Owls and Angels

anniversary

2010-08-14T07:06:00.001-04:00

If I were a poet, I’d write about how we—you and I—used to count our anniversaries in months, celebrating each thirty days that passed since the day we met. That first day over coffee and Rex Stout was less like meeting than like finding, and each subsequent month a kind of witness to our miracle of discovery and recognition and great good fortune. That first day, you held me for the first time, and you wrote to me, after, that holding me “felt like the future.”

Neither of us imagined how hard the road to our future would be, paved with crisis and disappointment—our good fortune seeming to fall by the wayside. And yet, you always found a way to enjoy the ride, no matter how bleak or devastating the scenery: art by crazy people, the local blues band at the local bar on icy winter nights, white pelicans on a Midwestern lake, the best roast chicken we ever had in a washed-up prairie iron town. Months, though, no longer seemed celebratory—we measured time differently, braced for the future, awaiting developments, hoping for a break. We spent our days acquiring perspective and grace and a pronounced squint, the better to recognize our good fortune when it did appear again, arriving as it has in disjointed bits and pieces.

Thousands of miles later and almost 33 months since we met, I am re-reading Rex Stout and writing to tell you that holding you feels like the future to me. Those miles and months created a forge of almost devastating intensity, into which our new relationship was thrown, carelessly, by a universe that didn’t care if we had other plans. We’ve been stressed to points that would have broken many relationships yet, this far along the road (and two years into our marriage), we are still bending: there may be stresses here, but there is also glue, and sharp eyes, and no doubts.

The Color of Cold

2009-04-07T16:01:00.002-04:00

It is the first week of April and yesterday morning was white and gray and blue and black and cold--definitively winter. Four inches of snow fell, the result of a typical winter storm that hooked up from the Rockies and pushed across the Midwest. Blizzard conditions to the west of us, heavier snow to the north and here, rain then hail then snow and more snow.

***

Spring has shown up here and there in tiny slices of warm sun, and then winter sweeps back in and takes hold. Nights below freezing. Ice on the front porch, ice on the driveway. I’ve just lived through my first Iowa winter and the memories of it are strong like the cold wind still blowing outside. It is the first week of April and I feel immersed in cold.

During these past dark months I found that the color of cold is blue, milky blue or brutally blue, depending on my mood and the temperature. On warmer days, where the morning temperature is 18 or 20 and the sun promises to come up and shine all day, on those days the world is bathed, just before dawn, in milk-white suffused with still more blue--blue shadows, blue glints across the snow, night-blue sky in the west fading to true-blue, sky blue sky in the east. On other days, colder days, when the sun doesn’t shine, the cold blue night fades to gray and the world remains black and white.

I collect the other colors of cold:

• Pearlescent ivory shimmering to lavender blue in the paint job of the old man’s Cadillac, parked outside Johnson’s Bakery in a snowstorm
• The kaleidoscope of diamonds burning across the snow in the sun
• Dull, bright, dirty, blue, orange, blinding white
• Dark blue shadows huddled in the footsteps of rabbits, squirrels, birds, me
• Brown dirty slush in the roads
• Sheets of yellow-white light blasting across snowfields at noon
• The blue and white premonition of falling white in the air just before snow starts falling
• A sunrise across a slate sky in the intense cold of dawn, navy blue then a bit brighter blue and then the colors come like cold neon flames, red and pink and orange
• The speckled breast of a hawk, ivory against the new snow
• Yellow morning moons
• One long, sunny, constant streak of lightning against white and ice

I spent my childhood waiting for bad weather. I loved rainy days and their coziness, the excitement of wind, the thrilling hope of snow. Quiet and solitary by nature, bad weather gave me an excuse to stay inside and read--or to be outside alone with the drama of the world. Every winter I hoped for snow, lots of snow. I loved to watch it fall, pile up, turn the world into a pretty and muffled place. During my Maryland childhood, snow was rare. Here in Iowa, snow is a regular event. It’s my dream of weather come true--dramatic, stunning, unpredictable, brutal, gorgeous weather.

Liking snow, and liking winter, requires a serious commitment. Most people don’t, and don’t try. Winter bestows a license to complain, to give up going out, being active, eating well. I’m an outcast: I go out daily with my dog, regardless--and I secretly like the weather. The cold is solid and dependable and there is no disappointment here--yes there will be snow, yes it will be cold. There are boundaries. We are embraced, all season, by cold and ice and light.

In the very coldest time, our holidays of light appear, Christmas and Hanukah and the solstice. Did they begin as exactly this, reminders of the light to be? Down the street the blacksmith hangs his handmade Christmas lanterns high in his trees, a makeshift heaven in the air, magical and glowing globes, boxes, pyramids, a garden of glittering delights, flashing and floating above and around us, wrapping us in fairyland. They shine like cold jewels, not themselves warm but giving the illusion and dream of warmth, warmth of spirit, warmth nearby.

***

It is the first week of April. The grass is turning green and the tulips are above ground. Slow, but as solid and dependable as the winter cold, spring is arriving. Every day, the returning light lengthens. Every day, we are embraced by birdsong at dawn, by shining constellations of tree blossoms against a warmer sky.

