Muir

Tags

lifestyle, Relationships, Words & Song, writing

They agree to return to the redwood canyon of their youth. Beneath towering giants, they recall the searing songbird calls, the draping moss and the morning light as it filters thinly through heavy fog and drizzling rain. She remembers the promise, and he, the hope.

Many years have since passed. She notes he no longer wears his hair long, and he studies her manicured hands, the diamond and its spark, and how it catches the light. Together they find the familiar path off the trail, and while he beckons, she stalls, considers, and she follows.

The damp dark soil sinks beneath her feet, the wet air curls her hair, and the atmosphere, so deeply green, savory, acrid and sweet, is familiar in her mouth. And he thinks how this path, this bend in the distance, is theirs alone; and she questions, is this the beginning, the middle or the end?

They work their way through the songbird trill, the hanging moss, the softened branches, the damp air and the lifting fog. And she held her breath and he, his own.

She views his farewell a beckoning, a tide, a relentless retreat, and a repeated approach. Was it she who begged the question? Was it he who left it unanswered? It didn’t matter.

Alone in her car, the Muirs cling to her fingertips, and she is unwilling to let go. The impatient songbird, persistent in its call, audible still, as each retreat to the sealed silence of four-door cars. They each know well the Muir songbird’s song. Its gut wrenching plea, a beautiful exclamation, an indisputable truth.

 

 

 

Paper

Tags

Relationships, truth, writing

When the welling inside her finally spilled forth, it ripped everything from the inside out. It pulled the walls down, and the hairline crack in her foundation stretched and snarled until the ground gave way beneath her feet. Then her words finally failed her.

In the rubble, she gave it all away: the furnishings, the food, the clothes, the instruments that make up a life, those that build a home, those that speak of what was there, the symbols of a life.

In the midst of the collapse, she viewed the letting away as a necessary slash and burn, a throw back to the anthropogenic fires of ancient civilizations. The landscape of her space obliged her to make way, to pull its rotted root, and to haul it all away. This purge — its blazing fire, the noxious smoke, the dying embers — calmed her.

Days later she held in her splintered hands the remains of what was. She recalled the delicate Unryu rice paper she’d bought years before. In the light, its feathery fibers twined like cherry blossom branches and it was completely translucent. She remembered the care she took when she carefully parsed together charcoaled words upon that paper. When rubbed, charcoal coursed like blood through its porous fibers. She learned to blow away the charcoal, lest she stain the paper with her mistakes.

Mostly, she remembered Unryu rice paper is surprisingly difficult to tear.

Pieced Apart

Tags

marriage, Relationships, writing

She sat across him, 1000 puzzle pieces strewn between them. Putting it back together seemed possible. He said it would take a focused commitment. She thought they would need a bit of patience, for the work might become tedious and its completion depended on dogged determination. On this they agreed.

And so they began. She lit a lavender scented candle. He silenced his phone. Through the window pane, days and nights blended in rapid succession. And with daylight, the parting of a soft curtain, and with night, a drawn curtain and a candle snuffed signaled time’s passing. At first, they worked in obvious commonalities: the flat edged pieces were somewhat easy to place together. The task had a rhythm and it led to repeated small victories. But soon that tactic failed once the outer frame took shape. The interior was daunting. All its indiscriminate pieces, its vagary, their common frustration. And that act, of sorting, finding, and discarding what worked and that which didn’t, tested him, tested her and it tested their resolve. And then, on occasion, that seldom found puzzle piece and its mate and its unexpected connection to another, a shared respite. But most often, for her and for him, this puzzle and its defeating unsolvability flung them apart in fragmented pieces.

Separately they pieced apart this great big strange thing, each working together and alone, silently, and soon the wholeness of the act mattered less than the race to the finish line. Both were indifferent to the light and to the dark, the parting and the drawing of the soft curtains, the candle, the lavender, and its flickering light, meaningless.

She thrilled in her individual assembly, the act of finding, fitting and placing. The invisible check mark against what is right and what is wrong, her scorecard beside her as he fell away, veered off course, his defeat, his resignation, his shrinking away, his predictability, a testament to her resolve, her commitment, her hypocrisy. Oh and she reveled in her individual victory, the validation, her vindication. Of course, she’d stay the course. Of course, he couldn’t. Of course he wouldn’t. Of course.

There were times he wandered in, his callous fingers skimming the sturdy mahogany table, leaning in with an unrequested suggestion, a failed assembly or two, and that seldom lucky placement, and now the crack in her veneer. The failure. Her anger: how could she miss that? The flickering candle and its fraudulent lavender, its heavy sweetness, thick in the air between them, enraged her. And how in that moment, she hated him. These futile thousand pieces, now fewer by a hundred or so, completely unsolvable and utterly pointless without him to measure up against, the assembly, her scorecard, absurd to her.

