"As you remember and record,
you pass the story, and the memory,
back through the heart once again."
C. Chambers, 2004
Do you remember the stories our teachers asked us to write on our 1st day back in the fall? “What I did on my summer vacation.” Here is a much abbreviated list of some of the things I was doing on mine.
Watching ants use a crack between cement blocks of the sidewalk as a safe super-highway.
Seeing a sprouting potato turn into a strange barren desert landscape with the most amazing exotic plants growing in clusters.
Drawing inspiration from the algae art on an old bench.
Reveling in the endless variety of shapes and textures created by the Earth.
Finding endless delight in the twin fawns who have been growing up in the woods behind our house.
Marveling at the intricate webs of spiders and the glorious flash of dragonfly wings — and then pondering the places where they meet in the endless cycle of life and death.
Admiring the makers – the finches building nests on our two porches, the tireless spiders filling space with their complicated structures, and the hornets working together to build their home. Fiber artists all!
(I, too, did some making over the summer. More about that next time.)
I also found myself reading each day, as I’m sure you did too, about wars, storms, droughts, fires, human inequities, species extinction, and the authoritarian drum beat that threatens this and other nations. I heard the lies, deceit, disinformation, conspiracy theories, and just plain disrespect that masquerade as news and wondered at the ease with which so many have been seduced into believing that false painting of “reality.” Sometimes it has been hard not to succumb to a numbing, paralyzing despair.
Theodore Roethke writes so beautifully:
In a Dark Time
“In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood—
A lord of nature weeping to a tree.
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.
What’s madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day’s on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.
That place among the rocks—is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.
A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is—
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.
Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.”
from Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke.
“What,” Roethke asks, “is madness but nobility of soul at odds with circumstance?”
My mentor Judith-Kate Friedman added, “What is health but facing circumstance with presence?”
Spending time with the beauties and marvels of this creative Earth helps keep me present, grounded, aware of my place and my responsibility as one of the myriad, wonderfully diverse participants in the on-going emergence of the world. It helps me face my/our circumstances with true presence. It helps me, in Roethke’s words “climb out of my fear” and stay open to wonder and possibility.
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