Cupcake Love

2009-01-26T16:16:00.004-05:00

It all started when I was six at Radford’s Baker—the sugary yeasty smell of it, the bright lights, the rows of pastries and cookies and the best-of-all cupcakes. My mother brought home doughnuts every Sunday morning. For me, she brought a cupcake.

I’m grown up now and it’s a January morning in Iowa. It’s five degrees outside but I’m warm in my dining room looking at a cupcake. Vanilla, white frosting, sprinkles.

The best cupcakes were always vanilla with white frosting and sprinkles—jimmies—the color of spring, pink and yellow and baby blue and orange. Soft, light cake. I bite and there’s the sudden gritty taste of sugar, that painful sweetness, the crunch of frosting and jimmies and underneath, lush and tender cake in my mouth. Eating cupcakes is an explosion of sweet.

Today there are a dozen cupcakes in my kitchen. My husband Josh got them at Johnson’s Bakery, a heavenly local oasis of sugar and light and cake, for a very grown up party we had last night. I made grown up desserts, rich complicated cheesecake, no-nonsense apple crisp, healthy fruit salad. We had a case of champagne and two dozen slender glass flutes to drink it from. We had 25 grown up people who ate all the cheesecake and apple crisp and who drank a lot of the wine and champagne.

In my thirties, divorced and an eternity away from Radfords and my sweet six year old self, I mostly baked my own cupcakes, a sure sign then of stress or despair. I took them to my neighbor, Denise, who had her own troubles but passed the cupcakes along to her kids. In those days, I leaned heavily towards chocolate with white frosting. I also happened to be dating a cupcake—what my friends and I called the solid, red-haired, adorable and absolutely unsuitable man I stuck with because I loved his parents and because he was, well, a cupcake. The comfort of any sort of cupcake is hard to resist.

The party cupcakes were a last-minute decision on my part. At dinner, the night before the party, I announced I’d better make some—no doubt a small sign of panic about entertaining twenty-five people as well as a sign of the usual creeping despair. Josh said no, it was easier if he went and bought some. A man who, for whatever reason, brings me cupcakes! Dreams do come true. At the party, the cupcakes perched on a fine china plate, gorgeous in their frosted finery, dolled and jimmied up, party cakes, festive dollops of sweetness.

No one wanted them.
I do.
I love them.

And so across my life cupcakes evolved into not so much a desire for their taste as a desire for the small, self-contained, intimate and immediate comfort they brought, their antidote to despair, a way back to a reinvented and eternally springtime childhood—a safe place of sweets, of anticipation, of being held in the arms of comfort. Cupcakes conjure up a sensory spectrum of memories—the hungry smell of baking, the enduring warmth of a kitchen in the winter, the velvety texture of cake, the strong, safe feeling of a man’s arms.

Cupcakes are time apart, small solaces, a sacrament of peace. Cupcakes and tea, cupcakes and hot baths, cupcakes and a good book, cupcakes and rainy afternoons and snowy nighttimes. Cupcakes are hope and prayers, comfort and love.

Yum.

thanks to jeannine marie luke for the cupcake art

Iowa

2008-07-30T16:35:00.008-04:00

I lived three years in Iowa, finishing my Bachelor's degree and getting my Master's. For much of that time I thought I was caught up in being young and not really paying attention--and yet, thinking back, walking into the delicate web of my memory, I can turn over an extraordinary amount of detail about Iowa and my time there, bits and pieces of a mosaic gleaming full and complete and in the background of my life, a richness of knowledge and habit permeating every moment I'm awake.

An oracle sent me to Iowa. Unhappy and wanting to write, I told a friend who said, "If you want to write, go to Iowa." Iowa? I didn't really even know where it was, or what connection an entire state could have to writing. Perhaps because of my complete lack of any other plan, I recognized my friend's advice for the divine intervention it was and so followed it—blindly, without a second thought. I simply applied and got accepted and packed my bags and showed up. Blind faith in a dream drove me there—it never occurred to me that I might not get in. When a TA suggested I apply for the Nonfiction Writing Program, I heard the voice of the oracle again—by then I'd learned creative nonfiction was the writing I'd always wanted to write, without ever even knowing it had a name.

In Iowa, I learned the universe supports my dreams if I have faith in it and them. I sent in my one essay and got accepted—and got an award, a scholarship, and an instructor's position. I learned I could be happy spending eight hours a day writing and researching. I learned, if I knew my subject well enough, it became magically transparent, giving me complete power over my writing—a miraculous occurrence. I learned when the lilacs bloomed all over Iowa City. I learned I did not like to do taxidermy. I learned what fairy rings are and where to find them, and where the beavers built their dams. I collected beaver sticks and found that, yes, pine trees on a windy day do sound exactly like the sea.

