Toward Home and Hearth

At Close of Day

After the labor that fills the day and long before full darkness falls,

We long to gather and go away, to leave the dimness of labor’s halls

And go back home to the fireside, where supper and books and armchairs wait,

To spend the remains of eventide over soup and a novel beside the grate.

This is the way the day should end, and peace and renewal repair the spent,

Frayed souls whose work was less than friend, for whom the fire is heaven-sent–

This nest of comfort from which we roam always draws us back to hearth and home.

A Park, a Pond, at Peace

Now that the temperatures are gradually sliding into what I consider survivable territory, it’s a lovely opportunity to go outdoors and simply take a leisurely stroll again. I was reminded of this on our little jaunt out to the west coast over Thanksgiving, when even though it was clammy and overcast and somewhat rainy it was a welcome thing to be able to step out the door and not be pushed back in by the blast furnace of the perpetual sun. I love sunshine, really I do, and I’m not sorry to live where I do just now, but it’s a delight to be able to get out and stretch my legs in the neighborhood without any necessity to dash for cover lest I turn instantly into cracklins.

This week, a walk through the surrounding neighborhood, exploring a few streets and walkways and pockets of this town that we’ve not seen before, was the perfect soother on a Saturday afternoon, and a rare treat at that. And it makes me plot further to spend some quality time over the brief winter cooling period just getting out to soak up the happy and calming atmosphere of our more tree-dense areas, our parks and lakes and ponds and the wonderful wild grasses and prairie native plants that make this such a good place to be. To simply step out on the patio from time to time and absorb the rustling leaf sounds of the backyard greenbelt and the obbligato of the birds whistling therein. To hike over to the university campus instead of having to take the shuttle just to survive the three and a half or so miles, and then once there not to need to tear indoors instantly.

I’m only too glad to have the opportunity to recall what is actually so great about the great outdoors and to relish the enchantments of a lightly ruffled pond or the distant competitive singing of a yard full of hounds or even, should I be outdoors and doing the right thing in the right spot at the perfectly right moment, to feel that exceedingly sharp joy found only when one is not enclosed by walls and roof. What a fine joy that can be indeed.

Nobody Loves Me, Everybody Hates Me . . . *

. . . Think I’m Gonna Go Eat Worms! [Note: no actual worms were harmed in the making of this photograph.]

Yes, it may be true that no man is an island–we all depend on others far more than we even recognize or comprehend–but conversely, every one of us is his or her own unique and seemingly isolated version of Three Mile Island at times when it comes to having personal meltdowns. It starts right at birth, when most of us scream and complain at having been removed from that ever-so-pleasant resort and spa, Mom’s innards, and ejected unwittingly and unwillingly into the cold, cruel world, and it continues, however sporadically, throughout our lives. We are such fragile creatures.

The majority of humans, happily, are not subject to this dark reality for too large a percentage of our lives, but it’s more common than is commonly discussed that we have trials, tribulations and the varying degrees of inability to cope with them that make us question, if not our sanity, then certainly our ability to rise above what’s bad, get a grasp on the good, and move forward regardless of feeling worthy or curable. Depression truly sucks–not just in the vernacular, but in the sense of pulling one down into a bottomless abyss like an evil and irresistible vortex.

I’m not referring, of course, to ordinary grief or sadness. We all get hit by those monsters at times. We flounder, we suffer, we recover. It may be deep and painful and take a long time to rebound from sorrows of even the most normal sort, but we do, eventually, learn how to go on living and being and take part in the doings of the world. Generally, that sort of difficulty or tragedy even tends to gradually heighten the sense and appreciation of what is good and joyful once we’ve experienced and survived the dark and can see the shining contrast of even a modest pleasure with what appeared insurmountably grim from its midst. True clinical, chemical, physiological depression, well, that’s a different thing.

It resists the most persuasive and intelligent logic. It batters self-worth and love in the most brilliant, gifted and accomplished sufferers. It tears at relationships of any sort with other people or with action, with one’s wit and will to survive. If it doesn’t make one outright, actively suicidal, it can simply kill through atrophy and attrition: sufferers have described the state of longing intensely to kill themselves but having no strength or energy to do so.

Why would I talk of such dire and dreary and horrid stuff, even think of it at all? Because I am reminded sometimes of when I used to be there. My worst bout of depression was perhaps aided and abetted by various situational and temporal aggravations, including the typical catalysts and intensifiers of real-world health and happiness threats: the onset of my spasmodic dysphonia, job problems, the murder of our good friend. These were of course widely different in intensity and timing, but to someone like me, their interaction with my evidently wonky endocrine system or whatever combined forces of chemical and biological imbalance were building in me meant that when I hit bottom, no amount of thoughtful and heartfelt reasoning with myself could ‘fix’ me or my situation.

