches its most narrow. There is a green and sweet smelling peace to be found there, among the Nettle and the Fern, and a nursery of Hemlock and a wee peeper, penny sized. Artemis-breasted Mayapple fruit, electric emerald moss on fallen logs, dogs tractoring up where no path will ever begin. Countless marvels for the Open Heart.

It has been dry, and the rain, falling gentle and steady, is welcome. Heading out to double-check I havent left anything out in the rain I shouldnt have (again), I end up pulling Redroot and Purslane from around the Roses, and it feels wonderful. I emerge from under the hood and accept the baptism of rain as a Sign of Unconditional Love, followed by a benediction of sunlight through which Cowboy and I pick our way like pack mules up a gullycreek, chaotic with rocks run down from The Rest Of It, vertical miles of the East Hill, like wild horses funneled through a chute with no corral.

And the last perilous scrabbling onto a flat open space walled like a water glass narrowly broached by slate steps, crumbling, spangled with light off the water whispering through cracks in the flat black terraced ascension toward the fabled Great Reward. I lose my Presence, my self, in thoughts of the future, of returning down the packed silt cut bank backwards, irrational panic exposing that glorious Will to Live when I ran out of ersatz exposed root railing, and I dont even see where I am or let it in or breathe. But my steadfast mountain goat companion led the way and when I ran out of root to hold onto, was compelled to fall back and slide slightly to the next exposed offering and Cowboys hand clasped around my wrist, divine concentration of Love and Truth and Well-Being, and we were back on the rocks as the rain started to pour down.

With these days of rain, the lawns have gone green and growing again; its been lovely, this long rest from the roar of mowers. Late July, I see how Summer is arcing above the unconfined pastures, Corn sprouting its fountain crown, and each seedpod spilling pale green silks, each paired to its kernel, a gossamer umbilicus.

Pulling weeds in the darkening, wincing at the difference where the manuring didnt reach, how cracked and implacable it is. So it asks, and shall receive. Its been so hot I havent been walking, the walking that feeds my mind and soul and body, and I feel its salubrious ether leaving me in a slow leak. Darwin said it wasnt the strongest that survive, its those most adaptable to change. Those willing to release their Qi like water, quiet patience for the slow deep places and a twinkling song for running among the rocks. Life-Bringer, Primal Environment, Ocean Mother of Us All, Soul. We Love You.

2011-07-25T11:55:00.001-04:00

for me.

2011-07-22T07:15:00.000-04:00

its the birthday of Tom Robbins.

“Unwilling to wait for mankind to improve, the outlaw lives as if that day were here.”

2011-07-21T17:26:00.003-04:00

happy birthday Marshall McLuhan, Cat Stevens and Robin Williams.

for Golden Boy.

2011-07-16T11:42:00.002-04:00

the saturday song.

for Cowboy, Winterbone Home for the Wayward Mad,
members of the Cirque du Soleil Reject Hour,

and Our Friends from the Smokepit.

2011-07-13T15:05:00.000-04:00

"Catechism for a Witch's Child"

When they ask to see your gods
show them lines
drawn delicately with veins
on the underside of a bird’s wing
tell them you believe
in giant sycamores mottled
and stark against a winter sky
and in night’s so frozen
stars crack open spilling
streams of molten ice to earth
and tell them how you drank
the holy wine of honeysuckle
on a warm spring day
and of the softness
of your mother
who never taught you
death was life’s reward
but who believed in the earth
and the sun
and in a million, million light years
of being

-J.L. Stanley

thanks to aerialcircus

2011-07-13T09:12:00.000-04:00

Letters from the Outside, #47

Bergamot blooming, chinese red pyrotechnic still-lives, and the day lilies, resplendent french-canteloupe colored waves of summer in the light and shade of the roadside. A stretch of bright, hot days, you find yourself walking through some wild meadow, brushing through trefoil and butterfly weed, toward a group of people you know cooking food over a fire and jumping off a little dock into a pond. The woods are cool and its shade excellent to breathe in. the blackberries are visibly red from across the lawn, and then I catch the boys eating their way across the swath. T. returns with a tithe of the small berries which havent yet reached their bursting prime.

I start another blanket, with no specific recipient in mind, just something for my hands to do. Theres one particularly beloved by one of Cowboys granddaughters, which may wear through, and im thinking this one on the needles, its twin, could be an eventual replacement. I broke down and bought two more rather sizable Bergamot plants to fill in the other side of the front steps, and dug some of the rooty bits from the edge of the established swath and relocated them also.

The outer stems of the new plants were recumbent, so I dug them under a wee bit of earth and Goddess willing theyll take root, too, and increase the coverage potential. Found a Bull Thistle growing behind the front Peonies and left it, for sentimental reasons. Scattered some Lupine seeds, the dry pods popping like Jewelweed if you hold them too tight. It may be the year off for my Hollyhock (its the year off for a lot out in the garden), so i dug it up and set it back against the outhouse, so that when they scatter their seed, the seed will settle and root into receptive loam, not lie on the thatch of the lawn and rot. The Mugwort I resuscitated several times in a small plastic pot its inhabited for two years now was planted out and thrives.

Bought a half-pound of clear rock candy for the cordial, and should go out and gather my quart while its still there. All the brassicas I planted live, but could certainly use more water than theyre getting. Everything could. Driving around you see some corn not three inches off the ground, and some you could wade into up to your floating rib. In the garden, a bird has snipped off some of the heads of growing Sunflowers and Brussels Sprouts. The aluminum pans will have to come back, to keep what Tomatoes im blessed with intact.

Parched earth culvert mosaic floors wind buffeting around in the trees, you close your eyes and youre almost at the ocean shore. The walnuts big as ping-pong balls, the wild turnip and the lilies and the vetch, joined now here and there by the soothing blue chicory, and the meadows in this long run of rainless days has gone brown, but a boon for haymaking. Weve been teased with the mere possibility of rain only twice in the last long while, and in the end for naught.

The garden is/was so truly delayed this year. No Tithonia, my deep orange Faerie crowns, the Sunflowers half-height (due to their move, no doubt) the Tomato plants also not the fragrant, serpentine thickets they usually are. So much fails to even sprout. And only half the garden itself is under cultivation. No carrots, no beets, no corn, but im having a hard time getting over the Tithonia. I was hoping some would self-sow, like ive seen the Delphinium, Lupine and other Sunflowers do, but no. but this is what it is. We need to inundate the fallow half with fine local manure and maybe next year do the same and let the second half rest. A large part of the problem this year was the saturation of the soil. Amending would assist immensely. Again, this ground has only been garden for, at the most, three years. There was the first central plot, then the right flank, and then the left. It takes, they say, seven years for a garden to really get its groove on. So I surrender, as always, to The Imperfect Process, and have those dense offerings of Echinacea and Bergamot to soften the blow.

In a flurry of industry I concoct the blackberry cordial and map out agitation requirements (for said spirits, not for me...as those are frequent and entirely unscheduled) on the calendar. I also throw together a batch of vanilla extract, but I question the quality of the pods, which have been sitting in a plastic bag in the cabinet since I met Stephen Marley. So I live like a Hobbit, whimsical and oblivious, going on about the dogs or the garden, while the juggernaut forces of what weve started to call around here “the Complex” direct their ego battalions to wade into the catastrophic subjucation of the world, hip deep in blood and money. Nick erected a few panels of privacy fence, which has made a huge difference. I put a little shrine out there for Red Stone Woman, and last night, we sat briefly under the moon, a beach glass bone caught in our planets spiral tide, with the flame from the wee vilakku bright and strong even in the blessed night wind. The evenings have been dreamless and mercifully cool, but the days are dense heat and biomic dehydration. But were a crafty and adaptable kind of creature, are we not? And we abide. And we fiercely miss you.

2011-07-12T09:21:00.002-04:00

its the birthday of Henry David Thoreau.

"If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen."

2011-07-09T09:31:00.002-04:00

for sara.

2011-06-27T08:22:00.001-04:00

its the (celebrated) birthday of Frank O'Hara. He was born three months earlier but his parents gave him this birthday so he wouldn't know he was conceived out of wedlock.

ANIMALS

Have you forgotten what we were like then
when we were still first rate
and the day came fat with an apple in its mouth

it's no use worrying about Time
but we did have a few tricks up our sleeves
and turned some sharp corners

the whole pasture looked like our meal
we didn't need speedometers
we could manage cocktails out of ice and water

I wouldn't want to be faster
or greener than now if you were with me O you
were the best of all my days

2011-06-26T17:14:00.000-04:00

Letters from the Outside, #46

Turkeys and deer at the side of the road, mostly toms and does. The turkeys strut to cover, but the does go tharn, their heads turned away from browse until The Thing passes. Dogs wrestling in my Delphiniums, which of course grieved me but it passed like lightning and theres still some left to spire and bloom indigo-violet among the Coneflower and Calendula. Allergy shots leave the inflamed evidence of a three-pound mosquito. There are times when Steve Earle singing, “Don't You Take It Too Bad” is the perfect thing.

Catalpa trees blooming, and the vetch, and the bullfrogs in Avalon commence the recitation of their sutras. The Wheel of Ezekiel. Friday afternoon John Coltrane eating garden strawberries over the sink, brownies baking. The hoya flowers weep their one clear resinous pendant tear and I find several caches of Cleome reseedlings, which is awesome. Co-chaired a nine ten-year-old-boy birthday party camp-out, sleeping under the sky, late waning moonrise light of dusk at an upper elevation. Parliament of bullfrogs, lightning bugs in the thin winsome wood which stood around us. I oared lemniscates onto the surface of the little pond spangled with water lilies, indian rubber hose stems feeding their mythic, transcendent, flowers that open with morning. My small steady ripple sliding and stippling the mirror image of trees into soothing hypnotic quantum-impressionist scenes; that, and the perfect vermillion square of sunset that shone through the wood and I walked to that silent light-sanctified portal and I was grateful, and I prayed.

In goes the last of the seedlings, the parsley and lettuce, the crucifers. The neighbors cut down the old Weeping Willow, that lovely undulating shade against the streetlight I was always so grateful for. Sister Mothers man sixty feet up in a cherry picker with a polesaw trying not to get whomped. And then theres the live tri-wire and so much of the tree left above him. Bergamot in its gestating won-ton phase, Stargazer space capsule buds lengthen and deepen their seams. The intricately architectured Rudbeckia and Coneflower crowns now beginning to raise their butterfly feeding stations. The first full day of Summer is rainy and grey, a good day for the garden to settle in, a cool and gentle rest. I read a Brian Greene book in the hammock, working all the time at making peace with myself, breathing mindfully, maintaining my vigil flame of optimism. The book is dense, and utilizes a great deal of my left brain, which isnt the more vigorous sibling. So i bake a banana bread, go out in my gumboots to take pictures of flowers.

These theories and calculations are based on the tiniest parts of Our Conceivable Everything, and apply universally to everything within the Everything. The beautiful pull of these ideas is their ability to inspire acceptance of myself logically as part of this Everything...“A child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars..,” all that. It approaches my illusory issue of alienation from an entirely different perspective, a neutral, left-brain argument for Belonging.

Series of cool, cloudy days, intermittent rain, giving the Growing in the garden a golden opportunity to wriggle its roots into the ground without the taxing toll of a typical late june sun. But all things thrive in Balance, and a stretch of hot bright weather would do All the Living some good.

