How It Is

It seemed long past quitting time, but I was finishing a piece of glass, buffing out the residue left by the oils post-firing, when I noticed that the colors on the glass were the same colors as the sunset: payne's grey, yellow ochre, turquoise blue.

Art imitates life.
Life imitates art.

Or, rather:
art is life.
Life is art.

And people, that is how it is.

Myths, Chickens, Alarm

My son recently turned me on to Joseph Campbell, the American mythologist, writer and lecturer, so one day this week, when we were sitting around the big table painting, we listened to some of "The Power of Myth", with Bill Moyers. (Highly recommended.) It's deeply affirming, powerfully moving stuff —and I'm still in the early stages of digesting it, so I won't venture to comment much yet. But in the midst of the second episode, we were interrupted by two men picking up a large shipment of work for the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art gift shop, and one of them began a story of their most recent house-sitting adventure, which I'll write here in my own words:

"There were goats and chickens on the property that we had to take care of, and the owners said that we needn't do much with the chickens, just throw them some food every day, because they were old chickens and long past laying. 

Well, chickens were new to me, so I decided to see just what they were about. I swept up their sawdust every day and sprinkled new sawdust. I brought fresh water and food, and just hung out with them at least once a day. 

And I began to cluck, you know, those little buck buck buck sounds. And they began to talk back to me. It was really sweet! They were kind of a kick. I really liked them.

And guess what — they began to lay again. Eggs! We had fresh eggs from those old hens who supposedly were done with their laying days."

Well, of course I couldn't help but tie this in to what we'd been listening to — the serendipity of this man walking into our afternoon with his unassuming story of the traveler who appears one day and changes the shape of things, who performs miracles, a kind of refigured loaves-and-fishes tale. Our very own living myth-maker, our teller of parables.

These were the gifts of the week — Joseph Campbell, and then the interlude of the chicken story.

Outside of this, the week was swirled in a kind of chaos — our show materials shipment arrived back home from the east coast, three pallets full,  and as it was unpacked, I had to examine and polish each piece and then repack in new configurations, to go to the photographer. (Hundreds of pieces.) Shipping materials everywhere, and we work in a small space. And glass being sand-blasted, painted, fired. Orders going off to all corners.

We're also sifting through legal issues and fallout concerning last summer's glass-smashing, as well as recent events (of which I won't write here). Issues of security and law-breaking, of locks and keys, and violation. We've been on the cliff-edge of alarm.

I'd much rather spend my days contemplating things like this:


"Eternity isn’t some later time. Eternity isn’t even a long time. Eternity has nothing to do with time. Eternity is that dimension of here and now that all thinking in temporal terms cuts off. And if you don’t get it here, you won’t get it anywhere. The problem with heaven is that you will be having such a good time there, you won’t even think of eternity. You’ll just have this unending delight in the beatific vision of God. But the experience of eternity right here and now, in all things, whether thought of as good or as evil, is the function of life."    —Joseph Campbell

That about sums it up.

I went to the altar of poetry, lit up with love.

Last night, as I drove to my weekly open-mic (as close to a notion of "church" as I'll get), my headlights lit the road brightly before me, and yet there was a less discernible glow coming from mysef as well.

I'd asked one of my sons if he'd replace a burned-out headlight bulb, and he not only did it, but taught my other son ( who is not quite the handy-man type) how to do it as well. And that made me beam, a bit, the notion of my path being lit by a collaboration of my sons.

And yes, the poet in me wants to haul out all the metaphors for a mother lighting the way for her children, but I'll refrain. Yes, as mothers we do that, instinctually. Not necessarily as instinctual for one's offspring to pay back the favor. Hoped for, yes, but not expected.

It was a small thing, but made all the more meaningful upon my return, close to midnight, driving the mostly-unlit lake route back to my house.

So lucky to have two sons!

Left Out —

The James Fenimore Cooper volume, abandoned to the elements —

Made blurry not only by the trick of a filter, but by the persistent rain loosening the ink on the decades-old pages —

And a red wagon —

I walked around the winter garden this afternoon just as a new storm was moving in, taking stock. I repaired the fence with bits of wire and hung up a bird feeder blown down in a voluminous wind. Snowdrops were up, pushed through the autumn leafage.

Afterwards, I came in to see this short film, making the rounds on facebook. If you've yet to see it, it's worth the four minutes of your time. How massive is our footprint in comparison to a population of deer in Yellowstone, and how profound the impact has been on the entire ecology in that patch of earth just by a shift in the numbers of a single species.

More, Please

Mysterious.....

This package arrived on the back porch at work yesterday, addressed to the boss, who was on her way home from NYC —

We were intrigued by the customs declaration that it was a toy, and that the value was $4000. What the heck? Just what has she been up to?

