our dark greens of meaning

"What if we're here just for saying: house,

bridge, fountain, gate, jug, fruit tree, window, —

at most: column, tower . . . but for saying, understand,

oh for such saying as the things themselves

never hoped so intensely to be. Isn't this the sly purpose

of the taciturn earth, when it urges lovers on:

that in their passion each single thing should find ecstasy?"

—

"How we waste our afflictions!

We study them, stare out beyond them into bleak continuance,

hoping to glimpse some end. Whereas they're really

our wintering foliage, our dark greens of meaning, one

of the seasons of the clandestine year—; not only

a season—: they're site, settlement, shelter, soil, abode."

R.M. Rilke, Duino Elegies

[New Orleans, disposable film, 2014]

this to that

may the tide

that is entering even now
the lip of our understanding
carry you out
beyond the face of fear
may you kiss
the wind then turn from it
certain that it will
love your back may you
open your eyes to water
water waving forever
and may you in your innocence
sail through this to that

[Lucille Clifton]

intent on what they touch

We were out of breakfast foods this morning, so today began by walking to the coffee shop around the block to pick up some muffins, which A. and I shared together on our porch, drinking coffee and avoiding a bee. It was a much needed slow morning after an all too busy week—one of those weeks which by the end of it I had no energy or kindness left to offer anyone.

Other things, lately:

Sarah Coakley on prayer (part II and III, as well).

Caroline Walker Bynum on Gertrude of Helfta.

Bruce Herman came over for dinner a few weeks back—and what a gift. He has a way of articulating what my own work is about that helps it become suddenly much clearer in my mind, and has encouraged me to plunge back into it. I needed that.

I have also been thinking about habits vs. rituals, and how those play out in my day-to-day life—what are those rote daily tasks that could become something more intentional, more beautiful?

I still think often about the food I had in Italy last summer—how simple, fresh, and good it was—and have been trying to emulate that approach in my own cooking. Rachel Roddy's column A Kitchen in Rome in The Guardian has been especially inspiring.

Dreaming about going to Look3 in Charlottesville. I have also been dreaming about going here.

And, here is a poem for the Feast of the Annunciation, an image for Good Friday, and a poem for when both fall on the same day (which apparently won't happen again for another century).

[Honeywell Pentax, 35mm, Durham, NC]

the heaped ashes of the night turned into leaves again

-

I love mornings in this house.

And these words: "This also is Thou; neither is this Thou." (St. Ephrem)

And this: "How can I live now with my heart open to the things that memory will call lovely?"

[in my kitchen, these days of living alone]
-

for grace

A few things, recently:

Jessica Ingram's Road Through Midnight: A Civil Rights Memorial at CDS. Such a beautiful, haunting exhibit. I still cannot believe I get to work at this place that I love so much.

Elephant Micah + Joan Shelley at Dear Hearts a few weeks back.

Today I tasted a sweetness long forgotten, something I have not known since those days of fierce independence, when I was in step with my own longings, attentive to the world, patient with myself. It is what I have been praying for, wanting back, feeling as if I had perhaps lost forever amidst these months and years of saying for grace, for grace, for grace.

And these words, from that summer of forgetting long ago:

Walk

Some things are solved by walking
in the night alone, striped by light

in the corridors of unknowing, you walk
down the street, past the rosemary hedge,

the wet hydrangeas that eat your shadow,
your shadow like a cookie that the sun

cut out of you—sun-stalker, you say
to the blue mouths: but then there is

the ping-pong moon, the warts of the
weeping willow, the uprooted crack

waiting to fault you for lack of confidence:

this is the world of Walla Walla,
of couching black blistered beetles—

don’t even try to run,
the only way is to walk.

[honeywell pentax, 35mm film, balancing rock, nc; words from seattle]

-

why we must struggle

-

"If we have not struggled
as hard as we can
at our strongest
how will we sense
the shape of our losses
or know what sustains
us longest or name
what change costs us,
saying how strange
it is that one sector
of the self can step in
for another in trouble,
how loss activates
a latent double how
we can feed
as upon nectar,
upon need?"

(Kay Ryan, Say Uncle: Poems)

Found this poem torn from a book and taped on a retro orange fridge the other day, and have been thinking about it ever since. This, especially: to name what change costs us. 

Also: missing my old room back in Durham, and looking forward to creating new spaces there soon.

[honeywell pentax, 35mm]

-

what calm or one clarity

-

things things:

Father John Misty stopping by Spotify.

A photographer of dust.

Christian Wiman in the Oxford American.

Psalms for Ferguson by a professor from DDS.

Chekov wrote non-fiction too.

The air has smelled like dirt recently and a few crocuses have popped up in the sandy front yard of my house. After two weeks of being sick, I am done done done with winter and all that comes with it and ready for some hints of another season. Goals for the near future include planting a few seedlings for the summer, making travel plans for Iceland, and finding a job, not necessarily in that order.

