The (Heart is a Lonely) Hunter

I'm writing about hunting here, but it seemed a good excuse to plug Carson McCullers' novel - which, besides being a great work, has one of the best titles for a literary work ever. It (the title) somehow captures the feel of a pop-song and very dark poetry all at once.

It's hunting season in the country. PA hunters are serious about their guns, and serious about their game. It's survival of the fittest, in absolute terms. I'm scrambling to make sure my pup is protected: C. the Postmistress tells me that the hunters in our area are notorious for shooting dogs. They will shoot whatever moves in their line of sight, and they won't feel bad about it. Apparently, if your dog does not have the wilderness savvy to protect himself, he doesn't deserve to live. Many have been shot, and they pretty much just get left for dead. There is also a legendary story about an old woman who got shot while hanging her clothes outside. She was wearing white gloves, and the hunter mistook her hands for a deer's tail.

Eek.

So the pup will be wearing a reflective orange safety vest from now on.

The law prohibits hunting on Sundays (because of God, I guess). And the immediate acreage around my house is "Posted," meaning it's private property where hunting is prohibited. Still, you hear the gunshots as if they are right there. I think one of the neighbors set up a shooting range for target practice.

I don't know what to say. Is hunting cruel? Barbaric? Or is it - as one of the Republican candidates said in the YouTube debates last night (was it Ron Paul?), boasting about getting his first hunting license at age 9 - "an important American family tradition." The right to bear arms. Interesting that John McCain, the candidate with the most direct experience with horrific violence, is the only one who does not own a gun (but don't get me started about what an asinine question that was).

It seems to me a classic example of "A Divided America," i.e. the challenges of a society which is both democratic and highly-diverse. For some, guns may well represent a cherished family tradition; for others, it's nothing but death and destruction. Not surprisingly, I'd come down on the side of gun control laws; if the tradition is really that cherished, then having to get a license or take an exam or go through some other qualification process is a small inconvenience to incur - especially when the larger benefit is enjoying a truly free, democratic, and safe society. For gun-lovers to make a claim on full license to do whatever and whenever with their guns is just plain anachronistic - what they want is secession, what they want is not to have to participate in a complex, pluralistic society. Do libertarians really not see the chaos that would ensue if government did disappear?

At any rate, gun control is not likely to go over any time soon in this neck o' the woods. It reminds me that I am a visitor here - for now, anyway - definitely not a true resident. (I in fact still vote in NY.) The same goes for the Bronx, really. Not quite at home in either place. A woman with no country...

The heart is a lonely hunter. Yup.

The Case For Obama Is The Case For Everything

I’m all wound up about the race for the Democratic presidential nominee and am going to have to detour from city-country musings for a moment or two.

I’ve kept a distance from most media in the last few months, sorting out some things in my head and via observation/experience. Catching up on a few periodicals today, it’s weird to read analyses which articulate almost exactly what I’ve been thinking and saying ever since Obama joined the race. This is not to say that I am prescient or of particular high intelligence in any way; but rather to throw an “Amen” into the ring, affirming that something is happening in world politics and American leadership – that this is indeed a critical moment in history, of which we post baby-boomer, liberal-leaners in particular are a part – whether we like it, or acknowledge it, or not.

My draw to Obama, from the beginning, has been directly related to his biography. Meaning, my judgment of his leadership ability has everything to do with his person – how is this person shaped, what makes this person tick, what does this person most hate and most respect, with what inner capacities and outer strengths will this person approach the world’s greatest challenges and assets. In other words, HOW does this person think, not strictly WHAT does he think; and how does he understand his job vis-à-vis the individuals and groups over which he has power and influence. What a person thinks and does changes over time, in shifting circumstances – more so than ever in an increasingly complex world. But how a person thinks and acts is more deeply ingrained - a more fixed measure of character, effectiveness, and potential pitfalls as a leader.

