By-Weekly Topic for Jan. 15, 2004
Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20060104150819/www.magpienest.org/scgi-bin/wiki.pl?ComingAndGoing
Coming and Going
Orion.
For today’s ECOTONE topic, “Place: Coming and Going”, I decided to post this excerpt from a journal I wrote during a trip to London in 1998. There are fifty pages of journal in-between the sections headed “Going” and “Coming”, and, as it turned out, I didn’t make it to my planned destination of Canterbury at all. However, the project envisioned back then continues in other forms, including writing about "Place" for the Ecotone.
GOING
December 14, 1998. In the air.
Water. Below me, the world has become nothing but water, clear blue stretching to the horizon, where it is met by sky. White clouds, water in another form, ridged like mountains, float above the surface of the Atlantic. The coast of New England curves away in the distance, all details of human habitation lost in the atmospheric perspective which fades everything to a uniform pale blue.
We've never taken the morning flight to Heathrow before. It is a spacious and comfortable 777, perhaps two-thirds full. As we climb to cruising altitude, the BBC World Service news plays on the flat, individual video screen mounted on the seat in front of me. We watch President and Mrs. Clinton disembark in the Middle East to make his historic visit to Palestine; in Washington, the House is beginning its impeachment debate, with a vote expected on the floor on Thursday. Clinton looks grim; like us, he is escaping.
--
The alarm rang at 3:15 a.m. I woke to find J. turning the electronic clock in his hands like a pro-hominid discovering a transistor radio for the first time. "How do I make it stop?" he moaned, still asleep, before realizing the sound wasn't coming from the clock at all, but from the tiny travel alarm on the nightstand.
We left at 4:00, the cold air on my face removing the last traces of sleepiness. As we drove away, the only light in the village was a small pine tree at the end of our street, completely encrusted with white Christmas lights.
In the blackness, devoid of stars or moon, I found myself noticing glowing things: reflective bands on the village fire hydrants, the white dividing lines on the highway curling off in the east, and the gleaming guardrail-markers, long strings of pearls for the sleeping giantess whose dark curves define this rising, falling landscape of mountain foothills.
As we left what I think of as home territory -- the outermost towns where people known to me, from work or church, lay sleeping -- a tiny reclining crescent moon appeared through a break in the clouds. Ten miles later, the clouds had disappeared and the sky was alight with stars in winter constellations: the Big Dipper, upside down to the left of the moon; on the right, Orion's foot balanced on the horizon, his bow pointed skyward. For miles at a time, not a sign of human dwelling, just the deep, dark Hansel-and-Gretel woods on either side of the road. We watched carefully for moose. Suddenly, I saw a shooting star, and then another. While I looked out the side window, J. saw two more. In the hour between 4:00 and 5:00, we counted ten, finally spotting them simultaneously. The last one fell all the way from the zenith, blazing a hot trail across the black sky.
Tonight the stars remarked to me, matter-of-factly, "We're here all the time, you know." I realized how I never imagined them being there during my waking hours: obscured by daylight, but shining behind the sky all the same. Somehow, I imagined the stars disappearing and rising like the moon. Why is it that so often we must travel away from the familiar to discover, with a jolt, truths that have been with us all along?
Near the Massachusetts border we left the dark wild landscape for good. As always, I found myself recoiling at the bright toll-plaza lamps, the tall signs for petroleum companies, the billboards, the sprawling malls, franchise motels, fast food establishments. I tried to imagine living in these faceless communities, and could not. "Well, what are you doing?" I asked myself. "You're leaving to spend two weeks in one of the largest cities in the world." But it's not the city I despise; there, at least sometimes, building has been concentrated into one plot of earth, and, in the city-center, planned for centuries. In London, great visual beauty, vigor, and individuality co-exist with the garish and vulgar, and generally win out. But in the suburbs of southern Massachusetts and Connecticut, what I feel most is the waste -- beautiful land chopped up as if it were an inexhaustible commodity. The natural landscape is often obliterated; you literally cannot see the forest for the signs. What does this do to people? Still north of the Massachusetts border at 5:15 a.m., traffic was already greatly increased and the driving aggressive. My sense of being a special traveler through a dark night of shooting stars disappeared with the dawn; we became simply one of a thousand cars hurtling toward their destinations.
6:00 p.m., London time. The sun has just set, the gold light fading from the wings of the jet and the pink that rimmed the horizon now a deep blue. I'm waiting to see my stars again -- for the second time in eight hours.
Across the aisle, a British mother who preceded us at check-in tries to sleep. Her little son, with his perfect, round, serious face, has clutched a floppy-eared bunny ever since I spotted him, seated on a pile of luggage, near the baggage counter. His was the first British accent I heard today, his clear little voice piping up to say, "Oy cahn cahdee moy rahbeet eento de plane moyself, cahn't oy?" Another mother, in a white sweater with a fanny pack worn frontways (who invented those awful things?) just walked down the aisle with her child on a leash. The first little boy, rabbit in his arms, watches them pass with silent solemnity, but I detect shock in his eyes.
Most of the passengers are watching in-flight movies; some work on laptops; some sleep or read. I'm willing to bet, however, that I'm the only one with her nose in Chaucer.
Part of my plan this trip, if possible, is to go to Canterbury. So the other night, at home, I pulled my volume of Chaucer's tales off the shelf and read the first page of the Prologue:
And specially, from every shire's end
In England, down to Canterbury they wend
To seek the holy blissful martyr, quick
In giving help to them when they were sick.
Chaucer's pilgrimage began in Southwark, a very old section of London across the Thames from the Tower, at an inn called the Tabard. He began writing the Canterbury Tales in 1386; it was still unfinished at his death in 1400. At that time, Richard II was King. When Chaucer died, just one year short of 600 years ago, he was buried in Westminster Abbey, the first of the great writers to lie in what became known as the Poet's Corner.