I understand now how it truly takes years to establish a perennial bed. I see only now how the components come together over time, spreading in dense strokes, disseminating, perennials evolving with sagacious patience into themselves, returning after the long rests ever more alive. There are patches, to be expected from a laissez-faire amateur, but I see how in those empty places the humble beginning of another grand display. Last year I hardly bought any new plants at all, and this year, none. I am tempted to look for another Monkshood as the way its grown along with the Globeflower inspires aesthetic intervention. Perenial stewarding is commonly compared to painting, and I see that now. The (potentially)6' Astilbe I bought three years ago has only reached about half that, but this is the first year theres even a breath of its frothy drooping pink paisley blooms. I realize also that I cannot let the Lemon Balm or the Wild Violet have its way with the north bed, as then there would be nothing more; even the hostas are suffering under their imperialism.

And then theres the northside nursery nemeton; how marvelous it is to watch the king whip, crown to crown with me, sprout a succession of new leaf clusters over the summer, lower boughs sporting their young-adult leaves, and were I to live to be one hundred, I would admire the first clusters of acorns, now ready to insure a futher eternity of Oak in, despite man, a miraculous and beautiful world. We Miss You.

2011-06-16T09:32:00.003-04:00

Letters from the Outside #45

Daisies in the tall grass on the roadside the black dog trots through, emerging spangled with phosphorescent pollen and seedheads,a synecdoche of the night sky. The first days of june bring red clover, black locust blossoms and wild roses. The mornings are cool, and afternoon usually burns off the chill. Locust blossoms scented swansong shrivelling and the foxgrapes only foam along the vine. A genuine june day, insistent eye of the Sun beckoning everything up towards the Everything, I dig comfrey, pull the feeble seeded froth of spent forget-me-nots, everything should be in the ground by now. Iris in the garden unfurls, aubergine chrysalis surrendering into deep heliotrope lesson in transformation, fleur-de-lis, and the lotus of peonies, pure pink petalbowl for the golden consumation. The air is ornamented with honeybees.

The lp tank killed the Buddeleia. Everything else I planted is still alive. I pick rocks, arrange them in towers of balance and Gravity, shape and Time. I make rolls. The roses at the end of your driveway smell so sweet; I always check to see if the communing cup is otherwise occupied before I bring the heady scent into me. June is the smell of wild roses, earth in the cracks of your hands, and long-lived light. The first fireflies tonight in the tall grass along the garden, the sonic arcing of bats through the waxing to half moonlight. T. noodles on the old Hoener in the dark kitchen to “It Hurts Me Too” (Live in London '72).

Tuesday cold and drizzling, but the tomatoes are in and the strawberries come fast in garnet tides. Tomorrow I may be able to get in a lot more of the seedlings, starting to stunt and strangle in their starters of re-purposed tofu and produce packaging. Cowboy and I plan to espalier the tomato plants for optimum light and air, and to offset the probably too-close setting-out. The green sweater goes on again, and I shut some of the windows. The rain helps me to focus on indoor chores, the houseplants and the dishes and the floors. I attended my first sweat lodge on saturday and it was a liberating epiphany. The humid womb was a thoroughly unexpected and familiar comfort and, as in the beginning, you emerged from the dense darkness into a dazzling, miraculous world. Air and light and the woods that surrounded us, each environment its own magickal sanctuary. I look very much forward to going again, and again.

Wednesday is bright and beautiful, I plant out the rest of the tomatoes, a patch of parsley, and relocate more sunflowers before they too are tilled under in the gradual reclamation of the garden from a vacuum-abhorring Nature. I realize how barometrically affected I am. Like a sheep, when the low pressure moves in, I have to fight the urge, however feebly, to just lay down in the field until the light returns. I apologize, again, for the long pause between letters. Ive just been a little blank; a sense of suspension, like the stillness before the wave breaks, that breathless pause before the coaster succumbs to the earths pull. The Solstice is coming, and I wonder if its worth it at all to plant corn or beans this year. Wait until july to plant beets and greens, and be satisfied.

Hard to express the sweet peace of dusk in the garden watching bats and lightning bugs emerge from their days seclusion, the Great Satellite, tonight smudged and blood-colored, rising over the fringed edge of East Hill, full in Sagittarius, despite the fact that by the time night comes to us the eclipse is long over and what we see is our waters god already in wane, and a bit after midnight it passes into the house of Capricorn, where things contract inside a formidable boundary when just before there was the sense of expansion that always provokes (in me) random emails to neutral and long past acquaintance, and the urge to talk to someone on the phone. Which, in my case, is passing rare.

I decide to go ahead and plant a few rows of corn and beans. The brussels sprouts and cabbage go in, the lettuce, and undoubtedly whatever else strikes my fancy at the moment, sitting there in the fresh-turned earth (thanks to Cowboy who dutifully wrestles with the bucking, belching tiller to cut a new swath of arable land each evening after work) flipping through the card catalog of seed packets. My french melons have flowers. More strawberries need harvesting, and i watch with a hungry heart the progression of blackberries from bloodless stones to fruit that bleeds on your fingers, bursts on your tongue.

I do believe the sweat lodge helped me let go if even just a little to the cinderblocks I drag around behind me, inside me. I dont feel as heavy, as hateful, as haunted. I have been staring into the rear-view, and now its time to live with my eyes on the road and my hands on the wheel. Past and future might as well be fairy tales. I have now to take the breath, plant the bean seed. And working in conjuction with the world through which I wander, all things that are mine will come to me as day comes after evening, and the Sun draws water up through the air so that it may re-member itself and return to earth again and again to be water. We Love You.

2011-06-14T06:57:00.000-04:00

its the birthday of Che.

“Let me say, at the risk of seeming ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love.”

2011-06-04T18:32:00.002-04:00

for Zuzu.

2011-05-31T09:16:00.000-04:00

Letters from the Outside #44

Im ruminating on maretail clouds and Hindu swastikas (“auspicious mark of well-being”)when a turkey flushes from from the scrub and flaps urgently over our heads coming down through the opposite understory in a coda of snapping branches and shattering leaves. Calves successfully weaned from their mothers after a week of grievous bellowing that haunted the valley air. The seedlings are getting more and more nakey-sun-time out on the picnic table to acclimate to a more authentic lifestyle. Its been too wet to even plant the cold crops, but I think this weekend, if the weather holds, we'll till in some fine local composted horse manure and set the bevy in.

The yellows of May make way for the the violets of June as per the first lovely flowers of Dame's Rocket, the piebalds my heart goes out to, neither of one nor the other. The bloom is off the lilac and the apple trees, and theres less of a rush in the rills. Buds on the nut trees transform to tiny gothic cathedrals, the grand central spire unfurling, buttressed by an immaculate geometry of sweet leaves fractaling outward through the evening into fresh sheets for the sun to lie in, and other than a few reluctant hold-outs, Cloud Valley is green from hogsback to fen.

I fill in some of the bare patches in the perennial bed with seedlings found wandering in the garden. The strawberry plants are full of white flowers, and again and again am I awestruck at the miracle of green and growing things, from bloom to fruit, from seed to leaf. Wet and wet and the world is changing. Storm front of tornadoes and fire, hurricanes and flood, messengers presaging a coming cataclysm or maybe were just catching up with ourselves, level the playing field. Aliens and Eschatology hover in invisible wavelengths over my head while the seedlings spend another day under the indoors for fear theyll drown in the insidious drizzle. Ive pulled the ancient Sage plants from their beds and moved a Rhododendron.

Now the empty eggshells on the ground, speckled wombs sacrificed for the sky. The pacific northwest climates been a boon for the evergreens I planted on the boundary line, a lush spurt of soft green growth, the snails are legion, and the ground is a cup filled to the meniscus; last nights rain returns to the earth a familiar and unwelcome squish, the soft shoulder of the road churned by the drag of fleeting, sinking hooves. I find one foreleg of a fawn along the road, banks and culverts covered in buttercup and wild geranium, the cuticle of its wee perfect hoof still lustrous. I tuck it under some leaves at the base of a Witch Hazel and wait to see what time will leave for me. Bob Dylan is seventy years old.

When the Sun comes out it as as Light on the face of the waters. And man welcomes summer in, strewing loose garlands of cans and bags and wrappers along the road while bumblebees hover over the russian honeysuckle and the Willow shows her summer robes. A dragonfly. The days I get my allergy shots are always a little weird, as im required to load up on benadryl and still function. Always that half-hour or so when I sit there staring at the sunlight through the hoya leaves. Which isnt so bad, I suppose.

Thunder woke me last midnight and I went out in nothing but my slicker to keep the seedlings I had left out on their first overnight outside from drowning in their wee plastic beds. This weekend we plant out what we can. There hasnt been a hard frost all May, so its not a killing cold that quails me but the rain. Every day the rain. Every day the looming threat of rain. Its getting a little psychological.

June and not one sweep of the tiller, not one seed in the ground. So the last monday in May I transfer some of the seedlings to their place on the Earth, move a few more pioneering coneflowers, move some notoriously-impossible-to-transplant Sunflower volunteers toward the margin; within minutes theyve fainted away, but only time will tell.

The Hopi Tobacco has gone in, as has the Calendula, Zinnia and Mugwort. There is still standing water in some of the garden. The strawberries are hard green bristly seeded heads, the blackberry still beaded fists.

Theres always thunder in the evening, and the days prove humid and bright. But its good to be out in the heat and the light, listening to the birds and feeling the breeze on my face. Its good to try and work with the Earth, bring something peaceful and beautiful and good into the world which sorely needs it.

My grandfathers factory fan comes down for the summer, tuesday we get our manure and then the tilling and the tomatoes go in, then the gardening in earnest, and the summer, and time moving out in all directions toward your return.

The last evening of May is wide open; quiet and pale and smelling of mown turf and evening dew. We keep at what must be done, patch by patch, and there are the closer hopes and the farther dreams, like small islands and the imperceptibly shifting stars, in search of Home.

2011-05-27T11:07:00.001-04:00

the friday song.

2011-05-27T07:42:00.001-04:00

its the birthday of rachel carson.

"The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction."

2011-05-25T07:48:00.000-04:00

its the birthday of ralph waldo emerson.

"Every materialist will be an idealist; but an idealist can never go backward to be a materialist."

"Amidst the downward tendency and proneness of things, when every voice is raised for a new road...for an improvement in dress...for a political party...will you not tolerate one or two solitary voices in the land, speaking for thoughts and principles not marketable or perishable? Soon these improvements and mechanical inventions will be superseded; these modes of living lost out of memory; these cities rotted, ruined by war, by new inventions...or the geologic changes; all gone, like the shells which sprinkle the sea-beach with a white colony to-day, forever renewed to be forever destroyed. But the thoughts which these few hermits strove to proclaim by silence as well as by speech, not only by what they did, but by what they forbore to do, shall abide in beauty and strength, to reorganize themselves in nature, to invest themselves anew in other, perhaps higher endowed and happier mixed clay than ours, in fuller union with the surrounding system."

2011-05-24T09:49:00.000-04:00

its the birthday of bob dylan.

2011-05-18T21:25:00.000-04:00

Letters from the Outside #43

Sunday bright but everything is still so saturated from a steady month of rain. Creekwater deep and ice cold. Every day is something different and every day is new. The lilacs have arrived, and the old branches cant hold their heavy blooms off the ground, especially now with this new round of rainfall, filling all the thousand mouths with water.

