We're never alone

 Here's a passage from an essay by Tobias Wolff:

"The Irish painter John Yeats, the poet’s father, described the making of art as the social act of a solitary person. Actually, he said “a solitary man.” They talked like that then. Anyway, I nodded in recognition when I came across that line. Maybe Hemingway could write in a crowded café, but I and the other artists and writers I’ve known have had to be shut away somewhere, out of the human stream, to get our work done. Yet as the years have frosted and mowed this head of mine, I have come to a different understanding of the situation. You may have retreated to your attic studio, you may even have pulled up the ladder behind you, but you were not alone. Never.

" Each of us here tonight has known something like what I describe. We are all the beneficiaries of others’ gifts of knowledge and talent, patience and time. And those gifts never stop coming, not as long as we can read a book—for a book is made of just those gifts.

As I said, we’re never alone."

Wolf Woman    Luci Campbell

And another thought from another poem,  related:

Poem by Mário Raul de Morais Andrade

(Oct 9, 1893 – Feb 25, 1945)

Brazilian poet, novelist, musicologist, art historian and critic, photographer

I counted my years and found that I have less time to live from here on than I have lived up to now.

I feel like that child who won a packet of sweets: he ate the first with pleasure, but when he realized that there were few left, he began to enjoy them intensely.

I no longer have time for endless meetings where statutes, rules, procedures and internal regulations are discussed, knowing that nothing will be achieved.

I no longer have time to support the absurd people who, despite their chronological age, haven't grown up.

My time is too short:

I want the essence,

my soul is in a hurry.

I don't have many sweets

in the package anymore.

I want to live next to human people,

very human,

who know how to laugh at their mistakes,

and who are not inflated by their triumphs,

and who take on their responsibilities.

Thus human dignity is defended and we move towards truth and honesty.

It is the essential that makes life worth living.

I want to surround myself with people who know how to touch hearts, people who have been taught by the hard blows of life to grow with gentle touches of the soul.

Yes, I'm in a hurry, I'm in a hurry to live with the intensity that only maturity can give.

I don't intend to waste any of the leftover sweets.

I am sure they will be delicious, much more than what I have eaten so far.

My goal is to reach the end satisfied

and at peace with my loved ones

and my conscience.

We have two lives.

And the second begins when you realize you only have one.

Spring Comes on the World

 

art by Lizzie Speights

Spring comes on the World
By Emily Dickinson

Spring comes on the World –
I sight the Aprils –
Hueless to me until thou come
As, till the Bee
Blossoms stand negative,
Touched to Conditions
By a Hum.

We had a lovely Easter Sunday, followed by days of endless rain and cold -- until today.

So happy to see my little plants beginning to emerge!

Pearly Everlasting!

Woodland Phlox

Golden Alexander

Each day they get a little bigger.

Here's another Easter/ Spring poem:

Holy Spring
By Dylan Thomas

O
Out of a bed of love
When that immortal hospital made one more move to soothe
The curless counted body,
And ruin and his causes
Over the barbed and shooting sea assumed an army
And swept into our wounds and houses,
I climb to greet the war in which I have no heart but only
That one dark I owe my light,
Call for confessor and wiser mirror but there is none
To glow after the god stoning night
And I am struck as lonely as a holy marker by the sun

No
Praise that the spring time is all
Gabriel and radiant shrubbery as the morning grows joyful
Out of the woebegone pyre
And the multitude’s sultry tear turns cool on the weeping wall,
My arising prodgidal
Sun the father his quiver full of the infants of pure fire,
But blessed be hail and upheaval
That uncalm still it is sure alone to stand and sing
Alone in the husk of man’s home
And the mother and toppling house of the holy spring,
If only for a last time.

 

 

Art by Anna Baartz

The Senior Citizen as Driver

I passed my Driver's test yesterday!

The group to which I belong requires its members to undergo a driving assessment when one becomes 75.

So I am happy and relieved to report that I passed, and can drive for at least another five years.