Our last visit to London ended in Southwark; this year's plans are not so much a religious pilgrimage to Canterbury, but an acknowledgement of these yearly visits as a personal pilgrimage, or, perhaps more accurately, a quest whereby I am gradually piecing together bits of myself. I told J., my first-generation, Armenian/Arab husband, that whenever I approach England I feel that I am coming home. "I know you do," he said, smiling at me. It took me two trips to realize this, two more to begin to see and write the outlines of a story which began centuries ago.
My earliest immigrant ancestors sailed for America from England almost exactly one century after Chaucer's death. For five hundred years, except for my father's service in the Second World War, no one returned across the Atlantic. Yet when I step off the plane, enter the crowded train from Heathrow to London, and set foot on the city streets, I am conscious of entering a familiar gene pool and a common heritage of manner, custom, interest and sensibility, almost too subtle to describe, that has somehow been kept alive in my family through generations lived out in "New" England and "New" York. It strikes me as incredible that this should be, so much so that I feel bound, by the great privilege which has fallen to me, to search and decipher, contemplate and record.
I try to bring to this task all my accumulated experiences, but am continually conscious of beginning again at the beginning. How, for example, has it taken forty-six years of my life to read Chaucer? Last night, back home, I was laughing out loud as I read his descriptions of his fellow-pilgrims in the Prologue. Yes, there were terms I didn't know. What was a Pardoner, a Summoner, a Reeve? But the footnotes explained what was unfamiliar. Far more astonishing is Chaucer's voice, which rolls effortlessly out of the fourteenth century to meet my twentieth-century ears with humor and immediacy. I am cheating by reading the Penguin edition, a modern translation of the original Middle English, but it's probably the only way I would read the work; so far, on the plane, I’ve devoured eighty pages and am captivated.
COMING
1:30 am. In the air.
Somewhere below is the coast of Greenland and the city of Godthab, near its tip. I'm listening to Haydn's Harmony Mass on the in-flight radio and sipping a paper cupful of extremely strong tea I procured from the flight attendant in the rear galley. "If you don't like this I'll make you a new pot," he said, and it is pretty strong stuff. J. is trying to sleep and that's good, he has 2 1/2 hours of driving after we land in Boston.
Mrs. Marazzi interrupted her late lunch this afternoon at the hotel to say goodbye to us. We kissed on both cheeks; I complimented her on the staff, and told her my only wish was that the sitting room had a piano, that I couldn't wait to get back home to mine. "We used to have one, a big one," she said, "but we had to get rid of it because the guests complained." I'm sure they did -- a piano would carry loudly through the hotel’s pressed-tin ceilings and thin walls. Unlike last year, when I couldn't bear the thought of going home, today I felt a little sad but basically contented. We know, now, that we'll be back. But more important, London comes with us; I've figured out how to assimilate what happens to me here and allow it to remain in me back home.
I'm gradually learning how to live the hours of my everyday life as a journey, even though, from the outside, the days and their pattern may appear routine. Each time I sit down at the piano or in front of a blank sheet of paper, I walk into that world-between-worlds, the tunnel that leads from the departure terminal into the aircraft with the ability to fly wherever it wants. It has taken a long time for me to see this. Living in this way, each day becomes an adventure within the self, accompanied by the sum of all of one's previous experiences and whatever guides we ask along: Chaucer or Calvino, Bach or Bob Dylan.
But this journey also exists alongside the paradoxical, parallel realization that no journey is necessary -- that we have already arrived at the only destination worth approaching, that all one needs is contained in each particular moment -- moments that, ironically, often appear to us when we are traveling.
4:38 PM
Source: http://cassandrapages.blogspot.com/2004_01_11_cassandrapages_archive.html#107420268933050159
January 15, 2004
By Bowen Island Journal
I'm back to blogging with the Ecotone community who are looking at Coming And Going this week.
Our regular ferry, the Queen of Capilano has gone for her annual refit, and in her place we have the smaller and much older Bowen Queen. The Bowen Queen was first pressed into service with BC Ferries in 1965 and she mostly fills in as a replacement vessel these days on the islands. Unlike the "Cap," the Bowen Queen is a much more utilitarian looking vessel. Walking on the car deck is hazardous, as there are pipes and spigots sticking out all over the place and the headroom means ducking and weaving between cars to get the passenger lounges. There are two lounges on either side of the first level and one lounge up top. When the blinds are down over the windows in the early morning or in the evening, it feels a little like the inside of a box car.
She's actually a faster boat, but because she is smaller, there are often overloads and delays and the schedule can get pretty messed up. Inconvenience aside, I like her because it feels much more like we live on an island when we sail on the Bowen Queen. The Cap is a luxury liner in comparison, and it's easy to take that boat for granted.
Coming and going gets more challenging this week, but also demands that we become more mindful of the act of getting to and from the continent and that's never a bad thing.
Think of the Bowen Queen as our annual dharma teacher.
Source: http://www.chriscorrigan.com/miscellany/bijournal/2004_01_01_archive.html
Coming and Going
By Switched At Birth
Today's Ecotone: Writing About Place topic is "Coming and Going." I can't imagine a more timely one in view of my own personal journey.
For the past seven years, I have been coming and going between the pine woods of Florida and the mountains of western North Carolina, roughly six months in one and six in the other. It has been a remarkable time in our lives and, I think, responsible for major personal growth, both individually and in our relationship that might well have never occurred had we not taken this bold step.Buck and I retired from working for others or having employees in mid-1997. He was 59. I was 46. He gave notice of his decision to retire, I sold my television news clipping service, we sold several other small businesses, bought a piece of land in the mountains near Asheville and started to build.