I am one of the true Lucky Ones. I finally felt so brain-fogged, so unable to resist the pull of that deadly sucking, enervating, soul-destroying feeling of pointlessness and ugliness and being unlovable and incapable of doing anything meaningful or good–well, I got so needy that I actually let others help me. That was it. The only way out of the hole was to grip the hands reaching in toward me and let them do all of the work of pulling me out. Part of it was accepting these helpers’ assurances that they did indeed believe in me and in how I felt, that they loved me and knew that I had worth and potential. Part was letting others lead me around and taking their advice and simply letting go of what little shreds of ego I had left enough to say that I would do better in following an educated and experienced prescription for improvement than I’d been doing on my ever-weakening own two feet. And a part that was essential for me was loosening my grip on my insistence that taking prescribed treatment–both psychological and chemical–without trying to create or control it myself was a sign of weakness or failure. It took, in fact, all of my strength and intelligence to recognize that any strength and intelligence I had couldn’t save me.

The luck involved is clearly that together we (my caregivers–medical and personal–and I) did find the combination of therapeutic treatments, behavioral changes and chemical re-balancing medication that not only unlocked my present emergency state of depressive existence but ultimately proved to let me feel fully, wholly myself for the first time in my life. I know that this is not a cure but an ongoing process for as long as I live. And, having lived both ways, I am more than happy to take on that responsibility. It’s a privilege.

What’s most beautiful of all, for me, is that when it happens (as it has in this last couple of weeks) that several occurrences and situations conspire to remind me of this my past and how it shaped my present life and self, it also reawakens in me the profound gratitude for all of those complex minutiae that converged so miraculously well as to make this life possible. To make my continued existence at all possible, perhaps, but particularly such a happy me. What seemed like the most disastrous and irreparable of confluences instead conspired to make just the right blend at the right moment that finally offered me a rescue.

Turns out that eating worms is the very nourishment that makes some birds healthy enough to sing their hearts out with the pure delight of existing. Last week I was out walking and saw a ditch full of drowned worms, lured into and killed by stormy waters. This week I was walking the same route and the sky was filled with the most spectacular warbling, chirruping, musical bird songs I could hope to hear. Coincidence? Very possibly not.

(* from the old campfire song Nobody Loves Me, Everybody Hates Me . . . )

 

Vita Brevis! Carpe Diem!

 

Let us mind our history lessons, each of us . . .

There’s nothing like sorting through one’s personal archives to stir up the notion that life’s short and memory shorter. Go through the files of family photos, yes, and there are ghosts staring back at me that I never even knew, let alone can name or place without my mother (perhaps my grandmother or great-) on hand as reference. How many thousands of stories have I ignored or forgotten among only the few handfuls of fading images I keep boxed up in storage, I wonder?

Delve into nothing more exotic than the household files, meaning only to rearrange what’s there more neatly and perhaps cull a few records that are far out of date, and I find I am plunged into a well of information that, even in those records and bills and receipts not older than a year, escape me like ephemeral puffs of ether as I try to grasp what they meant or why they were recorded in the first place. An atomic cloud of ideas and ideals sprays out of the folders that I thought would only hold a few needful numbers, a name or connection I must think I needed at tax time or on my next appointment with the named practitioner. Stories trail out in smoky wisps.

Reach back into the recesses of the cupboard or closet, hoping to simply rearrange my goods for daily use, and I always discover that my tidying has turned archeological, that items long forgotten lurk in the shadows and recall to mind grand plans since erased: a superb meal here, a skirt to hem there, a pint of paint bought specifically for a project that has lain neglected so long that the other parts were used eons ago for something else entirely. My life is a tale of constantly shifting shores, tangents taken and those unnoticed ones that might have led me in a completely different path to who-knows-where.

What is my legacy? I cannot know, other than that it is short and small. My life’s story will disappear in a hiccup about as soon as I shed my human shell. But in the meantime, what adventures can I take? How shall I flesh it out to my own satisfaction? That is the time of relevance to me, not history past or future but my own small window of experience. Shall I forget the stuff of my life long-shelved, my ancestors, the wide unfolding scenes of history and space? Oh, no, never by choice. But what will shape my happiness the most is none of that, is rather my living in this moment, possibly with a tidier cabinet here and there or a better sorted box of memories to visit from time to time, yet always with an eye toward the light, toward the rising and setting of the sun. Day in, day out, forever.

Life is astoundingly brief and runs away apace. But grasping the essence and ecstasy of any day need not be gigantic in its way, only enough to fill an undemanding heart with some small measure of contentment that might overflow, only enough in turn, to run out toward another heart or two.