All this is apparently getting some air time in the media now. Two recent articles about Obama – one in the New Yorker, and one in the NY Times Mag – speak to the strength of his experience as a human being. (“Experience” is the key word here, since Hillary is touting it as her advantage.) “[Obama] presents himself in all his cultural hybridity – African and American and Asian, black and white, infused with all-American hopefulness and with the reserve that comes of living on the receiving end of power.” Says Anthony Lake, one of Obama’s foreign policy advisors and former national-security adviser to Bill Clinton: “He has the kind of mind that works its way through complexities by listening and giving some edge of legitimacy to various points of view before he comes down on his, and that point of view embraces complexity.” Lake was first impressed “not so much by Obama’s policy prescriptions as by his temperament and intellectual habits.”

Complexities. Hybridity. Hopefulness and reserve. Something is happening. We are being asked to choose the long view over the short view. We are being asked to rediscover both our wild idealism and our belief in honest-to-goodness front-door problem-solving. “The security of the American people is inextricably linked to the security of all people,” i.e. “what’s good for others is good for us, there is no contradiction between idealism and realism” (this, incidentally, is a traditional African belief – ubuntu).

Obama is committed to truthfulness, but he’s not stupid. He may be a little naïve, but not completely naïve; and a little naïve is I think exactly what a visionary leader must be. I think that Obama is savvy enough to know the difference between truth and self-sabotage; he is in for sustainability, not suicide, but he wants to do it with substantive conviction at the core. [See an earlier post which references Obama and sincerity.]

Here’s a thought that will surely get me lynched among traditional feminists and grassroots activists: when it comes to distribution of power, I have always believed in a democratic republic, as opposed to a pure democracy: some are fit to rule, some are fit to empower. I am not in favor of tyranny of the masses. This opinion is directly related to the above notion that biography is everything, that what drives us and shapes us as individuals is everything about how we lead (and you can be a perfectly admirable human without being the right person for broad-based leadership at a particular moment). Obama’s edge, I think, is that he stands on firmer personal ground than Hillary does; he has less to lose. As a woman, Hillary has to be reactive. She has to play to and against certain expectations. Her supposed “tough-mindedness” is more about crafting perceptions than it is about true leadership. Obama is less trapped in this way. He is freer to speak candidly, to lead transparently.

This is not to say that there is no woman out there who could lead in this candid, free, transparent way; but Hillary, I feel, is not that woman. She is the sort of powerful woman who has had to play the accomplished-woman game throughout her entire career in order to get to where she is; she is shaped and driven by these experiences and will approach a presidency in the same way, with “inspired cynicism.” She will cover her ass, she will look over her shoulder, she will rule her staff with an iron fist, she will act the part she must act in order to maintain her power base, she will manipulate and revise truth and position hubby Bill and do everything she has always had to do – with supreme skill and discipline – in order to keep what she’s got and continue building her “career” in politics. (Let me say here that I would not lay blame on Hillary for her path or her tactics; she has done something remarkable in a world wholly unfriendly to her success. I just don’t think her particular psyche vis-a-vis power management is the best thing for the world right now, not from the seat of the presidency.) Obama, on the other hand, for better or for worse, has more latitude to approach his presidency with an attitude and an ambition of true public service, fundamental changes for the greater good – and I believe that he does. He can use “soft power” without being accused of weak femininity. Simply put, I believe that Obama is strategizing his campaign, doggedly pursuing election, in order to pursue his public service vision; Hillary, on the other hand, is strategizing her campaign in order to get elected. To quote the character Josh Liman from my favorite prime-time drama, The West Wing (who is about to jump ship from the [Senator John] Hoynes campaign for the Jed Bartlet campaign): "Senator, I don't know what we're for. I don't know what we're for, I don't know what we're against. Except that we seem to be for winning, and against anyone else winning."

