Category Archives: improvisation life

Jul2

step up 999

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Today is another opportunity to step up.  My daughter’s boyfriend and the father of her coming baby arrives today for a short visit.  In the catalog of raising kids, there are endless opportunities to step up, to learn a new dance.  Today is a big one.

Both of our daughters are adopted.  Based on observing my sister’s fancy dancing over the years of raising her kids, I don’t think that biological kids and adopted kids are different in the step up requirements. We have both had a lot of practice in learning the choreography of the day.

I have set an intention today for positive understanding and opening.  I want to start with an open heart.  Let it be said that I have moved an entire Himalayan range within myself to get to this place.  I am proud of that.  However, it must also be said that I am not the only one that is going to need to step up.

Here is what Abraham had to say about children a couple days ago:

Children coming forth today have a greater capacity to deal with the greater variety of information that is coming forward than you did. They deliberately are coming forth into this environment where there is more to contemplate. This generation gap that you are talking about, it has ever been thus. Each new generation, every new individual, that comes forth, is coming with you having prepared a different platform for them to proceed from. There is this thing that gets in the way of that that says, “I’m the parent. I got here first. I know more than you do.” From the children’s perspective, and from the purity of their Nonphysical Perspective, what they are saying is, “You’re the parent. You got here first. You prepared a platform that I am leaping off from — and my leap will be beyond anything that you have ever known.”

— Abraham

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Jun29

when I am among the trees

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This is actually a photo of my honey Pam (another poetry angel) among the trees on St. Barth in 2008.  She is gazing at the results of a hurricane/tropical storm that came steaming through while we were there.

We are currently sitting out a storm at home, requiring a battening of emotional hatches, a retreat to safety, and a reassessment of the landscape.  I have alluded to this, but Pammie, pictured above, did spill it on her blog.  Our oldest (but still very young) daughter is pregnant, the result of carelessness and perhaps an unconscious choosing of what seems to us an impossibly difficult, unwelcome, poorly planned path. Our parental list of objections and worries is long, ponderous even.  But maybe our parental list is not the point.  Maybe the point is that here we all are, and how are we going to proceed?

I remember that St. Barth storm and the philosophical, wonderfully French shrug of our landlord’s shoulders as he assessed the damage and then took his usual swim, once the waters had calmed.  It had happened before, and would undoubtedly happen again, this meteorological messing with his life and his home.  Beneath the turbulence, the sand is fine, the sea blue and warm, the volcanic shapes of the island untouched.

And beneath this current storm, the heart that connects us beats.  The arc of her life is hers alone.  This situation seems to me an excellent opportunity to practice my improvisational skills, to dance the music that is playing now, not the tune I was hearing yesterday.  Here’s some help:

When I Am Among the Trees

by Mary Oliver

When I am among the trees,
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
they give off such hints of gladness.
I would almost say that they save me, and daily.

I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, and discernment,
and never hurry through the world
but walk slowly, and bow often.

Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, “Stay awhile.”
The light flows from their branches.

And they call again, “It’s simple,” they say,
“and you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with light, and to shine.”

“When I Am Among the Trees” by Mary Oliver, from Thirst. © Beacon Press, 2006. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

 

Jun28

harsh clay

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Photo: Jeffrey Anderson  Deanna Pellecchia and Ingrid Schatz in FLIGHT

Rebus

You work with what you are given
the red clay of grief,
the black clay of stubbornness going on after.
Clay that tastes of care or carelessness,
clay that smells of the bottom of rivers or dust.

Each thought is a life you have lived or failed to live,
each word is a dish you have eaten or left on the table.
There are honeys so bitter
no one would willingly choose to take them.
The clay takes them: honey of weariness, honey of vanity,
honey of cruelty, fear.

This rebus is slip and stubbornness,
bottom of river, my own consumed life?
when will I learn to read it
plainly, slowly, uncolored by hope or desire?
Not to understand it, only to see.

As water given sugar sweetens, given salt grows salty,
we become our choices.
Each yes, each no continues,
this one a ladder, that one an anvil or cup.

The ladder leans into its darkness.
The anvil leans into its silence.
The cup sits empty.

How will I enter this question the clay has asked?

Jane Hirshfield

A note to the reader:  You will notice that I am posting poems and not much writing.  That is because I am seeking some answers in poetry to a personal challenge.  Children and their choices will do this.  At present, I feel that I am the clay and that this unexpected, difficult, unsought turn is working me like a fierce potter, throwing me again and again on a relentless wheel.  The good news is that all this mixing and wetting and spinning is having the inevitable softening effect.  The clay that is me is opening to these new shapes, warming to the hands of the maker.  Who is me, of course.  The poems help.