New Year's Eve

 

Vanessa Bowman

Maria Popova

Hindsight is our finest instrument for discerning the patterns of our lives. To look back on a year of reading, a year of writing, is to discover a secret map of the mind, revealing the landscape of living — after all, how we spend our thoughts is how we spend our lives.

What have I read this year?   I've re-read more things than I've read,  and re-listened to things that I've listened to many times over.

There are more, but I can't think of them at the moment.

As Maria Popova says, how we spend our thoughts is how we spend our lives.

So , what do I remember reading in the past 12 months?

Many New Yorker pieces, for sure.

Several pieces from The Atlantic, too.

What else?

Anyway, it's New Year's Eve, and I'm spending it at home. I was invited to a party, but one of the sisters here has RSV, and I don't want to take those viruses with me.

I had hoped to spend the day, a retreat day for the Daughters of Charity, meditating over this past year.

But one of our sisters had to be rushed to the hospital late last night, and the resulting activities here have kept me busy. She is 85 years old, and a very serious hoarder.  I won't go into the gory details here, but we've been cleaning out a small area of floor which was two feet deep in paper, shoes, cards, dirty clothes, etc.  And that was just a small part.  She will be in the hospital for a few days,  and we all dread her return here, when she sees that we've been intruding on her private space.  But when her private space is strewn with urine and feces, because she was so sick that she couldn't make it to the toilet, we really had to intrude on her private space. But enough on that.

Here's a poem by William Stafford:

Starting here, what do you want to remember?

How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?

What scent of old wood hovers, what softened

sound from outside fills the air?

 

Will you ever bring a better gift for the world

than the breathing respect that you carry

wherever you go right now? Are you waiting

for time to show you some better thoughts?

 

When you turn around, starting here, lift this

new glimpse that you found; carry into evening

all that you want from this day. This interval you spent

reading or hearing this, keep it for life –

 

What can anyone give you greater than now,

starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?

 

by William Stafford

 

It's been a terrible year in the world, full of violence and war, the hateful politics of the Republicans, and the threat of Donald Trump.

Here's a wonderful poem from Richard Wilbur:

Year’s End

​

Now winter downs the dying of the year, ​ ​

And night is all a settlement of snow;

From the soft street the rooms of houses show ​ ​

A gathered light, a shapen atmosphere, ​ ​

Like frozen-over lakes whose ice is thin ​ ​

And still allows some stirring down within.

​

I’ve known the wind by water banks to shake

The late leaves down, which frozen where they fell ​ ​

And held in ice as dancers in a spell ​ ​

Fluttered all winter long into a lake; ​ ​

Graved on the dark in gestures of descent, ​ ​

They seemed their own most perfect monument.

​

There was perfection in the death of ferns ​ ​

Which laid their fragile cheeks against the stone ​ ​

A million years. Great mammoths overthrown ​ ​

Composedly have made their long sojourns, ​ ​

Like palaces of patience, in the gray

And changeless lands of ice. And at Pompeii

​

The little dog lay curled and did not rise ​ ​

But slept the deeper as the ashes rose

And found the people incomplete, and froze ​ ​

The random hands, the loose unready eyes ​ ​

Of men expecting yet another sun

To do the shapely thing they had not done.

​

These sudden ends of time must give us pause. ​ ​

We fray into the future, rarely wrought

Save in the tapestries of afterthought.

More time, more time. Barrages of applause ​ ​

Come muffled from a buried radio.

The New-year bells are wrangling with the snow.

​

Richard Wilbur (1921 - 2017)

rs

Inside the dome of dark

 

Lines for Winter

BY MARK STRAND

for Ros Krauss

 

Tell yourself

as it gets cold and gray falls from the air

that you will go on

walking, hearing

the same tune no matter where

you find yourself—

inside the dome of dark

or under the cracking white

of the moon's gaze in a valley of snow.

Tonight as it gets cold

tell yourself

what you know which is nothing

but the tune your bones play

as you keep going. And you will be able

for once to lie down under the small fire

of winter stars.

And if it happens that you cannot

go on or turn back

and you find yourself

where you will be at the end,

tell yourself

in that final flowing of cold through your limbs

that you love what you are.

Sean William Randall

I Am Learning to Abandon the World

BY LINDA PASTAN

I am learning to abandon the world

before it can abandon me.

Already I have given up the moon

and snow, closing my shades

against the claims of white.

And the world has taken

my father, my friends.

I have given up melodic lines of hills,

moving to a flat, tuneless landscape.

And every night I give my body up

limb by limb, working upwards

across bone, towards the heart.