In Iowa, from the window of my third floor apartment, I was amazed to find I could watch, day by day, the slow transformation from winter to spring to summer through the hazy pink and red and yellow and green dappled cloud of flowering and leafing and light in the treetops. I watched the groundhog gorge himself on overripe mulberries fallen to the hot sidewalk, and the elderly Chinese man come every afternoon to pick ripe ones off the tree. I learned to love gin and tonic, learned the best thesis advisory sessions came with KFC and Coors at the Coralville Reservoir. I saw a rare and shy mink in the wild and I wrote more poetry than before or since. I spent hours driving home and back through the lion-yellow fields, windows open, warm summer air on my face—and swooped down empty streets in foggy fall sunrises, biking to my job cooking in the dorm kitchen. I read Confederacy of Dunces aloud to my long-suffering office mate and we laughed and laughed—I'm surprised he managed to get his PhD, sharing an office with me. But he was my companion for mushroom hunts and nature walks and long days of serene memories, my support as I tried to teach for the first time, my inspiration for working hard.

Lovesick boys wrote me songs in Iowa, I bought my first pottery there at an art show by the river, I ate the best cheesecake of my life, learned to poach a hundred eggs in one big pot of boiling water, to open champagne bottles, fast, one after the other, that bushes (full of a hundred sparrows) sang in the summer nights, that Alfred Hitchcock had a thing for blonds. I made my own butter, drank raw milk, got to know a herd of cows. I struggled with migraines, I delighted in hearing Galway Kinnell, I agonized over words, and reveled in the time I was given to write.

One day during my last month in Iowa I was walking to class as usual, down a pretty residential street lined with oak trees, headed towards the University Hospital where I always turned right to walk down the hill and across the river. Lilacs were blooming, I think, and all the late spring flowers. The air held the balmy clear warmth of May and the sky was blue and the entire town smelled like spring, all grass and lilacs and daffodils. I was thinking about leaving, about what I had to do before I left, when suddenly I felt an enormous sadness—a piercing sense I was leaving home. Home? I'd never felt this before. I'd never had to leave a place behind, without family to keep it anchored in my life—and I'd never before been in a place that felt like my home because I'd made it that way, because I myself had built a life there, because I knew it and loved all its familiar folds and scars and surprises and moods.

In Iowa, I learned I could write if I wanted to write. Years after I left that first time I went back, and took a workshop where I wrote more poetry and wrote more essays and learned, again, I could write if I wanted to write. Today, I sit with the hope of a way back to Iowa, to the physical place—but what I also learned in Iowa, in my memories of Iowa, is the lessons stay, the knowledge is mine, no matter where I am. I can go back any time and anywhere to the place that feels like home, where the lilacs bloom, where I know how to watch the subtle change of the seasons, where I know I can write, where I have faith in the universe and in my dreams.

Sustenance

2008-07-26T22:47:00.006-04:00

Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.

-Mary Oliver

I got back to the condo mid-afternoon and took the dog for a walk. Sultry and limp and damp, only the usual rag tag band of wildlife was braving the heat: the mourning dove cooing and hooing its misery in the far trees, the forest shrieking with cicadas, a horrid and surely errant slug sliming across the sidewalk, a muddy turtle in the road, and two frogs twanging for all the world like banjos in the mud of the sometimes-marsh.

Nighttime I went out again, still hot, the only sound distant fireworks. Nine o'clock and the light was hanging on—sky not black but a deep, shuttered blue. No stars yet but looking for them I caught movement and so caught the bats. I watched, head thrown back, neck swiveling to follow the flight, fast and chaotic—rags of brown velvet hurtling and tumbling through twilight, lapping up insects, crying into the night. Dizzy, I followed the oddly exotic scent of petunias home, Tessa herding a tiny toad around the breezeway.

I make a list of creatures in my immediate world: doves, blue jays, red shouldered hawks, ospreys, blue-tailed skinks, slugs, bats, tiny toads, spiders, box turtles, blue herons, beavers, woodpeckers, various and sundry butterflies, moths, and scuttling beetles.

Sunday morning I walk Tessa in the woods behind the high school. It's months since we've done this, too long since she (or I) has had a good run in the trees. I know we are first on the trail because I'm the one catching all the dawn spiderwebs. Mostly these are fragile, cobwebby affairs but I walk face-first into an orb spider's net that pastes its tough, sticky self across my face and hair. The web crackles as I pull it off me, and I wait for the feeling of spider legs scrambling down my neck or along my arm. As I untangle, I hear the sharp wail of a hawk in the tree above me and watch as he flies, startled, down to the creek, startling in turn two great blue herons who fumble their way upstream. I feel badly about destroying the web—its only sustenance we're all after this early morning—fish for the herons, mice for the hawk, bugs for the spider, a taste of wildness for Tessa, distance and solitude for me.

The creek is lovely, all blue ripples and green reeds and water plants. A woodpecker blunders through the branches then continues his loud breakfast excavations. A beaver makes a great splash in the shallows and a striking black and yellow box turtle scoots to one side to let my running dog pass by. Tiny pure white mushrooms looking dipped in confectioner's sugar cling to the clay banks. Here there is nothing, and here there is everything. Nothing of the burdens and laments and chores and people of everyday life, and everything of the miraculous we so rarely notice. That astonishing life rumbles on, regardless—the importance of finding food, of surviving flood and heat, of flying and eating and singing and weaving. To dive into it—to allow the dog and I each the freedom from our daily restrictions—seems imperative. I remember a few years ago I was working on a book and found, surprisingly, I required miles of long walking to allow my ordinary thoughts to subside and my writing thoughts, sometimes as fragile as morning cobwebs, to show up.