The assessment lasted almost three hours, and was given by a trained occupational therapist at a company office.  It was both cognitive and operational.  I thought it was interesting .  The only areas I flubbed were the ones concerning short term memory. That didn't surprise me.

ahhh, the rotary!

Violets at sunset.  Photo by Julia Carter

Almost the first day of Spring!

 Here's a wonderful poem by   Amy Shutzer:

WHAT TO DO ON SPRING EQUINOX

Compost this poem.

Take out all the words that remind you of winter,

words that slip frozen into the heart,

bare limbs of words that stick into the sky and shake.

Prune out dead wood;

rough ragged never gonna fruit,

done is done!

Pay attention to what is here,

not what isn't.

Send your roots into another row or field or bed.

Mow. Rake up all the grass.

Layer, as if you're expecting hail or a deep frost;

the end of winter is always unpredictable.

Add manure, plenty of manure

and call in the flies, the dung beetles, the worms.

Soon, there will be heat. Steam.

The pile will soften, break down, give in, let go.

Compost winter into spring,

take off those old clothes you've been wearing,

the despair like a hat on your head,

dig into the pile,

into the heat and the heart of what matters.

Plant your garden and remember, each year,

everything will be different;

compost what you can.

Luci Grossmith

"I heard a wood thrush in the dusk

Twirl three notes and make a star —

My heart that walked with bitterness

Came back from very far.

Three shining notes were all he had,

And yet they made a starry call —

I caught life back against my breast

And kissed it, scars and all."

Sara Teasdale - Wood Song, 1884-1923.

Heinrich Vogeler - Frühling - Porträt von Martha Vogeler, 1897

Major Facebook trouble all over the place

 I can log on to mine on the phone,but not on the laptop.  Very weird and frustrating. But at least I know I'm not alone in this craziness.  Facebook users all over the country and probably the world are struggling.

However, some weren't affected at all.

I mind because I can't post the beautiful artwork or photos or reallly anything.

Sigh. A first world problem.   It will get fixed eventually.

full moon over the Inn of Cape May

 

"March is the month of expectation,

The things we do not know,

The Persons of Prognostication

Are coming now.

We try to sham becoming firmness,

But pompous joy

Betrays us, as his first betrothal

Betrays a boy."

-  Emily Dickinson, XLVIII

 

 

Sparrow... art by Elena Selena

"This hill

crossed with broken pines and maples

lumpy with the burial mounds of

uprooted hemlocks (hurricane

of ’38) out of their

rotting hearts generations rise

trying once more to become

the forest

 

just beyond them

tall enough to be called trees

in their youth like aspen a bouquet

of young beech is gathered

 

they still wear last summer’s leaves 

the lightest brown almost translucent

how their stubbornness has decorated 

the winter woods"

-  Grace Paley, A Walk in March

The Rose-breasted Grosbeak won't arrive for another month or more.  I wait for him.

Harshness vanishing

Early Spring

•  

  by Rainer Maria Rilke

   

  Harshness vanished. A sudden softness

  has replaced the meadows' wintry grey.

  Little rivulets of water changed

  their singing accents.

  Tendernesses, hesitantly, reach toward the earth

  from space, and country lanes are showing

  these unexpected subtle risings

  that find expression in the empty trees.

   

   

 

Michael Cheek    Robin

"February made me shiver..."

 "with every paper I'd deliver,

Bad news on the doorstep,

I couldn't take one more step..."