All this to say that there are some who will be more effective and fearless at the level of the US Presidency – who have less to lose, fewer personal agendas, less social baggage (Obama for his part has plenty of social baggage, but, as he’s demonstrated through his two memoirs, he’s pretty darn self-aware about all of it and has effectively channeled lessons learned into public service passions). NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg – the epitome of the unpolitical politician, who approaches his job with a genuine interest in effectiveness and change and public good, because he’s really got nothing much at stake personally – is a good example.

These presidential primaries are posing to us Democrats a fundamental question about what we fear and what we hope for. More than terrorism itself, what I fear is the voting public’s giving in to (short-term) fear: “This is Obama’s problem in a nutshell. Democratic voters seem to be torn between the hope of reshaping a frightening world and the fear of being terribly vulnerable to that world.”

Friends, there is much to be afraid of. Some threats are more obvious, more in our faces – and much of this has to do with media manipulation by a regime which has effectively used their version of the world order – scare tactics – to control us and push forward a childishly categorical and boys’ club-based, narrow-minded agenda. Let’s be more afraid of a world in which deception is the norm for the American presidency; where we expect little from our leaders as far as courage and vision; where fear and self-preservation translate into bullying force which ultimately only intensifies the threat of catastrophic violence. Obama is trying to do something new, something different; he is the post baby-boomer voice – finally – who is saying, Ok, time to get up off the mat, enough post-Vietnam cynicism. We can go that route – Iraq being our Vietnam, we are halfway there – or we can try something different. The fact that Obama is also friendly with corporate leaders, believes in free-market capitalism, raises money from the wealthy, is a student of history and an admirer of select “old guard” American and world political figures – all this should serve as reassurance that he’s not just some over-idealistic arrogant kid, throwing the baby out with the bath water. He’s shaped by no one thing, and he’s shaping something real, something truly contemporary; something based in deeply-held values and heterogeneous experience, working its way out via the political realm, expressing itself through power structures. C’mon, folks. Being brave and being self-interested truly are one in the same here.

Obama '08. Yeah.

Thanksgiving 2007

I looked at my pup the other day and saw a kind of melancholy in his eyes. He'd been sleeping an awful lot, too - more than usual. I confess that I generally speak to my dog in complete sentences, not in puppy-baby-talk or single-word commands. So I cocked my head inquisitively and looked him in the eye and asked, pretty seriously: "Holidays gettin' to ya?"

I was talking to my mother a few days ago, as we were all (my family, that is) settling into whatever plans we'd decided on (this year, it was every man/woman/child for itself - each of us not up to traveling or hosting, for various reasons), and she said to me, "I can't understand why people get so anxious around holiday times. I don't see what the big deal is, whether you get together or don't get together." I think this may be a generational/cultural sort of thing, and I tried to explain to her that her family is the kind that always gets together, their sense of family is so strong, so unquestioned, that she always knows there's somewhere to go. Her problem is that she's often pulled in so many directions that she'd just assume stay home by herself and not be troubled by all the hooplah. In contrast, there are people (many of whom I know personally) whose families are so fragmented and estranged, that holidays are a time when you become acutely aware of how disconnected you are, of the absence of that unquestioned together-ness that once characterized the majority of families... but no longer.

As for me, I seem to be somewhere in the middle. My family would have me, certainly, if I had nowhere else to go. And while we do manage to maintain our relations and semi-regular correspondences - as best we can through some rocky times - we are ourselves rather fragmented these days, and it would be a forced sort of thing for all of us. I have a couple of friends in the city who fall into the category of disconnected-from-family, and who reach out for a casual non-family/urban-type anti-Thanksgiving. For them, I am thankful, and I try to make sure to spend time with them at some point around the holidays; they are and have been my crucial pseudo-family over the years. And then there are the close friends who have large family/extended family gatherings and who always offer me a place at their table (it's a toss-up whether these would be more or less awkward than Thanksgiving with my own family - depends on the specific circumstances from year to year, I guess).