The seedlings spent a few days taking the air, overnighting out in the open, even, but with all the rain I brought them back in under the bulbs. I ate the languishing beet, broccoli and lettuce seedlings and replanted some lettuce since the garden is still too wet to sow. The air in the morning is perfume.

The north beds are filling in, my Candelabra Primrose (also struggling at grace under the weight of rain), Astilbe, False Solomon Seal, its all there; the transplanted Echinacea settling in nicely among the Lupine babies thanks to the cool wet weather, the Dicentra remarkable in its hugeness and profusion, the long arcs of pendant hearts, each one split and dripping its one white tear. The Chocolate Mint resurrects in its dim corner cranny, and the diamond tipped frill of spreading Ladys Mantle is a ceaseless morning wonder, one perfect tiny orb of dew dancing on the pinked edge of the low-growing leaves.

The Hostas, the Peonies, the Columbine – just standing there witnessing their health and thriving affords me a deep and quiet peace I am endlessly grateful for. The wet weather bodes well for a fine Blackberry harvest, and my virgin foray into bramble-infused brandy for Yule. But the windows close, and i rekindle the bright dancing heart of the woodstove to chase the chill away. The hummingbirds seem grateful for the thick sweet food I prepare for them in this cold. Like the emerging flowers, these birds afford me a long moment (if im lucky) of unadulterated joy and grace. I offer them nourishment and they return the gift with the miraculous simplicity of their Light which feeds my own.

Hummingbirds, Mockingbirds, Grosbeaks and Orioles. Daunted by the gardens enormity, its dandelions, and its squish. Biblical rain from the low tyrannical clouds. And this whole matter of the world ending, which has whipped a startling swath around here into jibbering apocalyptic froth. I restart flats of spinach and lettuce, more cabbage and marigolds, try at peppers, hot and sweet. I air out the tomatoes in this sudden generosity of sunlight which will pass with the day into days more of rain. The black cat follows on the bank as I wash the garden mud from my shoes with a walk down and up the little creek that runs between us. It is lovely there, and over the years a deep pool has formed, id be up to the split in it.

. The dense energy of the crest from waxing to full has dissipated some; now theres not the wet down duvet oppression I felt under that hot thick Scorpio tide. Now we oar our little coracles into june, hanging in for heat and light and Litha. I keep the nectar coming, and the feeders full.

I havent walked in what seems like two weeks, save that last drizzling saturday I spent the next town over, in the woods on the hill, and talked about the visible difference between spring Tansy and Yarrow, bird call retention as affected by age, and animal sovereignty. A lovely sprawling place unfurling with ferns and spangled with trillium. The sound of water moving through the broad bed that runs along the shallow gully seam, and moments of that, for me, deeply comforting evergreen cedar smell. Coming upon a stone cellar in the slow and gentle process of returning to the good green world, a pioneer graveyard where the dark stones fall forward into settling pits.

With all this cool and damp, I tell myself, itll be a fine year for the bramble, and berry bloodstained hands will craft a sweet and heady cordial for the coming cold solstice. The bulb flowers have passed for the most part, the lilacs crest, and with the Grace of good weather, my Delphinium will rise, and the perennials will offer an excellent show of yolk-yellow, dusk violet and white petals gathered round the black and golden prickly hived heads attracting and adorned with pollen-heavy bees and the blue-eyed Painted Ladies, some of which were coddled and cocooned at the school down the road from here, making their way in the world.

In the garden, I see where the Jays broadcast juicy Tarahumara seeds last Fall, and I am loathe to till them under. The strawberries are hale, broad petaled blossoms heralding (hopefully) berries heavy and red, all the way through.

You and I did not know one another very well, and these letters may not change that. That was never their intent. But as I said before, you were to me, and will be, a Good and Peaceful presence, going about the days of your life with your friends and your family and your dog, always generous with your Spirit and your energy and your resources, and looking not for recompense, only an acknowledgement of mutual belonging to the family of Man. We love you.

2011-05-13T19:31:00.001-04:00

the friday song.

2011-05-11T10:21:00.001-04:00

2011-05-08T14:27:00.001-04:00

for my mother, on mothers day.

2011-05-07T09:55:00.000-04:00

Letters From the Outside, #42

Skunk totem, and a coyote. Furled hearts emerge on dicentra sleeves. Damp and chill, winters green sweater reemerges for a walk to Sister Mothers where I realize the hummingbirds are back. Jiggety-jig to make french breakfast muffins, and nectar. Its been a bit like Edinburgh here, without the culture. I think this is the fourth sump pump. Skunks are loner mystic pacifists, im told. Skunks walk their talk. Skunk people are buoyant with life-force, and crepuscular. Allied with Artemis, otherwise unaligned, with its own family classification, Mephitis mephitis.

Early afternoon doesnt feel quite like November as it had in the morning, that prickling in the air when mist crystallizes into thin glittering snow. There are columbine and lungwort and lily of the valley. Deep amethyst faerie cathedrals at the ends of lilac branches. The hosta unwinds in fluted chartreuse stands. Broadening swaths of Lemon Balm and Wild Violet, the Nemeton buds fuzzy with blood red at the edges. The Monkshood robust, Ladys Mantle, Lupine, Lambs Ear, Solomon Seal and Jacobs Ladder in spreading evidence. Coneflowers in deceptively humble clumps, Stargazers and Foxgloves. The daffodils are over, the tulips exuberance still concealed in slender stemmed reticules, and the lone purple hyacinth at the end of the drive rests its fragrant, heavy head on the rising tide of daylily. There might even be hollyhock, if they dont drown.

My little apple saplings sport their silver-dipped leaf clusters. Inside, the christmas cactus lets loose with an especially extravagant display of flowers, phoneix flaming. In lieu of planting leafy greens which I should presently be attending to outside in what most resembles an abandoned hog pen, I putter and dote with the nursery, just proud as punch of my tomatoes which I recently realized I never labeled when moving them into larger nests. Entirely like me, I suppose, but theyll let me know soon enough what their name is. The bookshelf set up just wasnt up to snuff; the bulbs were weak and two set tight together in the center pulled the outside rows of growing into limp slanting filaments. The lettuce and Calendula may never set right. So Cowboy hauled the big four-bulb we used last year up from the recently drained basement and we set it on pedestals of craft tackleboxes and up-turned terracotta pots. I imagine books will be employed to raise the bar as we reach the frost-safe date.

Instead of a fieldtrip I take a lap on the mountain bike (such a different experience from my garagesale blue chirping boardwalk cruisers) and begin the summerlong task of weeding the garden. The soil already leans toward clay, so the stuff is heavy and dense and the dandelion roots slide out with gently applied leverage. Im pulling Comfrey and Mullein and what ive heard called Witchgrass, for the sharp teeth waiting beneath the surface to bite. Today a toad, carried to the cool of last years lavender and sage with salutations to our Lady. Today a prayer more steadfast and effortless as any ive ever sung standing on the Big Pink as the water rushed around me, an incantation to weave me deeply into this wondrous painted veil of the world. And an enormous mythic stone in answer. And a snake, drowned and swaying, caught on a root underwater. I clear the leafpack and lay her in a spiral at the little altar of moss on the feet of an oak tree I have dedicated with a standing stone, a solid chip from a brick. A lot of bricks this spring in the crick.

I begin my auto-didactic banjo lessons today, me and my safety glasses and my workbook with accompanying cd. It is so strange to think it took me this long to get here. Still feeding the woodstove, but only to keep off the chill. Made cookies for Cowboys birthday, little cut-outs of dogs and suns and hearts and john b. stetsons.

Saturday another sunny day so im up and out for more weeding, and another day to work through the tearing pain that comes with my ostracism by Cowboys family, but desperately trying to understand that this is a crucial step in my evolving. But being informed by silence that im simply unforgiveable for a crime no one will explain to me, that my exile has been unanimously agreed upon simply as the way things are and the way they will remain, that i never meant anything to anyone...the senseless hostility and estrangement...its a millstone ive worn around my neck for years now and so much of my spiritual work right now is focused on lifting that millstone. The first decisive step is realizing that I cannot change others, how they perceive me, and their inexplicable, steadfast desire to maintain a hostile environment. It feeds and validates my vile and ignorant habit of self-loathing, it frustrates my true and beautiful soul-self to literal tears, and since it is a persistent but unspoken subject, it takes up residence in my dreams. This struggle no doubt has a purpose, crucial to my Awakening. But I grieve that when that Awakening comes, it will be only me, without them, on the other side.

2011-04-28T19:25:00.000-04:00

Letters from the Outside #41

Emergence. Everything saturated, standing water in the garden, roadside waterfalls running at top volume, creekmusic, night peepers, robins in the apple branches and redwing blackbirds taking up their stations in the tall reeds. I asked the best tree people we know about the blight on your plum trees. He said that the only cure for it is an intensive, expensive, season-long administration of some fungicide. We are looking into the pruning, as its a task which requires confidence and a grasp of tree logic, neither of which I possess. The Putty Place is for sale, 200K. They came in, bulldozed, sided and paved over whatever soul and spirit they could find, and flipped it. This is what passes for improvement, which is why I never fret too far for my delinquency from the status quo.

Today, a brief balmy respite from the rain, out in shirtsleeves digging dandelions out from the front bed, and just as soon the blue sheep pasture of sky grazes away toward the lake while from the hinterlands the storms dense, dovegrey breastfeathers come rumbling toward us, the house grows dark and im grateful for that extra stovewood I brought in wet this morning. Me in my topknot and purple silk kimono squilching up the mud track and down, two bits at a time in my fingers. When the bull would get through the fence on the farm its the kimono id go out in, to hold the gate open and scuttle it shut after Cowboy had successfully persuaded the two-ton creature to thunder back from whence it came with rocks and harsh invective. Me in rubber clogs and silk kimono not watching the offended juggernaut considering, with synapses on dial-up, whether to take the path of least resistance or the more intriguing one paved in violets.

The rain, when it comes, is torrential; ten-hundred upturned buckets at once, the kind you can watch the wind move through. And theres no dry decree from whoever gets paid to presage this sort of thing, although I am hoping for a bright-skied Beltane, after an Eve clear and crowded with stars.

The rain and thunder pass overhead, and now bright white underwings absorb the light, the light that never goes out, and farther south grey quilled tail feathers, and somewhere after that, blue sky. The windows open to the strong warm winds. It is a comfort simply to hear the wind through the oaks and the negative-ion white noise of the creekwater through the open kitchen window as I put together tonights pot pie. Taking out the compost, it suddenly rains on me, and here comes more lightning with its thunder. The heat and humidity like something off the southeastern seaboard. Deep thirst and breeze-craving returns with another chapter in Aprils epic monsoon, rain falling fat and fast making a river of the road and a dream sequence of the window panes. There is a weight to it that seems like something out of late summer more than early spring. And going out in the pour to shut the windows (a quirk of the hoosie), I realize the front gutter drains directly into its corresponding flowerbed, which explains why the Iris and Bergamot are thriving. The lawn is a shallow marsh in all directions, everywhere water in a mad rush to the ocean, and its temporary transcendence, a circle cycling through us and the world since the first night, on my head and my hands the sweat and breath and essence of all beings before me, ghost of snow and bitter condensed vapors from the works of man.

