blue moon

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I think it's interesting that la luna is considered womanly and fertile, partly because of its alignment with the menstrual cycle, yet we talk about the moon's face as the Man in the Moon. It is the sun that rules supremely and is associated with men - Apollo, Ra, Surya - they ride a chariot of war across the sky. (There is a Norse sun goddess, Sol Sunna, who also rides such a chariot. And the Hittites had Arinna, sun & fertility goddess.)

Quickly after winter solstice and Christmas celebrations - which originated in sun worship called Saturnalia - we have a Blue Moon. My color enhanced version is just a silly literal blue moon. You can read about the origins of the term blue moon at wiki. Whether it's the thirteenth full moon of the year, or the second full moon of the month - like this December with one on the 2nd and another on the 31st - folklore says when the face is blue, he talks to those in his light.

For a long time the way people have listened to Nature is through myths. I am a terrible student of classical mythology - Roman or Greek - let alone Aztec, Ojibwe, Hindu, Arabian or Norse and all those Wagnerian Brünnhildes. First my high school Latin teacher tried to drill Zeus and Aphrodite into my head. Then my university teacher Diane (lunar goddess) Wakoski - who centers her personal story in classical myths when she writes poems - taught me what she could. I would like to know more so that when I read an allusion to mythical characters I can understand the connection without looking it up. Sometimes I think all I do is look things up, and I want to know something without looking it up. Don't get me wrong, I'm devotedly grateful to Google, wiki, imdb and pantheon.

One character I always seem to come across in my readings is Persephone, whose story is a way of imagining the origin of winter. Hades, god of the Underworld, kidnapped her because she was so beautiful. Her mother Demeter, goddess of the harvest - or Earth Mother - wandered the earth looking for her, and the earth ceased to be fertile in her grief. At last Hermes went down to get Persephone back at Zeus' bidding, and he reluctantly let her go, but not before giving Persephone a pomegranate, which she ate seeds from, and it tied her to the Underworld forever for half the year, which is winter in Demeter's grief. She spends half the year with her mother, and that is summer.


Back to the moon. Diana is the moon goddess, or goddess of nature, fertility and childbirth (that menstrual cycle thing). Somehow she managed to protect those realms without getting directly involved in the messy affairs of people. In fact she was so uninvolved she was a virgin. Strange to be the protector of childbirth and fertility as a virgin, no? In myths the male gods may be the supreme rulers most of the time, but goddesses manage to mold and salvage something out of harsh circumstances the guy gods created.

Of course the moon and earth aren't female or the sun male; it's a way to think of the moon as the lesser light that is only reflecting the true source of light, the sun, in terms which have for too long been the parallel for women and men in society. I tend to be earthbound in what I can see, hear and feel and lack imagination and fantasy. We watched "Bridge to Terebithia" the other night, and I didn't much enjoy it. I don't have a desire to see "Avatar." But in spite of my distant quiet "virgin" observation of fantastical creations, it's nice to go out in the moonlight and let something other than facts speak to me. Maybe there really is something not in our heads that the moon says (he or she) when I get up in the night and see that blue light softly falling on the sofa the barn and the maples that isn't spoken in the light of day.

Poems sometimes arrive in the night. And dreams. Fears and worries too. But I don't think I've ever been afraid when the moon shone blue through the window. To me it says, Be still.

I wish you a wonderful New Year.



~Top image is the Sturgeon Moon shot August 28, 2007, processed blue in PhotoScape
~Persephone image by blackeri
~Diana image by Marinshe
~Bottom image shot when I was out in Lesley's kayak before sunrise, October 7, 2006; look closely at the .
.....horizon on the left side for geese in the water
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Christmas fires

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We're closing the circle of the year. Christmas for me is a spiral of memories, unwrapping tree ornaments from worn and wrinkled tissue paper, laying out glass and glitter, like stars burning light years away. When it's time to rewrap them, clouds will cover them until next year's opening into another season of light in Nature's darkest days.

