18 November 2007



















Something new under construction.
I don’t know what it is yet (!) but will report back at a later date.
Meanwhile, I’m so thankful for the people in my life. I’m so thankful for you.



The man was tall, dressed in camouflage, dead ducks clutched in his fist. The bodies were plump, the feathers thick and glowing.

He and a partner had exited the pickup, were heading for the house. There was a quietness in their movement. The birds, so fresh the kill. It was only noon.

A jolt, seeing both the still fluid beauty of the birds, the recency of their death.

Perhaps the men will eat the ducks.

Perhaps the knowledge of the swamp, the sunlit clouds reflected on water, the real-ness of the ducks’ last hours will inform their eating.

The men will know where their food came from, whose hands took the ducks from flight. They will eat sacred food.

17 November 2007

Keee!...Keee!... Keee! 7 AM, there he was, up in the high branches of a pecan tree, great freckled bird missing most of his tail feathers. Tail-less red-tail. I focused the binoculars. Though his head was facing north, I could see he was angling a glance my way.

Hawks have so much carriage, so much attitude with their powerful heads and hooked beaks. They are not humble birds. I swear, this guy looked down at me with irritable disdain before he swooped low to the north out of sight. With the state of his feathers, understandable. Being caught bedraggled can foster disdain, perhaps disguising embarrassment. I was sorry to see him go. His abrupt departure seemed to stimulate a funk of many layers.

Late in the afternoon, ribbons of black ash from burning cane fields littered the air and ground. There was the man with a fistful of dead ducks. Life was curiously in the pits.

But then, dragonflies and other insects appeared overhead. Seemed to me doors were opening, things were shifting, no longer mired. I was seeing the possible as no longer impossible. (Ok-so how many people see a bunch of bugs as promising? raise your hand...)

As light dimmed to dusk, a northern harrier, handsome gray hawk, crossed the pasture and out of sight before me.

A minute passed—I really wanted to see that harrier again. He returned, without keeping me wondering, the same confident glide back.

His friendly second pass left me light of heart, with conviction in my new optimism.

(I read that the northern harrier is known as gavilon ratonero in Spanish, busard Saint-Martin in French.)

16 November 2007

The sun was rising
above the treetops.
As I circled the field this morning
again and again for warm-ups,
the lawn transformed from green to white,
the grasses coated with frost...
they crunched beneath my feet.

15 November 2007

Pine needles catch
sun’s white fire;
Pale hawk follows
white-haired man in field.

14 November 2007





Two travelers caught a ride from the airport. Three miles down, the vehicle sputtered; the driver coasted into grass on the side of the road. The car was out of gas.

As this was BC (Before Cell phones), the driver started walking to the nearest gas station for fuel.

One passenger, muttering furiously, slumped low in the back seat of the car to wait. The other passenger got out, breathed fresh air, leaned against the hood and watched passersby, some of whom smiled or waved.

Both travelers eventually arrived at their destination at the very same time.

13 November 2007





Lotsa weird stuff going on.

A striped lizard keeps appearing, parading in front of me in the house. Red leaves from Nowhere litter my path. A single azalea bloom in November-and a new brood of Carolina wrens in the garage. Three wild strawberries in the grass.

I found the 5 red leaves this morning under the oak where I practice. I looked and looked and found no source for red leaves, no source for leaves at all of their distinctive size and shape. Where did they come from?

A few years back I saw a PBS program on bowerbirds. The male bowerbird constructs elaborate architecture—fundamentally to attract mates, but it seems to go beyond that.

There are several bowerbird species—some build plain thatched nests. Some bowers are quite big if I remember correctly. Then there are the species who create colorful welcome mats, bowerbird mosaics. Intricate installations that have nothing to do with nesting. They interest me the most. The birds collect, sort and arrange small objects—sometimes bringing them in from quite a distance. Blossoms of pink or yellow. Shining insect wings. Berries and seeds.

On the program, if the narrator rearranged something, the bird would return, do a double take, and fix things back. Beetle wings HERE, thank you very much. Clearly, the bird had an idea of what he was trying to build, what he was trying to express. All of the bowers were intriguing; some were very beautiful.

Toward the end of the program, the focus was on a bowerbird species whose habitat overlapped human space. Near a school yard, one bowerbird’s construction had a section composed of broken green plastic soldiers, another of-was it bottle caps? crayons?