It will take the garden a good long while to dry out. Meanwhile the Opalka tomatoes are thriving, the french melons drawing their little serrated leaves from somewhere inside the stem, like the kerchiefs of a magician dandy, the parsley proffering tiny green palms. I think I started it all too far from the bulbs, though. The lettuce and calendula are leggy and struggle to rise like that woman in the Andrew Wyeth painting. Deep replanting may be in order.

The wind has been fierce but I revel in it. And the strong wind channeled down the valleys helps return the Earth and Sky to balance. There is a great deal of that wild Beltane energy about. The trees are bubbling with buds, tight little eggs of leaves at the ends of bitty branches. Little cherrywood butterflies among the comfrey and forget-me-not battalions assembling in the garden.

Piercing restlessness sends me down the road, striding into a headwind, watching the canopy sway. The sun sinks through a filigree of thin hillside trees. There is a gentle mischief in the woods which calls to me ceaselessly, pixie-led down soft scented paths of pine needles and creekwater, the calls of crows or doves, the pixilated prickle of dusk you can feel on your forearms and the tip of your nose. Those last long sleeves of light before the land you stand on rises away from the sun and takes you with it into another night of wee peepers and wind and maybe rain, always maybe rain. In a few days it will be May, and we will miss you all the more.

2011-04-15T12:52:00.000-04:00

the friday song, for Zuzu.

in the dream it was just like it is.

2011-04-13T08:38:00.000-04:00

its the birthday of Seamus Heaney

Rite of Spring

So winter closed its fist
And got it stuck in the pump.
The plunger froze up a lump

In its throat, ice founding itself
Upon iron. The handle
Paralysed at an angle.

Then the twisting of wheat straw
into ropes, lapping them tight
Round stem and snout, then a light

That sent the pump up in a flame
It cooled, we lifted her latch,
Her entrance was wet, and she came.

2011-04-12T09:44:00.000-04:00

Letters from the Outside, #40

It has been a lifelong crusade against my Self, the part of the Universe that has been gifted to me for a brief moment in Time/Space, and now, as the arc begins its descending trajectory, I blink awake a bit in the Light, and I am lonesome. This is what ive been dreading. Ive lived in self-imposed exile all my life, and it was simple persistence which convinced me that any kind of Home was somewhere I would never find. I avoided the ache by believing there was nowhere for me to go, like a girl I knew in grade school whos mother died and she said, “I stopped believing in heaven because I couldnt bear to think my mother was somewhere I couldnt get to.” I perambulated my eddies in resignation so determined some of my teeth are cracked from decades of gritting. I flung my flaming oarless coracle into black-hole maelstroms, reckless in surrender to self-loathing. And im going to stop blaming myself or the actions of others because those haints have had their way with me, and I want what little time I have left to be Real. But all this knowing makes me lonesome. Lonesome for Real. Its like that wanting I get to wander in the Fall, but stronger now, and in Spring. I cant say I let myself really believe ill ever feel at Home, but I can at least stop hating the Away.

There are things to think and lessons to learn and Peace and Beauty to be found most everywhere you go, even if you go in some projected hamsterball of others avoidance and alienation. Were all just travelers, a spark of Light in a twist of flesh, and our journey, inextricably linked to all others, is also our own. My incredibly early acceptance of deep despair led to a fundamental ingratitude for my life that propelled my storyline like a smartbomb, print to fit and cover the base of a cage. And this sudden respect for the time it takes to write it calls up deep desires, directions the best of us head into as we fledge. I have been untrue to myself, and pay the price, which is my life. What I need to begin to believe is that what is left is worth saving, is worth being Real. And I will do that where I am. I will be brave, and wild, and kind.

True Spring, the bleeding-heart and the hollyhock and the lupine raring to go, the monkshood already a robust viridian mound, not to mention the hyacinth and daffodil and squill between the lilac tree and the creek that sings the season in alongside an unbroken chorus of peepers in the wetland. Evening with the wind blowing warmer and everywhichway, the buds pointillist ornaments on black bare branches against a deep blue and burnt papaya sky, the kind of breath born from knowing that the snow is over until another summer comes to its close.

My Matamorphs and Faraos unfurling already; how wise these motes of dust once allowed the right environ! This week, after the rain, ill begin the work of the garden in earnest, and tend to my Self alongside these terrestrial labors. We are object lessons. Our lives are how we learn.

Orion setting in the west, the handle to the Great Plow swinging widdershins, the icicle of stars melting and rising and pouring rain from the open gourd. I bring my attention to Sirius, and our Moon. T. is already around and about with the soles of his feet like eyes wide open to the Earth, constructing impromptu art installations from rare and mysterious gifts washed down the mountain; the understated elegance of ceramic insulators, potshards of wedgewood Phoenix and pale, raised, painted roses, the vaguely eroded-grecian-torso of a chunk of pink granite set before the trifurcated stump of a small tree topped with a rusted cribspring becomes some wayside shrine, an auspicious sign along the Path, that all things carry within them the Light, and the Truth, and the Way.

Our first campfire, a small affair in honor of T.'s birthday, which his sleepover companions insisted on attending to with their fluids, before which I retired to the hoosie, lest I profane this secret (and decidedly rural) male rite with my motherhood. Monday I raked away the winters maple leaf mulch from the perennial bed and unwound some of the windows, and the breeze through the house was a benediction.

The hoya blooms in handfuls and lettuce, tomato and brussels sprouts come up in wee helmeted tendrils splitting quick into chubby palms to catch the light and rise, and grow as only they know, and offer themselves to us for our benefit in the magnificent and natural order of things. Nightbirds and spring peepers and rain so fine only the ground gets wet the rest of your dry winterbone body drinks it in and you sleep in a breeze with no dreams and in the morning its half as warm as it was the morning before. Overnight, seedling emergence doubles. The thin magenta whips of beet, the sudden stout sockpuppets of french honeydew, all that life unfurling, shining sweet and pale and growing greener, stronger, with the sun. We love you.

2011-04-06T17:46:00.000-04:00

Letters from the Outside #39

The wind blows damp under a milkwater sky, raising the ragged hem of Aprils early skirts, showing a little lovely green ankle of sprout and bud among the leafmat and mud. The rain falls in earnest, and I slip more cloves and cinnamon scrolls into the Shakti pot on the woodstove to bless the house with comfort and abundance. The dogs and I out for what seemed like the first time in a long while, striding open and unconstricted, the sky bunted with clouds you dont see in winter, those flat-bottomed large-curd congregations of vapor unburdened and serene before the one-way-glass of summers blue morning sky.

I go out in my gumboots and yellow raincoat to fill the feeders and bring in a little more stovewood to dry. Everyday something new emerges. Something miraculous and lovely and wholly intent on unfurling into itself. Sitting the morning gloom eating oatmeal with wolfberries (which I find eminently more edible once rehydrated) listening to Stevie Ray play Tin Pan Alley, im more at ease than ive been in too long a while. I watch a cactus flower stretch open its petals to let in the light. Lightning and thunder, the multiple personalities of rain.

I have been dreaming of skies at night, night skies, dense mythic constellations and mandelbrot clouds. I dream of enormous bullfrogs and hostile crowds. And so this week the seeds begin; I waited for the Dark Moon to move through void-of-course and into Taurus, earthy and determined. Waited out in the damp blowing chill of a rustbelt ghost town for over an hour to pack myself like a bearing into the firehazard beerhall before Gogol Bordello, where my ability to withstand The SeaGlass Treatment has waned with the years. Cowboy and I convected over the evening, ending up at the spacerich far edge between stage left and the kitchen doors. The friendly, slab-featured Staff standing on an ampcase threw water at us from small plastic bottles while Hutz asperged the front row with fragrant, nameless red wine. Before the first encore the band gathered by the back doors, double dragonmaws smoking steam into the black open night, and then trotted past us to get to the greenroom doors. I howled, and he held out his hand. In that brief moment, our corporal bodies met as I set his hand against my lips. Not a kiss, just a connection, an acknowledgement of cells meeting briefly, a unique moment in an infinitude of unique moments.

Another foray from home offered me Stephen Marley in the parking lot of a natural living supermarket. His presence is intense. All these men who carry dense radiant wedges of Spirit with them. We are matter, drawn by gravity. Women seem to carry it like a riverstone in their pelvic bowl, or confected light around their faces. Men send it out through the breastbone like a tractorbeam. Theres another chakra that excels in this magnitude of communication, but I dont respond much to it. Im way more for the Pineal than the penile. At which point of course I reach the end of my chain and am hoist back by my own petard into the haunted wasteland that is the subject of my father.

I grew up with the old Drifter banjo hanging up on the wall, the one where hed set a Liberty silver dollar into the dark wooden peghead. I grew up with the sound of banjos and they always honed in me the deep longing for piney woods and bare feet on hard cool clay. But fear kept me from letting the Sound speak through my fingers, a physical fear of the strings. And I read just today that “the treasure you seek is in the cave you are afraid to enter.” and I see now somehow more clearly that a long time ago I locked my wedge of Spirit in a lead box, and my spirit grew to believe the dimensions of its cage to be the ends of the World. And something lately has let me see from farther away. I see the box. And I know it can be opened.

Now I am not such an enlightened creature that I can simply flip open the top and release my captive aspects like a picnic hamper full of doves. But I am awake enough to understand that the box must be opened. So I go back to The Plow, and at this lead fear ill focus the Light, ill play prism with Celestial white, and sing down Wholeness, and know the Peace that comes from such a crucial reunion. Thats the plan, at least. And I might just get there playing the banjo, my plowshare from a sword. So im getting it the Lazarus Treatment and maybe some lessons, and a pair of safety glasses.

Steady winds blow north through Cloud Valley, relaxing all the boundaries, releasing the lockjaw of another Winter, lifting the skirts of Spring. The snow still comes now like it comes in late September, that sudden shift from drizzle to flake that never seems to make it to the ground. I bring in more stovewood to dry like a henge under the resuscitated rubbertree. Tonight the sky is wide open, profaned by the dreadful clamor of a raccoon burgling one of the goose nests by the creek. My mind is a dovecote with the doors open. We love you.

2011-04-05T11:53:00.000-04:00

the next stop.

2011-04-01T08:25:00.001-04:00

the time has come.

2011-03-31T16:54:00.001-04:00

again.

2011-03-31T16:44:00.000-04:00

Letters from the Outside, #38

Bellyache, maybe the spectre of something i successfully parried with last falls flu shot. who knows what else they put in there. but grief settles in the lungs and anxiety sits in the belly like bones. i think i said that before. so theres this ache set under my rib-bones, hostage of my diffidence, my rabbit-mind. deeper down they tell me there be cells fomenting a mutiny. the goldfinch at the feeder is complete in its light-half transformation. not the goldenrod of summer courting, but each feather bone filled with serum to carry the current for color.

The first law of thermodynamics says energy can neither be created, nor can it be destroyed. the Whole Thing shifting and churning, everything expanding away to converge. but expand into what if It is all there is? Life expends energy. everything sheds light, cells, fumes. weve built our culture from the molten bones of the Old Gods, now reaping their vengeance. Something about the earthquake in Japan causing a wobble that lengthens the terrestrial day.

i patter and bang on the djembe with the intent of casting out some of these haunting squatters but i dont think the style is right. my instincts -- in my middle life i begin to allow them their "still and quiet voice within" -- indicate something Arctic, Boreal. the dry hide of a reindeer stretched over the outer ring of Evergreen, or Birch, or even Ash. struck with a blunted stick or a wingbone like a bodhran or the drum of some Sami shaman. im getting my fathers banjo restored, and will play it wearing safety glasses if i have to.

