Tag: perspective

Information for the heart.

This gift is from a known and moving poet. Worth sharing.

(slices of sorrow beneath the moon)

How to Apologize

By Ellen Bass

Cook a large fish—choose one with many bones, a skeleton
you will need skill to expose, maybe the flying
silver carp that’s invaded the Great Lakes, tumbling
the others into oblivion. If you don’t live
near a lake, you’ll have to travel.
Walking is best and shows you mean it,
but you could take a train and let yourself
be soothed by the rocking
on the rails. It’s permitted
to receive solace for whatever you did
or didn’t do, pitiful, beautiful
human. When my mother was in the hospital,
my daughter and I had to clear out the home
she wouldn’t return to. Then she recovered
and asked, incredulous,
How could you have thrown out all my shoes?
So you’ll need a boat. You could rent or buy,
but, for the sake of repairing the world,
build your own. Thin strips
of Western red cedar are perfect,
but don’t cut a tree. There’ll be
a demolished barn or downed trunk
if you venture further.
And someone will have a mill.
And someone will loan you tools.
The perfume of sawdust and the curls
that fall from your plane
will sweeten the hours. Each night
we dream thirty-six billion dreams. In one night
we could dream back everything lost.
So grill the pale flesh.
Unharness yourself from your weary stories.
Then carry the oily, succulent fish to the one you hurt.
There is much to fear as a creature
caught in time, but this
is safe. You need no defense. This
is just another way to know
you are alive.

“How to Apologize” originally appeared in The New Yorker (March 15, 2021). 

(defense-less before the wave)

Deep Green

Diversity

Walking in a small protected forest, I constantly plunge into the dizzying effects of a landscape given freedom. There is so much to see on a small scale and so much to see looking up. So much to hear in the silence.

In reality there are probably no truly ‘old growth’ habitats left, between man and the alien creatures who follow, the balance is constantly changing. None the less I am grateful to be here now, breathing the air with them.

Braided Beauty
Native Hawaiian Raspberry (‘akala)
Lovely Leaf Litter
Guava (introduced 200 years ago)
Up
Over

Apart from Time

Eastern Sierra Nevada

Time moves easily on, but I seem to be slumped in the corner here. I have a desire to move forward and accomplish something; this is the image of me slowly hardening into the amber, caught by the golden sunlight, unaware of my demise. I am sure that a reader might find this image of my personal lithification depressing. Please don’t. I am not so outrageous in most of my life, but a little macabre imagery seems to tickle me right now. Acceptance is a gift of the spirit; it is the movement of life with recognition of its own impermanence. Sometimes it makes me sad, sometimes I look right at it and laugh out loud.

Geology has always been my stabilizing rock, so to speak. It has given me the gift of perspective. In memory, I sit on a summer warmed granite rock, in the California Sierra mountains. This is my favorite type of rock; clean, hard, light colored. It was late in the development of the hot, pressure induced, liquid batholith which it grew from; it had more time to grow those lovely large crystals. Slow cooling of the original melted rock allows larger crystals of grey quartz, and pink or white feldspar, to form in a matrix, these are cut through by dikes (imagine cracks filled with another colored material that forms a discrete and interesting line through the more uniform, larger mass, of rock). Dikes arrive from an even later melt in the batholith with even larger crystals, some with a matrix of small dark, interesting things of a different chemical composition. These huge rocks where I rest, are weathered to the size of cars, buses, and palaces; a world of their own has been smoothed to a polished shine, here and there, by tons of glacier grinding past for thousands of years. I place a hand on its surface and feel my small, and very time limited, nature. Perspective. Lovely.

Wild Wild West

Cattle Drive

This grainy old-time view is how I hope to display a world that is passing: two cowboys, a rare cowgirl, a couple of cattle dogs and a herd of 30 head. The next generation won’t see this happen. There are too many folk, too little land, too large a drive for money and power. Thus, the world changes as it always has.

Do not, please, assume I am denying change or supporting the meat industry. I am simply playing observer and noting the inevitability. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I wonder if we can play the part of guide in this process. Often the very idea of inserting myself into the maelstrom of change terrifies me. How dare I, how could I? Certainly there is very little that I know about the balance of man and nature, the balance of man and mankind. I wonder if it is simply the process of bringing authentic kindness to the process each time we move. This too terrifies me, as I am so inadequate to the task.

Hot Dusty work.

So I left the boys, girls, and dogs behind to travel another road, where my inadequacy will be forgiven, if it is ever noticed at all.

The land is dry here, the road is inches deep in the dust of a dry lake bed. The map is torn.

Perfect.

Road North

Other travelers have stopped here to discuss something, some story, some prayer. I stop and open up to what I see.

Sky, cloud, life.

Your Story

This basalt block holds the key to a mind long past. These images, tapped patiently into the rock surface, are thought to be as old as 12,000 years. I am caught by the truth that I will never know what the meaning of all this felt like for them. It is so simple to take a bit of poetry, a bit of some novel, and place myself within the perceived meaning. I realize though, that whenever I write, or read, or gaze at art, that the meaning slips here and there, never the same for artist or art gazer.

Really, this is the point. I do not wish my creations to have some kind of solid, inflexible meaning that will be prattled on about in a classroom. I want the bubble that exploded from my heart and mind to engender a bubble of yours. It is a form of touch. I reach for you and you return the gesture. There is a deep mystery in this, a beauty.

Stone Yard Biota

Here is a change of perspective. See the stone-yard biota above? This is the other side of the picture rock I just showed you. Moss and lecithin making its own lovely message heard above the roar of the universe. Here, below is hot spring biology with the same gambit.

In just such moments, it is the striving to understand that precipitates change within. There is no correct answer, there is only the quest.

Hot spring biota
Out Beyond
by Rumi
Out beyond ideas of wrong doing
and right doing,
There is a field. I will meet you there.

When the soul lies down in the grass,
The world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase
'each other'
does not make any sense.