Still

Somewhere in Durham, NC, 1982

I recently found a bunch of letters from friends and lovers in a box at the back of my closet. I also found a trove of negatives from a documentary photography class I took as a sophomore at UNC in 1982. I'd forgotten about the family that I visited over a period of three months and chronicled and with whom I became friends. I moved away. Still I remember developing them in the darkroom, my hands immersed in the bath, the slippery feel of the paper blooming shadows and light, the hands of the boy I loved mixed up with mine, his mouth.

Saturday morning. Complacencies of the peignoir.

Still. What makes me "happy" is fifteen minutes in bed meditating, then reading about authors I love and their new books, then hearing Sophie in the room down the hall humming again after more than a month of silence. Also, Costa Rican coffee from the man I love who is out there somewhere taking photos of burrowing owls.











Field Guide

Once, in the cool blue middle of a lake,
up to my neck in that most precious dement of all,

I found a pale-gray, curled-upwards pigeon feather
floating on the tension of the water

at the very instant when a dragonfly,
like a blue-green iridescent bobby pin,

hovered over it, then lit, and rested.
That's all.

I mention this in the same way
that I fold the corner of a page

in certain library books,
so that the next reader will know

where to look for the good parts.

Tony Hoagland

Saturday Morning Poetry

On the Nature of Understanding

Say you hoped to
tame something
wild and stayed
calm and inched up
day by day. Or even
not tame it but
meet it half way.
Things went along.
You made progress,
understanding
it would be a
lengthy process,
sensing changes
in your hair and
nails. So it's
strange when it
attacks: you thought
you had a deal.

Kay Ryan, from Erratic Facts

Today

Today I'm going to forget about the fact that for the third morning in a row, our dog has thrown up in my bedroom in the wee hours of the morning. I'm going to count on the wisdom of the Buddhists who claim that nothing is permanent, even the darkest of moods, even seizures, even circumstance and inequality and injustice and stupidity. I won't despair. That also means that lightness and ease, seizure freedom, equality, justice and intelligence are not permanent states either. I will be grateful.

Saturday Morning West Coast Re-Post

Saturdays are slow, no? The next door neighbor's dog is yapping and yipping, The Brothers are arguing over television shows, Sophie is taking a morning nap, I have a pile of federal grants to read and review, there's a baseball game in a couple of hours and I guess I'll get dressed and get on with it.

Here's a post from a year or so ago that popped up today. I like it.

Sunday, February 26, 2012

What's given and what's handled

Is the ability to hold two opposing feelings and/or thoughts something that one is graced with or something that comes with time and experience and exposure? I don't know the answer, but I see it all the time in those who share the experience of caring for a child with disabilities or who have lost a child to illness. I can look at Sophie and grieve for the loss of "normalcy," but I can also exult in her being exactly the way she is. I can sorrow over the absurdity of changing a near-seventeen year old's diapers and marvel at the gift of intimacy that entails. My friend Jody's beautiful daughter Lueza suffered from severe cerebral palsy due to gross medical malpractice when she was born, and she died unexpectedly nearly a year ago at the age of sixteen, but Jody told me the other day that it was such an honor to have cared for her daughter so intimately for so many years. I'm not talking here about all that unconditional love blather, although trite expressions are trite for a reason. I'm heading toward an understanding of openness -- of what it means to be truly open to experience, to the relinquishment of false notions of power and control, to, dare I say it, Love. I wouldn't be able to live, one person might say, hearing of the death of someone's child.  I could never do what you do, another says, I just couldn't handle it. 

Contrary to what some might say, we're not given what we can handle. We're opening to handle what we're given.

After the rain

photographer: Robert Doisneau

It's a spectacularly beautiful day here in Los Angeles, even as most days are pretty spectacular. It rained off and on yesterday, sometimes it poured and when lightning struck and thunder roared, the people in the cafe where I was eating lunch collectively gasped (or at least I imagined so) at the rarity. I've let the dog out in the backyard and stood on the top step, listening to birds and sipping coffee. The air is stripped clean and the sky is blue and cloudless. The sweet-pea bush is heavy with the weight of yesterday's water and many flowers, and the roses, both pink and white have begun to bloom, again. Baseball games have been cancelled due to flooding, and both boys are asleep. Sophie is sitting up in bed, humming, a bird, a sweet-pea, a rose.









***The great French photographer, Robert Doisneau, would have been 100 years old on Monday.He's being honored by Google, and this photo struck me this morning like the lightning bolt yesterday.