Hi again, after a long holiday weekend!  Hope you all are getting whatever mix of rest and activity you wish for or need.  After some good time with family and friends the last few days, I think rest is what I’m needing most.

As the year draws to a close, Bob has invited everyone to a retrospection party.  You post your favorite entries (from your own blog) of the last year, and then he posts everyone’s lists over here.  A really nice way to get to the heart of quite a few blogs/souls.  Here’s my RSVP.  Wanna come too?

1.      The Two of Us

2.      Thinking

3.      Tiny Teacher

4.      Pass the Potatoes

5.      Faces of God

It’s been a rainy week around here, dark and wet.  I mananged to get in two morning walks, and on the first one, these liquid amber fruits caught my eye.  The rain had knocked down tons of them, and I found myself returning there, with my camera, with this phrase in my head:  Which one are you?

I’m not sure how to answer that–what each one might symbolize.  But in the midst of all my busyness this week, I’m sitting with the question.

How about you?  Which one are you?…and why?

Baby’s sleeping.  It’s morning.  The sun has pushed past the complex next door, making the condensation on our windows glow.  Diffused, it spills onto our table, over papers, photographs, receipts, laptop, the bowl filled with shiny red balls.  There’s a blanket on the ground that N must have used in the night, studying there for the final he now takes.

I hear the fridge, the whistle of a train, someone raking and the drone of blowers in the distance.  Books I’ve wanted to read are next to me.  My journal.  Empty cups and the camera, still stuck with the chord that makes its goods transferable. 

And the baby stirs.

This week I move between first gear and overdrive, humming along with tasks, with my writing, with making a household run, and then slowing way down, yearning for something (for what?), wanting to feel more, to attend.  These paragraphs about what’s here, what’s now, in front of my face, are attempts at this attending.  At noticing, and being still enough to feel what it’s like to be in this place, surrounded by these things.  Not ever in another, more inattentive, space.

Steam from the dryer below billows up behind my glowing panes.  Naked tulip branches hold it, the steam, and then let it slip through.  Maybe I’m a branch here, too, naked, as ultimately we all are, holding these moments before they disappear.  Holding them and saying, “you are,” and “you are here,” before they waft into the sky.

I just met a great lady this week, and think you all ought to go check out her new blog, Chameleon Chronicles.  Her theme will be spirituality, and it looks like gender/feminist issues will get their time there as well.  I’m looking forward to reading more! 

Welcome to the blogosphere, Tess!

Elijah, 3 months

I love this little creature.  I love him with a love that’s new and ancient.  It makes me want to laugh and cry.

From Tonya
(By the way, if you haven’t already checked it out, this post at Tonya’s site is just so worth reading, particularly if you’re a woman, and have any role to play in planning womanly rites of passage)

Seven things to do before I die:

1.  Publish books
2.  Build a writing/art studio from scratch
3.  Learn to play the cello
4.  Eat a prickly pear
5.  Become a speaker who speaks on soulful things
6.  Take painting lessons
7.  Be gentle with myself at least 95% of the time

Seven things I cannot do:

1.  Finish every book I start
2.  Stop checking the weather page
3.  Appreciate leaf blowers
4.  Not feel, at some deep level, like I’ve done something wrong
5.  Ballet
6.  Watch close-up violence on movies or tv
7.  Stop trying to understand

Seven things that attract me to someone that I love [husband, in this case]

1.  His kindness/sensitivity
2.  His sharp mind
3.  His ambition
4.  His ability to listen
5.  His ability to track conversations well
6.  His chocolate eyes
7.  His sense of humor

Seven things I say most often:

1.  Geez!
2.  Can I eat the rest of this?
3.  Nice work! (to baby, about bodily functions)
4.  Hi!  Yes, hi! (again, to baby)
5.  You’re cruising (as in, for a bruising)
6.  Good morning
7.  Mind if I finish this?

Seven books (or series) I love:

1.  Deep River (endo)
2.  Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (pirsig)
3.  Brothers Karamozov (dostoyevsky)
4.  Everything Belongs (rohr)
5.  Secret Life of Bees (kidd)
6.  Most things by Joseph Campbell
7.  My Name is Asher Leve (potok)

Seven movies I would watch over and over again:

1.  Good Will Hunting
2.  Matrix
3.  Cry the Beloved Country
4.  I Heart Huckabees
5.  Princess Bride
6.  Sound of Music
7.  I can’t think of any more

Seven bloggers to tag:

Considering how few of these memes I can comfortably complete, I think I’ll just give an open invitation:  any of you who would like to do this one, do it!  Let me know so I can enjoy!

This morning I wandered through a cathedral.  Worship was going on in parts of it, but not all.

I wandered through, looking up at the infinite, vaulted ceiling, around at the artwork, the icons.  I saw the most gorgeous web, and gave thanks.  Leaves of all colors.  I noticed how cold the place had become, how I could see my breath.  The sun making eddies of light. 

I noticed worshippers asleep, awake, wandering with purpose, without it.  Mostly they were few.  Later in the day there would be more of them.  More of them visible.

And there was music.  Ancient tunes.  Later would be modern stuff with it, but now it was only the ancient choir, robed in leaves, feathers, furs.  And me.  My feet, my breath joined their refrain:  “Glory!” (a wordless translation of that).  “Glory!”