[milosz monday at monuts, when it was open on mondays, honeywell pentax, 35mm]
-

sightlessness to sight

-

"We travelers, walking to the sun, can't see
Ahead, but looking back the very light
That blinded us shows us the way we came,
Along which blessings now appear, risen
As if from sightlessness to sight, and we,
By blessing brightly lit, keep going toward
That blessed light that yet to us is dark."

[Wendell Berry, Sabbaths 1991: V1. Given]

And so another year begins, and the feast of Epiphany approaches, the conclusion of the Cycle of Light. I am back in North Carolina, preparing for a final semester of school before graduation, trying to imagine what this next year may look like, or what it means to speak of the manifestation of God when in reality it seems so ambiguous. I want light, clarity, certainty, but I more often feel darkness, anxiety, and doubt, particularly recently.

Yesterday a friend mentioned something about what it may mean to walk in the dark, seeing that God created the light and the dark. And it was in "the thick darkness," after all, that Moses encountered God at Sinai: "The people stood far off, while Moses drew near to the thick darkness where God was." I found some small relief and hope in her words, that perhaps this present anxiety is simply the blessed light that yet to me is dark.

[windowsill, honeywell pentax, 35mm film]

-

you not a noplace

-

“listen,
you a wonder.
you a city of a woman.
you got a geography
of your own.

listen,
somebody need a map
to understand you.
somebody need directions
to move around you.

listen,
woman,
you not a noplace
anonymous
girl;
mister with his hands on you

he got his hands on
some
damn
body!”

[Lucille Clifton]

reminded of this recently through a friend. good words.

-

a song to keep us unafraid

-

This summer has been fast and uneventful, a waiting time between graduation and graduate school, mainly spent tending to the same place I've lived in for the past four years. But last weekend a few of us packed in a car and drove to Michigan for a quick trip and it was everything I needed. Royal Oak and Ann Arbor, I want to come back soon.

Now I am home again for another quick period before moving to North Carolina. Somehow I am twenty-two and sitting in the same room I sat in at thirteen, when I knew loneliness so well and used a typewriter to hash out all my anger. It is always surprising to come home because I remember a part of myself I had forgotten, perhaps the part of myself I most want to forget.

I read A Timbered Choir on the long drive home, and these words keep coming back to me:

"When field and woods agree, they make a rhyme
That stirs in distant memory the whole
First Sabbath's song that no largess of time
Or hope or sorrow wholly can recall.

But harmony of earth is Heaven-made,
Heaven-making, is promise and is prayer,
A little song to keep us unafraid,
An earthly music magnified in air."

[Wendell Berry]

[holga film, heather in royal oak + cantaloupe rinds]
-

on being useless

-

"It's hard to pay attention when there is so much nothing to take in, so much open land that evokes in many people a panicked desire to get through it as quickly as possible."
(Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography)

Sitting on a train for thirty-six hours certainly evoked in me a panicked desire to get through that endless North-Dakota-Montana-land as quickly as possible. But it also forced me to realize I had no power to make the train go any faster. I had thirty-six hours to be completely useless. For a task-driven person like myself, that's really hard.

"Everything you need to get done before you die isn't going to get done," or so says my drawing professor. Where did we get this idea that everything has to be useful? Drawing doesn't work like that. Sitting on a train doesn't work like that. Really spending time with people doesn't work like that. Loving someone doesn't work like that. A lot of things with value do not produce — and that's alright. Now just to actually believe that.

Other things today: this best restaurant in Lincoln Park and Angel Olsen.

[michael at glacier national park, montana]
-

it was a tilting

----

Annunciation by Marie Howe
-
Even if I don’t see it again—nor ever feel it
I know it is—and that if once it hailed me
it ever does—
And so it is myself I want to turn in that direction
not as towards a place, but it was a tilting
within myself,
as one turns a mirror to flash the light to where
it isn’t—I was blinded like that—and swam
in what shone at me
only able to endure it by being no one and so
specifically myself I thought I’d die
from being loved like that.

[light in the attic, holga 120 with 135mm film, double exposure]
-

swung like laughing infants

-

The Love of Morning

It is hard sometimes to drag ourselves
back to the love of morning
after we've lain in the dark crying out
O God, save us from the horror . . .

God has saved the world one more day
even with its leaden burden of human evil;
we wake to birdsong.
And if sunlight's gossamer lifts in its net
the weight of all that is solid,
our hearts, too, are lifted,
swung like laughing infants;

but on gray mornings,
all incident — our own hunger,
the dear tasks of continuance,
the footsteps before us in the earth's
beloved dust, leading the way — all,
is hard to love again
for we resent a summons
that disregards our sloth, and this
calls us, calls us.

[Denise Levertov]

sometimes we proceed by prophecy

 -
"Sometimes a child will stare out of a window
for a moment or an hour—deciphering
the future from a dusky summer sky.

Does he imagine that some wisp of cloud
reveals the signature of things to come?
Or that the world’s a book we learn to translate?

And sometimes a girl stands naked by a mirror
imagining beauty in a stranger's eyes
finding a place where fear leads to desire.