I texted her the first two photos shown here, and got my answer:

Neither toy, not $4000, but our favorite candy, the milky caramelly "8.2", shipped via Amazon Prime, from Japan. I'm guessing that it was a drone delivery, from across the great wide Pacific.

Waning Winter

There's light now at 5pm, and I know it happens every year and every year it seems like a bit of a miracle or a large part of a miracle or even an entire miracle unto itself. The return of the light, and 5pm is one of those pivotal times, a shift from day into evening, a letting-go of the workday and letting oneself into the last interval of aliveness in a single day.

Every year I wait for it and every year it surprises me, like there's a small part of me that doesn't believe it's going to happen, that maybe we'll be forever plunged into short days and interminable nights.

O lordy this is getting to sound grim.
Best to end here.

January: the month of disinspiration, if that's a word. The fact of the calendar marching quickly away from January all week has been enough to elevate my spirits.

I didn't go to New York — an unexpected onslaught of wholesale orders required whip-cracking on the homefront, so my boss flew off to Super Bowl Central alone, and I'm entirely fine with all of it.

There's a bouquet of roses on my kitchen table left over from my November birthday. Completely dried, they are the most exquisite "rose" color, a red-going-to-pink, but not quite. An undecided red, a decidedly-not pink.

Ah, color. (It exists for me somewhere on a piece of glass between where the eye meets it and where the light comes through from behind — liminal, nowhere, everywhere, shifting.)

Recumbent —

I'm Listening....

I was in that place, last night, that place between being awake and being fully asleep when dream images flash across the semi-lucid landscape of the mind at an alarming speed, and suddenly there was my mother rising up from her chair, looking at me straight-on and smiling, and saying, T., I have something to tell you —! And I yanked myself out from that not-dream, that not-yet-sleep and sat up fully awake, fully lucid and said What? What do you want to say? I'm listening!

Self as Stranger

One day a month now, the fourth Monday, to be exact, I wake with a sense of rumbling anxiety, that old nearly-extinct shyness trying to creep back in. And to remember that I've brought this on myself serves no good purpose. So I roll from my bed and move forward into the day, knowing that at 8pm that night, I'll stand in front of a group of various and assorted poets, musicians and Columbia City bar trolls, microphone turned on, and start up my monthly open mic.

Actually, the moment I walk into the bar, I slip easily into the persona. It seems like a bit of specious magic, but it works, so I don't question it. Last night I lugged-in parts of the sound system, and enlisted a few men to deal with the heavier pieces of equipment. One even cheerfully volunteered to crawl under the pinball machine to plug in the extension cord. (A man-servant is a useful thing.) Once everything was appropriately electrified, the house music killed, I tested the mic with a hello howdy and we were ready to roll.

Host! (Does anyone still use the word hostess?!) I'm the confident one with the clipboard (with the Rosellini for Governor! sticker on the back — he who was last governor in Washington state in 1965) who circulates from table to table signing people up. I'm the person who introduces each poet and musician, who makes small talk at the mic before the intermission, the person who starts the whole thing up again after intermission. I'm the person circulating about the room, making certain to have a friendly word with everyone who's come out for the evening. I'm the person who, while packing up the equipment, makes an effort to thank each and every person as they head out the door, knowing always there will be one or two I'll miss.

And finally, I'm the person hunkered down in the corner booth at the end of the evening with the last few straggler-poet-musicians, unwinding our stories and laughing at as many things as possible, our drinks diminished to a few clinks of ice, Phil the bartender behind the counter calculating the tabs.

I'll leave The Hummingbird Saloon close to midnight, in a state of weary elation for the undeniable fun it all was among these friends who are the best of the best, and, once in bed, wonder who that woman was who got up in front of all those people in a bar — a bar, for god's sake — and pulled it together.

No reason, except.....

....sometimes a lace dress embedded in red leaves is the only thing that relieves winter.

The Years Settle In....

Odd cranial rumblings, remembering the many dreams where my dead husband returns without explanation, five, or six, or seven years later, solemn and silent, wanting back in. And my utter disbelief, relief, consternation. The chaos of it all, the impossible undoing of too many things now too deeply entrenched to undo.

And an even odder realization that I wrote a poem about these dreams thirty years ago, many years before I knew the reason for writing it. I went back to it tonight and it made sense, finally, that poem. It's the dream alright, with broken glass and a leaky roof and the return of a silent character —

"....dark collar turned against the night."

 A bitter irony:  the title is "Grown Old".

Something wrong in the order of things.

Things That Are Holy

So many, in the woods today, as I walked along paths strew with lichen and branches blown down in recent storms....

More fern than tree —

Talisman on the path —

Decaying chunk wreathed in bright fallen branches —

Mossy notch high in a maple —

 And then perhaps less than holy, on my front porch, the ruined remains of a dead pumpkin ravaged by squirrels in search of the cache of seeds within. Less holy, yes, but no less fascinating in the cycle of life. Instead of having to look deeper for evidence of life now that we're entrenched in winter here, my post-holiday sloth has allowed a colorful front porch view in pithy glowing oranges, all the slippery slumping slime of it on display. (The neighbors already know I'm nuts.)

