Spring, Eliot and Nepo

We have much that is spring here in sunny southern California, gray mornings that seem protective of the plants, sleeping, before the brilliance of afternoon sun. The oak-leaf hydrangea reach ever higher in my front yard, each tiny white blossom a cup where hummingbirds hover.

Birds sing, too, and are nearly jubilant even as crows hop belligerent across the street, their caws less frantic than a month earlier.

Green isn't green but chartreuse, and marks the line between spring and summer.

April, though, is the cruelest month, as the poet wrote.

It breeds lilacs out the dead land, Mixing memory and desire.
(T.S. Eliot)

I have felt lower in April than March and certainly February, Winter kept us warm, Covering earth in forgetful snow, feeding A little life with dried tubers.

This morning, the birds sang and the crows hopped and Sophie hummed, but I felt as if I were pulling love out of shadow. I read this:

If you can't see what you're looking for, 
see what's there.

Close your eyes and know that though you may 
not see anything, you are growing, and that something
larger than you is carrying you toward the light.

I am growing. I am being carried toward the light. I lack nothing.

Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening

What I'm Reading

the way upward and the way downward is one and the same

Heraclitus

Heraclitus - Michelangelo

I.
School 'Reform': A Failing Grade by Diane Ravitch, The New York Review of Books:


...In these two books, we have two versions of school reform. One is devised by Wall Street financiers and politicians who believe in rigidly defined numerical goals and return on investment; they blame lazy teachers, and self-interested unions when test scores are low. The other draws on the deep experience of a compassionate teacher who finds fault not with teachers, unions or students, but with a society that refuses to take responsibility for the conditions in which its children live and learn -- and who has demonstrated through her own efforts how one dedicated teacher has improved the education of poor young people.


II.
from the 49th issue of the literary journal Tin House, the issue titled The Ecstatic, a feature by Elissa Schappell called How the Light Gets In -- a mind-blowing accounting of the author's experience of temporal lobe epilepsy:

...However, this is how I reconcile my belief in science with my belief in the divine. You can say it was a seizure that sparked my ecstatic experience, the same way it brings on an aura. I will argue that because of the epilepsy I was open, the scar in my brain the crack that let the light in.


III.
T.S. Eliot's (prompted by a recent New Yorker article about him) Burnt Norton in Four Quartets:


Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory


Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.


                                 But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.




I am grateful for this reading, for my ability to read, for the ease with which I read and for the unending curiosity I have -- I am grateful for these graces bestowed upon me.