mud, branch and sky

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I said in my untethered donkey post a few days ago that I am the author and authority of my life. What arrogance! Was it arrogance? Was I setting myself up for a heavenly lightning trident to spear me into humility, pinned to this red leather chair, writhing in ego pain? I do see myself on a throne, Leo that I am. It is a perch somewhere between heaven and earth, close enough to drop to the mud and claw for wormy sapphires and garlic, and open to the empty sky above for ascending into perspective taking. . . .

Garlic and sapphires in the mud

Clot the bedded axle-tree. 

The trilling wire in the blood

Sings below inveterate scars

Appeasing long forgotten wars.

The dance along the artery

The circulation of the lymph

Are figured in the drift of stars

Ascend to summer in the tree

We move above the moving tree

In light upon the figured leaf

And hear upon the sodden floor

Below, the boarhound and the boar

Pursue their pattern as before

But reconciled among the stars. 

    ~ T.S. Eliot, from Four Quartets

Where are scars reconciled among stars? How can I find that centering, bedded axle-tree?

I can’t control the circumstances and authorities that tell me what to do. Students ask for advice, I must answer. I have to pay bills and make deposits to cover them, which means Don and I have to earn a paycheck. I brake for stoplights. I make food for us and our hungry bellies. I can’t just tell it all to go take a hike. Well, I could, but where would we be?

So what am I the authority of? I am the authority of my attitude. Like a bird who drops to the earth for thistle seeds, bugs, worms and juniper berries, I, too, keep hunting for body and soul food. Like a bird who carries scraps to her perch for a nest, I transport words and ideas from literature, art, music, world events and relationships -- especially relationships -- to this branch in me where I weave the nest of my soul. And like a bird, I dash up to the expanse of air above to see what it all looks like below. This is a continuous cycle. Dig in the earth. Carry to the perch. Rise above on air currents in an open space of sky. Back to the ground. Up to the nest. Fly to the sky. It is that rising above where I scan, reflect, and rewrite my mindset, remembering that life is not all mud and toil, or just nesting, or only flight above the touch, labor and pain of life.

In the nest, something gets created in the cycle. I find that I don’t, and can’t, create something inspired and fresh (ideas, writing) if I am only stuck in the mud of duties and stress, nor can I create something of value if I am only in the sky of my heart-mind. Beauty and new life are born in the nest when the air pulled down from above in arcs of flight meets the mud from my claws, in the nest embedded in the axle-tree. Whoooshh -- thwapp -- piing! . . . sapphires and garlic.

GO WITH MUDDY FEET

When you hear dirty story

         wash your ears

When you see ugly stuff

         wash your eyes.

When you get bad thoughts

         wash your mind.

                           and

Keep your feet muddy.

    ~ Nanao Sakaki

Here's a twig I gathered from my husband last week: Did you know that birds sound different from each other in flight? Have you heard a parakeet flap its wings? Loud! Have you heard an owl flap into flight? Silent. Their feathers have different textures of softness, as my dear Susie discovered when she rescued an injured barred owl from the side of the road and felt her silky-soft downy feathers, so unlike her chickens' feathers. Glide and scout, silently on a thermal.