Moving slowly forward, I seek the beauty in each little thing.
In the words of Rainer Maria Rilke:
"The core of every core, the kernel of every kernel,
an almond! held in itself, deepening in sweetness:
all of this, everything, right up to the stars,
is the meat around your stone. Accept my bow..."
Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth. What you held in your hand, what you counted and carefully saved, all this must go so you know how desolate the landscape can be between the regions of kindness. How you ride and ride thinking the bus will never stop, the passengers eating maize and chicken will stare out the window forever. Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness, you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho lies dead by the side of the road. You must see how this could be you, how he too was someone who journeyed through the night with plans and the simple breath that kept him alive. Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. You must wake up with sorrow. You must speak to it till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows and you see the size of the cloth. Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore, only kindness that ties your shoes and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread, only kindness that raises its head from the crowd of the world to say It is I you have been looking for, and then goes with you everywhere like a shadow or a friend.
All night
the dark buds of dreams
open
richly.
In the center
of every petal
is a letter,
and you imagine
if you could only remember
and string them together
they would spell the answer.
It is a long night,
and not an easy one--
you have so many branches,
and there are diversions--
birds that come and go,
the black fox that lies down
to sleep beneath you,
the moon staring
with her bone-white eye.
Finally you have spent
all the energy you can
and you drag from the ground
the muddy skirt of your roots
and leap awake
with two or three syllables
like water in your mouth
and a sense
of loss-- a memory
not yet of a word,
certainly not yet the answer--
only how it feels
when deep in the tree
all the locks click open
and the fire surges through the wood,
and the blossoms blossom.
A friend included her list of books, which she is reading, in a letter at my request. In response, I provided a list of what captures me. Here is that excerpt, in case anything might please you too:
The way I read is perhaps odd; I tend to have a book pile and draw from it over many months. Much of it is non-fiction, so small bites work best. I usually read my fiction in gulps though. Often I hold onto them to look up bits I liked.
One, that I read years ago, came to mind: Nekropolis, by Mauren F. McHugh. This is a science fiction set in a future Morroco where people bond themselves with bio/chem tech which causes them to love and obey. Very disturbing and interesting.
I just read The Broken Earth series by a wonderful black woman author. She is found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N._K._Jemisin. Well worth looking at; she is a well-educated woman who also writes engagingly. I love her, she includes geology in an interesting way!
On my bookshelf/pile/kindle:
NON-FICTIONThe Fruitful Dakness - Joan Halifax ;auto-bio, buddhist/ tribal/ travel. wise, mythic, insightful
Art and Fear - Bayles & Orland: Observations on the perils and rewards of artmaking.
The World Without Us - Alan Weisman: scientific imagery of the word recovering when man is gone.
The Dream of the Earth - Thomas Berry: some marvelous insights into man vs earth on all levels; a Sierra Club book.
Molded in the Image of ‘changing woman’; Navaho views on the human body and personhood - Maureen Trudelle Schwartz: an anthropologist that was adopted into a home and tribe, she provides exact quotes which challenge the reader to understand a culture so close, yet so different. Really good.
From the Glittering World; A Navajo Story; Irvin Morris. This is mythology told by a contemporary Dine writer.
The Hidden Life of Trees: what they feel, how they communicate - Peter Wohlleben, great stories about tree life. Fun.
Becoming - Michelle Obama; revelations about herself and family. Just lovely.
Educated - Tara Westover. escaping via education. worthy concept.
POETRY/POETICDream Work by Mary Oliver: great poet, love her
On the Loose by Jerry and Renny Russell: a fantastic journey in 1969, by these two young men. every Pacificas Crest hiker or wilderness lover should read it. Sierra Club.
Nature - Emerson
Walking - Thoreau
Leaves of Grass- Whitman
Letters to a Young Poet - Rilke
View with a grain of sand - Wislawa Szymborska; great poems, nobel prize winner
SPIRITThe Authentic Life - Bayda: Zen, 'Skillful Means’ with the saving grace of staying with the real issue: enlightenment.