For what is prophecy but the first inkling
of what we ourselves must call into being?
The call need not be large. No voice in thunder.

It's not so much what's spoken as what's heard—
and recognized, of course. The gift is listening
and hearing what is only meant for you.

Life has its mysteries, annunciations,
and some must wear a crown of thorns. I found
my Via Dolorosa in your love.

And sometimes we proceed by prophecy,
or not at all—even if only to know
what destiny requires us to renounce.

O Lord of indirection and ellipses,
ignore our prayers. Deliver us from distraction.
Slow our heartbeat to a cricket's call.

In the green torpor of the afternoon,
bless us with ennui and quietude.
And grant us only what we fear, so that

Underneath the murmur of the wasp
we hear the dry grass bending in the wind
and the spider's silken whisper from its web."

Dana Gioia
-

on prayer | 10

-
On Prayer

"You ask me how to pray to someone who is not.
All I know is that prayer constructs a velvet bridge
And walking it we are aloft, as on a springboard,
Above landscapes the color of ripe gold
Transformed by a magic stopping of the sun.
That bridge leads to the shore of Reversal
Where everything is just the opposite and the word 'is'
Unveils a meaning we hardly envisioned.
Notice: I say we; there, every one, separately,
Feels compassion for others entangled in the flesh
And knows that if there is no other shore
We will walk that aerial bridge all the same."

(Czeslaw Milosz)
-

on prayer | 9

 -
Psalm: First Forgive the Silence

First forgive the silence
   That answers prayer,
Then forgive the prayer
   That stains the silence.

Excuse the absence
   That feels like presence,
Then excuse the feeling
   That insists on presence.

Pardon the delay
   Of revelation,
Then ask pardon for revealing
   Your impatience.

Forgive God
    For being only a word,
Then ask God to forgive
   The betrayal of language.

(Mark Jarman, Five Psalms)
-

blue

-


Upon Running to the Sea

It happened as I ran towards the Pacific, like one of those moments you imagine
will flash by like a news reel when you first arrive in heaven, surreal patches of colors,
sunspots, children let loose to run, running, running, running towards the cool blue

submersion, then splashing and letting loose the fear in an involuntary forgetfulness,
and then this—in a stand still moment—the imperceptible reality of the greater certainty
surrounding all my uncertainties, which have, anyhow, dissipated in the sand, swallowed

whole like the snail I feed to the sea anemone, and I find myself attempting to convince
myself of doubt to convince myself of faith, until I just stop it all, and believe—
for once in my life faith is effortless, sweet like the juice of a nectarine in my mouth.

[disposable camera, sky and ocean off the coast of pt. reyes, california]
-

because they have to be

-


-

Some days you just have to plant petunias. On my way back to campus this afternoon I walked by the garden store and spontaneously bought these pink petunias: little reminders of my mother and little affirmations that faith is still sweet. I have been needing that lately. And anyway, it was on my list of goals to have a windowsill garden before the end of the semester . . . and now I have one.

Today I am grateful for energy, for dirt in my fingernails, and for these words:

Faith
-

"Faith is in you whenever you look
At a dewdrop or a floating leaf
And know that they are because they have to be.
Even if you close your eyes and dream up things
The world will remain as it has always been
And the leaf will be carried by the waters of the river.

You have faith also when you hurt your foot
Against a sharp rock and you know
That rocks are there to hurt our feet.
See the long shadow that is cast by the tree?
We and trees throw shadows on the earth.
What has not shadow has no strength to live."

(Czeslaw Milosz)

-

walking questions

-

I.

The way you live
is a work of art —

and it does not require explanation or profundity,
just mystery and paradox, magicians and nonsensicality,
graceful question marks walking down the street,

our S-curved bodies as
marks of holy levitation.

[words from this summer, photo from the boulders at st. peters in early august]
-

our living task

-

Some miscellany today:

Home now and missing all the blue. California won me over. I knew it would.

I have decided that all I want for my birthday is a kayak. The parents are a bit skeptical about this idea for a variety of reasons (conversations tend towards drowning and price tags). But I am convinced that my life would be 95% happier if I had a kayak. Well, not really. But you know. (I would also be content with a Holga, tickets to Sigur Ros, or a Frankie subscription. Just saying.)

In holier and less materialistic thoughts, this has been on my mind a lot:

"I draw breath; that is of course to wish
No matter what, to be wise,
To be different, to die and the cost,
No matter how, is Paradise
Lost of course and myself owing a death:
The eager ridge, the steady sea,
The flat roofs of the fishing village
Still asleep in its bunny,
Though as fresh and sunny still, are not friends
But things to hand, this ready flesh
No honest equal but my accomplice now,
My assassin to be, and my name
Stands for my historical share of care
For a lying self-made city,
Afraid of our living task, the dying
Which the coming day will ask."
[w.h. auden, from horae canonicae]

Those last two lines. I think I need to put them in a frame above my bed.

Also: summer songs so far are THIS, this, this, and this.

[photo of the sunset at the lake]
-