Ego is a drug, is an addiction. It --we use it-- validates and magnifies our Fear. Love and Fear cannot exist in the same place at the same time. And all our choices come down to that dichotomy: Love or Fear. From which spring do we choose to drink? For the great majority of us, Ego is a deeply ingrained habituation, which we are all infinitely stronger than, but its imprint upon us from the start, its intrusion and stealth, makes it like the river for a fish or the forest for a tree. Inextricably interwoven. A package deal. But thats simply untrue. Days old, an elephant is chained by the leg to a log it cannot drag. As the elephant grows, only the size of the shackle must grow with it. the log need never change. the creature believes it is immovable, implacable, ultimate. The weight of the log is an illusion now, maintained faithfully by the creature itself.
and only one step forward would set it free.

2011-03-31T07:48:00.000-04:00

Letters from the Outside, #37

Upon the Equinox. The dogs paws break through clear thin ice on the culverts running gravity's perpendicular. The Big Dog celebrates the water, however challenging the temperature must be. He is half water-dog, and I suppose it takes up the whole half. Blue Dog is decidedly highground, dryground. Big Dog longs to lope away in great concentric arcs, the wily deluge of smells rushing through him, his long limbs falling into some ancient and effortless gait. Blue Dog trots forward purposefully and slightly away, but always the return, the brush of a nose against that latitude of my leg, and away, over and over, the Earth and the Sun and the Moon.

The frozen edge of everything softens. For days the cellar pump has ceaselessly run, and it gives a kind of tugboat/trawler penobscot romance to the house. Me and my purple crayon...

Long days now, were all thrown off by seven o'clock sunshine, used to dinner in the light of a kitchen inside the outer dark. But cold, mercury hanging off the twenty line with admirable tenacity.

Canary colored sunrise spreads through the feathers of the finches at the thistle feeder. There is birdsong in the morning, and robins, their proud breast the banner of Spring. There are fuzzed buds at the very top of my young apple trees, pussywillow bunnytoes along the roadside.

Commencing greenhouse operations with the dark moon in April (once it moves out from void-of-course), the tomato plants, maybe those orange-flesh honeydew seeds I saved. Parsley. Peppers, if theres any of those seeds lying around, usually the orange or yellow bells, some hot Hungarians. Everything else should probably stay tucked into their sleeves until Beltane. Could get the lettuce and greens going, those dont have to wait until the end of May. Some Calendula for salves and salads, my Matamorph and Cempoatxochitl Marigold garden sentry devas. Peas, beans, radish, carrots and beets will go straight into the ground. Less Chard, more Broccoli. Collards, Cabbage, Squash. Sunflowers, Hopi Tobacco and Corn. I think my Outhouse Hollyhocks will come back this year in the sun, and the Foxgloves in their shadow.

The light is so strong in the cold; atomic hope streaming into everything as we lean for awhile toward our star. The hummingbirds are coming soon. Snow holds onto northern exposures and the ground is frozen. Ragged flannel nightgown clouds turn April to February. Monday saw most of my chores completed, so tuesday seems the day I drape myself into the library hammock and read.

Ceremony (“the greatest novel in Native American literature”)

Go With Me (“the most suspenseful, frightening, memorable and best-written novel about backwoods America since Deliverance”)

Inside of a Dog (“Enter the sensory world of your dog”)

So Long, See You Tomorrow (“One of the great books of our age”)

At the surface of the backburner stack are Fight Club (the first published Palahniuk)

The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos (“its only prerequisite the will to persevere”)

The nightstand queue holds translations of The Metamorphoses of Ovid(“from the time chaos is transformed into order at the moment of creation, to the time when the soul of Julius Caesar is turned into a star”)

The Real Middle Earth (“a fine tour through the mythology of early medieval England”)

The Bardo of Waking Life (“a magical artifact materialized out of a future dream”)

Thoreau (both Walden and Civil Disobedience)

Ravensong: A Natural and Fabulous History of Ravens and Crows

No Time to Lose: A Timely Guide to the Way of the Bodhisattva,

The Solace of Open Spaces (“Wyoming has found its Whitman”)

Still repotting in that burgeoning dirt urge, bought two more Schlumbergia 'cause these have different flowers, slender petaled desert flowers with scrolling filament stigmas, and came in two colors. Bookshops and Plant Nurseries. I suppose that accounts for the décor around here. Brownies and 1-2-3-4 cake. One of the orchids has sent out a long, thumbed stalk to bloom from, and the Hoya with its nectar weeping fuzzy compound flowers . Oxalis blossoms profuse, more evanescent and subtle than paperwhites. The Banjo as an exercise in conquering Fear.

One of those days you wonder if the snow is over, for now, and then they call for three days of it before a weeklong of rain. Everything is rising from its dormancy, but the heavy baffled clouds make the brown fields and bare trees seem more desolate and witholding,like November. Its one breath at a time, and I need to believe that theres something to it, so I do. We love you.

2011-03-29T11:21:00.001-04:00

and many happy returns, Mr. Idle.

2011-03-25T06:46:00.000-04:00

its the birthday of Flannery O'Connor.

"When we look at a good deal of serious modern fiction, and particularly Southern fiction, we find this quality about it that is generally described, in a pejorative sense, as grotesque. Of course, I have found that anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the Northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic. ... Whenever I'm asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one."

2011-03-22T06:42:00.000-04:00

its the birthday of Billy Collins

For Bartleby The Scrivener

"Every time we get a big gale around here
some people just refuse to batten down."

we estimate that

ice skating into a sixty
mile an hour wind, fully exerting
the legs and swinging arms

you will be pushed backward
an inch every twenty minutes.

in a few days, depending on
the size of the lake,
the backs of your skates
will touch land.

you will then fall on your ass
and be blown into the forest.

if you gather enough speed
by flapping your arms
and keeping your skates pointed

you will catch up to other
flying people who refused to batten down.
you will exchange knowing waves
as you ride the great wind north.

2011-03-14T18:27:00.000-04:00

2011-03-11T15:36:00.000-05:00

Letters from the Outside #36

The mist a thin scrim, an intermission between events sent from Ohio, the deep snows. But now its water in the air like by long falls and liquid music in the rills feeding creeks and east to the Sea. Stacked maybe two face cord, baked an apple crisp. My heart was sad out there in the side yard, thinking how cool it would be to wave hey to you across the sound of the water, through the thin twigs of the hedge. And then came in and listened to knopfler and ate warm apple crisp with vanilla ice cream and I thought maybe sometime Potter will come over and well eat warm apple crisp with vanilla ice cream in the kitchen and listen to music and laugh.

Lady pulls up with a clipboard and I override the pink sheet on the door what says “We would greatly appreciate it if you would refrain from attempting to sell us either your product or your god. Thank you.” shes selling cable. One of the first things we did when we got here was take the tv spacedish off the outhouse. She reads the sign and takes me in, psychedelic longsleeve with the collar cut out, wide leg linen pantaloons billowing, my hair haphazard in some yogi topknot, smiling. Admirably, she gets to the point. “You dont believe in cable, do you.” “I believe it exists,” I reply. The dogs are circling and leaping around her, and I can see shes filing through her gambits, exercising the remote edges of her training in sales. I ask her who owns the company shes trying to sell me. She does not know. I tell her that we may be interested at some point in switching internet companies. She gives me a number at which to reach her directly. She remains pleasant and agile throughout the interaction. I will call her, probably.

Forty on friday, the glacier recedes but taking out the recycling is still a small treacherous endeavor. A yard of long grass, matted maple leaves and thawing frozen dog turds is revealed. We throw the frisbee to the blue dog, who skids and cavorts through the slush and the mud endlessly retrieving. Therell be more snow before this is over, but we walk through the latest brief reprieve, the wind raging through ragged white sheets of cloud so that when the sun comes through its like some miraculous event, which I suppose it is. But theres deep damp in it, the air full of water from the creek that leads to the lake up over its edges, swamping the blue trailer and spreading over the back lawns across the street, a churning of pumps in cellars all down the row, I suppose.

Everyone tired; overstimulated by so much light is my hypothesis. The light is rising out away from november and back towards may, just the thinnest skim of cowslip to it, little flame slowly rising through the white. This is still a winters wind, just full of snow drawn back up into humidity, however chill. I study the wild grapevine, the wild violet already evidencing how hardy and hale it is, ready to conquer the northern flowerbed, whatever alternate plan I may have had. The rhododendrons made it, even today their waxy palms unfurled to bring sweet green light to sleeping xylem and phloem. The true canadian migrators pass over the house in twos and fours, that glorious noise that stops me like Mary Olivers muezzins. There are small bogs across the lawn, and the garden fence is wonked, entirely. This leads me to imagine the long days of breeze with more generous syrups of sun, bringing down the old sunflowers and corn, digging out the more formidable looking weeds before tilling. Remember not to till too early, I say. I could put in a patch of spinach and greens before proper tilling, I say. But I am an old woman and this damp cold, despite the visceral thrill of the sound of the air moving through tall trees close by, drives me inside, albeit half-heartedly, George Gordon dying slowly on the grey moor, something like that. Drives me inside and suggests time spent putting together another crisp for the weekend is just as well spent, the mind roving its memory and consciousness, the hands at work transubstantiating last years apples and dessicated discs of grain into something warm and sweet and excellent smelling to be eaten in a small bowl with maybe just a spoon of ice cream and some coffee.

If there was somewhere for the dogs and I to rove that didnt include passing cars and macadam, id go. But today, right now, im here in the four-legged squallor and piles and stacks writing letters to my evangelical friend about Peace, and Jesus and Love and Liberation Theology and why I wont attend her church service no matter what. Sent along two cds of old-time folk and country gospel. I cant sit there and vote with my butt in that pew when the man at the front tries to convince me that God is a vengeful punishing overseer, that the price of humility is damnation, and unless I pledge to disparage all who believe otherwise, its hell for sure, for me. Its a great comfort to resist the hook of shame, and fear. I highly recommend it. We love you.

2011-03-11T09:37:00.000-05:00

the friday song, for martin and allison.

My heart's in the ice house come hill or come valley
Like a long ago Sunday when I walked through the alley
On a cold winter's morning to a church house
just to shovel some snow.

I heard sirens on the train track howl naked gettin' nuder,
An altar boy's been hit by a local commuter
just from walking with his back turned
to the train that was coming so slow.

You can gaze out the window get mad and get madder,
throw your hands in the air, say "What does it matter?"
but it don't do no good to get angry,
so help me I know

For a heart stained in anger grows weak and grows bitter.
You become your own prisoner as you watch yourself sit there
wrapped up in a trap of your very own
chain of sorrow.

I been brought down to zero, pulled out and put back there.
I sat on a park bench, kissed the girl with the black hair
and my head shouted down to my heart
"You better look out below!"
Hey, it ain't such a long drop don't stammer don't stutter
from the diamonds in the sidewalk to the dirt in the gutter
and you carry those bruises to remind you wherever you go.