The mountain place became a "relationship" house -- a great place for family and friends to gather. It also gave us an opportunity to hike the mountains, and live at 4,000 above sea level in a setting of blinding beauty. Most of the time we were there alone, the nurturing silence broken only by the cries of juvenile hawks as their parents tutored them in the hawkly art of fierce screaming, the mournful spiralling calls of screech owls, or me at the piano playing a Chopin Nocturne or another composition written by some other genius.
We eventually sold our larger home near Pensacola and built a one-bedroom "cabin in the woods" there on a piece of forested land we've owned for many years.
And so, in late Spring, when the "hot flats" begin to sizzle a bit, we pack up the car and the truck and head for higher ground near Asheville. I forward the mail, stop things in one place, start them in another, and try to stuff the houseplants in somewhere, along with zippered bags of herbs and spices, a canvas bag full of books and music, and whatever else I can't live without in either place.
Then in mid-November, when all the leaves have fallen and our neighbors houses down the mountain have become visible, we repeat the process in reverse, and return to Florida.
We wanted to create two wondrous places to be at home together, so good that we would always feel longing for the one and nostalgia for the other. That's exactly what happened. I feel a pang each time we close and lock the gate to leave the flatlands, and another stab each time we winterize the North Carolina home and head down, down, down the mountain.
I can almost sympathize with the bigamist who, truly in love, marries persons in different states.
Something I have noticed is that folks who have known us in Pensacola believe we have moved away. And to our North Carolina neighbors, we will always be "that nice Florida couple." Presuming myself to be quite insular, I didn't think that mattered. And for a long time it didn't.
But now, the love of one place, that love of one's true home, the place where I want to be digging in the dirt and growing flowers and trees when I am a very old lady, and the place where we both want to nurture the forest and provide a place of sanctuary for our family, has won out.
And so, since we cannot live parallel lives, but must make choices which take us down a particular path, Buck and I have made another bold decision -- both painful and joyous: we have put our North Carolina home up for sale, and have set about dreaming a new dream in this place of deepening roots.
04:58 PM in Ecotone Biweekly Essays on Place | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBack
Comments
Sounds like a wise choice to live in a place where you will not always be a stranger.
There is a freedom that comes with living in an area where "immigrants" are accepted and valued.
Tidy little villages with tidy little minds keep track of those who arrived first and rank all others based upon the length of their stay. However nice and sweet they are, in their innermost thoughts, they don't want to invest time in getting to know you.
I hope you find people like yourselves, loving, yet emancipated from the tyranny of place and history.
You bring your world with you. You need to find others who pride themselves on what they do,
not who they or their forebears have been.
Posted by: David at January 15, 2004 06:13 PM
Well heck. I imagined our paths crossing, you in your NC nest being close to my daughter's in-laws in Cullowhee and near our former home of Morganton. Haven't been to the panhandle of Fla since our two day- one night honeymoon in Ft. Walton back in the Pleistocene. Congrats on making your decision and hope it will bring you much happiness.
Posted by: fredf at January 15, 2004 06:34 PM
Well this is big news. I, like Fred, liked the fact that you were nearby, relatively speaking. I imagined a hike one day in Shining Rock. Oh well.
I'm torn sometimes between the need for roots and the need for new adventures. I hope your roots now grow as deep as you want and need them to.
Posted by: Trey at January 16, 2004 06:55 AM
Oh, Beth, how well we know how agonizing these decisions are. David and I had hoped to meet you in person at last as we have two children living in NC. Being closer to them was one of the factors that determined that we should leave California. And, the decision was the right one...we've never looked back.
I am happy for you and Buck and know you will florish in the Panhandle, close to your extended family. All our best wishes.
Posted by: Gretchen at January 16, 2004 07:09 AM
Wow Beth, what an adventure you're starting on. What an wonderful thing it is to have found the place you're really meant to be!
Posted by: Ana at January 16, 2004 06:54 PM
Greetings Beth,
I found your wonderfully thoughtful site via a comment you left on mine. Lo and behold, I live in Asheville and the community here is so close knit, I wouldn't doubt it if our paths have crossed. Best of luck to you as your destiny and dream become ever more clear.
Many blessings,
jaybird
Posted by: jaybird at January 19, 2004 08:50 AM
Lovely post - thank you for sharing this with us.
Posted by: Jenny at January 19, 2004 12:52 PM
Of going and coming
By P.
If what makes a place worth writing about is our relationship to it, then entering and leaving ought to have a special place in our thoughts. Here are a couple of anecdotes that might be more about the relationship than the place.
This is a tale of two movements, of going out and of going in, of losing and of a small moment of grace.
Some years ago, my uncle sold his Adirondack cottage, in a pretty colony of private summer homes on the remote shore of one of the lakes. Already in Cleveland, I made the long drive there to fetch an old canoe that lived beneath the cottage and manhandle it away to safety.
For years, our family had gone on visits there, and I can fairly say I loved the place even though I could claim no rights in it. It was a sad trip, because I knew it was unlikely I would go back.
After I lifted the heavy red boat onto the top of my truck, I walked down to the dock, to take a last look at the lake. In the deep quiet of a weekday afternoon after Labor Day, I stood at the shore and tried to fix the scene in my memory -- gray clouds, gently rippling water, steep green hills just beginning to change color; islands; and the tiny chuckle of waves poking under the dock. It was calm and open, the sort of place to relax the eyes and let you give up ordinary cares and even the prospect of hours of driving. I didn't want to turn away.
Then someone came up behind me. "Excuse me -- this is private property. " he said. It was the colony's resident busybody -- almost every small community seems to have one, and well-off, closed places always seem to. I suppose now that I should have more respect for him, for it takes some courage to accost strangers dressed for work in an unpeopled spot more than an hour from the nearest police station. If I had acted on my first impulse, what would he have done?