Perhaps, I tell myself, I need to begin again—to walk, often, in the hot and empty woods, to walk into this wild life, to let it paste itself across my face and insinuate itself into my heart and soul. Perhaps this is what, in the end, sustains us.

Back to Basics: Living from the Heart

2008-06-27T07:10:00.003-04:00

My accountant says he is trying to "live more from the heart." My therapist, just last night, encouraged me to drop my awareness, and my breath, from my intellect down to my heart. "You'll feel a physical shift," he told me.

I live so exclusively in the confused and hectic world of my head that I'm not sure I can find my way out. The same folks who built Caesar's Palace designed my brain--it's easy to find the slot machines but the exit? Sit back, relax, gamble some more. You'll never get out of here.

My external life right now contains ONLY uncertainty. Oh I suppose I do know the sun will rise tomorrow, but that really is the extent of it. Where I'll be, where Josh will be, where we'll be working, where we'll live--none of that can be answered. And may not be, until the very last possible moment before it all starts to happen. My brain, poor literal creature that it is, tries to handle all this chaos by taking control of anything it can get its grubby little grip on. When this doesn't work, it commands me to stop doing everything and sit and wait and re-read old mystery novels until clarity arrives. When this doesn't happen, it amuses itself by making elaborate plans that attempt to cover every possible contingency--and then tries to force others to agree to them.

My heart is silent.

It occurs to me that "living from the heart" has to be more basic than living from the brain. The heart feels things, mostly--it doesn't think them to death. The heart opens, the heart responds, the heart cares.

Josh is applying for jobs in other places and I'm trying to evaluate and analyze each new place that comes up, trying to figure out if I can be happy there. This is a purely intellectual exercise based on a few chat rooms about a particular town and some cryptic charts and graphs and Google maps. It's all the input I've got right now. Yet, the spirit of a place is what matters--but how do you know what that is? How do you get at that, tease it out, look it over, turn it over in your hands?

So I made a list. My list won't be your list. It won't be anybody's list. It's my list of basic, heart-felt life necessities that I think any place I live must have: owls, trees, trails through the woods, independent bookstores, funky coffee shops, a good farmer's market, a source of great cupcakes, a house we can afford, water, wildlife, a place to write, some other people who also write, seasons, places to kayak, the possibility of work, a yard for Tessa, a room with a view, somewhere to get good beer.

***

Now it's tomorrow. The sun has risen again, life has gone on, and I've re-read what I've written. How ridiculous I am! Once again, I've really only completed an intellectual exercise. My list is meaningless--does it matter to my heart if there are flamingos rather than owls? Not really. And as for wanting some certainty in my life, well, no one in this world has external certainty, not really, not with the proverbial bus idling just around the corner waiting to run us down.

I see that I must throw out my list and let go, somehow and finally, of the intellectual craving for certainty in my life, the sort involving stuff and plans and dates and moving boxes and owls. At least, I need to take as many small steps as I can towards realizing that ALL the certainty I will ever have in my life I have right at this moment, because the only certainty we do have does come from the heart--and that is the certainty of our connections with one another. This is the certainty I have right now: the love of my family, my friends, my dog, and the incredible love and support Josh gives me. Living from the heart--it seems the beauty of it is portable, independent of place and time and circumstance. What does it matter where I am? What sort of birds call outside my window? I wake up in the morning, I see the sun has come up once again, and I fall into my place in the world surrounded by those who love me, and by those whom I love.

for Josh

2008-04-28T10:18:00.005-04:00

I live now on even bigger water--the Chesapeake Bay itself--and from our back deck I can watch all manner of things on and around it: islands and ospreys, motorboats and sailboats, shorebirds and common blackbirds, the water itself. Improbably smooth this particular sunset, calm as a salt flat but with the lovely muted pastels of a winter Monet--soft pinks, whites, creams, mint greens--a bride's colors. Stark contrast to the bare rough wood of docks and piers, the shouts from the bar just up the road, the dingy grackle nest-building on the roof next door, the high pitched call of an osprey on its nest, nervous about me and my dog.

Sunset--the sun leaves from behind me, away from the bay, the dwindling light dulling the eastern sky to a wooly pinkish gray. This was the first real day of sun warm enough for basking, and I did--trying to bake sickness and stress out of body and soul. "You're detoxifying your soul" is how it was put to me recently, what I am going through--the "what" being almost every change you can imagine.

Change is of course inevitable--the fish happily and dumbly swimming in its fishy life until the very moment it becomes the osprey's lunch. A woman living a solitary and unheedingly lonely life until, all of an afternoon, she meets the man she'll be living with four months later--and knows she'll still be with thirty years after that. It happens. If we're lucky, we're given, unlike the fish, time to adjust.