Quietly (from where I was) priests presided.  Priests preaching and praying and calling to worship.  Calling the faithful toward powers and gods (only some of them religious).  I hoped I could hear the ones calling toward Life.

The sanctuary began to warm, and I too, wandering, listening, glorying, giving thanks.  Parts of it stayed cold; parts of it were filled with horrors unspeakable, souls starved and turned inward, walls crumbled and painted with signs only youth can understand.  But where I was, the view from where I wandered, filled me up with holy.  It filled me up and sent me home in wonder, a more beautiful, more centered soul.

Last night we bundled Elijah up and headed downtown for the Holiday Stroll.  This is an event where shops are open later than usual and food booths dot street corners and musicians of all kinds fill nooks and plazas.  Lots of strollers and men with babies wriggling in front packs and lovers and friends of all ages on up through retirement.

Highlights:

Roasted chestnuts!  We waited in line at the only booth we could find while costumed vendors checked and rechecked and shuffled piles of them roasting on portable barbeques.  Every once in a while an older lady with a couple of teeth missing I think, and who was also costumed, and tending to a young child that might have belonged to the checkers and shufflers, burst into chorus, singing, loudly, the first lines of a carol before bending over the child again and forgetting to finish.  Occasionally her bursts were something about “CHESTNUTS, HERE!” and those of us in the queue looked at her and each other, and laughed good-naturedly.  The chestnuts didn’t taste very good, but I can now say I’ve had some, and actually know what all those songs of them are talking about.  It’s the idea, right?

Our friends seeing us from their car, slowing, and shouting repeatedly from their windows, “WHAT A BEAUTIFUL FAMILY!”, to our initial confusion (we didn’t at first recognize them) and a very near collision with the car in front of them.

Lowlight: 

A sample from a booth, offered by a gentleman with a thick French accent and an urgency to get us to buy something from him, which tasted like a very smooth, very potent form of creamed liver.  On toast.  Could be our tastes aren’t refined enough to appreciate this delicacy, but it was so terribly strong, and really so awful, that once we smiled and nodded our way away from him, N asked if I felt like I needed to throw up too.  “Tastes like I already have,” I said back.  We wandered on, looking for a mouthwash booth, or turpentine or something—anything to cut the liver.

How are you getting into the season?

A noiseless, patient spider,
I mark’d, where, on a little promontory, it stood, isolated;

Mark’d how, to explore the vacant, vast surrounding,
It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself;
Ever unreeling them–ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you, O my Soul, where you stand,
Surrounded, surrounded, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing,–seeking the spheres, to connect them;
Till the bridge you will need, be form’d–till the ductile anchor hold;
Till the gossamer thread you fling, catch somewhere, O my Soul.
                                                                                                ~Walt Whitman

I don’t stop searching for places to belong, people to love and be loved by, anchors to build a life on.  I muse, I venture, I throw into oceans of space, “seeking the spheres, to connect them.” This is why I read, why I write, why I take classes and attend lectures and strike up conversations with strangers.  This is why I love friends.

Last night, filament clad, I made my way to a dramatic reading of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.  And really, why hasn’t anyone ever told me about this guy?  I was captivated.  The whole time I felt like I had just stepped into a hot bath.  I closed my eyes and just sank down into it, goose bumps and all.

Leaves of Grass, for those of you who don’t know, is an expansive collection of poems that grew and grew over the course of Whitman’s life.  It speaks of nature and humanity and the divine.  It speaks of life and death and the cycles of things.  It challenges sexism, racism, classism, religiosity, body-fear.  It lifts us all up, cosmic things like planets, comets and stars, small things like birds and plants and dung beetles, and everything in between, inviting us to notice.  To notice.  To hallow, while not taking too seriously.  To recognize interconnectedness and unity in everything.  To find a holy spark in even what’s lowly and forgotten.  It’s spiritual, sensual (!), playful, contradictory, prophetic.  Amazing.  Truly.

I’ve found a new friend.  A new bard to help divine the times.  My throwing last night was so not in vain.

P.S.  I’ve often found poetry inaccessible, like it’s written for insiders rather than me.  I’m thinking it’s time I change my view on this and actually do some exploring in the field.  Get my feet wet in it.  Suggestions gratefully welcome (anthologies and otherwise).

I’ve been learning to love persimmons this fall.

I’ve been buying them at the farmer’s market each week and feeling sort of exotic every time I eat one.  They’re everywhere here—hanging (rotting) on trees on nearly every block.  So why exotic?  I don’t know.

This week I sliced into one and found my very first seed.  You know how there’s those moments, those flashes of something special, when time slows down and attentiveness ramps up, and you really notice something?  Deeply notice it?  Call me crazy, but that’s what happened with this seed.  I felt like I had struck gold.  The last egg on an Easter egg hunt when you thought they all were found.  I pulled it from its bed and just looked at it, so smooth, so dear.  I thought of baby skin, and lambs ears, and the eyes of kittens a few months old.  I thought of Elijah’s face when he smiles at me, the whole thing bright and clear and free.

I set that seed on the counter and watched it as I ate the rest of the fruit.  Its magnetism makes me think it should be the heart of a new novel, or poem, or some simple-deep truth.  Something about promise being hidden in ordinary stuff.  Something about extraordinary depending on the eyes we use to see things.  Something about tiny, gentle, swaddled being the place where big stuff starts.