Besides personal memories, there is genetic memory. Don comes from Brits, and I come from Swedes, Brits, and maybe some Irish. Traditions from those ancestral families were not given attention when I grew up, and I felt the lack when I saw other families make German lebkuchen or Swedish papparkakor. Whatever European landscapes are in our past, I know in my blood that I am from old stone houses with ten foot hearths, where mutton from the moor bubbling in a pot fills the room with savory smells.

This Christmas, without our Lesley, Brian and Peter to celebrate with us - Don and I wanted to honor the day simply, in new Old World ways. We found three traditions.

1 We burned our first yule log Christmas Eve, cut from a fallen French lilac branch that I'm dragging, below. For centuries European barons had laborers carry in a felled tree to their hearth, sticking its end into the fire - the rest jutting out into the room. That night everyone was invited to party - servant and master together, equal and friendly. Old feuds were drowned in flowing wassail. Then a brand was taken from the fire and set aside as a talisman against fire and evil for the year ahead. This same remnant from the yule log was used to ignite next year's holiday fire.

Smoke from our lilac branch smelled like sweet pipe tobacco outside. Christmas evening, with fireplace tongs we grabbed a charred remnant from one of its pieces in the wood stove, cooled it in snow, then set it up on the mantel to be a symbol of safety and hope for the year ahead. We'll ignite next year's yule log with this year's piece.






The whole time we focused on this yule log thing, I had my mind on another Christmas fire - the devastation I'd driven up to going to town the day before Christmas Eve. A siren-screaming fire truck barreled past me on our country road, and there ahead I saw billowing smoke, and a little house in flames! Fire trucks blocked the road, so I had to turn around and go to town a different way.



When I returned home later in the day, I drove by the charred house and could still smell fire though there wasn't any smoke in the air. We read in the paper that two young men lived in the house, though only one was home and only had minor burns on his face. We were relieved but sad thinking of what gets lost in a house fire that can't be replaced. A nightmare before Christmas.


2 The second tradition we claimed was from Ireland, the country where we both have spent more time than any other in Europe.




For Christmas dinner we cooked lamb, carrots, onions, potatoes and turnips on top of the wood stove for stobhach gaelach, or Irish stew. The smell of thyme and all that goodness almost drove us crazy for two days, first cooking the bones for broth Christmas Eve, then the stew on Christmas Day. Christmas Eve Don had to run out for buttermilk when we suddenly decided Irish stew needed Irish soda bread. He got to the store (15 minutes away) one minute after closing (it only closes once a year, for Christmas), and the utterly worn out frazzled store lady at the door mercifully let him in when she heard his desperate plea for the soda bread. "Run," she said. He ran, picked up buttermilk, then grabbed a bottle of champagne, paid for them, and handed the merciful worn out lady the bag with champagne and the receipt (so no one would think she was stealing it) saying, "thank you, and Merry Christmas," and she wept.


3 On his way home from the store Don heard Lynn Rosetta Kasper rave about a French holiday cake on NPR. So, because I am a francophile and love to bring France to the farm, we added this Gâteau Basque for dessert: a shortbread type cake with Don's homemade blackberry jam layered in the middle. "It's a great cake to make for the holidays because it's sturdy and easy to transport and can be eaten at any time of day . . . it's a grown-up pop tart." Delicious!




When our grandchildren come on the scene one of these days, I want them to connect with their own memories, those of their parents and grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles, and also with those of their ancestors. Stone. Iron. Wood. Fire. Water. Bones. Edible roots out of the dirt. You know, they're just embers gone cold that get rekindled on our hearths, in our ovens and on our stoves. I am very thankful for what we have not lost.

I hope you had a wonderful Christmas.

Killarney, Ireland - 2006

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A Christmas visit on Solstice Day

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male junco

In the darkest day I looked for light. Shadows needed to be brightened
with divine announcements - to be redeemed in the filth and the hollows -
a chink of sunrise when starvation there
and fear here set the stone table.

Then a bird, fleeing the sparrow hawk,
flew against the window with his body, and fell, dazed.
He was invited in to perch in the eternal tree where an electric candle
on the bough's tip is a star in the tar of night.

Oh sweet birdie, warm up, calm yourself, catch your wits
in the Life of the star, the very one that bridges night to day.
Be revived, reborn, released - and fly away.