But morning comes with small

reprieves of coffee and birdsong.

A tree outside the window

which was simply shadow moments ago

takes back its branches twig

by leafy twig.

And as I take my body back

the sun lays its warm muzzle on my lap

as if to make amends.

Linda Pastan, “I Am Learning to Abandon the World” from PM/AM: New and Selected Poems (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1982). Copyright © 1982 by Linda Pastan. Reprinted with the permission of the Jean V. Naggar Agency, Inc. on behalf of the author

 

Ulla Thynell

Christmas Eve

 

art by Mickey O'Neill McGrath

The House of Christmas by G. K. Chesterton There fared a mother driven forth Out of an inn to roam; In the place where she was homeless All men are at home. The crazy stable close at hand, With shaking timber and shifting sand, Grew a stronger thing to abide and stand Than the square stones of Rome. For men are homesick in their homes, And strangers under the sun, And they lay on their heads in a foreign land Whenever the day is done. Here we have battle and blazing eyes, And chance and honour and high surprise, But our homes are under miraculous skies Where the yule tale was begun. A Child in a foul stable, Where the beasts feed and foam; Only where He was homeless Are you and I at home; We have hands that fashion and heads that know, But our hearts we lost - how long ago! In a place no chart nor ship can show Under the sky's dome. This world is wild as an old wives' tale, And strange the plain things are, The earth is enough and the air is enough For our wonder and our war; But our rest is as far as the fire-drake swings And our peace is put in impossible things Where clashed and thundered unthinkable wings Round an incredible star. To an open house in the evening Home shall men come, To an older place than Eden And a taller town than Rome. To the end of the way of the wandering star, To the things that cannot be and that are, To the place where God was homeless And all men are at home.

Baking Bread for Christmas

 I love to bake bread, and yesterday and today were the first times in months that I've had the time and the energy to do it.

No class to prepare, no papers to grade, no meetings, no prayers in common.  I had a wide open space to bake.

Yesterday I made two loaves of Cranberry Orange yeast bread. These two were a success.

Today I made four loaves of Stollen.  Labor intensive but still so enjoyable.  The loaves look like they will be good, too.

Here's a poem I wrote a long time ago about baking.

Recipe 

Yeast rises like praise 

clings to the cloth,

 leaves its thready face there.

 Dough rolls smooth

 springs back 

seamless in hand as thought. 

The oven opens and closes its arms.

 Smell seeps from room to room.

 Bread, as finished as a child. 

Every slice of the knife it sings its fearful litany:

 I live in the jaws of hunger. 

I break as I give

 I rise as I die

It's the last day of the ""O" Antiphons:   O Emmanuel

It's the day before Christmas Eve, and now I don't have any frantic rushing or cleaning , or even baking, to do tomorrow.

This is an old Catholic prayer custom.

Christmas lights at the pavilion at Cape May.  I won't be there again until May, but I have some good Facebook friends who send wonderful photos of the town at Christmas.

Eva Melhuish

The Mainstay Inn, Cape May

Approaching Christmas: more art and poetry

 

CHRISTMAS STARS

 

Blazes the star behind the hill.

Snow stars glint from the wooden sill.

A spider spins her silver still

within Your darkened stable shed;

in asterisks her webs are spread

to ornament Your manger bed.

Where does a spider find the skill

to sew a star? Invisible,

obedient, she works Your will

with her swift silences of thread.

I weave star poems in my head;

the spider, wordless, spins instead.

 

Luci Shaw

 

 

artist: Danielle Mackinnon

Advent

BY MARY JO SALTER

Wind whistling, as it does  

in winter, and I think  

nothing of it until

 

it snaps a shutter off

her bedroom window, spins  

it over the roof and down

 

to crash on the deck in back,  

like something out of Oz.

We look up, stunned—then glad

 

to be safe and have a story,  

characters in a fable  

we only half-believe.

 

Look, in my surprise

I somehow split a wall,  

the last one in the house

 

we’re making of gingerbread.  

We’ll have to improvise:  

prop the two halves forward

 

like an open double door  

and with a tube of icing  

cement them to the floor.

 

Five days until Christmas,

and the house cannot be closed.  

When she peers into the cold

 

interior we’ve exposed,  

she half-expects to find  

three magi in the manger,

 

a mother and her child.  

She half-expects to read  

on tablets of gingerbread

 

a line or two of Scripture,  

as she has every morning  

inside a dated shutter

 

on her Advent calendar.  