As with human artists, does the work at some point evolve from trying to impress potential lovers to having meaning in and of itself? Is the bower-building more about attracting, or expressing?

At the time of the program, I wondered if a blog or website wasn’t a sort of bower. A bit of color here, some insect stories there. Let’s switch to dance or poetry or astrophysics or arrowheads.

Perhaps God or the universe behaves like a bowerbird, offering this shining tidbit and that, drawing each of us forward.

If we are willing to follow.

12 November 2007

Ten little birds
with red red beaks
live in a cage
in the reception room
of the nursing home;
They twitter
welcome
to every new resident
who arrives.

11 November 2007

Sunlight filtered through pine branches and an empty bird feeder.

Because I practice martial arts in the morning, I have a friendship with dawning light. The sun’s position shifts day by day, creates pleats along the arc of a hand-held fan. The sun floats up from horizon to sky, strikes a new path in the yard.

This morning everything was achingly beautiful. I felt weak, first day out after a nasty cold, but weak felt like a good response to aching beauty so I wasn’t hard on myself. I carried my boh, had no rule but to be out there with the boh.

I rolled it around my waist.

The light shot through trees along the fenceline of the pasture, turned moisture-burdened air into pink-lit clouds rolling on the field. I heard a distant train whistle, and a blue jay squeak like an un-oiled gate. A helicopter and cars. I stood in an oak's shadow that melded seamlessly with the oak. The air had a poignant smell of brown leaves on the ground and dew on pine needles.

Nothing amazing happened in that my energy didn’t suddenly rebound. I didn't run, didn't throw the boh into the air.

To feel good and happy, though. I forget. That's the point.

10 November 2007

I told someone this month about this poem-that it was by Theodore Roethke. So wrong! Here it is, by Gerard Manley Hopkins:


Spring and Fall, to a Young Child

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

-- Gerard Manley Hopkins


By the way, when I first studied this poem in high school, I'm nearly certain that the 'e' in 'Margaret' in the first line only had an accent mark. We discussed how that little mark heightened the distinction between the child in the first line, the adult in the last.

In my brief Google research tonight, I find no sign of any accent.

09 November 2007











08 November 2007








07 November 2007



06 November 2005

06 November 2007

I returned again and again
to the one red leaf
in a sea of brown.

And, oh, a monarch’s wing-
stained glass
framed in speckled black-
lay near the rosy leaf.

And there,
a cellophane wing of a dragonfly
reflecting gray sunlight
against green grass.

(“head down, feet extended,
these sociable birds delight
in feeding aloft,
and 20 or 30 of them
wheeling overhead
can make dragonfly wings fall like confetti…
as for landing on the ground,
a star would be more likely
to fall to earth
than a Mississippi kite.”)

There are no other red leaves in the yard;
I've seen no monarchs,
no dragonflies
in this November air.
The kites have flown.

Just scattered in the grass,
like paper markers
fallen from a closed book,
reminders
of where a tale left off...




quote from
Book of North American Birds
Reader’s Digest


05 November 2007






The Shintaido bokutoh or sword is intentionally designed to be a heavy, clunky chunk of wood so that you don't take sword work lightly.

Unlike hands, or staff (boh), or walking stick (joh), the sword is by definition a weapon.

The sword is a material paradox.

A paradox on many scales:

Heal/hurt
Destruction/path clearing
Cripple/liberate
Intimacy/distance
Light/dark
Death/life
self/other
weighty/weightless
Finish/infinite

The more you know about sword, the more you know sword is unknowable.

When love guides timing and nature of the blow, I’d like to think you can cause no harm. But perhaps even then, that is not true; there’s an element of unpredictability in the sword, something precocious.

You aim at a target you see, yet strike what is unseen, with uncertain consequence.

So. Strike or sheathe?

***

My mom and I rode in an ambulance this morning, transportation to her new home at a nursing facility. I’d always imagined a quiet, well-insulated ride, but this was more like the back of a truck, noisy and drafty. In her blankets, she was strapped to a stretcher like a baby on a papoose board. She was very, very brave.