Listen to a podcast of this poem here.


Happy Solstice ◊ Merry Christmas ◊ Happy New year
To all of you, my dear friends -

be free, into a new day.

This writing began in inspiration from Elizabeth Jennings' poem The Annunciation, which I read in a small volume of Christmas Poems edited by John Hollander and J.D. McClatchy - which I won in a drawing at beautiful Pamela's blog From the House of Edward. Then, mid-sentence, the advent of this visitor.

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The Swan

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The Swan


Did you too see it, drifting, all night, on the black river?
Did you see it in the morning, rising into the silvery air -
An armful of white blossoms,
A perfect commotion of silk and linen as it leaned
into the bondage of its wings; a snowbank, a bank of lilies,
Biting the air with its black beak?
Did you hear it, fluting and whistling
A shrill dark music - like the rain pelting the trees - like a waterfall
Knifing down the black ledges?
And did you see it, finally, just under the clouds -
A white cross Streaming across the sky, its feet
Like black leaves, its wings Like the stretching light of the river?
And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything?
And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for?
And have you changed your life?


- Mary Oliver
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Listen to Yo Yo Ma play Le Cygne by Camille Saint-Saëns.



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Photo of the swan taken at MSU's Hidden Lake Gardens, Tipton, Michigan, March 2007, previously posted at flying.

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a book report, I mean review: Henry James' The Ambassadors

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The date stamp on the library book tells me I checked out The Ambassadors around the First of December, 2008, which was the very day I listened to an inspiring NPR radio essay by Ann Patchett about it. (I do some things quickly, immediately.) I renewed the book twice, six months each. Henry James himself said this novel is his finest work of art, but it is well down his own list of the order in which you should read his novels. He knew it was opaque (Patchett's word). Portrait of a Lady, for example, is farther up his read in this order list.*

I am no book reviewer. I will leave that art to my friends DS at third-storey window, Arti at Ripple Effects, and others. But after leaving foreshadowing comments here and there about my long slow progress through this book for the past year, starting here, I sort of feel I owe you at least my own version of a review. Plus, posting its completion here is a celebration. Warning: There will be mixing of metaphors.

The fact that I stuck with this book tells you something. My friends know how averse I am to reading novels, even though I was an English major. I tell myself I am quite a literary person for someone who reads so little. If Jane Austen were still writing, I would be the first to read her latest.

I'm not going to tell you much about the tale itself, which James published in 1903 as a serial in the North American Review. The plot is tame, no murders or espionage. No deadly collisions - though there are human collisions. It's the human part that kept me with it. It's about an American named Lambert Strether who goes on a mission to Paris to retrieve the son of his fiancée, a widow we never really meet in a scene. Her son Chad should be home learning to run the family business in Woollett, Massachusetts, but instead he is off doing who knows what in that worldly City of Light. What James manages to show in this wonderful book is how even a fifty-something man like Strether can learn profoundly enlightening things about himself and others, and the assumptions he makes about both.

Henry James' style both daunted me and kept me going. Not the easiest of books to read, I couldn't take many pages in one sitting. But I didn't shelve it for good, as I often do when a book doesn't arrest me.

James writes a paragraph with more words, clauses, commas and longer more compounded sentences and descriptions than you might think necessary or possible and still keep a thought alive. But when you're finished with that paragraph, you recognize that had he described the same event or thought in one succinct straightforward statement, you may have known what transpired, but you would not have arrived at the same point of human discovery. Not that he doesn't leave you constantly asking, "what the heck did that mean?" and a re-read of the same sentence three or more times to see if you can figure it out. But, if you just let the question babble on temporarily unanswered, you will eventually find what you need. His idea has to travel down the page through elaborate channels and locks for the river to deposit it into your ocean of understanding so satisfyingly.