So this deck is now "our" deck, this view of the water "our" view. My conviction that relationships do, indeed, happen this way had faded over the years but never really vanished--vanquished, I am still astounded by the conviction that this particular partnership is so deeply and profoundly the right one. Conviction isn't quite the word--there was no sudden revelation, no fall down the rabbit hole--what began as, we both thought, a promising friendship turned within days into the sense of something larger and, after a first meeting, slipped comfortably into forever. "Do you know what this feels like to me?" he asked as he hugged me that first time, that first afternoon. "This feels like the future." I have never been held so gently and yet so tenaciously. He's not let go yet.

The sun is gone now, dipped below the marsh to the back of me, where the frogs call on warmer evenings. The pink cottony haze in the east has slipped into the water, staining it a slippery mother-of-pearl. The eastern shore is a smudged gray pencil line that may really be the edge of the world. The moon brightens, the redwings sing for their mates, the motorcycles thunder down route 261 to the bars. I sit on my new deck with my dog, adjusting my view of the world, and looking east into all the mornings of my future.

initiation

2007-10-19T08:22:00.000-04:00

I am learning to swim.

Except I think my body already knows. It’s the oddest feeling, one of the oddest I’ve ever had.

Let me explain.

For reasons too tedious to go into, I don’t like putting my face in the water but I love to swim. How do I do it? My ex husband taught me, 23 years ago now, to do a basic lifesaving stroke. It’s a bit like being an enormous frog—but between that and back stroke and simply keeping my head out of the water whatever I’m doing I’ve swum an awful lot over the past twenty years. I like it—it makes me feel as no other exercise does.

Let me explain, too, that for most of my life people have assumed I’m a swimmer. They take one look at my broad shoulders and exclaim it—as if swimming grew shoulders and not the other way around. And I guess I am a swimmer, of sorts. I’ve swum at all times of day or night—in empty pools, hot pools, fast pools, crowded pools, pools where they forget to turn on the lights. I’ve swum in pools outside in winter in Colorado, with steam rising off the water and snow falling on me and the water warm as a bath. I’ve swum where the Dallas Cowboys train (and learned what “fast pool” means). I’ve not swum in the ocean, much, or in lakes—and I swim not just for exercise but to hatch myself out of myself, to enter an entirely new place.

People complain about swimming. It’s too much trouble—changing, getting wet, showering, changing again—but all that’s the part that captivates me. It’s an initiation. A transformation. An entering. Sometimes swimming for me is difficult, if I’ve not done it in a long time and I’m out of shape, if I’m swimming next to a triathlete who’s been freestyling through the water for an hour already, if I’m feeling particularly embarrassed about my enormous frog stroke. When I’m out of shape I give myself a certain amount of time in the water—and the promise simply to move in it for that long, without stopping. Swimming for me comes back quickly—in a week I can double my time, in a month I can swim for an hour.

And each time, no matter what, the transformation. I change. I relax. The water, the movement, the exertion, the struggle all feel natural. Despite my awkwardness, I feel at home.

But still I am embarrassed. I don’t feel that my swimming is real swimming, and that is what I wish I could do: the forward crawl, freestyle, that on-your-belly graceful sleek cut-through-the-water stroke that everyone—except me and the old ladies—seems born knowing.

I am learning to swim.

I’ve had two lessons with Beth, my instructor. Beth is positive and happy and a mom, and unlike some previous instructors who treat me like glass seems instead to intuit an inner toughness and pushes me accordingly. Did I mention I’ve had two lessons? Within the first thirty minutes of the first lesson, I was swimming freestyle.

Not breathing well and panicking a lot but, still. Swimming.

The funny thing is, I’ve never done it and yet I knew how. Beth tells me to get in the water and swim freestyle without breathing for as far as I can and when I come up, three quarters of the pool later, I feel glorious. I feel transported. I feel fast and streamlined and sexy and long and strong as if I’m possessed by something that knows how to fly. Beth is amazed. She tells me I’m perfect—my stroke, my kick, my form. She tells me I’m fast, clearly without even trying to be fast. She tells me I have great lung capacity. She tells me that I already know the hard strokes people struggle with—my enormous frog turns out to be an almost-perfect breast stroke, my back stroke is wonderful. I have good upper body strength and a strong pull. She tells me that once I get comfortable breathing there’ll be no stopping me.

No stopping me? What do I do with this? I am far too used to my limitations. Far too comfortable with not knowing how. When I get good at things I run from them—this blog, people, places, jobs. But I’m coming to realize that maybe there are some things that I can’t escape. That are, instead, built into my bones and etched into my soul, that come from some other place. Inborn, inescapable things: the gift of writing, the gift of getting along, the gift of sensitivity, the gift of understanding dogs, the gift of my smile—and now, the gift of swimming.

I’ve been cataloging gifts the universe has given me. This week, I can see a little bit the gifts I send out into the world. That are inevitable parts of me. That are the pieces of who I am. My knowledge of them feels clumsy, the controls and filters are unfamiliar, they tumble out into the open and expose me.