But I didn't strangle him, of course, and I suppose he knew I wouldn't.
Instead, I mildly told him who I was and why I was there, and explained, "I just came to take a look at the lake. I will never be back here again."
Not a total clod, he was silent for a minute. "That's sad," was all he said, and he walked away.
But my reverie was gone, and a moment later, so was I.
The canoe I still have. The last time I tried to float it, it sank. I have some refinishing to do.
Of coming in, I have a more modern story. My heart was beating hard when I walked into the city library just after the new year. My first piece of mail for the year was a notice that several dozen books had been charged out on my card and not returned, and I realized that my identity had effectively been stolen, for the card was gone from my wallet. There was well over $1,000 worth of stuff gone, just from the list in my pocket. One of the books was a Bible; another, a Torah.
I was terrified that I could lose my library privileges and have to pay some huge, unaffordable sum for the lost books, since the card had clearly said I was responsible.
Now, I have an irrational attachment to libraries. I've been in and out of them since before I was old enough to read, and my old, paneled hometown library, tiny as it was, is one of the treasured places in my memory, while the big city one I use now is an almost inexhaustible treasure trove of entertainment, if not serious research. I conducted my first grown-up transactions with librarians; the idea that I had let them down by losing my card and having it misappropriated was devastating far beyond its actual impact on my finances.
So I pushed into the gold-carpeted Modernist building with what I can only call dread. I really had been having nightmares of a nasty interview with some wizened circulation-department chief or, worse, with the library's overwhelming director himself.
Of course, the circulation director turned out to be a short woman my own age in a new-looking Christmas sweater (in modest librarian fashion, mostly black). No, she would not hold me responsible for the theft. I could even have a new card, without so much as a snotty reminder to take care of it.
What's more, my theory that a student hanging around the last day I had the card could not be correct, she said, for they usually take CDs and DVDs -- the popular stuff. My tormentor had taken how-to books and references (the titles were obscure on the list I had), and those over two weeks, which is unusual in book-thievery, she said. They might even come back someday.
I formed a vision of an immigrant, perhaps undocumented, who didn't dare make an official connection but wanted to learn, to take advantage of what the library has to offer at its best.
That the books apparently would be put to good use was a relief. That I would not be penalized was encouraging. That this matter-of-fact representative of library officialdom didn't seem to be mad at me was grace.
The sense of relief I had was overwhelming. I had not felt that way since my daughter was born healthy and strong, with her mother well and happy.
So far, I have been right about not being able to return to the central Adirondacks. Happily, I can keep returning to libraries.
Source: http://my.core.com/%7Epzicari/text/InandOut.html
Coming and Going
By Feathers of Hope (Pica)
There is a Hebrew blessing for everything, just about, and there is certainly one for entering and leaving your house. I've seen several translations of this but the one I like best is "blessed are you in your comings and goings." For a culture that has spent much of its history on the move, at least mythologically, it's a good blessing, focusing on the present and the inevitable but bringing "home" into it. It's packed with resonance yet wholesome. Blessed are you in your comings and goings.
I come and go all the time; I've lived in four countries. USA-Spain-UK-France-UK-USA. The years I spent in Boston I moved seven or eight times in as many years. You keep your pack light; you get restless; you move on. (Sometimes you are made to move on because of circumstances outside your control, but part of me believes there's more control available here than I'd like to think.)
I'd like a blessing, instead, for staying put, something I seem to find almost impossible. Blessed are you in your sitting down. Blessed are you in your emptying your head of shopping lists. Blessed are you in your quiet time, in the quiet time you seem to shove aside as though you feared it.
Blessed are you in the fog and the moonlight and the breath you take to enfold them. Blessed are you in your breathing. Blessed are you--in your place.
(Ecotone Wiki joint post on Coming and Going)
Posted by Pica at January 15, 2004 09:26 PM | TrackBack
Comments
That's a lovely post.
Posted by: Coup de Vent at January 16, 2004 05:39 AMA wonderful post, Pica. I didn't know where you were going with it so the request for a staying-put blessing came as a surprise, and it really touched me.
Posted by: beth at January 16, 2004 05:47 AMI like the word "dwell." In this context it would remain grammatically ambiguous: "Blessed are you in your dwelling." Can we KJV it? *Blessed art thou in thy dwelling.*
Just my 2 cents. You said it best!
Posted by: Dave at January 16, 2004 08:28 AMDave: I like the word "dwell" too. I was thinking to enlarge the notion of "dwelling" to the chosen place of one's abode, not just the physical house, but "dwell" can do that.
The Irish language doesn't strictly have a concept for a noun of occupation, so "I am a teacher" becomes "I am (literally, I stand) in my teacherness." I just love this. I think I want to say "blessed art thou in thy dwellingness."
Posted by: Pica at January 16, 2004 09:29 AMThis lovely post echoes Psalm 121 which is one of my favourites. "May the Lord preserve your coming in and your going out" , Pica.
Posted by: Jenny at January 16, 2004 01:29 PMthis was a wonderfully woven post. I've only recently (today) discovered ecotone, and look forward to exploring the many themed writings there.
your post was so artfully simple ... and I do wish you blessings in your staying put. Within your soul, your dwelling, your quiet time.
Posted by: ntexas99 at January 17, 2004 05:46 PMWhat a lovely piece, dense like a poem, and just as difficult to paraphrase. “Lovely” is perhaps not the right word here. A deceptively simple piece that crosses far and wide not only place but also time.... Thanks for this post, Pica.
Posted by: maria at January 18, 2004 05:30 PMHaving recently realized that a place has claimed me and I am staying put in it made your post all the sweeter. I feel blessed.
