Morning Poem # 1

I open the corral gate to a new day andthe white pony of hope gallops out long legged.

Both of us are throwing back our heads, pressing our knees to the mud, praising the sun.

But shadows grow long, and the sickle of sorrow makes the grass lie down. Things are never what we expect.

Already you can see the buzzards circling. The colt’s rib bones, like twelve new moons, make white silhouettes against the greening grass.

** Add the link to your morning poem from today below.

"Think In Ways You've Never Thought Before"

I went to hear Robert Bly speak tonight, and felt, after listening to him read in his Minnesota accent, from his newest collection of poems, utterly vibrant. It was a little like touching the glass on an observation beehive, where the warmth from the thousand beating wings transfers instantly into the palm of your hand. Like that: warmth saturating my being, making me huger for more than I already have---more words, more knowledge, more courage, more poems.

He said: “I asked William Stafford ‘how can you write a poem every morning?’ and Bill said, ‘Just lower your standards.’”

Then he said: “Start with anything—whatever happens, and write one every day.”

My favorite poem he read tonight was this one, from his book titled Morning Poems.

Things to Think Think in ways you've never thought before. If the phone rings, think of it as carrying a message Larger than anything you've ever heard, Vaster than a hundred lines of Yeats.

Think that someone may bring a bear to your door, Maybe wounded and deranged; or think that a moose Has risen out of the lake, and he's carrying on his antlers A child of your own whom you've never seen.

When someone knocks on the door, think that he's about To give you something large: tell you you're forgiven, Or that it's not necessary to work all the time, or that it's Been decided that if you lie down no one will die.

** I’m making this my challenge for the rest of September. A morning poem every day. Some morsel that reaches out and touches wonder. Some collection of scraps that, when gathered together, contains the beautiful remnants of a day.

“You can say anything in language.” He said, daring us to try.

Care to join me?

5 good things

A recent painting (that I made for DH’s birthday). What do you think?

A three mile run tonight with DH along the muddy road. Rain falling softly. Leaves the color of ocher and rose drifting earthward. Cattle, with their ruddy brown fur and white bellies all facing the same way, grazing in knee high grass. The creek, a ribbon of indigo with cattails up to my waist.

Thai food, the three of us out on an impromptu date, at a tiny restaurant near here. The chalky sweetness of traditional Thai iced tea. Moo Ping. Tom Kha. Bean using a grown up fork to shovel fried rice into his mouth (his overall bib pocket was full too!) The leisure of sitting back, aimless conversation, and no clean up.

Ben & Jerry’s and a the latest Project Runway on Tivo.

And rocking Bean to sleep in the dark, his heart against mine. There is nothing sweeter in the whole world.

What are yours?

Riding the waves

It’s so funny hanging out with six year olds all day. We read a book about spiders and learn that the babies fly away on silken threads soon after they are hatched.

“Cool,” one little boy says. “It would be SO FUN to fly away and not have any parents. We could do ANYTHING.”

“Like what?” I want to know. Watching a grin spread wide across his freckled face.

“Like STAY UP ALL NIGHT!” he says emphatically, waving his arms about at the possibility.

The magic of that idealized independence hovers in the air.

“Yeah, and we could eat candy for every single meal,” another boy chimes in.

I remember that time, before grown up. That time when days sometimes felt like years. When yesterday was so far off it hardly mattered. Now grown-upness saturates the air around me like a heady perfume: replacing the oxygyn of whimsy with the dioxide of worry.

Maybe I’ve been feeling this now more than ever because death has pressed close up against the periphery of my life, or maybe it is simply because I’m in my late twenties—and this is the time when most young people invariably start feeling old.

Talking with my sister on the phone the other night, we agreed, when we were eighteen we knew it all. At least that’s how it felt for me. I was at the top of my game at eighteen: ballsy, headstrong, self confidant, and completely invincible. I wrote reams of poetry, jotted pensive philosophical notes in the margins of my books, read Shakespeare and Whitman, and regularly skinny dipped in the ocean. I knew everything then. I’d take up conversation with anyone. No argument was too complex, no social challenge too awkward. I attempted almost anything: rock climbing 1000 feet above the Mediterranean, sleeping with men I barely knew, volunteering in an HIV positive community in Harlem, jumping from fifty feet into an abandoned marble quarry filled with still green water. I had nothing to loose.