My world is transformed.

I am swimming.

gifts

2007-09-11T21:55:00.000-04:00

Bizarre doings down at the dock today. The water was high, dark and murky, and in it I saw a big group of something—aquatic critters—swimming in a tight, frantic circle, around and around like you see sardines doing in those TV shows about the ocean. At first I thought—ridiculously—they were squid, then maybe fat enormous tadpoles, nine or so inches long—but every so often one would veer off sideways, its flank flashing gold in the gloomy sunlight, advertising itself as “fish.”

***

Yesterday, a friend and strategy consultant met me for a personal session to help me focus my business. What he taught me went far beyond that; what he gave me is an enormous gift. It was one of those spectacular occasions when I learned things that shifted my perspective and thinking entirely, opening new pathways and possibilities, nudging me into epiphanies and insights. He fed me full of sparkly, alluring, solid ideas, ones I don’t yet fully understand—but with which I’m already making my own tangential explorations and connections.

I’m left exhausted and fairly delirious.

Today I’ve simply been quivering. Finally I took myself and the dog for a walk in the gray, damp cool of the afternoon. Humidity slapped us around pretty thoroughly. The woods were quiet and wet, green and brown and yellow with early-turning leaves. And at the dock I saw this frantic school of insane fish, swimming in their frenetic circles.

Nature mirroring my own mind.

***

I think these fish are Atlantic menhaden—sort of like herrings—“the breadbasket of the Chesapeake Bay.” They are, apparently, devoured and relished by everything, sharks and osprey and humans.

I watched the circling for a while. It was like an object itself, not individual fish but one large seething mandala of scales and cold flesh. When the school swam too far down in the dark depths sometimes all I could see were flashes of individual fish and wrinkles on the water. Like messages from the darkness, really. Or the occasional coherent thought. Or the flash of insight when you suddenly know the thing that you feel is right, socketing into the place it belongs in your heart and mind.

We walk home through the dim woods, watching the darkness collect in the undergrowth. I am on the edge of a bigger way of living and feeling, the dog is chasing rabbits, and the summer is dying. Startling gold leaves flash in the gloom. Nature is steadfast and determined and inexorable. On a daily basis, unless you remember to look closely, she seems unchanged--it is only over the course of weeks or months that you notice asters beginning to bloom, red leaves skimming the creek, nuthatches flying south, ospreys leaving. This seasonal time is unerring, ceaseless, flowing like water gently wearing down the year. And, if I try very hard to let go, I can step into this current of long time and feel it press me down into its longer view, a more fluid connection with what I know and what I learn.

I had no knowledge of the menhaden until I saw them today. Yet now they and their frantic silver circling and flashy schooling are a permanent part of my woods and creek.

***

Menhaden return, seasonally, to the ocean to breed. At night I will lie in bed and wonder where they are, what they are doing, out in the depths of the bay. I will imagine their tight circle unraveling, untying, and their silvery watery slipperiness streaming back into the bay’s saltiness and from there back to the ocean. And I will be soothed by knowing they are simply there, doing what they do, making my own world deeper and richer.

The gifts my friend gave me yesterday are most valuable because of the giving—making them now mine to ponder and study and absorb into my own way of being and living. And so, as I fall into sleep, I will also imagine all my new, shiny nourishing epiphanies slowing and slipping and streaming away with the fish, falling into their own seasonal cycling of breeding and feeding in the ocean of heart and soul. And I will be soothed by knowing they are simply there, doing what they do, making my own world deeper and richer.

wings

2007-08-26T11:47:00.000-04:00

I have a bathtub—large. It is next to a window. Outside my window this evening---the dusky blue of twilight, the vegetable silhouette of an oak, an insistent bird, calling in the darkness.

I am held by the web of the world.

Outside my front door, as the darkness comes to its whistle, the winged creatures begin to arrive.

I want to tell you about a winged creature I lived with once. His name was Marty. Marty was a screech owl, injured somehow and now missing a wing. He could never again live in the wild, and the group I volunteered with was rehabilitating him to use in educational programs. This meant he needed to get used to people and to being handled---he needed to get as domesticated as a wild raptor ever can get. So for a summer, Marty lived in our house.

Marty was tiny, as screech owls are—only eight or nine inches tall. He puffed himself up like a small melon when he was defensive but he seemed to prefer making himself tall and lean and whippy instead, like a thin lead pipe, and glaring at us out of slitty yellow eyes. During the day he stayed on his perch in the living room and at night he slept in the basement. He would clutch his perch with one talon and his dinner in the other---a dead half rat, or a frozen mouse, that we brought him from the freezer.

At night, alone in the basement, Marty would call. His tremulous, wavering notes would find their echoing way up through the air conditioning vents and into my room. To my twenty-year-old mind he sounded unceasingly lonely, a proud, vigilant, dangerous bird whose life had fallen into chaos and confusion.

I’m not sure he ever got used to people.