( from "American Pie" by Don McLean)

Art by   Laivi Poder

Truly, being in my middle seventies has turned my mind to nostalgia, or memory, and hopefully not regret.  In the month of Valentine's Day, I have been remembering the men I've loved in my rash youth.  I connect them all to songs from my youth, which now I can access through itunes, and can download and save and play on my ipod.  Those are words that didn't exist in my youth, though the songs certainly did.   Here are a few:

Angeles   (Enya)

A Summer Song   (Chad and Jeremy)

Try to Remember   (Harry Belafonte)

You've got your troubles, I've got mine  ( the Fortunes)

Yesterday ( Beatles)

I'll follow the sun ( Beatles)

We'll sing in the sunshine  (Gale Garnett)   

Here comes the sun (Beatles)

Stranger on the shore

Ventura Highway (Simply Red)

Waiting for Snow (Gordon Lightfoot)

Song for a winter's night  ( Gordon Lightfoot)

MacArthur Park (Richard Harris)

Come to my bedside my darling  ( Eric Anderson)

I'll always be beside you

Fields of Gold ( Eva Cassidy)

I'll be seeing you  ( Judy Collins)

Miles ( Richard and Mimi Farina)

One time only ( Tom Paxton)

Greenfields (Brothers Four)

The green leaves of summer  ( Brothers Four)

The Promise ( Tracy Chapman)

All that you have is your soul  ( Tracy Chapman)

The good times we had     ( Peter Paul and Mary)

Friends   ( John Denver)

Last month I found out that Frank Reilly has died in Florida. He was 82, and had Alzheimers.  Sixty years ago I had an enormous crush on him, though our relationship was strictly platonic.  I had an email from him, out of the blue, in April of 2017, and we corresponded until 2020. Then, I imagine , his mind began to go,.

Others have passed away:  Jim Wambold, Pat Finnegan, John Whelley, Barney Galvin...

Now occasionally they show up in my dreams. 

insights from writers in The New Yorker

 

  Tufted Titmouse      artist: Diaga Dimza

The last few issues of The New Yorker have been filled with articles I really loved reading, and which provoked my own thoughts.

In this latest one, from February 26, Adam Gopnik had an essay called  "Four Years Later,"  about "What we can't learn from 2020 "--- the COVID Pandemic. He says "when normal life stopped  in mid march of 2020. He reminded me that a million Americans died before a vaccine was accessible . 

He says  "What if the Pandemic, rather than knocking us all sideways and leaving us briefly unrecognizable to ourselves, showed us who we really are?"

"KLINENBERG'S own figure on the pandemic ground is that America's exceptionally poor handling  of the crisis exposed   the country's structural selfishness:     tell people that they are on their own."  

I need to say more on this, but glare on the pages got to me tonight. 

our country's structural selfishness.... that really hit me.

"The pandemic exposed the geological faults in American society, which now threaten to split the earth and plunge us inside."

Then he asks: "Did 2020 change everything? Perhaps those big, epoch-marking years

are tourist traps of a kind. The year 2001 may, in historical retrospect, be remarkable first as the year when, at last, more American homes had Internet access than did not.

A life spent online is a permanent feature of our modernity."

No narrative is more marketable than metamorphosis

 

A Memoirist Who Told Everything and Repented Nothing

no narrative is more marketable than metamorphosis   Hilary Kelly

talking about writer  Diana Athill

How did I get this way?” is one of memoir’s primary questions. 

“I believed,” she writes, in “Somewhere Towards the End,” “and still believe, that there is no point in describing experience unless one tries to get it as near to being what it really was as you can make it, but that belief does come into conflict with a central teaching in my upbringing: Do Not Think Yourself Important.” 

Photos of her (Athill), with her snow-white hair and velvety, folded skin, fomented interest in a nonagenarian who would “run through all the men I ever went to bed with” instead of counting sheep.

"She watches her own diminishment with a sharp eye. “We tend to become convinced that everything is getting worse simply because within our own boundaries things are doing so,” she writes. “We are becoming less able to do things we would like to do, can hear less, see less, eat less, hurt more, our friends die, we know that we ourselves will soon be dead. . . . It’s not surprising, perhaps, that we easily slide into a general pessimism about life, but it is very boring and it makes dreary last years even drearier.” This isn’t callousness or delusive optimism but, rather, a rebellion against the suffocating expectation that the elderly have foreclosed the possibility of joy."