Now, ten years later, I am humbled. My heart each day feels the breathless immense weight of Love. Now there is everything to loose.

It seems like instead of seeking challenge like I did then, challenge finds me. The sum of my experiences, like a few small crusts of bread in my pockets, do nothing to feed the hunger of the beasts I now face. Over and over I find my words come up short; my hands empty. Then it was all about pushing the envelope: how wild could I be?

Now it is about other, fiercer, more tender things.

Navigating the terrain of love, seven years in (this month, our anniversary); making new meaning in the context of near death; finding words to express even a small sliver of the immense protective love that comes with motherhood.

I wouldn’t go back. I love the challenge of now: the tender grace of meeting someone’s needs unconditionally, the fierce affection that comes with having woken up day after day after day next to the same man, or the ease that comes with starting out again, for the fifth year, with a class of children. But some days, especially the long ones, when my heart feels worn and scattered like a handful of sea glass, I get nostalgic for that time before DH, before Bean, before a career. It would be nice now and again to feel that rock-solid certainty that comes with inexperience.

Stumbling towards normal

A beautiful weekend of good food (made by DH!) and good company. Late nights, zinfandel wine, walks with the Bean in the red wagon, and a harvest moon. The first crisp days of fall--where the light is rosey on the mountains and the air cold in the shade. This morning the first frost in the darker parts of the woods.

My heart is still aching though, despite the goodness of the past few days. The vast realization of ten hour days away from my sweet boy makes me breathless driving home from work, just as his day is winding down. I'm still stumbling towards the center of a normal routine from somewhere far out on the periphery where things are spinning far too fast.

I know I'll get my stride again, but the learning curve sucks. You know?

TGIF

My Image upload plugin still doesn't work. I have so many pictures and art to share, but it will all have to wait until later in the weekend when I can devote time to such things. I stumbled through the past two days quite well. I was asleep last night by 9:30, utterly exhausted. Tonight, not much better, but my students had a solid first two days and Bean and I had a wonderful early evening hiking the perimeter of our land: watching monarchs, picking crabapples, eating the last wild black berries, checking out frogs, and pointing at crickets. So good to spend some quality one-on-one time with the little guy, who by the way, is growing SO FAST. I have so many funny Bean stories to tell, but, like the art/photos, they are pushed to the back burner until I've had oh, twelve hours of sleep and a stack of pancakes. :)

Incoherent

Feeling wiped out tonight after a ten hour day, and an open house. Freshly sharpened pencils. Smiling until my cheeks ache. Wishing I’d stopped at Starbucks for an iced latte. Trying to make every parent feel like I will be teaching for their child alone. The past few days have been rocky, not because of the work-related stuff, but because some days are just like that. Everything comes out edgewise and sharp, without meaning to. My foot has spent its time permanently lodged in my mouth. My skin is breaking out, and shopping over the weekend I was devastated to discover that the eighties are entirely BAAACK and I want to gag. I thought the trends were dumb in the eighties: legwarmers, frumpy ankle boots, and, dear god, skinny jeans, which look terrible on everyone except maybe Kate Moss. Really, why did that decade have to come up in the fashion rolodex THIS YEAR? I have enough to worry about right now. Buying jeans should not be a distressing pastime. All I can do is pray the whole pegged jeans look is not about to be revived.

So yeah, a rocky couple of days. Bad fashion. My image upload plugin isn’t working properly, I apparently have lost all tact when it comes to saying things to DH, and it’s his birthday this Thursday and I’m a little bit bummed about that because it’s the first day of school and I hate not being able to devote more time and energy to him. If it’s not raining we do have a fun evening planned though: a hike up to the lean-to at the top of a hill to build a fire, drink hot coffee from a thermos, and check out stars through his telescope. If it does rain, I’m screwed. I am bad about having a working Plan B. I wing things. Probably to much for my own good.

I guess I’m just way outside my comfort zone right now: in limbo, waiting for the routine of work to kick in. Making this huge transition on top of the post-traumatic stress of the incident at work has resulted in me gaining probably five pounds too, and that really doesn’t help perk me up. The only thing to redeem all this is that my best friend is coming for the weekend, and she always hits me like an extra-bright sunbeam. Love her. There will also be pedicures involved. So there is a light at the end of the proverbial tunnel (though as she puts it, sometimes that light is an oncoming train—ha!)