***
I am late finishing this—it has been a difficult week. I’ve thought quite a bit about Marty, about his lovely and mournful calls in the night, about how the loss of his wing meant that he could never again survive in his native habitat. Was he lucky that we’d found him and saved him from death by coyote or fox? Or would he rather not have had to adjust to the impossible panic of a human world?

More importantly, is there something that we as humans have inside us that is as important, as irrevocable, as wings?

***

Watch any winged creature—its envied flight, its seeming joy at being airborne, its graceful dance along thermals, through woodlands, over the tops of meadows, windborne and free. We’ve wanted to fly since we could scratch our desires onto the walls of caves—and we do, to some extent—we can mimic the sense of freedom and space that birds, bats, butterflies, insects all must experience. And yet we are fine without wings, where winged creatures are dependent upon theirs. Can any of them survive flightless? I cannot think of one…

And so—the wing. What is our wing? What part of us, if removed, would banish us from the world as we know it?

As I said, it has been a difficult week. I’ve been thrown into a cauldron of fear and stress, a place where I can barely breathe, a debilitating and lonely place. The cupped hands of the world’s web seem far away now and I can’t see a clear path back to any sort of peace. I send out a call for help, as best I can, I call my troubles out into the world—and back into this dark place come an army of people with axes, helping to chop holes in the barricades to let the light in. My best friend, though far away and going through her own ordeal, listens to all my rantings and fears and offers unconditional support and encouragement. A new-found artist friend and her husband offer to drive over if things get bad. Neighbors call to see how I’m doing. A friend (and ex-boyfriend) calls for the same reason, entertaining me with recipes and movie reviews. My spiritual director sends me the wisdom of the ages and irreverent limericks. A lovely man in the park talked to me about ospreys. My parents offered advice and came over to hang out a while. Countless others hand me their own experiences, their own brand of comfort, outpourings of more support than I could have even imagined. It was all a lifeline, meant to lift me out of this place of fear. It was, I realized, my human version of wings.

***
We are social creatures. While plenty of us in this world live lonely lives, how many of us can imagine living cut off from all love and friendship? Without the support of some human contact? Without the ability to hold out a hand and have it held—somehow—in return? It takes so little, I find. No dramatic rescues, no overwhelming gestures—just the simple gift of response—of someone being there.

At night, when the darkness closes in, when the moths and bats come out, when the owls start to call, I think again of Marty. And I hope that in some owl-ish way his calls into the darkness were answered, that he was in some small measure comforted, as mine were and as I was.

Thanks to everyone for the wings.

jenny wren

2007-08-17T20:59:00.001-04:00

I am studying birdsong.

Walking in the evenings I pass an apple tree, which often bursts into song as I approach. I’ve heard birdsong described before as “liquid” and that, I now know, is because it is often the only word possible to describe the sense of the sound in the air. It is like being in water, where all is flowing circles and curves, where all is continuous movement, where that pouring slow wave of sound has an organic, sensuous, rounded crest and the trickles and gurgles and races of it fill the air like bell-notes without the clamor and hard edges of metal. Think of a sweet cake batter, so smooth it shines, being poured from bowl to pan—think of heavy cream rippling sinuously into a basin. This birdsong is like that—the individual notes eliding one into the next so there is never quite complete silence between them, the individual notes sounding round and full and big in the heavy summer evening air, yet not heavy—they rise, not fall—they float, round, through the dusk.

Each night I look in vain for the singer. It is as if the tree itself is singing to us as we walk by, Tessa and I. I hear the droning percussive voices of insects in the grass, the occasional out-of-tune-banjo twang of frogs in the pond across the way, other birds calling in the stand of trees just across the clearing. But nearest me, and sweetest, is this amazing evening song.

Tonight—with some patience and luck—I did see the singer. I have been looking, I realize, for a large bird—thinking that such a full and voluptuous song must come from a large throat, something sturdy and heavy on the branch. But what I saw was the merest handful of feathers and beating heart and bright eyes—brown, almost dull—a wisping flitting fast moving house wren, who came down out of her tree to show herself on the white board fence before flying off into the hedgerow.

A wren. I was so pleased to have put a name to this voice, to have grown that tiny much more familiar with my world, to be able to wake, or sleep, hearing that liquid song and know who is singing. And I am pleased, too, for the reminder that it is the size of the spirit that determines the size of the song and that the body has nothing whatsoever to do with it—that spirit cannot be measured by any yardstick of earth, by material lengths and weights, but is rather tallied up in some heavenly way. Much the same way water is able to outlast and outwear the hardest of any stone, the spirit must have its own rules of shape and size. I am reminded to listen to its message before, or instead of, wrapping it up in my own preconceived and mismanaged notions of body.

..........................

Birdsong, for me, is like poetry, I cherish both but can memorize neither. Even the simplest songs I hear over and over escape me. I try to fix them in my mind, I hurry home to my birdsong tapes, and inevitably I find they are gone—and the song I heard could be all, or none. But birdsong, all the same, structures a piece of whom I am, orients me somehow on this planet. For five years I lived in Colorado. While I didn’t much like that time, I never really thought about the birds except to notice they have magpies there, as they do in England, and that always struck me as odd (I’d not had a particularly good time in England, either, for quite similar reasons when you boiled it all down). When I moved back east, where I’d grown up, it was under a cloud of frantic desperation: I literally fled the west back to familiar territory, back to family, putting as much distance as I could between myself and where I’d been. A geographic solution, if there ever was one.