 

Thinking on a Thirsty Thursday

As another Summer slips toward her torrid latter days, I thirst mostly for a sense of serenity amid the ache and struggle that transforms everyday deeds into Herculean tasks by mere virtue of the sizzling sun. And as I do, and sip the simplest glass of cold clear water, I recall that Summer has a range of beauties all her own. Contemplating them can bring a water-clarity to my heated thoughts and gradually, I find that slipping sense of refuge in the burning day has righted itself again, if only for a moment or two, and that is quite enough.

Here, then, I salute the summer. I salute water, and the wealth that lets me have it in cold clarity almost whenever I should want. And I salute, with deepest peace, the calm that comes in recollecting all that’s good and fair and simple in that harshest place, the burning midst of the high season of the sun itself, knowing it is its own sort of beautiful and will be missed again some other day.

Her Moment of Respite

Reading

A heavy braid of brown-black hair

Coiling over her shoulder frames

The mourning dove-brown collarbones

That rise and fall in subtle flight

As she breathes, sitting back there in such quiet repose

As if to lend some grace to that so humble vase of white

Field lilies at her side, and when she turns

The antique pages of that favored book,

She spares a moment’s look to watch the lilies catch

The kitchen windows’ waning light

Just as the late-day sun tips in

Behind those distant trees to

Chase the night

Solace in Silence

Let us look for our peace wherever we can. Let us embrace it and rest in it. And let us always share that peace with whomever, whenever and however we are able, inviting them all into our places of peace so that they and others all around the world, too, can find and disperse the sweetness of true and deep repose.

Invitations to Dance

Dancers I: Bend Sinister

Leaning back into a dire S-curve

And turning, twisting out of grace,

Finding cruel existence takes

Her to a meaner, coarser place,

She rebels against the tide

That pulls her downward, scrapes her soul,

And makes a revolutionary

Spring to leave the great Black Hole

Of wounded spirit, tortured love,

To swim back into something sweet—

This is the mandate of the dance:

To win by keeping on her feet

Dancers II: Conjuror

Under a spell of loveliness

She leans, she curls, expands;

She falls against the strong caress

Of gladness, in the hands

Of magic greater than herself,

And when the spell is done,

There is no darkness, loneliness

Or sorrow; she is one

With every boundary, with joy,

With having been set free

From all constraint; the dance has won

Her to infinity

I Close My Eyes

I close my eyes.

Breathe. Breathe, and think nothing–deliberately think nothing: not thoughts about nothingness, but no thinking. Just feel. Feel my breathing. Let it slow and deepen. Sense how my lungs are filling and how cool and soothing the air can be. Feel the inside of my eyelids becoming less dry and harsh, softening with the renewing almost-tears that mark the relief of closing my eyes after too little sleep and too long a day to follow it. Breathe.

I can smell the familiar scent of my freshly washed shirt collar that’s pulled up close to my chin, not because I’m cold but because it’s a favorite and a comfortable, so-soft shirt. All I hear is the gentle whirring of the air through the house, the light flickering of leaves outside the window in the slightest breeze, and a bird not far away, practicing its sweet and simple arias without tiring. The sun’s warmth, coming in the window, is blushing its way through my eyelids but still I keep my eyes lightly closed. I am content to maintain my steady breaths, my slowness, my calm, my emptiness, and simply to feel. My pulse ticks softly, steadily, unhurried.

There is no need to think of anything just now. Nothing I could think would change what is real in my world or better my place in it, at the moment, so it is good to turn off the thinking and just let go of my usual tense grip on it all for a little while. The world will wait for me.

I can visit other worlds if I like. Sometimes, with my eyes closed, I will. I can make such wonderful worlds inside, when I wish.

But for now, what I want most is this silence that I have sorted out from what’s outside of me; these slow and steady and uncomplicated open spaces I am cultivating and embracing on the inside. The warmth of the sun, through glass, caressing my face. The depth of soothing air moving through my lungs in a grateful, peaceful sigh.

Everything that must Happen and Change and Do will have to wait for me while I am so very un-busy just being. That is enough for now; sitting, eyes closed, breathing, silent, open. For now, that is everything.

My Heart is Racing

Moving at Speed

Everyone’s obsessed with speed

As though it were a grail,

But give the people what they need—

Not what they want—and they’ll

Discover much to their surprise

Alternative delights

That come in the more subtle guise

Of leisured days and nights

And find at last that racing lacks

The lure of lying low,

Avoiding rampant heart attacks—

Instead, loving the slow,

The thoughtful, easeful lassitude

Of living at snail’s pace,

And savoring those motes of joy

Bypassed by those who race

Nearly Endless Cycles

We pedal around at a furious rate

Just as though we’d outrun finitude, death and fate

But the truth of the matter, however we flee,

Is we’ll all still die off—that guy there, you, and me.