What type of person are you? Do you plan things out or wing them? Are you more spontaneous or predictable? What makes you feel like your outside your comfort zone?

The ecology of resilience

Like a dislocated limb being reset, it was almost easy to slip back to where we were. A little pain for sure, but the ingrained rhythms of preparation (making charts, sorting crayons) quickly resumed its drumbeat in my heart. Everything had been put back, repaired, restored. Outside, kids and parents came en masse to weed and landscape; to plant trees and put up bird houses. The front doors were painted a bright new blue. And tonight, the community will gather again to hold hands all the way around the school.

This is the ecology of resilience. To choose not to be defined by tragedy, and to bend instead like a new sapling, toward the green sap of hope.

Tonight

Today I feel the earth has tilted on its axis farther from the sun. The air tonight is cold, and the earliest of the maples are vermillion on the hillside. Monarch butterflies have been everywhere in the past few days. They fly in their delicate aimless way from flower to stem along the roadside, and I wince as one hits my bike tire. It’s beautiful wings falter, but it’s no use stopping. It is not like a bird, whose body in shock can be revived with the shelter of warm hands.

In the flats below our house the mountain rises up from the wide field of grass like an elephant on bended knee, purple in the late afternoon sun. We make a fire after dinner, and sit in the quiet of early evening listening to the last of the crickets and the crackle of burning wood. The first frosts will be here in a week, and then the nights grow silent. The fire licks logs, and quickly turns the wood to pale ash. A snake, curled in a flat crevice of rock awakens with the heat, and glides from its hiding place, tonguing the smoky air. Above us, the moon is exactly half full, tangled in the leaves of a maple tree, and across the field our cat, a streak of orange and white, pounces on a mole.

When the sky turns from cerulean to indigo, we pour water on the fire and go indoors. In place of smoke, steam rises up. Tomorrow we go back. Back to the place where havoc happened and everything that mattered most was encapsulated in each pure second of staying alive. Tomorrow we go back to where we were before tragedy scraped across the surface of our souls. Back to where we were standing before the gun shots and the breaking glass: near the sink cutting paper. The new geranium in the bright sunlight on the windowsill had already dropped its first petals on the floor.

Yesterday I went with others to see the colleague I had been standing with who was injured. Just out of the hospital, her face was radiant with smiles. In place of guilt, she offered up forgiveness, easy and immediate, despite the fact that we all heard her cries but couldn’t come. Didn’t. Because we placed our own lives first. Self preservation lurching up in our throats, a part of the hardwired code being human, followed immediately by the bitter taste of regret. Seeing her was good. It gave me room to breathe again, room in my heart to stop replaying every broken moment, and to move instead towards preparation. And seeing her also made me think of this again: forgiveness is an act of love.

Night fills the bowl of day. The window becomes a mirror.

Self Portrait Tuesday: The enclosed space of sadness

Saturday Notebook

The autumnal bird migrations have begun, and last night we watched them fly across the golden sky, each bird a small winged fleck of gratitude. I am alive. Yet my heart aches at the loss, and at the wonderment of my own self preservation. Like Penelope, I keep returning to the spool of memory, unraveling each moment of terror again and again. The mistaken stitches of “what if” tangle the tapestry of these moments.

I breathe. I sleep. I carry the loss of life and injury in a fragile compartment next to my heart, each moment grateful, each moment heartbroken. And then I remember to be right here.

No farther than this moment with birds spiraling up into the evening sky. No farther than their flight of air and feathers, silhouettes against the bright balloons of hedonists, drinking the good beauty of the day drawing to a close.

Then I breathe again. I breath in air sweet with drying hay, and leaves turning hue. Again I am learning how to bow at the alter of the moment. Again I am learning that now is all I have.

Friday Notebook

Know this: Your life is precious. YOU are precious. Carry the gift of your life in both your hands with utter awe and gratitude. Everything can turn in a moment. Everything.