I found comfort back east in a way I’d never thought to look for it. I moved in early March. It was snowing in Colorado that afternoon I drove out of town—and wet and chilly the midday I drove into Virginia. I moved into an apartment, I organized my stuff, I started walking Tessa around the neighborhood. Oddly, and almost immediately, I felt on these walks some very inner, essential core of my being relaxing, unwinding, settling. I puzzled over this feeling, not knowing it. And then the azaleas began to bloom and I heard a mockingbird sing and I knew. It was the birds—the birds, and the timing of the birds, and the blooming of the azaleas. I was immersed again in the outdoor cycle of my childhood, my first and lasting experiences of my wild backyard. So when the daffodils came out before the tulips—when the azaleas bloomed after the dogwood—I knew what came next—I knew what birds sang when, right through the entire gorgeous blossoming of the year. In Colorado, I had no history, no knowing. My history back east was different, something my cells had memorized down the years. This cycle felt right to me, felt like mine. I may not know all their songs—I may look in vain for the singers when I hear them—but their songs are as much a part of me as the sound of the blood in my veins, my own heartbeat, the rhythm of my breath. Their songs are the framework on which I hang my life, my seasons, by which I can tell whether or not I’m home.

rediscovering water

2007-08-10T22:07:00.000-04:00

My dog and I are rediscovering water.

When I moved here in mid-June this meant walking each morning and evening down to our community dock to watch the creek and the birds that lived there and—for my dog Tessa—to “manage” the fish that jumped when the evenings were flat and still and lovely. It meant seeing the crowds of frogs that came out after dark and hopped in the grass near the warm pavement. It meant throwing open my bedroom windows on the cool nights to hear these frogs calling through the darkness, five or seven or ten different voices and the deep lunk-lunk of the bullfrog behind them, lulling me to sleep.

Now it’s August. Cicadas droning in the trees by day have replaced the night frogs. We’ve a serious drought and the frog marsh is almost dry—apart from an occasional nocturnal or early morning toad, I don’t see frogs anymore. We still walk to the creek, Tessa and I, which has a sort of floating scum on it on calm days—most days now are calm—and all the water seems to reside in the air itself, as temperatures race headlong into the high 90s and the humidity follows close behind. Our walks pull the water out of the air into my tee shirt, and pull some kind of restlessness out from inside my belly. It’s hard to find equanimity, much less serenity—it is hard to be outside at all.

And yet, if one has a dog, one must venture out. And so we do, several times a day. We try to get out early in the morning, and we try to get to the creek, though the walk takes us through the most humid piece of land around, the mulch path to and through the woods. (Mornings, something like a hundred thousand spiders drape their webs across the path. I tell myself that, surely, spiderweb is good for one's complexion…?)

This afternoon the skies got dark and the wind came up and we had a few minutes of light rain. When the dog and I went to the creek the path through the woods was cool and watersplashed and lovely. Diana butterflies floated in the aisles and speckled sunlight. We walked out of the coolness and down the dock to sit on the bench there, back in the baking sun, in the dazzling late afternoon glare of August. In my head were emails I had to write and copy that was overdue and new clients I had to manage. But I sat on that creek and I closed my eyes and I let the sun beat down on me and some of that clamor faded. And as the clamor fades the birdsong comes up, two separate volume controls going in different directions. I thought suddenly about angels and about how nice it’d be to share this particular piece of afternoon.

The man walked out of the woods then and down the dock and sat on the end of it, swinging his legs over the water. He wore green nylon running shorts and hiking boots—that’s all—black hair, light eyes, a smile. I’ve seen him before, twice, both times by water. Once he was sitting, weaving something out of grass, and once he was coming out of the weeds by the water's edge, perhaps out of the creek itself. Perhaps, I thought, he is an angel. My dog went over to lie next to him. The sun kept beating and the tide kept turning and we watched four ospreys for a while, circling way up in the sky and calling to one another in their high, sweet, wild voices. “Can you feel it?” the angel-man asked me then. “Can you just feel the energy coming up off this water?” He held his palms out over it. I looked away from him, downstream. I looked at the flow of the water down and out to the bay and sea, at the flow of the tide coming up toward us, at the ripples of wind across the skin of the creek. I felt as if the entire earth was shifting and the creek was the only solid piece of ground. I felt the heaviness of the day fall apart and the energy of the water come up to meet me in a volume of birdsong and wind, trees creaking and fish splashing, throwing themselves in the air like silver medallions, flashing in the sun.

Tessa and I walked back slowly through the cool trees and along the hot path where the trumpet vine blooms orange-red and blue and black dragonflies dart and hover. Somewhere behind us the creek rests in its shifting impermanence—and I realize I have anchored myself to this water as firmly as I’ve attached myself to anything on this earth.