This evening I walked back and forth across the house, disassembling the hospital room we’d made out of the living room these last weeks. This house holds 47 years of her stuff: her chairs, her carpet choices and drapes, newspaper clippings and photos and dishes and laundry detergent. Stamps and paper clips. The egg ornaments she bought at one of our last shopping excursions back in March. Her enormous leather purse. All of her belongings. And today, we took her away from this, her own home. We used sound and sensitive reasoning; it's a good if not happy decision. But, oh...

04 November 2007

This popped up today on the Yahoo home page:


...Currently 997 ancient oaks stand on the 450 acres known as the "beating heart of the forest," Banton said. About 450 are still living, and of those, 250 are good shape, while the other 200 are particularly vulnerable. The remainder are standing deadwood, still valuable to the forest because of the life they support.

Each oak has its own management plan and some even have names, like Medusa, Stumpy and Twister. Rangers monitor them closely, watching for branches that look droopy or stressed, anxious to ensure that each tree lives as long as possible, said Paul Cook, a senior ranger.

"Every time I come up here I think, 'Has that one gotten slightly lower?'" Cook said, looking at one aging oak. "It is a shock every time one comes down."

Ancient oaks survive about 900 years, of which 300 years are spent growing and 300 dying. Of the seven trees already lost this year, four were felled by high winds on one February night.

With fallen trees go the mostly unique kinds of beetles, moths and bats that live in them.

"It's the hidden side of Sherwood — everyone knows about the amazing trees, but they're not aware of life it supports," Banton said. "They're not all cute and fluffy, but they have just as an important role to play."

The oaks and wildlife will become more vulnerable as long as they remain isolated from the rest of the forest, Brady said. The rescue plan would focus on planting 250,000 trees to knit the parts of the forest back together...

from
Robin Hood's Forest is in Trouble
By KATE SCHUMAN, Associated Press Writer
Sun Nov 4, 2:34 PM ET

03 November 2007





The truth is
I’ve been running away
from writing about the trees-

three tall graceful giants,
the great broad oak-

so brave
all week standing there
without their limbs

today
workers came with their chain saws
and mercifully finished the job.

There are plenty of other trees-
I know-
and the road widening-
36 years overdue!

This week,
I'd acknowledged the casualties,
moved forward,
focused on the living-

such beauty to enjoy
these cool fall mornings
sun lighting the woods in
orange and rose-

but really
the truth is
the kids at 'Mini Me'
some certain squirrels,
birds, bugs and spiders,
and me-
I do care
about those particular trees…







02 November 2007





I simply believe that there's a very organic, immeasureable consciousness of which we're a part...I believe this consciousness is so unimaginably calibrated in its sensitivity that not one leaf falls in the deepest of forests on the darkest of nights unnoticed.

Now, given the immensity of this immeasureable power that I'm talking about, and given its pervasiveness through the universe (extending from distant galaxies to the tip of my nose), I choose not to engage in what I consider to be the useless effort of giving it a name, and by naming it, suggesting that I in any way understand it, though I'm enriched by the language and imagery of traditional Christianity and old island culture. Many of my fellow human beings do give it a name, and do purport to understand it in a more precise way than I would ever attempt. I just give it respect, and I think of it as living in me as well as everywhere else.

The grand consciousness I perceive allows me great breadth and scope of choices...This means that the responsibility for me rests with me...

Sidney Poitier
The Measure of a Man: A spiritual autobiography

01 November 2007

...or standing on the rocks by the sea and fishing with a piece of thread and a straight pin I'd bent into a hook. I did all those things, and it was fun, because on such an island poverty wasn't the depressing, soul-destroying force that it can be under other conditions.

But the special beauty of Cat Island wasn't just what we had; it was also what we didn't have...I was lucky...I didn't have to digest television...I didn't even have to deal with the myriad stimulations that come from the presence of mechanized vehicles. No one on the island had so much as a car or a motorboat...

In the kind of place where I grew up, what's coming at you is the sound of the sea and the smell of the wind and your mama's voice and the voice of your dad and the craziness of your brothers and sisters--and that's it...

What occurs when something goes wrong is that someone reaches out, someone soothes, someone protects. And as the people around you talk, you begin to recognize things that are carried on the voice. Words and behavior begin to spell out something to you. All those subtleties are what's going on with you, and that's all that's going on with you, day in and day out.

Sidney Poitier
The Measure of a Man: A spiritual autobiography