Posted by: Beth W. at January 19, 2004 05:10 AM
Source: http://www.magpienest.org/feathersofhope/archives/2004/01/15/coming_and_going.html
Waves Coming and Going
By Feathers of Hope (Numenius)
An entry for the Ecotone topic on Coming and Going
It's been a week of playing with sound. On the laptop that is, where it's easy to take a recording from a CD (the sound sampled at 44,100 times per second) and open the file in a sound editor and look at the waveforms. If you zoom down far enough, to ever shorter and shorter periods of time, you see the individual sample points, approximating the continuous sound wave. (Dogs must find CD recordings dreadfully lo-fi, being unable to render the upper octaves of their hearing.) That we perceive these pressure waves coming and going as sounds of different frequencies is a marvel.
Outside, a Pacific tree frog, by far the commonly encountered frog around here, is going 'crickle, crickle'. This is their time in the cycle of the year -- plenty of water around to keep them happy and able to wander about freely. At left there is a plot of the sound spectrogram of their call (time is on the x-axis, frequency is the y-axis). Their call pattern is strikingly periodic: a two-part 'crickle' every second or so.
It's cloudy, and I don't know what the phase of the moon is. But I do know that 29.5306 days from now, it will be at the same phase. Such is the periodicity of this universe.
Posted by Numenius at January 16, 2004 11:07 PM | TrackBack
Source: http://www.magpienest.org/feathersofhope/archives/2004/01/16/waves_coming_and.html
Winged
By Laughing~Knees
Pressure ice upon the Charles River, Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A., 1989.
This is the fifteenth installment of the ongoing Ecotone essay series. This week’s topic is Coming and Going. Please stop by and read the other essays or feel free to contribute your own words.
Downy feathers of snowflakes are falling like lost children from the sky this evening. It is the first snowfall this year. More than likely it is but a whim and the morning will find the earth as bare and dry as weeks gone by. But a lone Tree Sparrow (Passer montanus) sits alone upon a bare branch of the False Acacia outside my window, awaiting the passage of light, hunched into her puff of feathers, her tiny head bare to snowflakes. I sit still, so as not to alarm her, and watch. It seems the moments together are filled with counting, all the way until she flicks her wings and flits away. The branch is left quivering in her sudden absence. And I find myself poised on the edge of my chair, alone in the gathering darkness, the air aswirl with children laughing.
So it is with birds, they come and go. If any creature could embody the movement of wanderlust, or the great rotation of the seasons, it must be birds. It seems that in the Beginning of Time, when some Speaker of Identities was handing out instructions on form and content, birds chose the way of airiness and elegance. To not be grounded, but to solve problems by carving away the extraneous, instead of throwing on more clay. The result was a marriage with the wind and a vision of distances, the planet beneath acting as springboard.
Earthbound that I am, I venture from my dwelling in the last dusting of winter, swiveling my head in lookout for the songs that had left with the dying of last year’s leaves. The voices come back in twos, catching the tops of the trees as buds form, and still tinkling with merriment from the warmer climes, like lovers newly returned from a honeymoon. Three, four, five, the old familiar faces are back, some directly to the memories of a summer gone. For those birds who remained behind, the ones that always shout louder than the others and shoulder through the delicate crowds, the return of the travelers shakes down the house of winter silence, and for a time the air quavers with indignation.
It is the return of the Barn Swallows, though, that barks, for me, of Spring fully arrived. Like liquid thought they barrel down the streets in fierce pleasure of, and concentration upon, clutching past arrival. Close-up their world seems to take on the rush at the terrible edge of a jet plane’s wing. Step back and Swallows love the open air, their wings scything the invisible. Even their eyes seem formed to look into the hard light and further, into the future, where their eggs lie.
Though I can’t understand a word of their language, the fluting and burbling and chittering of Swallow song always seems to speak of adventures and far off fields. It seems to beckon to my heart, just like the bugling of migrating geese, laughing and urging me to get out of this chair and lift my arms…
The brief summer harbors their laughter, has me on my tiptoes after the spell, sniffing out the salt sea or the undiscovered meadow. I would go with them, my mind seems to say, and it is time to prepare my travel bag. But that is the mistake right there. Swallows… all birds actually… have long done away with baggage. Their minds have been gleaned from aestheticism, from a total devotion to the task of flight. True travelers, believing in the brief encounter with all their hearts.
And come the chilly days of autumn I am again left behind, my legs feeling as leaden as tree trunks. The days commute to slumber, losing colors, bearing old grievances.
But my heart does beat more slowly than a bird’s. If I have wing beats, they echo in my footsteps. I may take longer to cross mountains, but the keening is there, to be off. Off and singing.
Posted by butuki at 06:05 PM in Nature and Place | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBack (0) Comments: WingedMiguel, I have a feeling I am not alone in this - when I read your posts, I am overcome by the textures. So much so, that I barely know what to comment. Not wanting to break the spell.
Today I was a winged bird upon the cold crisp air of winter. I felt brittle breeze lift me, warming my heart as I soared above the snowy expance. Thank you.
Posted by ntexas99 at January 18, 2004 08:04 AMThoreau would envy this. I certainly did. You dropped me into a reverie about nighthawks, which swoop among tall city buildings in the summertime, harvesting insects from around the streetlights and squawking from time to time, perhaps to help orient themselves, as bats do, or to warn off other diners, or perhaps complaining that they don’t really LIKE insects, why can’t they have some nice millet? Best wishes!
Posted by Peter at January 18, 2004 08:07 AM“So it is with birds, they come and go..” When I read this paragraph, something inside welled up and I was filled by an overwhelming sense of sadness. This is not a bad thing, it is a credit to the delicacy and beauty of your writing. The words seemed to encapsulate much about life and the intransience of many things. But your essay was of new beginnings and it gave me hope and a new sense of clarity. For that I am extremely grateful. Thank you.