That night she ripped the puzzle apart. She blew the candle. She flung open their soft curtains. She crumpled her scorecard. She saw all she mistook, what she was and he was not. And she saw. And he noticed.

 

 

 

On facing fear

Tags

children, daughters, gymnastics, life, parenting

These last few weeks Maya’s gymnastics training has really stepped up. She is learning elements elite gymnasts practiced during the Olympic Trials this summer. The transition from her last level to her new one is, in my view, very tough, and as her coach has emphatically stated, “real gymnastics” has now begun.

The rips in her wrists are deeper and the bruising in her body is punishing. The conditioning is tougher and the pressure to perform, to learn, and to try harder is constant as well. The push to go faster, stronger and further doesn’t end.

Then there’s fear. Not the kind of insidious fear that destabilizes a childhood, but the kind of fear that can cripple an athlete. She’s 13 and she understands it, feels it, can name it, and can taste it. It’s a pivotal moment in her life as a gymnast, and as of today, she thrives despite her daily, hand-to-hand combat with fear.

I know these are unique life lessons she will carry with her for the rest of her life. I never faced fear in my childhood and when I did as an adult, the truth is that I was ill-equipped to confront it. I was (and am) a soft-skinned mollusk fully panicked when exposed to the elements.But she’s not me.

She’s that other version of me, the one  I aspire to be ♥

 

 

 

Unwritten

Tags

writing

I have a friend who collects words. She amasses them tightly in small bound journals, places them in wooden tackle boxes, and neatly stores them for reference. Each journal a bookmark of her life. Everything is neatly cataloged, annotated and illustrated, for in her view, these journals are a sentient body of work which lives and breathes and simmers in her hands, like a lover or a dog, eager to be touched.

Over the years I too have been gifted with journals. Years ago I received a hand stitched burgundy leather-bound coarse-papered journal. Its enticing craftsmanship beckoned me to write, to write, to write gently swaying castles out of thinly strung words. But each time I touched it, it stained my hands red, and for days those stains were impossible to clean.

Now it sits in a drawer with the odds and ends of other bits and pieces of my life I can neither part ways with or use. Its leather is still fine and stiff, and its paper remains unyielding to any words I might dare write.

I suppose one day I might find the right combination of words. I might, like a timid lover, string together glimmering words that softly chime and twinkle when read. Words that undress, words in quiet repose awaiting their turn to leap into the starry night.

I’d like to think I could, that I might.

 

Eight Miles

Tags

art, lighthouses, romance, writing

On the rocky shores of a jagged sliver of land stands my home, a granite 44 foot lighthouse. Generations in my family have faithfully manned this post. It is our shared destiny.

Duty tethers me to this spot – but a mere eight miles away from here are the shores of my homeland. Eight desperate miles to her coarse sanded beaches, and four miles up along a winding mangrove dirt path which clears into the town’s outskirts. There my dark-eyed beloved quietly awaits. It may as well be a continent away.

In red and white my gas lit tower stands. It’s a reassuring beacon to every ship and sailor who passes by. Accessible only by boat, my mission is to record every occurrence on this islet. I take inventory of every supply ship entering and exiting our narrow harbor, I document the tide and the weather, I install buoys and reposition them as needed. But above all, I man the beacon. I clean the lens and lantern with a cotton cloth. Punctually I climb 200 steps to the top of the lighthouse to lite the beacon at sundown. I keep it bright until sunrise, when it is dimmed.  I then retrace those 200 thread bare steps, and walk out to a rocky path which winds down to my living quarters, 30 windswept steps away from the lighthouse.

I think of you as my body strains against the weight of the nets I cast earlier in the day. I think of your dark hair and the melody in your gait, and again I am lost and swept away to all but you. My hands chafe against the rocks when I check my traps, and I am certain it is your voice calling my name among the splashing waves. Alone I prepare my meal and I count and recount the ways and whys of my life here, eight miles from you, all I most hold dear.

Tonight I take comfort in knowing we gaze at the same stars swaying low and bright. Their flickering lights recall the night I first held your soft hand near the Flamboyan tree, and you told me the stars above were swaying lanterns held high by laughing giants. I believed you then when your alabaster hands pressed a seashell into my palm, your fingers tracing its smooth edges, your sad smile telling me it was time to leave.