I'm sorry I can't write more--I'm not sure about this medium of blog when it comes to matters of deep crisis and privacy, but I also love the community I've found here and need to share some small image of what has taken place in my life in the past few days. Those of you who know me well will probably understand this post. Those who do not, should read it simply as a reminder. Live your life fully. Love yourself and your family. Be grateful for every single day.

Edited to add: Thank you for all your concerned emails. I am okay and my family is okay, for which I am deeply grateful. I was in shooting at the school where I work, and not all of my colleagues are okay.

Wednesday Notebook

Have you ever felt like your heart is outside you, irretrievably scattered like the thousand small pieces in some jigsaw puzzle without a box?

Was it like this? Coming home after hours (like decades) away, and your little one doesn't want to accept your hug, and then calls for Daddy when you're putting him to bed.

Tell me, have you ever felt this fragility, this quaking tenderness, this dislocation?

Tuesday Notebook

Here is the whole two-page spread.

Monday notebook page

Seeking solace in paint. After hours of in-service on literacy, I long for the opposite of words. Pure color, images rife with the meaning of heart. Feeling a little dislocated coming home at five, to have my little boy nestle in the curve of my neck for the first time all day. Everything is in a state of flux. Transition, chaotic and inexplicable. This week instead of writing, I think I'm just going to post whatever image I create in my notebook. Not sure where this will lead, but it's what I'm pulled toward doing right now.

Splash

I'm feeling a lot better today and so is mr. grumpy Bean. A lot of routines to get used to around here right now; a lot of splashing (or mucking) about as the case may be, until things smooth out & we all get used to me working again.

weekend amusement:: edited to add--it was a really crappy day

This. I've always sucked when it comes to popularity contests. A haircut at Aveda. A whole hour of time to ponder my reflection was apparently not what I needed today. My stylist wore shiny black knee high boots and a black dress with several buckles and studs. Also not quite what I envisioned.

Shopping. Without 18 month old company. DH and Bean ended up joining me for lunch. Bean was a grump, and DH ordered pancakes which suddenly made my avocado and melted cheddar openface seem just exactly what I was not in the mood for. I hate ordering something, and ending up wanting something else entirely.

Flowers & chocolate yesterday for no reason from DH. Still really nice.

And a breve latte. For some asinine reason, I got a pomegranate frappucino instead. And then spilled it on my favorite shirt.

No complaints.Somehow I vastly overestimated the potential for today. It was overcast and humid. Ocassionally it would rain lightly and it felt exactly like being spit on. Bean is getting what appears to be a final set of four molar-ish teeth and he's a disaster. Whiny, clingy, needy, and honestly, totally irritating. When he was in my arms he wanted Daddy. When he was in DH's arms he wanted Mommy, when he was at the table he wanted down, and when he was down, he wanted up. He put a bowl full of shells behind the couch; pulled the cat's tail while the poor guy was coughing up a hairball, and is now throwing a bedtime fit, and I'm really entirely sick of hearing him whine. Grrr.

Oh, and apparently I have autumn allergies.

1.5 years old

Dear Bean, I come home after being away from you for hours, and gather you up into my arms. Your hair smells like wild grasses and sun. Your feet are bare; knees scuffed from climbing rocks and logs. On your collar, the crumbs from the small lemon vanilla cookies you ate by the fistful. Daddy tells me you finished the entire box on your way home from the grocery store, and you look pleased.

This is what you are like now: always hungry—devouring two eggs and toast at one setting for breakfast, and then coming back for melon and yogurt a little later on. We get glimpses of the future you: a lanky teenager, eating the refrigerator empty in one go. And like that boy you’ll be, you’re skinny now too. All lean muscle, with a little round belly leading the way.

I skipped last month’s letter, and in the turning of that calendar page, you were weaned and never looked back. I can’t believe it was only two months since stopped nursing. I can hardly remember the way you were then, still linked to me by those moments of sustenance, because the you of this moment occupies my mind so boldly. You are a whirlwind of running feet; a sky full of wild grins, a pocket full of mischief.

You are becoming yourself every single day, and watching you I long for that kind dynamic growth: to wake up each day open to learning things abundantly.

Every morning you are fresh to plunge in again. Always, you want to name your world. You open your eyes, then point. Door, window, kitty, Daddy, water, Mama. I hardly can imagine what it must be like to jump like that; to submerge oneself into the rich variety of experience, from the moment of waking, onwards.