Posted by RR at January 18, 2004 11:20 PMI am saturated with the abundance of your images… Envious, too, of your grace and exquisite choice of words. Thank you!
Posted by nobbog at January 19, 2004 03:56 AMJust beautiful. Really. Made me want to read it aloud.
Posted by Trey at January 20, 2004 07:26 AMYou wield the language with delicacy and expertise, again. Thanks.
If there is a balance to be had between the joy we feel in the encounter (like the birds, done away with baggage) and the sorrow we feel at their faithless flightiness, I want to err in the direction of joy.
So that when they fly off (birds, people, whatever), it is not against the current of my wanting.
Thanks again for the meditation.
Posted by commonbeauty at January 20, 2004 09:54 AM
Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20040401171626/http://www.butuki.com/archives/2004_01.html
"Hither and Thither"
By bird on the moon
One of the blessings of my childhood was my mother's trust that I could somehow safely manage to come and go as I please. I did that in great measure... after school, no matter the time of year, I could be found ruminating and looking for stones by the creek, throwing stones off the railroad trestle, building lean-tos in the woods, or on the bike with tunes in my ears. I took full advantage of that permission and that trust. Thinking back, no planning was involved. I went because I went, and that was that. Add a decade or two into that equation and the result is markedly different.
I yearn to go, constantly, my mind is always fixated on a wandering star that beckons me to chase it through skies distant and far, fabled lands whose enchantment I glean only through a fingertip pressed to a map. The rules have changed, it seems; in order to 'go,' much more time is taken up planning the exit than the journey itself. One must navigate many gauntlets and sever a bond or two in order to plow through to freedom.
Indeed there are many transits I undertake daily; the threshold of my home counts continual passage from here to there, but mostly I'm abiding a schedule, little flags planted on the clock that flap in the winds of obligation. I've leaned, however, to see the goodness in even my errands. I navigate a route, that no matter the mundane circumstances, never ceases to bestow little jewels of wonder. I course through winter mountains, sleeping, concealing their resilient greens under a cloak of quiet that is slowly being tugged by a toddler sun. There's a road where someone new is always walking in the margins, an immigrant, themselves hoping to open a path to destiny through their asphalt footfalls. There's a patch of interstate above which the sunset falls, never a disappointing ray or light. Has there ever been?
I think the difference between childhood wandering and adult commerce with place is that, when we're young and mining for what's mine, hoping to strike a lode of identity, we're out there for the freedom of it all. We were in the emotion of going, the slackening of the tether to the nest. I've long since flown the coop of my birth, and now the prospect of going is more about the place, and whatever tinglings of freedom generated by the pursuit of awe are received joyously. When young, I could be just as free and wild in a parking lot, doing wheelies and looking cool in a favorite jacket. Now, parking lots are anonymous, trodden, and melancholy places; I would not go there to feel free. I require more thrust and direction to get away, and in getting away, to relate to new vistas by letting go.
Thinking about this helps to remind me that going and coming, our engagement with the hither and the thither is a ritual that we often do without noticing it. The trappings of the mundane mislead us into a haze of ordinary and passive observation. A journey to buy bread becomes removed from our circle of magic because it's common, and simple. So when I leave home, I'm debating the merits of wheat or natural grain rather than noticing the flocks of birds that alight from pole to pole or the quality of light as it lands on the abandoned farmhouse on my road.
Nudge myself into paying attention and it's no longer a trip to buy bread but rather a moment of deep connection to the space around us, a spatial play of wonder, a widening of the magic circle to include myself, right now, the errand I have to do, and the parking lot where I find myself laughing quietly, remembering the innocent pleasure of popping a wheelie. The spell that's come upon me is easily broken if I wish it, and perhaps that spell is the same as it was in my youth but has survived in a different context. What it requires to slacken is to actively speed off in a direction because I want to, rather than by the dictates of need. It will eventually snap, if but for a while, but long enough for the world to seep in and teach and tell me something new in it's infinite language of beauty, even in the commonplace, even in seeing the tree-line through a supermarket window.
That direction could be a loaf of bread or a waterfall, a friend and a bottle of wine, the pursuit of an egret or the dancefloor downtown. It could be miles or inches away. It could be among the marketplaces of beloved Haiti or along the spine of a lover. Having a choice is a side effect of living in the now, and whether we're fumbling for our collective keys by a darkened door, or watching the stars from some distant spot on the map that a fingertip once pressed longingly, we can be fooled into remembering that it's all a journey, all a choice, all a pilgrim's path through a sacred landscape full of surprise and little jewels. Each time we pull that door tight behind us, and our feet hit the floor or home or the dirt of far afield, we could be pioneering the widening arc of our magic circle, pushing the boundaries of here and there, coming and going.
If I could, I'd pick up that curly haired kid in his favorite denim jacket whose name and history I share. We'd ride the road, and he'd learn all about the wilds the thrive beyond the horizon, the exotic and quixotic nature of travel, and he'd teach me about freedom, and the peaceful solitude of a creek and her stones. And we might, just might, come home when called for dinner, but we'd have to stop and watch the lightening bugs along the way.
This entry has been written to add to the dialog of Ecotone Wiki's current topic of Coming and Going.
Comments
Just read your wonderful words of life. Thanks, Jay.
Posted by Beth W. at January 19, 2004 07:56 AMSource: http://web.archive.org/web/20040202021559/birdonthemoon.com/cgi-bin/mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=1277
Sleeping with Strangers
By Hoarded Ordinaries
The following is my belated response to the Ecotone topic, "Coming and Going."