She takes it from the mantel  

and coaxes one fingertip

 

under the perforation,  

as if her future hinges

on not tearing off the flap

 

under which a thumbnail picture  

by Raphael or Giorgione,  

Hans Memling or David

 

of apses, niches, archways,  

cradles a smaller scene  

of a mother and her child,

 

of the lidded jewel-box  

of Mary’s downcast eyes.  

Flee into Egypt, cries

 

the angel of the Lord  

to Joseph in a dream,

for Herod will seek the young

 

 

child to destroy him. While  

she works to tile the roof  

with shingled peppermints,

 

I wash my sugared hands  

and step out to the deck  

to lug the shutter in,

 

a page torn from a book  

still blank for the two of us,  

a mother and her child.

 

artist: Anne Mutch

Happy Winter Solstice!

 The longest night...

"The edge of the solstice,

the barren darkness,

the wheel.

Nature knows that every cycle

must return to stillness and silence.

That every inhale has an exhale.

That every ending births a beginning.

That the light always returns

to a future beyond imagination."

~ Victoria Erickson

Author, Edge of Wonder

 

Dana O'Driscoll,   Moon and Solstice

At the Solstice

Shaun O'Brien

We say Next time we’ll go away,
But then the winter happens, like a secret

We’ve to keep yet never understand
As daylight turns to cinema once more:

A lustrous darkness deep in ice-age cold,
And the print in need of restoration

Starting to consume itself
With snowfall where no snow is falling now.

Or could it be a cloud of sparrows, dancing
In the bare hedge that this gale of light

Is seeking to uproot? Let it be sparrows, then,
Still dancing in the blazing hedge,

Their tender fury and their fall,
Because it snows, because it burns.

 

 

 

And now the leaves suddenly lose strength.

Decaying towers stand still, lurid, lanes-long,

And seen from landing windows, or the length

Of gardens, rubricate afternoons. New strong

Rain-bearing night-winds come: then

Leaves chase warm buses, speckle statued air,

Pile up in corners, fetch out vague broomed men

Through mists at morning.

                                  And no matter where goes down,

The sallow lapsing drift in fields

Or squares behind hoardings, all men hesitate

Separately, always, seeing another year gone –

Frockcoated gentleman, farmer at his gate,

Villein with mattock, soldiers on their shields,

All silent, watching the winter coming on.

Philip Larkin

 

 

The Edge of Solstice

 

Jeanie Tomanek

"The edge of the solstice,

the barren darkness,

the wheel.

Nature knows that every cycle

must return to stillness and silence.

That every inhale has an exhale.

That every ending births a beginning.

That the light always returns

to a future beyond imagination."

~ Victoria Erickson

Author, Edge of Wonder

December evening , West Chester

We decorated the Christmas tree tonight.

 Christmas in Madison Square, New York City       Painting by Paul Cornyud

Tree in Longwood Gardens  2010

My favorite Christmas card from years past:  "The Animals in Winter"

Our tree is an artificial one, by fire regulations.  It's perfect,and pretty, and it doesn't particularly look fake, but I know by the absence of fragrance.  I spray some really good Claire Burke room spray of Balsam Fir, and that helps.

I finished the grades today, so the semester is over.  It was a good one, though I am grieving over my own student, "The Phantom"  who is failing because he hasn't turned in the major paper or the final exam. 

Here's a poem for the second week of Advent:

 

Advent Calendar

BY GJERTRUD SCHNACKENBERG

Bethlehem in Germany,

Glitter on the sloping roofs,

Breadcrumbs on the windowsills,

Candles in the Christmas trees,

Hearths with pairs of empty shoes:

Panels of Nativity

Open paper scenes where doors

Open into other scenes,

Some recounted, some foretold.

Blizzard-sprinkled flakes of gold

Gleam from small interiors,

Picture-boxes in the stars

Open up like cupboard doors

In a cabinet Jesus built.

 

Southern German villagers,

Peasants in the mica frost,

See the comet streaming down,

Heavenly faces, each alone,

Faces lifted, startled, lost,

As if lightning lit the town.

 

Sitting in an upstairs window

Patiently the village scholar

Raises his nearsighted face,

Interrupted by the star.

Left and right his hands lie stricken

Useless on his heavy book.

When I lift the paper door

In the ceiling of his study

One canary-angel glimmers,

Flitting in the candelabra,

Peers and quizzes him: Rabbi,

What are the spheres surmounted by?

But his lips are motionless.

Child, what are you asking for?

Look, he gazes past the roofs,

Gazes where the bitter North,

Stretched across the empty place,

Opens door by door by door.