My first thoughts rarely have to do with embracing the day. For me, it’s more about prolonging sleep, then coffee, then a list of obligations. It’s as though because I am ‘grown up’ I’ve come to think I know the world, and have as a result, stopped loving it as much as you do. I’ve let cynicism creep in, and it fills the small chinks between wonder and exhaustion in my mind.

Being with you, I’m learning how to dive back in; to feel wholly, to awaken to the bright fullness of the moment. When we walk down the road to get the mail, I stop expecting to actually get the mail. I stop expecting anything at all, and simply follow as you lead.

We go through tall grass to a big rock. You climb it’s sloping side, and when you’re at the top you lie on your belly. We are eye level now, and for a minute we stay this way, grinning at each other, feeling the warmth that the rock has absorbed from the sun. Then you swing your body around and climb feet first down the sheer side; your toes finding small foot holds.

You grin when you land on the grass again with a small thud. Then you run back around, ready to climb again. Once is not enough. Twice is not enough. Each time you climb and slide, you soak up the experience anew with pure exuberance. Each time you come to the experience with an open heart, expecting only joy.

I breathe in deeply, and feel the heat rising through my palms resting on the rock’s smooth surface. Above us, the sky is flecked with small clouds, and the field sings with a million insects.

Summer is coming to an end, and it’s as if they know it: their treble song is louder now, merging at dusk with the staccato of the night creatures. At the edge of the field woods behind us, a few branches on a one maple tree have turned vermillion, like a single chili pepper in a vast green bowl. On the hilltops across the valley, the evening light is falling rosy on the trees.

You’ve had enough of the rock now and want me to put you up on my shoulders. When I do, you grab my cheeks and laugh. I bring your toes to my lips and kiss them, and they smell like sweet clover, and are stained green.

If you were going to daycare this fall, my heart I’m sure, would be shattering into a thousand small pieces. But instead, you will be with your Gran, who has moved down the road, and so I’m looking forward to having a new routine, to being newly challenged by work, and to the time away from you. These moments with you then, are all the sweeter. Scooping you up after hours apart, I want to drink you up.

Your Gran is always bringing us small treasures: fresh eggs from the farm where she pulls weeds; amethyst crystals; bright zinnias. And it’s been nice to have her here—nice for us to grow into a new relationship, to see each other differently, and perhaps more accurately, as we are. Someday maybe you’ll understand this. Someday, impossibly, you’ll grow up and want to be wholly separate from me.

But for now, we’re both content to be thisclose. Your nose pressed against mine, your arms wrapped around my neck.

Love, Mama

Field notes

The waist high grass bows to the mowing blades

Slack heaps trail the field like discarded snakeskins drying in the slanting summer sun.

With clear skies, the farmer spends each day on his blue tractor, turning bales.

Along the borders between fields, their round weight casts dark circles on the grass, a home beneath them now for worms and voles.

Above, the moon like a scythe hangs against the pale barn wall of heaven.

time management

Some days no chart exists to diagram all the ways each minute must be doubly spent in order to accomplish all that must be done. Today was like this: like the whir left hanging in the air a nanosecond after the hummingbird flown away; like the thrumming silence between the beats of a drum; like the tumble of mud upon rock in a landslide.

It was also Bean’s 1.5 birthday today, and he was so precious and independent and sweet, watching him nearly took my breath away at least a hundred times. He came to my classroom with me, and spent hours playing without direction or fussing: climbing chairs, investigating keyboards and reading books. Tomorrow a Bean letter for sure. Tonight, let it suffice to say that I love him exponentially each day, and that those moments with him curled against my chest, just after he’s gone to sleep, are like bright garnets in a handful of gravel.

The rest of my day was a pmsy, moody, blur of productivity. Hence the run on sentences. I’ve been meaning to post all night, but haven’t been able to dig myself out from under everything else I’ve been trying to do (I missed a call to my sister, planned my class schedule, developed literacy curriculum for the beginning of the year, and mourned the loss of Allison on Project Runway, fast-forwarded on Tivo, among other things.) I suck at time management.

Seriously, I want to know your strategies. How do you manage your time? What tools do you use? How do you plan for rest and play and productivity? How do you avoid over scheduling/exhaustion?