2011-03-09T06:24:00.000-05:00

its the birthday of Vita Sackville-West, of whom Virginia Woolf said,

"[She is] like an over ripe grape in features, moustached, pouting, will be a little heavy; meanwhile she strides on fine legs, in a well cut skirt, & though embarrassing at breakfast, has a manly good sense & simplicity about her. ... Oh yes, I like her; could tack her on to my equipage for all time; & suppose if life allowed, this might be a friendship of a sort."

2011-03-07T09:23:00.000-05:00

its the birthday of townes van zandt

and the deathday of alice b. toklas

2011-03-04T12:53:00.001-05:00

the friday song.

2011-03-01T08:07:00.001-05:00

2011-03-01T07:34:00.000-05:00

Today is the birthday of Robert Lowell.

"He had manic-depressive disorder, today called bipolar. He himself referred to his mania as "pathological enthusiasm." He once described a manic episode as "a magical orange grove in a nightmare."... He spent a lot of time apologizing to people, making amends, attempting some damage control..."The whole business has been very bruising, and it is fierce facing the pain I have caused, and humiliating [to] think that it has all happened before and that control and self-knowledge come slowly, if it all."..."

text by Garrison Keillor

Man and Wife

Tamed by Miltown, we lie on Mother's bed;
the rising sun in war paint dyes us red;
in broad daylight her gilded bed-posts shine,
abandoned, almost Dionysian.
At last the trees are green on Marlborough Street,
blossoms on our magnolia ignite
the morning with their murderous five day's white.
All night I've held your hand,
as if you had
a fourth time faced the kingdom of the mad -
its hackneyed speech, its homicidal eye -
and dragged me home alive. . . . Oh my Petite,
clearest of all God's creatures, still all air and nerve:
you were in your twenties, and I,
once hand on glass
and heart in mouth,
outdrank the Rahvs in the heat
of Greenwich Village, fainting at your feet -
too boiled and shy
and poker-faced to make a pass,
while the shrill verve
of your invective scorched the traditional South.

Now twelve years later, you turn your back.
Sleepless, you hold
your pillow to your hollows like a child,
your old-fashioned tirade -
loving, rapid, merciless -
breaks like the Atlantic Ocean on my head.

2011-02-27T20:23:00.000-05:00

Letters from the Outside, #35

The quality of light changes. Small home improvements require a shift in the Aloes, these previously mentioned krakens that contort and rise, spined succulent arms reaching everywhere get a sponge bath and two get a repot and my poor wan rubber fig I wash the winters dust from its broad grooved leaves and then the Monstera frond that just may have taken rooting. I see the Purple Queen requires airspace and legroom in far greater quantities than shes been afforded. I realize ive always lived in houses that had this one odd space, some little room or enclave that indicated either poor planning or the need to satisfy some esoteric purpose ever ungrokked by me. This is where we keep the Wall of Books, the majority of Aloes, and the Norton. This space also includes the fabric stash and craft supplies, a Gibson and the AT-AT Walker. But Blessed Be its getting a floor.

Last tuesday in february with the light changing good and strong in the clear and definite cold, single digits and later afternoons. The Mugwort seedling started last spring is still with us, grown a bit leggy, I do that mindless cut-off-and-stick-in propagation thing with it, having faith it knows what it wants to do. Hopefully itll only spend a few days in limp convalescence and then start to take. A lot of repotting to do. Ive had some of these plants so long, the dirt they stand in is deplete, and the new sproutlings need either definitive division and/or more room. The seeds came, and I bought one of those lots-of-baby-spinach containers with the hinged lid to start my seedlings in. there are a lot of seeds im using from last year, and those orange flesh honeydew seeds I saved. Something like that would benefit from being started now, maybe. Maybe mid march.

The Italian Flatleaf I could probably start now, they take something like three weeks to sprout. I could also get my marigolds going. The breeds I buy from Seeds of Change grow into these enormous shrubs, my Cempoalxochitl, and the Red Matamorphs, heady-scented three-foot plants round the perimeter, im thinking. More Peacevines, ill always grow Peacevines, their lovely transition coloring, all sweet and red at the end, traveling through orange and yellow and green back toward the stalk were training this year like grapevine. Plum Purple radish and Pronto beets, I ate a plate of summer canned beets with salt and yogurt a day or so ago and it was lovely. My Tarahumara and those doublepetaled Supermane sunflowers, and im curious to see how last years sunflowers reseed. Shell peas which would be cool to can but I havent learned to grow them that well yet. Bountiful bush beans, Calendula, Kurota carrots.

A new breed of tomato to try this year, Martian , Giant. The deeply ruffled ones are transcendent eaters but an enormous amount of work to can. Spinach and Sweetcorn and those lovely little Farao Cabbages eaten early steamed with salt and butter. I wonder about blight this year, about What I Can Do. I think about actually harvesting the Tulsi and drying it for tea. The Comfrey will still be coming up at the end of this years growing season, but ill keep at it, itll be in with the beans this year, the tomatoes moving toward the corn and the corn over to where the beans had been. Lettuce and greens. My Cleomes, and the spread of perennials. Hollyhocks. My little Apple Trees, maybe this year even blossoming.

The sunlights so much stronger, it offsets even the cost of this coldwater wind that blows south down the valley. Theres really no sense in starting seeds until at the very cusp of April. So ill dig around the houseplants, repot and dust-off and get my seedling operation organized. I fiddled around and turned one of those hanging wire kitchen basket things into a planter, Ivy and two Spiders and a Strawberry Begonia that im hoping will take and eventually send out those daughter filaments now that its suspended in a greater space; all three descending in tiers that leap and twine, pendant propagations and living visual interest...i realize im not as comfortable as I could be in a room without houseplants. Its that deep, peaceful Presence I find out of doors, inside. Not quite as resonant, not the same key, but an intelligence that exists at a different frequency, the waves occasionally intersecting, the atmospheric symbiosis, the flowers. Theyre calling for eight inches of snow and the four-dollar gallon. The news of the world is revolution. I made coffee cake and a roast chicken, drank a little red wine and listened to old Allman Brothers. Friday its a good-fashioned snowing, heavy and fast that wins paper over rock over the road laid down between the high open ground of coming tall summer grasses and corn and youve got dogs and black coffee and books and yarn and Love and home. We miss you.

2011-02-22T14:21:00.000-05:00

Letters from the Outside, #34

Cold and I listen to Pascal Comelade. low pressure system fills the house with smoke, everything smoulders, im looking forward to cured stovewood burning hot and bright and clean. I walk to the post office in arctic sunlight, stew in the slowcooker, bread rising on the woodstove. I send tithonia, calendula and delphinium seeds to my friend Zuzu. Cowboy and I are looking forward to this years garden. Each year its a new adventure in the Old Earth. Spring is coming in, the moon waxes. Four face cords and ive been stacking and even an hour of it makes my hands weak and faraway, a roving bite along the high hogback of my pelvic bone. The mud is coming, blood of Spring. My offering, my utmost Equanimity in this house of four-leggeds and shoes. The fingers itch for digging, the salt smell of the Waking Earth. Peas foraged, the heady gift for weeding beneath the lavender and sage. Speckled early lettuce. One fine radish, with salt and butter. The flowers. The sitting in the shade of the steady maple, watching the flowers and the butterflies and the birds. The sibilance of those tall cottonwoods, or whatever they are, my treehouse dreams. Bare feet in the grass. I understand a temperate climate. The faithful changes Life Death Rebirth brings. A wheel turning behind a painted veil. Knitting that rabbit, but I can sense the waxing year turning my comfort and industry toward the Earth.

Amid eggshells and wooden spoons I eat the bits of pear that didnt make it into the nutmeg muffins at the moment baking behind me while I read about the JFK inauguration ball in Vanity Fair. Entirely readable and lots of little portals like I like...”Arthur Krock – the Times columnist who had first come to Washington to cover the administration of William Howard Taft – had persuaded an adventurer in a Volkswagen to drive up onto the sidewalk and drive him a short distance to the Metropolitan Club.” A centerfold spread of black-and-white candid photos of Tony Curtis, Milton Berle, Frank Sinatra putting on his socks, later embracing Ella Fitzgerald in her gold ring and cloche. Jimmy Durante. A very smooth Nat King Cole. So theres dishes to do. The day goes. Nonetheless this false thaw, one little bird venturing a few sweet sliding notes, the sound of the creek rushing, the hum of the pump. I adhere rather loosely to the idea of eating in season, and try never to eat a tomato I dont grow, but this 37 degree heatwave has me craving something you cant exhume from a root cellar. Friday was fifty and as many miles an hour the wind would blow, roaring around the houses and pushing us toward the centerline, fierce weather on the full moon, wise and gentle bend of the oaks, and the maple held. The plowed fields dark and saturated in their first exposure. Saturday morning five new inches of snow on the woodpile. I find a blue marble in the doorway of the laundromat where I went to wash the counterpane and encounter the man who helped ferry folk across the creekbed at our wedding. He talks horses. We are both wearing gumboots and dirty jeans, funny hats crafted from natural fibers. I see my first mink, sleek and lithe on the ice of the boatlaunch.

Most of us, I believe, view the world, and our lives in it, through one dominant lens. For the ferryman, its Time. For me, its Space. Its more Where, than When. Pearl Street, The White House, The Farm. I wanted to study how geography affects religion when I got into college. What does it say that my Wish is the Woods? Blue light and night rising up from the floor, the stones and moss and water and the one scent that has always carried with it the key to my only fleeting peace. Evergreen and loam and creekwater. Apparitions on the gullyrises. Birdsong. Being out in the world is always an adventure I manage best in little chapters, Cowboy and I and the sincere heart and the schtick of it all, being honest about the inanity, and discovering that there can be times when you ask a quiet room full of strangers “is this diana ross?” and someone answers “its gloria gaynor.” I put myself down three times in that little room that seemed like some Delphic lair with the hypnotic incantations and the shifting lenses and three remarkably palpable silences met my denials with a sort of sledge effect, making it clear that the nature of those remarks would meet with no purchase, an impenetrable deflection. This was a quantum leap on the road to my recovery. And this is why the World of Man is only digestible for me in little bites, each one dense as the moon, each interior its own culture, each person the product of infinite historical variables, emitting and absorbing Illumination, each one a messenger, a reflection, and this significance carries a weight, grainsacks or kindling to be ported, sorted, and brought through to bread, or fire.

2011-02-17T06:47:00.000-05:00

upcoming pilgrimage to be asperged in the sweat of my lord and saviour.

2011-02-11T16:44:00.000-05:00

the friday song.

2011-02-08T11:18:00.000-05:00

Letters from the Outside, #33

I should accomplish a thousand things but for inertia. Its not torpor so much as this unusually welcome stillness from which happiness and calm emerge dewy and beautiful, rising up from the deep of sitting still. So right now im okay, not trying to expunge or redeem, just firewood and dogs and a little knitting. First of February we should be burning the Yule Tree any time now, Zuzu says theres daffodils coming up south of the Mason Dixon Line. These hinterlands just get deeper snow, snow such a weird space thing, fractal and numbing, frozen and uniting. Late january was a Wyeth, old barns and winter pasture and crows. Today I can feel the seed splitting, cracks letting the Light through, grass through the callous of concrete, heady purple flowers from a little brown bulb. Laundry billowed on the line and the smell of lilac. Seeds in the ground, bare feet on the lawn. the dogs full of their dogness, so much to roll in. But for now I crave carbs and sleep and sitting in a dark room drinking scotch and smoking cigarettes and listening to Steve Earle sing My Old Friend the Blues.