I ran through the mangrove’s snarled path, reached the darkened shore, mounted its swelling waves, and rode my weathered skiff into the salted air. In the gray flutter of low flying seagulls I heard the beat of the son you so love. My heart and fist tightly clenched the seashell you’d given. That night, every wave wailed its eulogy against the lighthouse walls.

Eight miles. You may as well be a continent away.

Upright

Tags

aging, life, writing

Some years ago we observed a well dressed elderly man collapse against the sliding electric doors leading into Walgreens. We parked the car and helped him.

His skin, thin like parchment, peeled off in layers and bled through his shirt. His face and hands purpled with tender bruises. His large butterfly hands flailed when he reached for his glasses on the ground. His gray eyes, shell-shocked and panicked, locked with mine, uncomprehending. All his disjointed parts, it seemed, had scattered to the ground. “And how,” he must have wondered, “do I begin to pickup my broken pieces?”

We offered to drive him home or to a hospital but he refused. His soiled legs and arms trembled as he got to his feet. To this day I don’t know how he mustered the strength to gather up his soul into his thin, frail frame. But he did. He did despite whatever force had prevailed upon him moments before.

I’ve since thought of him often. And so it seems, the notion of one’s soul remaining upright, despite being buffeted here and there by life or one’s own failings, is universal.

It’s our nature to stand upright regardless of that which pulls us down.

Broken Vase

Tags

life, writing

I heard it fall apart. The boom. The crash. The broken glass.

You, by the thin kitchen light, caught off guard when the vase fell apart. The glass lay scattered around us. We knelt to collect the shards. I carefully picked up the large broken pieces, they were easier to see. You knelt closer to the ground, quickly sweeping up the smaller glass with your bare hands.”My calloused hands,” you said, “can handle the cuts. Yours can’t.”

The glass punctured my soft hands, tiny splinters invisible beneath my skin. Blood dotted my fingertips. I brushed it away, but persistently, the blood seeped, again and again.

Tenderly you took my hands in yours, “I’m so sorry,” you quietly said.

The sharp pain eventually faded away. The scars, however, remained. A faded reminder of the irreparably broken vase.

 

Flightless bird

Tags

beauty, life, writing

Beside you I walked. Faceless men in short sleeves wearing thick gloves hauled lumber from large stacks, measured and counted the beams, then bound them together. You knelt before the stacks, peered into the grain and ran your fingers over its honed smoothness. Carefully you selected your planks.

I kicked the saw dust floors with the tip of my boot. The wood shavings and their spicy scent brought to mind our winter. The evergreens, barely visible for the heavy snow, demanded our attention. You didn’t tire easily, splitting the old pines in our yard, your breath visible in the distance. I wondered how long those white and red pines could hold their frozen burden. I imagined those trees shrugging off their weight and walking in straight lines into the tall grass plains of northern Minnesota, loyal followers of a soaring eagle. Oh!, and how I so wished they would.

You placed the logs on the stone hearth and set a fire. Everything within its proximity reveled in its warmth. And there you sat, your hands warming by the fire, a drink at your feet, beckoning me near.

I realized then I sought something other.  My back to the warming hearth, and my hands pressed against the frozen windows. The view outside contrary to everything you’d built inside. And I recalled the American eagle and its powerful flight.

Yet somehow I too understood the plight of the winter evergreen. I too yearn for a letting go, a solitary path to something other, a different kind of weather.

I know too well the condition of the flightless bird, its useless wings, its conundrum. And I understood.

 

Cobalt, Aubergine & Russet

Tags

beauty, life, Relationships

You brought me sunflowers. Their thick stems, outstretched arms and open faces stood tall —  laughing braggarts in a vase. I cherished their vibrant audacity.

I can no longer defend the sunflower or its yellow outburst. Nor can I defend those years, when my hair, unbound, grazed my back, and the passage of time was marked only by light and dark, the sand on my skin, and how the questions were infinitely more interesting than the answers.

I recall the parchment paper you favored. Its fine layers, pliant and fragile in my hands, lay heavy with your drying acrylics. Colors colliding on paper we could ill afford. My walls, my body, my thoughts, a mural you hung your art upon. I came to hate it. I did.

“What do you see? What does it mean?” you’d persist as you brushed your hair from your eyes. So difficult for things to just be. Of course there was no right answer, but I didn’t know that then.

Sometimes, from a distance, an image did emerge, but up close, it was always chaos.

I cannot look upon a sunflower without thinking of you. Nor can I look upon cobalt, the blue you streaked across our walls; aubergine, the marriage of red and blue; and russet, borne of crushed plums and red grapes, without remembrance.

I crave the beauty of the humble blossom, the dignity of its pale hues, and the comfort found in its simple design. Its unquestioning existence aligns to my own.