Emptiness - Guy Armstrong
Heartwood of the Bodhi Tree; Voidness - Buddhadasa Bhikku
I AM - Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
Centering in Pottery, Poetry, and the Person - M.C. Richards
FICTIONThe Overstory : Richard Powers. Coalescing short stories with a tree. Very nice. You would like it.
Terry Prachett, Neil Gaiman: basically anything they write. I like the humor and the view.
Hillerman: Leaphorn and Chee series: detectives in Navajo Land. Fun.
Any Medieval ‘who dunit’ (you can google this!)
The Broken Earth series by N.K. Jemisin: Science Fiction well done.
When the tree fell, I lost all belief, but not hope. Hope is another thing altogether and I am a relentless harborer of hope. I turned to Simone and brushed my knuckles along her shoulder. She was very still, which is not usually a good thing; her vibrance is part of her beauty. She is half a head shorter than I am and nearly as strong. I am one of the corn-fed, usually small in stature. No one in my home group was as tall as Simone, not even the adult males, and I had stood like the tallest stalk of corn over them since I was young. She is of the sea-fed and has the round solid musculature of the swimmer she is. She has never stood out in her community for anything other than the lovely qualities of grace and skill that are natural to her.
“Are you ok?” I asked her, meaning “Are we done here? Should we go?”
“Great.” She answered in a tone so deep and heavy, I thought it was not her voice I heard. Her meaning? “Will any of us ever be OK again?”
Survival is, in part, appropriate communication. Simone and I excelled at this. The tree fellers glanced at us, but made no move to drive us away. We posed no threat. They had even exchanged friendly banter with us when they arrived, not far from the place where Simone and I had made a home. They were from beyond the Wall, or beyond the Pale as my mother was wont to call it. Though my people’s hair matched the silk of the cob, our eyes were dark and our skin many shades of brown, as are the Sea-fed. The Wall folk are, however, so colorless that it made one itch. Light eyes, light hair, and skin that turned red in even the slight sunshine of winter. Even though they performed tasks that proclaimed them as strong and robust, they gave the illusion of sickness and fear. They were tender to any prick, bleeding easily, and flinched at the slightest wind ruffling the grass. I was grateful to have been ‘born to the corn’ as we call it.
I shifted my hand to take Simone’s, more to reassure myself that she would not simply attack them without warning. For this I received a wry look from a side-slited eye, but she squeezed my hand back and leaned into me, which meant “Mourning now, vengeance later. Do you think I am an idiot?” I am not an idiot, so I made not the faintest reply to this as we waited for the over-full wagon of murdered tree to depart. I know my sweet-heart well, you see, and at this moment she was as close as I had ever seen her to making a rash move.
For a thousand years, no tree had been cut. Walled or unwalled folk had honored this. If we made tools or built from wood, it was from dead wood. Even here there was a process of asking and receiving permission from the other nearby peoples, including the Wall folk. There was also a ritual for asking the tree if its fallen trunk or branch was ready for harvest. No answer was often the answer and considered affirmative, as the tree had moved on. The tree before us was still green leaved and its branches cast, cut and broken, before us on the ground. I had stood back as they worked on, so they would not see the ocean of grief as it began to fall from my eyes. Never give warning, my teacher told me; there is always time for discussion when danger is past. Any fool, even these, would know me then. We are a taciturn people.
The end had arrived for this arbor moratorium, but surely not the deeper reason. As yet mature trees were still few and far apart and the young ones were still struggling, but the struggle proved long. I never imagined that the end of this agreement would be taken up by murderers, greed mongers, and betrayers. What else could these be? Anyone could see that the results of a millennium were not yet what they should be. With an effort, I turned my back, guiding Simone with me, letting the grind of wagon wheels move away unobserved, so a backward glance would raise no suspicion.
Together, we made our way to my mother’s home: a building without a single beam. She and my father, now long passed, had built it from the humbler and stronger form; stone. Well broken and fit, it had taken them three full seasons to build. People teased them, calling it “Three-Year House”. It was round, and held a roof of weave and thatch that rested upon the craftily formed lip of a central stone chimney. The center hearth was not used in our area, but my father came from some distance away, where it was. My mother and I were shamefully willing to extol its virtues, even now. Each pie of a room entered the warm family setting directly. I hope someday to build one like it for Simone and myself.