She was still writing when she was in her nineties.   I hope I'm dead by the time I am ninety.

 

Only in winter

 

"There is a privacy about winter which no other season gives you … Only in winter…can you have longer, quiet stretches when you can savor belonging to yourself."

-  Ruth Stout,  How to Have a Green Thumb without an Aching Back

 

 

The Freedom of the Moon

by Robert Frost

I've tried the new moon tilted in the air

Above a hazy tree-and-farmhouse cluster

As you might try a jewel in your hair.

I've tried it fine with little breadth of luster,

Alone, or in one ornament combining

With one first-water start almost shining.

I put it shining anywhere I please.

By walking slowly on some evening later,

I've pulled it from a crate of crooked trees,

And brought it over glossy water, greater,

And dropped it in, and seen the image wallow,

The colour run, all sorts of wonder follow.

 

The Dream of February

BY JOHN HAINES

 

         I

In the moonlight,

in the heavy snow,

I was hunting along

the sunken road

and heard behind me

the quiet step

and smothered whimper

of something following . . .

 

Ah, tree of panic

I climbed

to escape the night,

as the furry body glided

beneath, lynx with  

steady gaze, and began

the slow ascent.

 

         II

And dark blue foxes

climbed beside me with

famished eyes that  

glowed in the shadows;

 

I stabbed with

a sharpened stick until

one lay across

the path with entrails

spilled, and

the others melted away.

 

The dead fox

moved again, his jaws

released the

sound of speech.

 

         III

Slowly I toiled

up the rotting stairs

to the cemetery

where my mother lay buried,

 

to find the open grave

with the coffin

tilted beside it,

and something spilled

from the bottom—

 

a whiteness that flowed

on the ground

and froze into mist that

enveloped the world.

“The Dream of February.” Copyright © 1993 by John Haines. Reprinted from The Owl in the Mask of the Dreamer with the permission of Graywolf Press, Saint Paul, Minnesota.

Source: The Owl in the Mask of the Dreamer: Collected Poems (Graywolf Press, 1993)

Gardening in January...and February

 

In January and in February it begins with a dream.  These grey days I look out at my garden and imagine all the activity going on under the leaf litter and cluttered sticks and twigs. Struggling right now with my desire to "leave the leaves" and follow the guidelines for "overwintering habitat" from the Xerces Society, and clean up some of the messiness.  My faithful friend Micah, the grounds guy in charge of the courtyard, is pushing for a cleanup. My other faithful friend, Sister Mary Jo, is urging me ( and him) to leave everything until the temperatures reach the fifties .

January got away from me, not because I was particularly busy, but because my mind was occupied with worrying over a situation in our house.  With one of the sisters who lives here, and who is having some serious physical and mental problems involving a hoarding disorder.  That's about all I can say about that in this semi-public forum.

art by Kat Fedora

Here are some wintry poems :

Winter Trees

BY WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS

All the complicated details

of the attiring and

the disattiring are completed!

A liquid moon

moves gently among

the long branches.

Thus having prepared their buds

against a sure winter

the wise trees

stand sleeping in the cold.

 

art by Olaf Ulbricht

 

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

 

art by Penny Gaj

Fairy Tale, by Miroslav Holub

He built himself a house,
                his foundations,
                his stones,
                his walls,
                his roof overhead,
                his chimney and smoke,
                his view from the window.

He made himself a garden,
                his fence,
                his thyme,
                his earthworm,
                his evening dew.

He cut out his bit of sky above.

And he wrapped the garden in the sky,
and the house in the garden
and packed the lot in a handkerchief
and went off
lone as an arctic fox
through the cold
unending
rain
into the world.

(Translated from the Czech by George Theiner, from The Rattle Bag, edited by Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes, Faber and Faber, 1972)

 

Tomorrow is FatTuesday - Mardi Gras day...

and the next day is Ash Wednesday....And  Valentines Day...

Deborah Gregg -  Valentines