This year, J. and I and the pup are in the country (J.'s family is similar to mine in its semi-together-fragmentedness, and so the forces saw fit to give us time together). We spent our Thursday more or less how we always spend our time here - cooking, eating, working, studying, playing, resting. I am thankful. Yes, I am thankful. The stripping away of typical traditions is, on the one hand, a little sad; but then again, in their stead is a kind of bare-bones gratitude that is perhaps even closer to the original spirit of the holiday than the holiday traditions themselves: for shelter and warmth, for love and friendship, for work and rest, for freedom and choice... I am thankful.

And, of course, for all of you, too - dear friends and fellow pilgrims in this strange and ever-challenging modern world of brokenness, evolution, art, commerce, loneliness, and love. Hope you had a good one.

Thanksgiving Anti-Turkey Meal: Suckling Pig, Sauteed Swiss Chard, Beans n Rice

First Snow, and Rilke on Ambition

The snow is falling fast here this morning - it's lovely. About a foot I'd say. Should taper off this afternoon. The wood pile is almost all stacked in the shed (yesterday's labor), and the new furnace is humming along. We discovered a mystery electrical cord emerging from the crawl space in the basement and realized that it's heating tape for the kitchen and bathroom pipes - the ones that froze last winter. C. the Postmistress told me about heating tape - you attach it to your pipes, plug it in, and it (safely) heats the pipes when temps fall below freezing. I was planning on researching and trying to install, so what a relief - one of those gifts from above - that it's already done. My second winter, and I'm just a little more prepared, which is a good thing.

So winter is officially here, and in the quiet of the world going dormant, laying itself down to sleep, I have been reading Rilke's early poems and some biography. The poet's realm was that of the soul, the deep inner life. In Robert Bly's intro to his translations of selected poems, he writes:

When I first read Rilke in my twenties, I felt a deep shock upon realizing the amount of introversion he had achieved, and the adult attention he paid to inner states. From the pragmatist or objectivist point of view, Rilke goes too far in this attention; he goes over the line. The American, in Latin America or North America, is willing to accept some introversion, but when it goes this far, he may dismiss the whole thing as solipsism, or as an evasion of political responsibility... Rilke knows what Tolstoy knows in The Death of Ivan Ilych: that our day-to-day life, with its patterns and familiar objects, can become a husk that blocks anything fresh from coming in. Before the industrial revolution brought its various creature comforts, it is conceivable that the shocks of winter cold, sudden poverties, plague, brutal invasions, abrupt unexplainable deaths, regularly broke the husk. In our time the husk is strong, and Rilke turns to look at it.

Here in the country, in solitude, I find that the husk falls away. The soul, the spirit, unfolds:

I want to unfold.
I don't want to stay folded anywhere,
because where I am folded, there I am a lie.

The spareness and the stillness of a country road, farmlands minding their own seasons and work in good time, big sky, snow falling... the slow, deep work of fruitfulness that is born of nature, as opposed to human-driven competition or ambition. And yet Rilke, like Donald Hall, has a very clear idea of his ambition:

You see, I want a lot.
Perhaps I want everything:
the darkness that comes with every infinite fall
and the shivering blaze of every step up.

So many live on and want nothing,
and are raised to the rank of prince
by the slippery ease of their light judgments.

But what you love to see are faces
that do work and feel thirst....

You have not grown old, and it is not too late
to dive into your increasing depths
where life calmly gives out its own secret.

Calmly. As Denise Levertov reminded us, "Much happens when we're not there." And much happens when we do nothing. We unfold... and we hear things. We may even hear the snow falling.

Recoiling & Progress

“I pray that my progress has been more than recoiling with satiation and disgust from one style to another, a series of rebuffs." -Robert Lowell

There's a certain soggy, cold, autumn-turning-winter sort of day in the country which reminds me of rural New England in November. Which is a funny/odd reminder of what drove me to the city in the first place.