“Korn! Simone!” my mother welcomed us with her usual joy. She named me not for the plant, but for it’s spirit, the one who saved us all.
“Hello Mother”, Simone addressed her. They love each other well and so I am twice blessed with a peaceful family.
“What has hurt you?” My mother’s sensitive wisdom is what makes her such a skilled doctor and herbalist. She is a wise woman indeed and I am proud to be her kin.
“The Wall folk have cut the linden tree.” Simone has always been able to speak with complete candor; she balances my still silence. I let them do this work now, I could not.
“No! To what end?”
“They claim the call of commerce, and the right of law.”
“They bring evil on their hearth. They will bring the results down on us all!” These two women of my life leaned in together and holding each other, wept. I had already wept my fill and felt strangely cold. I stood back.
When they stood separate again, I took their leave. “I need to walk,”I told them shortly. They both nodded and I, holding some emotion now, that I could not name, walked back to the place where an old friend had once stood. When I arrived, I could see her sap still flowed and my heart constricted. I did not feel the same uncertainty though. I had changed. The words “commerce” and “law”, spoken by my Simone, had struck it from me. These ordinary words, which should indicate healthy interaction and agreement in a community, had been twisted to hide “greed” and “aggression”. As I have told you, Simone and I excel at translation, and whatever the means to set this right, whatever the interpretations, and actions required, I had not lost courage or hope.
If you would like to stop listening to politicians without science backgrounds, and read the science, if you want to understand and make decisions on facts, try this, with interesting charts and real numbers:
“Even in the darkest of times we have the right to expect some illumination, and that such illumination may come less from theories and concepts than from the uncertain, flickering, and often weak light that some people, in their lives and works, will kindle under almost all circumstances and shed over the time-span that was given them on earth.”
Conversations With A Stone
By Wislawa Szymborska
(Nobel Prize winner 1996)
I knock at the stone's front door
"It's only me, let me come in
I want to enter your insides,
have a look around,
breathe my fill of you."
"Go away," says the stone.
"I'm shut tight.
Even if you break me to pieces,
we'll all still be closed.
You can grind us to sand,
we still won't let you in."
I knock at the stones front door.
"It's only me, let me in.
I have come out of pure curiosity.
Only life can quench it.
I mean to stroll through your palace,
then go calling on a leaf, a drop of water.
I don't have much time.
My mortality should touch you.
"I am made of stone" says the stone,
"and must therefore keep a straight face.
Go away.
I don't have the muscles to laugh."
I knock at the stones front door.
"It's only me, let me come in.
I hear you have great empty halls inside you,
unseen, their beauty in vain,
soundless, not echoing anyone's steps.
Admit you don't know them well yourself."
"Great and empty, true enough," says the stone,
"but there isn't any room.
Beautiful, perhaps, but not to the taste
of your poor senses.
You may get to know me, but you will never know me through.
My whole surface is turned toward you,
my insides turned away."
I knock at the stones front door.
"It's only me, let me come in.
I don't seek refuge for eternity.
I'm not unhappy.
I'm not homeless.
My world is worth returning to.
I'll enter and exit empty-handed.
And proof I was there
will be only words,
which no one will believe."
"You shall not enter," says the stone.
You lack the sense of taking part.
No other sense can make up for your missing sense of taking part.
Even sight heightened to become all-seeing
will do you no good with out a sense of taking part.
You shall not enter, you have only a sense of what that sense should be,
only it's seed, imagination."
I knock at stone's front door.
It's only me, let me come in.
I haven't got two thousand entries,
so let become under your roof."
"If you don't believe me," says the stone,
just ask a leaf, it will tell you the same.
Ask a drop of water, it will say what the leaf has said.
And, finally, ask a hair from your own head.
I am bursting with laughter, yes laughter, vast laughter,
although I don't know how to laugh."
I knock at the stone's door.
"It's only me, let me come in."
"I don't have a door," says the stone.
The Myth of Trees 