He lays out words of detail in the tiniest attentions spread out on the bed, as if the elements of each paragraph will be packed into a travel trunk for a long extensive journey, and you must be prepared for every contingency. Or, each paragraph is a journey itself, magnifying the terrain of miniscule human flutterings deep down in their psychological interior. And at the end of one, or a collection of many, you do not feel that you traveled far for nothing. Rather, you wonder how you could have lived this long and only through this trunkful of words arrived at this destination, this understanding of a human emotion, as if you had yourself experienced all that led to it. Over and over I found myself relating to Strether - in his lack of confidence and sense of being an outsider looking in.

This craft seems to me a symbol of what James himself pointed out as the crux of the book on page one hundred and thirty-two:

"Live! . . . Don't . . . miss things out of stupidity."

Later, on page one hundred and sixty-five, little Bilham, the addressee in the dialogue I shortened with ellipses above, continues the thought in this scene:

Strether was silent a little. "Ah but he doesn't care for her--not, I mean, it appears, after all, in the sense I'm speaking of. He's not in love with her."

"No--but he's her best friend; after her mother. He's very fond of her. He has his ideas about what can be done for her."

"Well, it's very strange!" Strether presently remarked with a sighing sense of fulness.

"Very strange indeed. That's just the beauty of it. Isn't it very much the kind of beauty you had in mind," little Bilham went on, "when you were so wonderful and so inspiring to me the other day? Didn't you adjure me, in accents I shall never forget, to see, while I've a chance, everything I can?--and really to see, for it must have been that only you meant. Well, you did me no end of good, and I'm doing my best."

Quite literally, James' writing slows you down in real time, so that you don't miss things. You have looked so closely, it is as if you revolved things on a digital screen, rising and falling like a telescoping robotic camera, hovering slowly and methodically over each grain of texture. This slow time allows his meanings to sink in like a long deliberate marinade - tenderizing and flavoring the final bite to perfection, which means our dear Strether gets just exactly where I myself have gotten by reading: a transformation. To write so well that a work leaves the reader feeling herself to be Strether embodied whenever an "ahh aha" comes on a page is an everlasting treasure. What multiplied the emotional impact of the book on me was the fact that I had felt a similar opening into freedom upon my own visit to Paris after my mother's death in 1997.

That voice, he had to note failed audibly to sound; which he took as the proof of all the change in himself. He had heard, of old, only what he could then hear; what he could do now was to think of three months ago as a point in the far past. All voices had grown thicker and meant more things; they crowded on him as he moved about--it was the way they sounded together that wouldn't let him be still. He felt, strangely, as sad as if he had come for some wrong, and yet as excited as if he had come for some freedom. But the freedom was what was most in the place and the hour; it was the freedom that most brought him round again to the youth of his own that he had long ago missed.

I warned you I would mix metaphors. You humored me and pretended you were traveling in a trunk, floating down a river, eating tasty food inside and filming the whole thing with expensive film equipment. Thank you for that.

I'm glad it took more than a year to read The Ambassadors. It stretched my brain's close reading capacity, and the pace suited the penetrating writing of Henry James. Maybe I'll renew it for another six months and read it again. I think I could finish it in half the time this go 'round. Or maybe I should read Portrait of a Lady next, which is #2 on his read in this order list in a letter he wrote. (Or, if I'm really adventurous, I'll read a different author, like maybe Ann Patchett, whose Bel Canto has been on my reading list for about, oh, eight years.)

*Here are both lists James himself recommended as the order for reading his novels:

1. Roderick Hudson.
2. The Portrait of a Lady.
3. The Princess Casamassima.
4. The Wings of the Dove.
5. The Golden Bowl.

The second, more "advanced" list, includes two from the first:

1. The American.
2. The Tragic Muse.
3. The Wings of the Dove.
   
4. The Ambassadors.
5. The Golden Bowl.
   

Cover illustration for Oxford World's Classics edition of The Ambassadors; I wish I knew who the artist was. Maybe Childe Hassam?

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self discipline & success

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Luckily I had my camera with me walking to a meeting across campus on one of the coldest days a couple years ago. His nose and ears were as red as his shorts. I gave him a hat to warm his ears (in post processing, not for real, silly). He gets me thinking about self discipline, something I'm sure I could have developed if I'd had the willpower, ha. I have it in me in small spoonfuls. You know, one month on the treadmill, one month off.