Theres a huge wasps nest the fall uncovered at the end of a maple growing through a lilac next to the shed. I have seen products for sale that look like wasps nests and you hang them from where you dont want wasps because wasps are territorial and wandering wasps dont want no trouble from no Big Ol' Wasp Metropolis. But what if you used an actual nest? I keep thinking the wasps would know the dead prophylactic for what it was; sense no hum nor smell of life within its hexagonal city gates, tune in the presence of a dead metropolis, a sleeping Auroral kingdom, as sure as wed feel the hollow in our bones driving into some post-apocalyptic town. Does the vended grey bag give off some warning smell? or is it simply close enough? Does the wasp have an opportunity to Consider the situation, or is it so well programmed that a flicker through thumbnail sketches proclaims it not risk-efficient?

So strange this land ive landed in, so many quickly shifting geographies for the Hill Pilgrim, and now this clouds of cotton time, this february, whose snow-washed corn stubble turns to bright july rivers of sweet bearded wheat driving north in the afternoon light which every day now lasts a little longer.

Things fall to the bottom, and things rise to the top. I can feel the press of panic against the back of my breastbone but the meds are a broomstick wedged to keep the door shut. I read that to fend off the undead it is energy better spent to dig a moat than to board a window. But the itch of anxiety is scratched with the beating and banging of hammer and nail. Digging a hole, all one imagines is lying down in it.

Blue Jays, everything about them intense and inciting, hang upside down from the fruit and seed feeder. The cats who watch the goldfinch at the thistle knock my Kali and Ganesh over, shuffle my laminated Mary prayer back behind the gilted Icon. the blue Phoenix potshard T. found in the creek slides into the Star of Horus, rattling the rhinestones in Zuzus nano-gourd ornament. The Lords attention is turned away from The Lady. The birdfeeders are a life well spent for the plush sister kitten cats, who prefer to watch beautiful prey from inside atop the toaster (which I only recently thought to tarp with a tea towel) rather than from some frozen vantage, uncertain of success and so far away from the feathers and the eyes. Its the game on widescreen for them, and nobody gets hurt, no slidey-necked titmice to return to the earth under a hill of stoveash which is ones only reasonable option here in february but ive been fortunate in that regard and so far, since this summer, have only dealt in voles and barnmice, which the Mama Cat must be sternly convinced not to bring in for fun and provision. She has no time for television, even if its a reality show. shes out smelling for heartbeats along the banks of the creek, travelling up through the culvert pipe under the road and into the world of the hill the sun sinks behind. the one male goes off in the other direction, solitary panther patrols up i imagine toward the main feeder for the lake, but who knows what woman hes enchanted to feed him wet suppy from the back stoop as a tithe toward his company. he must consider me, for i never do smell it on his breath.

I found the hat, the style ive been looking for to eventually turn-out in alpaca. Its a chullo, and theyre from the Peruvian and Bolivian areas of the Andes mountain range. Doing a little research, I found that the chullo is traditionally made from alpaca yarn. So there you go. Theres several folks in the area who peddle the stuff, and im looking forward to turning out a fine woolen winter hat just in time for spring.

Ive been baking and baking, mainly muffins since Cowboy requested “something without chocolate chips in it.” Apple muffins, banana muffins, and today, cheddar jalapeno cornmeal muffins. After that though, im baking brownies and getting ready for the next granddaughter project, a brown knit rabbit with a deep emerald pinafore and little black shoes. Itll be my first knit creature, just as this last blanket was my first foray into fancy knitting, which turned out better than i expected and wrapped in a brown paper bag. I cannot believe you will not be over the creek this springtime, tending your apple trees. sneezing.

We Love You.

2011-02-07T10:30:00.000-05:00

Pascal Comelade

"Promenade des Schizophrenes"

from within, not from without

2011-02-07T10:15:00.000-05:00

again, for all of us.

We'll drive until the gas is gone
Then walk until our feet our torn
Crawl until we feed the soil
Film the whole thing.

It's all business in the left hand lane
Drive there and then drive back again
Escape can't be the only way
To escape

So I've gotten used to coffee sweats
Still getting used to road regrets
Hell I took you up on all your threats
To leave.

It's a shame... It's a crying shame.
Them's the breaks.
And ain't it always the way
That takes you back to from where it is you came.

Robby like's his country tune
It's never been the lens that I see through
But I guess driving for a week or two
Puts words in your mouth.

So find Dodge and then get out of it
It's about as country as I can get
See you ain't living till you're living it
You’re not dead till you die

But watch out for the paraphrase
Cause they will crown you then they will take your legs
See the cost is more than what you get paid
But do it anyway.

It's a shame... It's a crying shame.
Them's the breaks.
And ain't it always the way
That takes you back to from where it is you came.

2011-02-06T11:03:00.000-05:00

its the birthday of Michael Pollan

"A lawn is nature under totalitarian rule."

2011-02-04T06:28:00.000-05:00

beautiful cooking frenchmen,small, agile motorcycles, and a concertina.

MUSIC VIDEO RIDING SEPTEMBER from Hush on Vimeo.

2011-02-03T07:16:00.000-05:00

its the birthday of Gertrude Stein

Kiss my lips. She did.
Kiss my lips again she did.
Kiss my lips over and over and over again she did.
I have feathers.
Gentle fishes.
Do you think about apricots. We find them very beautiful. It is not alone their color it is their seeds that charm us. We find it a change.
Lifting belly is so strange.
I came to speak about it.
Selected raisins well their grapes grapes are good.
Change your name.
Question and garden.
It's raining. Don't speak about it.
My baby is a dumpling. I want to tell her something. Wax candles. We have bought a great many wax candles. Some are decorated. They have not been lighted.
I do not mention roses.
Exactly.
Actually.
Question and butter.
I find the butter very good.
Lifting belly is so kind.
Lifting belly fattily.
Doesn't that astonish you.
You did want me.
Say it again.
Strawberry.
Lifting beside belly.
Lifting lindly belly.
Sing to me I say.
Some are wives not heroes.
Lifting belly merely.
Sing to me I say.
Lifting belly. A reflection.
Lifting belly adjoibs more prizes.
Fit to be.
I have fit on a hat.
Have you.
What did you say to excuse me. Difficult paper and scattered.
Lifting belly is so kind.

2011-02-01T14:02:00.000-05:00

its the birthday of Langston Hughes.

"Then it was that books began to happen to me, and I began to believe in nothing but books and the wonderful world in books where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables, as we did in Kansas."

2011-02-01T12:12:00.001-05:00

februarys song.

2011-02-01T08:11:00.000-05:00

its the birthday of Galway Kinnell

The bud
stands for all things,
even those things that don't flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as St. Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of
the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking
and blowing beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.

2011-01-30T10:56:00.000-05:00

its the birthday of Richard Brautigan

I sit here

on the perfect end

of a star,

watching light

pour itself toward

me.

The light pours

itself through

a small hole

in the sky.

I'm not very happy,

but I can see

how things are

faraway.

2011-01-29T16:04:00.000-05:00

its the birthday of Edward Abbey.

"Still, even so, not all was lost. The beaded light of

afternoon slanted down beyond the canyon walls,

whiskey-gold on rock and tree, a silent benison from

the flawless sky, free from your friendly solar system.

Cut off, then reappearing, the pale elided wafer of the

new moon followed after. A good spirit, a faery queen, watching over them."

2011-01-25T08:03:00.000-05:00

its the birthday of Virginia Woolf.

"No one need wonder that Orlando started, pressed her hand to her heart, and turned pale. For what more terrifying revelation can there be than that it is the present moment? That we survive the shock at all is only possible because the past shelters us on one side and the future on another... 'I have sought happiness through many ages and not found it; fame and missed it; love and not known it; life--and behold, death is better.'"

2011-01-23T16:53:00.001-05:00

2011-01-11T17:11:00.000-05:00

Letters from the Outside, #32

I apologize for the lapse. Ive been hibernating.

Early january was a lot like springtime. The light was gentle, the birds were at a chatter and only the standing shadows bore a negligee of snow. Then a few days of snow, snow T. and I walked through at night, smiling. Now the mercury stalled at twenty and the tarp of snow is stale and frozen on the ground, tiretracks and footprints as static and obvious as the moment they were made. Halfway through january and its still cold, with no snow. Dark moon in Sagittarius turns the tide in the light and I leave the house in increasing degrees, making it into the stateland by midweek. But most days its too easy to stay in and maybe bake something, read something, drink tea. I pick up a pine bough, a snail shell, an acorn and a gall. A red rock. Seven jay feathers. And then it snows. And in my cardigan and homeknit hat, field coat and T.s brown rubber boots (worn over the jeans), I fancy I embody the archetype of a salty nor'easterner, a resourceful and resilient woman, Judi Dench in Shipping News.

Out for a brisk with the dogs. I thought I might get all the way to the freeground but the wind was hard today, sounded like an autumn woodland army through the oak leaves left on the trees. The below-freezing cold sharpens the snow and the dogs paws suffer. I suspect the town is expecting more snow as the plows are out in late morning with sand and scraping the turns. The windfall maple burns better than should be expected, and theres always books, and tea.

Two deer. A blue heron (in january!). The raven we thought we saw seems to be two and the sound low over coyote road is a rumbling of river stones, some sentiment expressed intelligently in a descending glossal purr. I couldnt believe it when I saw the first and then to see two, to hear one speaking, its been marvelous, and encourages further forays up coyote road, and the farther aforementioned freeground. I did some research on distinguishing ravens from crows at a distance and the next serendipitous encounter with them ill make sure, one way or the other. The owl, all these traditionally dark portents that only gladden my winter heart and make me feel even more a part of things, of the world I love and understand. Were approaching the heart of winter, the one beat at noon and the other at midnight. The frogs are at their frozen nadir, the earth is stone. But its a deep and peaceful sense of rest, gestating the green miracle of Spring. And I see in myself a reflection of this apogee, and cut myself slack. The dogs tree a raccoon kit up a sapling at the edge of one of the gullies, and every day now we go by that spot the black dog stops and sniffs the air. It was probably doing a little foraging in the thaw. The brave little heart, the intelligent hands and sharp, clicking little teeth, grateful it stayed in the tree.

Its a fine beta, this hat, but needs now knitting in woolen. Im thinking alpaca. T.s adopted the beta, which for a hack knitter like myself is a real gold star. Cowboy and I have been reading fiends, a few weeks of books and the woodstove and music playing (and tea). This year will continue to challenge my creativity and clarify my path. With Love am I looking forward to it. I think about soup and bread, and books, and tea. I hold on hard to my metagnostics, my breath and the prayer wheel Golden Boy gifted me this christmas. Im dreaming more.

Enormous pileated woodpecker at the suet cage. Manic Panic crest of electric strawberry, not the chinese red of the smaller downies I usually get. The goldfinches in their winter dun look miraculously small beside him at the feeder, but my heart is with them. Nevertheless the pileated is a wonder, and I stand at the sink, with the cats, my mouth and eyes wide open.

Theres something uneasy in the air today, a lot of natural, and malignant, cataclysm of late unsettling even in the empty open cold. Hoofprints and birdtracks are runes and omens in the snow. But enormous inertia, and anomalous inner silence and books, and tea.