I've had the words of Walt Whitman ringing in my head ever since we went to Manhattan this weekend. There's a bus that connects Keene and New York, so we spent a good portion of the weekend wending our way through snow-blanched fields and anonymous brick facades. And although we were on a bus, not a boat, the lines of Whitman's "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" kept echoing in my mind:
-
Flood-tide below me! I see you face to face!
Clouds of the west--sun there half an hour high--I see you also face to face.
Crowds of men and women attired in the usual constumes, how curious you are to me!
On the ferry-boats the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home, are more curious to me than you suppose.
And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence are more to me, and more in my meditations, than you might suppose.
Buses, like cars, inevitably put me to sleep. When we lived in Randolph, Massachusetts, I regularly took a city bus to and from Boston. This bus traveled the urban streets of Roxbury, and I was typically the only white face onboard. And I always, inevitably fell asleep on that bus even though my mother's voice warned me that inner city Boston was a dangerous place and that anything could happen to me as I slept defenseless on a bus with strangers. But nothing ever happened on that bus to Boston; I simply slept.
And so this weekend on a bus to New York I similarly slept, and so did Chris, the two of us nodding as faces black and white slept around us. And in a dream I imagined our souls floating above our sleeping bodies, the souls of rich folk and poor folk, white folk and black. Above our bodies, these souls mixed and mingled, dancing in a delicate swirl as landscape and clouds streamed past our windows like the inevitable march of time. For while we rested, time rolled on ever wakeful, gradually and invariably taking us toward our intended end.
Manhattan is a marvelous city not primarily because of its museums, music venues, and fancy restaurants, although Chris and I sampled all of these. Instead, Manhattan is marvelous because it is home and host to a diverse crowd of humans, a pedestrians dream. Walking the streets of Manhattan, you see people everywhere, endlessly walking: women in designer furs, homeless men with cardboard signs, suited businessmen with cell phones, puffy-jacketed youths selling imitation handbags. Eavesdropping on the streets of New York, youll hear the tongues of the world: Italian, Russian, Spanish, Arabic, German, French, Hebrew.
On our walk home from the Metropolitan Museum, Chris and I stopped to watch the skaters at Rockefeller Center. Everywhere stereotypes were shattered as urban youths skated alongside suburban mothers alongside gay men in tailored slacks. All those faces simply flowed fluidly around the rink as teenagers joked and jostled, lovers held hands, and children clung tenuously to the hands of parents and grandparents. In the hypnotic swirl of faces circling singly, Whitmans words again resonated in my head:
-
Whatever it is, it avails notdistance avails not, and place avails not,
I too lived, Brooklyn of ample hills was mine,
I too walkd the streets of Manhattan island, and bathed in the waters around it,
I too felt the curious abrupt questionings stir within me,
In the day among crowds of people sometimes they came upon me,
In my walks home late at night or as I lay in my bed they came upon me,
I too had been struck from the float forever held in solution,
I too had receivd identity in my body,
That I was I knew was of my body, and what I should be I knew should be of my body.
This weekend in New York a woman died while walking her dogs in the East Village: she stepped on a poorly insulated electrical plate, fell to the sidewalk, and was electrocuted. Her dogs were injured but survived, one with burnt paws and the other with a bitten nose; the woman who died was only thirty years old. Just like that, she came to the end of the road, and her ferry crossed to some other shore. Shed been walking, not sleeping, but even the wakefulness of city streets couldnt save her from fates sudden unforeseen turn.
We all are coming and going, even those of us who never leave our hometown or house. All of us are wending inevitably toward some end which weve not chosen nor do we know. In the interim, we skate and sleep with strangers, if we dare; we walk our dogs and brush our teeth as if were fated to live forever. Were not, but we forget; in our slumber, it doesnt feel like the bus is moving. And yet it floats, gradually and inevitably, toward a sunlit shore weve never seen and cant begin to imagine; around us is an infinite band of other travelers, nameless faces, whose souls mingle with ours across the aisles.
Posted by lorianne at January 21, 2004 05:08 AM | TrackBack
Comments
Lorianne, this is just a stunning piece of writing. Thank you. I'm off to reread it now.
Lorraine, this is truly beautiful, and such a skillful interweaving of themes and people traveling not only between destinations but past and future. Thank you so much.
Posted by: beth at January 21, 2004 07:13 PMNice tribute to jolly old St. Walt. Thanks!
Posted by: Dave at January 21, 2004 08:16 PMGlad to hear you enjoyed it. And Dave, it's great to hear there are other Whitman fans out there... :-)
Posted by: Lorianne at January 22, 2004 05:32 PMSource: http://web.archive.org/web/20040312202309/http://www.schaub.com/lori/blog/archives/000055.html
worldly words
By alembic
This post is my response to ecotone's (January 15, 2004) biweekly topic: Coming And Going
La velocit la forma di estasi che la rivoluzione tecnologica ha regalato alluomo, (Speed is the form of rapture the technological revolution has bequeathed to humanity) is what I am reading in an Italian translation of a book written in French by a writer who used to write in Czech. The book in question is called La lentezza, and it was written by Milan Kundera.
I used to think that learning languages was like taking trips -- or better yet, taking up temporary residence full citizenship rights in another world. For example, the beach was a much different place than la spiaggia or a tengerpart, though all three had much the same sand and waves teasing its shores ... but all of them equally capable of leaving me with a nasty case of metaphysical sunburn.
Growing up under communist rule, with our every move controlled and documented in booklets filled with the quilt of hieroglyphic stamps, we dreamt of travel the way Odysseus dreamt of going home. Though our borders were closed and we were shipwrecked, the world was still wide open to us in words.