Most of the super disciplined people I've met made me feel bad about myself. Well I guess they didn't make me feel bad, I just felt bad. I felt like they saw me as a slacker, and I didn't feel confident in slackerhood. You're a better person if you paint the peeling porch, take out the trash rather than let it overflow for two days, never eat Kentucky Fried Chicken, finish reading that book after several months, and visit all your blog friends regularly. (Oh, but some people think sitting on your computer visiting blog friends is slacking.)

Not to be a braggadocio, but I was voted Most Likely to Succeed in my high school graduating class. I know it sounds impressive. But actually, it's embarrassing, considering my high school career and my rather normal life now, and if you knew me then you might wonder about it like I do. I was an average B student, after four of my siblings before me were either valedictorian or salutatorian. Maybe if I'd actually studied I might have done all right, I mean high school isn't that hard. I was not involved in any student organizations, though I was a terrible class treasurer sophomore year who didn't do a single thing if I recall. It was risky electing me to that job, as you'll see below.

My co-recipient of the Most Likely to Succeed award was Frank Fitzgerald. Here we are in the yearbook photo. Someone thought it would be cute to photograph us sneaking money out of the cafeteria's cash register. See what I mean about risky?



Now Frank was a worthy recipient and a high achiever who didn't make me feel bad. A straight A student, he went on to be elected to the Michigan House of Representatives. Oh, I found him in wiki on his grandfather's page - his namesake Frank D. Fitzgerald who was Michigan's governor from 1935-36. Guess what, while he was Governor the state budget was balanced!

In our small town, Frank and I lived a few blocks apart, on presidential streets - I lived first on Harrison, then Lincoln, and Frank lived in a big red brick house on Jefferson (across the street from Loring!). Like Thomas Jefferson, Frank was a redhead. If he hadn't died suddenly at LaGuardia Airport in Queens, NY, on a business trip December 9, 2004, maybe Frank would have gone on to run for governor some day, following his grandfather's path. I heard an owl thrum the morning I read about his sudden death in the paper, leaving his wife Ruth and two kids. I think he was saying good-bye. Before our spree as criminal partners robbing the till, we started out as lil chefs side by side in kindergarten making applesauce and butter at Holbrook Elementary and went through every grade together until graduation.

I was never ambitious like Frank. No career goals. I was, and am, a starer out of windows. Why was I voted Most Likely to Succeed alongside the class valedictorian and future public servant? Was it because I was a non-rebellious PK (preacher's kid)?

I'm still an average person in the echelon of success, but I have a supremely comfortable, healthy and happy life.

Of course the question is, what is success and how is it measured?

Vincent van Gogh, also a PK, was a miserable failure in relationships with women and in various careers before he decided to create beauty. Famously, he sold just one painting to someone other than his dear brother Théo, who supported him. When I stood and turned slowly in the middle of the van Gogh gallery in the Orsay, surveying the bright palette and overwhelmed with blue, I wept. I bet no one voted him Most Likely to Succeed.

I think when you join discipline with passion, the world benefits - though when you're passionate the discipline doesn't really come hard. But self-control for its own sake, about the "shoulds" someone somewhere has written in the sky, just makes me feel like a slacker, 'cause I will always stare out of windows, whether or not the trash needs emptying or the book I've been reading for a year still has 88 pages to go.
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the power of our rhetoric

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1
A blogger wrote what you
couldn't say -
do you know how it feels
to be empty
that way?

2
A photo at flickr shines light
on brown water
a silhouette of men in a boat -
fishing lines crisscross the
knob of the sun
do you know what it means
to be full
in that fun?

3
Across campus a stranger
talks venom and danger
about things
she does not know
and you - are you swallowed
by telephone and email
inside the hollow of her blow?

4
Around the world a friend
sends a photo
a fuchsia flower bent low
like a woman in veil
do you feel what she feels -
her essence inside
being fully
regaled?


Together we enter
the questions and answers
on our bridge
over ocean and reef -
our words art and photographs
publish the meanings
in the ongoing book of our life.

*- epigraph quote from Rumi's poem A Voice Through the Door

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