 

This is childhood's shrunken door.

When I touch the glittering crumbs,

When I cry to be admitted,

No one answers, no one comes.

 

And the tailor's needle flashes

In midair with thread pulled tight,

Stitching a baptismal gown.

But the gown, the seventh door,

Turns up an interior

Hidden from the tailor's eyes:

Baby presents like the boxes

Angels hold on streets and stairways,

Wooden soldier, wooden sword,

Chocolate coins in crinkled gold,

Hints of something bought and sold,

Hints of murder in the stars.

Baby's gown is sown with glitter

Spread across the tailor's lap.

Up above his painted ceiling

Baby mouse's skeleton

Crumbles in the mouse's trap.

 

Leaning from the cliff of heaven,

Indicating whom he weeps for,

Joseph lifts his lamp above

The infant like a candle-crown.

Let my fingers touch the silence

Where the infant's father cries.

Give me entrance to the village

From my childhood where the doorways

Open pictures in the skies.

But when all the doors are open,

No one sees that I've returned.

When I cry to be admitted,

No one answers, no one comes.

Clinging to my fingers only

Pain, like glitter bits adhering,

When I touch the shining crumbs.

Gjertrud Schnackenberg, "Advent Calendar" from Supernatural Love: Poems 1976-1992. Copyright © 2000 by Gjertrud Schnackenberg. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC,  http://us.macmillan.com/fsg. All rights reserved.

 

 

Regrets, I've had a few...

Excerpts from an article about regrets:

 "Avgi Saketopoulou and Ann Pellegrini, and in it they argue that the born-this-way model of treating gender of trans and nonbinary patients ignores the vital role life experiences, including traumatic ones, play in shaping gender in all people. Pretending it is otherwise “sets the stage” for regret, Saketopoulou told me.

“To imagine that there was a way to live a life without regret is to sign on to a very particular understanding of human life as being interior, as being sovereign to itself, as having nothing to do with the social world, with the political world, with relationships with each other,” she told me. When it comes to gender, “there’s no way to make a mistake, and there’s no way to get it right. Meaning that you get it right enough. That’s what we’re all aiming for.”

"... It does not impoverish the value of the wonderful life I’ve led to imagine what pleasure and pain might have come from living a different one, or foreclose another, future transition, whatever that might bring. I’m lucky that I got to choose. The gift is the choice, even if I haven’t always been sure I made the right one.

."..We all know what awaits us with age, and yet it is all but impossible for any of us to fathom the transitions our selves will undergo over time. Each of those transitions is a kind of little death — the end of one way of being and the birth of another. It is no surprise that the more unexpected the transition, the more deeply unsettling it is.

"We are all hurtling, inevitably, toward that one last transition, across the one true binary, the one between life and death. And that binary is the true source of all our regrets, and our joy, too. Regret exists because we all get just one life."

LYDIA POLGREEN  

I will be thinking about this for a long time.

In the meantime, here's a poem and a picture:

AGING....     by bianca luz

You grow old, they told me, you are no longer you, you become distant, sad and lonely.

I didn't answer...

I don't get old, I get wise.

I stopped being what others like me to become, but what I like to be.

I stopped seeking the acceptance of others and accepted myself.

I have left behind the lying mirrors that deceive mercilessly.

- No, I'm not getting old.

I just become more selective with places, people, customs and ideologies.

I have let go of attachments, unnecessary pain, toxic people, sick souls and rotten hearts... bitterness and unhappiness are not for me, I release them for my health.

I'm ditching party nights for learning and embracing insomnia.

I stopped living stories and started writing them, I threw aside the imposed stereotypes.

I no longer carry eyeshadow in my bag, now I have a book that beautifies my mind.

I exchanged wine glasses for coffee cups, forgot to idealize life and started living it.

- No, I'm not getting old.

I carry freshness in my soul, innocence in my heart, and it discovers me daily.

I have in my hands the tenderness of a cocoon that, when opened, will spread its wings to other places unreachable for those who seek only the frivolity of the material.

I have that charming smile on my face when I observe the simplicity of nature.

I carry in my ears the chirping of the birds that delight me and accompany the walk.

- No, I'm not getting old.

I become selective, betting my time on the intangible, rewriting the story I've been told, rediscovering worlds, saving those old books I've forgotten half open.

I'm becoming more cautious, I've stopped the outbursts that teach me nothing, I'm learning to talk about transcendent things, I'm learning to cultivate knowledge, plant ideals and falsify my destiny.

- No, I'm not getting old.

I begin to live who I really am.~

~Bianka Luz