The sirens -- dictionaries, primers, novels -- perched on the shelves of our small bookcase, sang and lilted of enchanted sunny islands in the subjunctive of French, echoed of the cobblestoned meandering paths of German compound nouns, and spoke in clipped tones of the bright, jagged cliffs of English verbs that stood like wardens holding off the invasion of maudlin latinates.
Our passage through these worlds of words was slow and required a great deal of effort, though we traveled light and weather was never an issue. But, back then, we had time and we had plenty of energy -- for we had few possessions to care for, and the exercise of effort seemed the only right to free speech left to us.
So we ventured, back and forth, between the languages, whispering words from one or the other to crack open the doors to a bit of fresh air and to another view, as the stuffy discourse -- the official language of some situation or another -- threatened to suffocate or blind us.
All the while our feet were bound to walk the same distances within the gates of our city, we managed to cover large continents, always in transit, like pilgrims hoping to witness a miracle at the end of the journey. Our destination, then, was never place, but the promise of transformation. Dispossessed of speech in our native tongue, we went looking for the manna we hoped to find in the rubble of Babel.
Of course, all this was a long time ago now. To speak of it requires another language, another crossing of sorts.
Now we have the Web. We have blogs. We come and go, hop from connection to connection, all the while sitting in a room, caf, street corner, or what have you. It takes so little effort to come and go, to reach a startling new landscape, be it one of vision or words.
The worldscape -- that extended one we inhabit through language -- seems open and familiar now, so our comings and goings hold no surprises, only annoyances when our browsers dont load fast enough or spam litters the roadsides.
Years ago, I went searching for the familiar in foreign languages ... nowadays, I am hoping to discover something foreign in all this familiar speech.
Perhaps, this desire for the strangeness of the familiar that had me marching into the tortured recesses of poetry when I wrote the following:
A Dish of Peaches in Cluj
--After Wallace Stevens
A peach is sweeter than any other
If its taste is the sun of years, the idea
Of a peach, extravagant and plump
Staked to the tongue--
The peach was on a branch, the branch was
From a tree, and the tree grew
In a town that had a name
In three languages.
A peach is the sun in the faience of sky,
One noon in the bowl of hunger;
One boat on a sea without
The allure of tides--
The peach was enormous. It sat on the sill.
The window was one of many, the town
Was one. It was the only one,
The one I left behind.
A peach is a word, and a word is the path
That wind around the appetite
Like a tourniquet. Piersică, Barack, Pfirsich,
Which one is my one and only peach?
The peach is a fruit I ate yesterday.
It came form Chile or Peru, full of sun --
I did not know any peach could ripen
Into the sole peach of the tree in Cluj.
* Edited -- Thanks to language hat for the astute editorial eye.
Posted by maria at January 23, 2004 11:21 AM | TrackBack
Comments
One of the things about living within a multicultural world is the passage from one language to the next that I constantly must go through. I turn to one side and speak in English, another, I speak in Japanese, yet another, in German, and sometimes in Portuguese, French, Spanish. And though my words trip from my tongue in the required sounds, my mind always lags, still catching up to the language before. So when I step onto a train and am suddenly faced with a non-Japanese who does the uncharacteristic thing of smiling and saying hello, I am left tongue-tied and twisted into a linguistic pretzel. It's like sloshing the wine around in the glass faster than the liquid can react, creating an internal muddle. I always wonder what those friendly people on the trains think: "god, this guy sure is reticent!" But I'm not, really! I'm just temporarily dumb, going down on the Babel elevator...
Posted by: butuki on January 23, 2004 05:32 PM"Down on the Babel elevator" is a wonderful image for what you are describing, butuki. I thought that you might appreciate what I had to talk about in this post, as you, yourself, have gone through it ... and many times, too!
Posted by: maria on January 23, 2004 08:33 PMWonderful: both the post & the poem are delicious (in any language). Thank you.
Posted by: Lorianne on January 24, 2004 04:16 AMI love both the post and the poem. I hope you will forgive an editor's pedantry: the Rumanian word is piersică (ie for e, si for is), and the Hungarian is barack (one r). The Hungarian, by the way, is borrowed from some South Slavic form which in turn was borrowed from German which came from Latin malum persicum 'Persian apple.' Peaches get around!
Posted by: language hat on January 24, 2004 05:55 AMlanguage hat, thanks so much for the editorial pedantry! I do appreciate it ... and must hang my head in shame (as my older son used to say) because it is astounding that I should make these mistakes, if I want to be taken seriously, that is.
Hungarian is -- or should I now say, was -- my native tongue. Rumanian (though the preference in Romania in the early Ceausescu days was Romanian) was a close second there...
Thanks again ... and anytime you see something like this again, please let me know.
How lovely. There's a quality to fresh fruit sometimes that is ecstatic. I can remember eating some volunteer melons one lazy summer day as a young teen and being as happy as possible. Thanks for evoking the memory.
Posted by: jim on January 24, 2004 01:54 PMHave you read David Mas Masumoto's Epitaph for a Peach? It describes the quest to grow the perfect peach, but one that is doomed to almost certain failure by an industry (and therefore a culture) that values transportability over taste. He's a Japanese American farmer in Stanislaus county. A lot of his book was about being from another culture; his farm workers are mostly Mexican, and the peach musings triggered some very interesting musings that were not about peaches at all.
I can't think of a better fruit to launch such a splendid discussion. Biting into a good peach is a way to travel that short-circuits language, foreign or native. Thanks for this, Maria.
Posted by: Pica on January 25, 2004 07:24 AMmaria, I'm stunned into silence once again by the beauty of your writing. thank you for this thought-provoking and original post and for the gift of a peach to me on a day when all i can sense, persephone-like, is deepest winter.
Posted by: beth on January 26, 2004 05:30 PM
Source:http://web.archive.org/web/20040201234504/http://www.ashladle.org/archives/000282.html