Not much of a letter and it took weeks to put together but I wanted you to know not a day goes by we dont think of you, and send you our Peace and our Light. The seed catalogs start to come in and im looking forward to further honing my tomato cultivation techinque. In january the garden of july seems a miraculous and paradisaical place, which it really is. The sweet fruit off the bramble, the clean peas from the pod. Last night we had beans I put up in july, when the dogs and I walked down the road in barely anything at all. In july when the air above the grass spangles with fireflies, the smell of lavender and sage on your fingers, breeze in the shade of a tree. For now, I bake brownies and watch Okay Go videos, and steep tea. We love you.

2011-01-11T13:56:00.001-05:00

for Zuzu, between words.

2011-01-10T13:17:00.000-05:00

From December.

Dialect

two tongues

trying to

translate

a language

with no

words.

2011-01-04T10:53:00.000-05:00

"without music, life would be a mistake." - f. nietzsche

(may i present to you, for whatever reason, the song for 2011)

Don't sell me anything

Your one time offer, so uncalled for

You call it piece of mind

Cause I can see your house from here

Now leaves have fallen, dear

I can see you're just a little privateer

As your confession draws more near

Time and again, I find I'm listless

Or rather, fistless

In time, oh, that's what I find

So carry me to Mecca

With what you may divine

Take me with you, take me with you

Don't leave me behind

Oh cause I, I don't want your life insurance

Home, moto, health, flood, and fire insurance

Oh, just make, please make this basic inference

And speak of me in the present tense

Oh cause I, I can see your ship from here

Now the weather, so bright and clear

I can see you're just a little profiteer

As your confession draws more near

2010-12-11T12:15:00.001-05:00

for John, after the din dies down.

2010-12-11T11:42:00.000-05:00

its the birthday of Grace Paley,

"The ladies who once wore I Like Ike buttons sat on the south side of the sandbox, and the rest of us who were revisionist Communist and revisionist Trotskyite and revisionist Zionist registered Democrats sat on the north side."

"I own two small boys...When I'm not furiously exhausted from my low-level job and that bedraggled soot-slimy house, I praise God for them."

and of Jim Harrison,

"...the stars and moon were a tonic after the dark lid of her thicket."

"The first step is to pee and make coffee, which I can deal with, and after that what happens is not in firm hands."

2010-12-10T21:44:00.001-05:00

for friday, and sister mama.

2010-12-09T06:55:00.000-05:00

it's the birthday of John Milton.

"Milton coined more than 600 words, including the adjectives dreary, flowery, jubilant, satanic, saintly, terrific, ethereal, sublime, impassive, unprincipled, dismissive, and feverish; as well as the nouns fragrance, adventurer, anarchy."

2010-12-08T07:10:00.000-05:00

its the birthday of gregg allman

southern rock god, dog lover.

2010-12-07T16:36:00.000-05:00

Letters from the Outside #31

Supersaturating rainfall turning to heavy snow in the freezing dark and now in the molecular heat of first december sunlight the hill crackles with the thaw of ice like rock candy under a chicory sky. The wind that roars around your house at night whistles under your hat and its hard to hear the cars coming, though when its still the cold air helps you hear for miles.

For all my talk, I think I have it backwards, still. Theres a quantum leap between knowing something and Being it that I have yet to make. And to these ends I wend through vineyards beneath windfarms for a dark, fey woman in a blue house on the hill, her little arctic familiar sounding out the hour, and for now ill call her The Plow. I am thinking Frau, and the guidance of stars and the lovely dark furrows of late fall that presage pale green fields of Springtime. Pixie-led into the forest of symbols I knew as cones and acorns in nimble little hands my lifetime ago. Here, at the bottom of the year, I am arrived at the Gate of my latest adventure, the Seeking of the Key. Key to Box and Whats Within will come later. For now, delighted and satisfied with a sign ive come the right way around. And Lo, the light on the sword that rises slowly to its hand through the water attracts the silent flight of my sharp dark, eyes like the canyon creekbed you fall towards in dreams. Of course the whole thing is translated into some mythic battle for my bright and ceaseless Soul but arent we all the Multiverse made microcosm? Arent all our stories the nth retelling of the One? Archetypes, Transformations, Faery Tales. I go back to Sexton and Bettelheim, Lame Deer and the one about wolves. The Hobbit sets out to Return the Ring. Retrieval of access to Self that is not locked in a box but a wild bird roosted and to a certain tree returning. Fresh scars the hieroglyphs of how I fight to keep the ax in my own hand at bay. The recurring struggle of my Decembers, the Oak and Holly battleground, the Wheel. Its just the next leg on the Road to Find Out. Creiddylad, Drudenfuss and Gawain (whom Zuzu referred to as "those other gwynnishdwiddlinsceruddlinoos") lead me back to The Lady, who was waiting all along on the altar behind the ravens and the rabbits and the horses.

There are no love songs on Highway 61 Revisited, and crows flap and gather in the shallow snow of stubblefields. Water in the culvert turns to slush and the brown reeds in the fen seem less bereft and more an essential symbol for the hope that what once was green will be again. Creeks and culverts adorned with baubled atolls and archipelagos of ice, hibernation pulse of sunlight I can feel the exposed plane of my face respond immediately to the fleeting glow, honey dripping down to meet the steam rising from my skin. The woods seem subdued beneath the first hypodermic freeze thrown sleeping rug of snow the dry autumn carpet not entirely inhumed and the hillfloor is a texture like brushstrokes, the broken surface of change before the deep eiderdown expanse of january.

I review my understanding of vast mechanics and am briefly allowed into their telescopic perspective. The sacrificial Sun spending itself in Light and the attendant orbiting aggregates of dust, rock clockwork tipped like pears in the hemisphere of a wooden fruitbowl, making their Way. I see how the good growing world changes, how the light shifts. I represent my pagan tribe, a small shining vigil for tolerance and wonder, at the school again this year, invited to share the Celebration of the Light, drawing down the Lady Freyja in her amber and her falcon cloak and her fiery crown. Then I circle small tables in my big black boots and serve white-icing sweets to wide-open faces.

Cold now until april, with mud and sprouts and everything emerging into itself. I discover a cache of fine stovewood earlier obscured by the gown of an old lilac. 'Tis a golden gift and im out in my socks and my clogs, climbing sliding piles of industrial shelving to carry the heavy eggs of fire inside, celebrate by baking brownies and drinking the last of the shiraz from the bottle.

Three o'clock low sky twilight. The boys come home, showing me their gentle, smiling faces, inspiringly patient, kind and understanding, my wee ones. And all this after all that questionable parenting. Coming in from the cold to the smell of fresh coffee and baked chocolate. A little Steve Earle and the Del McCoury Band, waiting to start supper. I hope these letters are leaves of filigree that you can hold up to the light like paper snowflakes and see a little of the world that waits for you, the wind and the weather and the wildness. The Faerie Keep and the butterfly silhouette made from the tenacious open husk of a chestnut high up in its tree.

We enter the long dark, but how bright the stars burn for us now.

2010-12-07T15:50:00.000-05:00

for Zuzu, and the giddy, and the tea.

2010-12-01T06:32:00.000-05:00

its the birthday of Woody Allen who said,

"Time is nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once."

2010-11-30T09:39:00.000-05:00

Letters from the Outside, #30

It seems a glorious march day, in the thrust of the thaw, except theres no ragged hold-outs of snow in the shadow of the trees. The south wind is warm and wet and the sound of the woods tells me ill shortly be wetter. The road is a leopard slug. The dogs and I revel in the smell, even the smell of spring, the wet earth. I stand here in gentle rain, in no fetter but of my own devising, the dogs wet and wondering why the wait, and I dedicate this feeling of quiet grace to you. I take up again with Sitting and Stretching, and extra walks, even when it rains. This time of year im more than willing to release myself from the bonds of my body, so living deeper into it helps maintain the fragile attachment until Spring restores my fiercer dedication to living. The cars hiss close and hard going by, and it drives the dogs bonkers, who dont like them much anyway. The sound of bullets is everywhere now, deep hoof tracks in the damp sand by the side of the road, the deer so freaked out theyre driven from the heart of their home to the fringes by the hard scars where the alien anti-creatures kill but do not eat them. I am grateful for canny hoof-folk around here, thats its few and far between the buzzard pickings for this road. The woodpeckers and the jays raise their wild cries beating branch to branch a blur of bright blue or the broad black wingspan of the woodpecker, Picus, with the white slashes. Cardinal and Spruce and Jay are the colors of this season.

I tend the fire, bake hot milk cake and cornbread, paint my Zuzu a letter, send her the little videos of my day, T. on the trampoline in tinted swim goggles which he wore onto the bus in the morning, rain on water by the wayside. We stopped in front of the barn at the place to make way for a car coming up over the rise and in the grit was a red stone, human heart shaped, perfect. Wrinkles and cracks on the back draw a fox, a woman walking, a star. It is windy and warm and everything is cast in either high glare or black shadow. The branches of the barren feral apple trees seem sinister in the contrast and the empty pasture has a perfect summer tundra quality, I expect to see an arctic fox in his winter whites loping across from copse to copse, nosing along for mice or the track of a rabbit, headed for a good drink at the creek, one eye on the treeline.

The next day I go out in a pour and come home under the clearest sky in a long time. Thats two in a row. But its been good to walk in the rain, the supersaturated air and your good wool sweater doing its job, the rain rolling across your eyebrows and collecting on the tip of your nose, striding along with the shadow legions the rain makes looking through it as it falls and blows on the wide empty spaces, billowing ghost rags, waves and undulations across the valley floor. The rain is symphonic, and I can hear it drumming on the bare branches of the far hill. Voices carry so clear through the valley, and on windy days its hard to tell from where the cars are coming, and if theyre even on this road or the one over. But the significance hasnt been lost on me, my rainy graveyard grandmother and her cold mist sister calling the spirit of their man back into the Open. I knew it yesterday walking past the place, knew it when I came home and “Saule, Perkons, Daugava” was playing. The man lived a long life, full of lifetimes, shook hands with Adolf and Dwight D., but didnt say much about it, or anything. He was a fine tenor. Grew roses and raspberries and liked to sit in a rowboat and fish. He was always aloof with me. I think kids reminded him of all of his he left behind in the ground across the Ocean. My grandfather had a good run; we should all be so lucky. And now the deathrattle of a bitter ancient bloodfeud in my family, hostilities embroidered onto our bones, poisoned fingers pointed at the funeral of all things, certain cars sliding out of queue to convene with the leather elbowed attorney to see if something cant be done. It was an arctic cold that attended the interment, and I took brief refuge in the blockstone chapel across the path where the gravediggers leaned against the walls like bit parts in a Shakespeare play. I thanked them all for the crucial service they provide and they responded with wide eyes and silence so surmised I, again and as always, had breached some unspoken etiquette. One man looked to his others and back to me. “No ones ever thanked us before,” he said.

This time of year im just hanging on with my fingernails, and the words are few and far between. But you are never far from our hearts and minds, especially now, in the waning of the year, the protracted dark, when we as naked apes huddle together around our hearth fires and are thankful simply for each other. It cannot be too soon you are returned unto the motley rumpus.

2010-11-23T13:17:00.000-05:00

tuesday is the new friday. in honor of The Engineer.

Dievs Sveti Latvija.