I can't help but think of pie.

!00% of Full

I was walking up a hill last night in the dark — hemmed in by laurel and photinia hedges, by hundred-year-old houses — and was met at the top by the moon, our illuminated dream-keeper and insomniac companion, our endlessly romanticized satellite rising full blaze above the Cascade Mountains and stunning me breathless, stumbling me with astonished wonder.

What we're really seeing is a massive heart of liquid iron encased in an olio of minerals: feldspar,  olivine, pyroxene, limenite. Back this mess of minerals up 238,900 miles, shine a light on it, et voilà: our grand dame of nocturnal beauty.

Of course, I didn't consider the lunar mineral content until today, when I decided I wanted to write more than just:

 O behold! 

photo by David Hutchinson

The latent scientist in me does battle with the poet, every day.

Midnight Janitors

An ex-lover bought my ex-husband's house. And invited me over, to help him do dishes. And I was barefoot.

This didn't really happen, of course, except when I was deep in a rapid-eye-movement slumber. According  Maria Konnikova, in the NYTimes (read the complete article here), As your body sleeps, your brain is quite actively playing the part of mental janitor: It’s clearing out all of the junk that has accumulated as a result of your daily thinking.

In this particularly unsettling dream/nightmare,  I can't help but wonder just what, upstairs, was getting scoured.

And now a glorious dawn sun has penetrated the omnipresent mist; and while I feel illuminated, in a bodily sense, my nighttime subconscious rompings have left my awake self feeling quite less than illuminated, and more than a bit betrayed by the midnight janitors of the brain.

Sly Little Arrows

Since the turn of the year, I've begun a practice of listening, intently, to not only the many words from the tongues of friends and strangers, but also to the voice of the wind in the Douglas fir outside my bedroom window, to the scrape of the hydrangea on the siding, to the silence of the cat entering my room, to the ongoing ticks and sighs of my house that become so apparent in the dark. There is content everywhere, interwoven with connections, and sly little arrows that point the way.

Fran Leibowitz once said, "There is talking, and there is waiting to talk." I'm waiting longer, these days, letting the space between words, between phrases, take its own shape — space that isn't force-filled with more words. My habit of many years has been one of talk and wit and quips and laughs — it's not so easy letting go of some of that. But something is coming into focus, in those gaps — hazy still, amorphous, indefinite. Patience is my ally, as well as the challenge.

And, well, it's January.
It's winter.
Interminably grey.

---

 The Layers

I have walked through many lives,

some of them my own,

and I am not who I was,

though some principle of being

abides, from which I struggle

not to stray.

When I look behind,

as I am compelled to look

before I can gather strength

to proceed on my journey,

I see the milestones dwindling

toward the horizon

and the slow fires trailing

from the abandoned camp-sites,

over which scavenger angels

wheel on heavy wings.

Oh, I have made myself a tribe

out of my true affections,

and my tribe is scattered!

How shall the heart be reconciled

to its feast of losses?

In a rising wind

the manic dust of my friends,

those who fell along the way,

bitterly stings my face.

Yet I turn, I turn,

exulting somewhat,

with my will intact to go

wherever I need to go,

and every stone on the road

precious to me.

In my darkest night,

when the moon was covered

and I roamed through wreckage,

a nimbus-clouded voice

directed me:

“Live in the layers,

not on the litter.”

Though I lack the art

to decipher it,

no doubt the next chapter

in my book of transformations

is already written.

I am not done with my changes.

--Stanley Kunitz

Meh

Winter.

Every word I type feels spun-dry of intention, of inspiration.

The cats have it right: sleep.

Reports of the Aurora Borealis visible tonight from around these parts, but I'll have to go with imagination only, as we're socked-in up to the eyelids with cloudcloudcloud. The Borealis is on my  list of Things To Do in this lifetime, assuming, of course, that this is all we get. But what if we get more? What if this is just the prelude, the preparation? Not one to give in to Christian notions of an everlasting afterlife, this seems, of course, preposterous. But what if something else exists,  something that requires a vocabulary, a type of "seeing" that we are as yet unable to comprehend?

Oh, these Friday night ramblings will only get me into trouble. Better to shut this whole thing down and go to bed, let the subconscious do its uncensored ruminations.

'Nite, then.

A multitude of mushrooms....

....and a secret passage to the center of the earth.

Unexpected

Chapter subheadings from A Pet Book for Boys and Girls, 1949:

A Skunk As A Pet
A Pet Skunk's Diet
How To Pick Up A Skunk
When A Skunk Needs A Manicure

And also:
Pet Alligators
Quarters For A Baby Alligator
Food For A Young Alligator

All of this useful information for all of you, of course.