I went to boarding school in New England from 9th through 12th grades. My parents had this grand idea - somewhat typical immigrant dream - about their elite-educated children, ivy league and would-be Supreme Court Justices or renowned scholars. I was a morose pre-teen of the suburbs, so they figured it could only do me good to send me off. So off I went. They were strange and lonely years, my introduction to class-and race-consciousness and social alienation on a whole new level. I am grateful for the education, a real love of learning got under my skin during those years; and it is ultimately unbecoming, I realize, to complain about an expensive education. At any rate, when those four years were up, I was more than game for something different - for the big city, for a place where there were many more people in general, and many more people who looked more like me.

So this funny/odd reminder makes me wonder if something else got under my skin during those years, despite my abrupt flight to the city: a certain comfort in solitude, the building up of inner resources in the face of an unwelcoming external world; the beginnings - or perhaps the second bloom (the first being a mostly lonely childhood) - of some breed of vocation for quiet and apartness. It's a simplistic but not wholly untrue paradigm for artistic evolution, I suppose - turning one's basic sense of alienation into a creative state. I learned a preference for quiet over noise, for intimacy over crowds, during those years - as a way of survival.

In my memories, both childhood and boarding school are perpetual autumn. When I conjure up those times, I see and feel only a soggy cold, or a crisp cool; silence or the barely audible rustle of the wind, the crunch of leaves under my feet; gray-ness, muted greens and browns, or rays of light shooting through tops of towering trees in a private forest. I try to recall spring and summer, and I see images, but I see them from without, as if observing another body, another being. For many years during my young adulthood I remember thinking and feeling a kind of animosity toward spring and summer; as if thaw, germination, bloom, brightness, and warmth had nothing whatever to do with me, and I bore them, awaited their passing, like a shrill marching band blasting through. Over the last decade or so, this has slowly begun to change, especially as I've taken up gardening in earnest and learned to love spring and summer on their own terms - for their work of fruitfulness, for their own warm stillness, for the ways in which they open their arms for all manner of living creature to emerge and get busy and propagate (yes, even the BUGS).

In two weeks, it will be one full year, a cycle of seasons, since this city-country journey began (since I closed the deal on the house and spent my first night). Ironically, I will be spending that anniversary weekend with my family in the suburbs. I'm sure it will be an interesting and useful "pause" as I launch into the next four seasons of city-country life, and city-country tales.

Poem for a Quiet Morning / a Quiet Life

Much happens when we're not there.
Many trees, not only that famous one, over and over,
fall in the forest. We don't see, but something sees,
or someone, a different kind of someone,
a different molecular model, or entities
not made of molecules anyway; or nothing, no one:
but something has taken place, taken space,
been present, absent,*
returned. Much moves in and out of open windows
when our attention is somewhere else,
just as our souls move in and out of our bodies sometimes.
Everyone used to know this,
but for a hundred years or more
we've been losing our memories, moulting, shedding,
like animals or plants that are not well...
And though it may have nothing at all to do with us,
and though we can't fathom its designs,
nevertheless our condition thereby changes:
cells shift, a rustling barely audible as of tarlatan
flickers through closed books, one or two leaves
fall, and when we read them we can perceive,
if we are truthful, that we are not dreaming,
not dreaming but once more witnessing.

-Denise Levertov, from "Window-Blind"

*This line should be indented, blogger's formatting not cooperating.

Only Let Me Be...

Dear God,

Let me be something every minute of every hour of my life.
Let me be gay
Let me be sad
Let me be cold
Let me be warm
Let me be hungry, have too much to eat
Let me be ragged or well dressed
Let me be sincere, be deceitful
Let me be truthful
Let me be a liar
Let me be honorable and let me sin
Only let me be something every blessed minute.
And when I sleep, let me dream all the time,
so that not one little piece of living is ever lost.

-Francie Nolan, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

Listening to the last of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn on my way out to the country today, the above passage struck me. It reminded me, I think, of why this crazy life of extremes – often disorienting (and very inefficient) – of city and country.

By the time of the above passage, it’s 1917, and Francie is 15 years old. She has been forced to quit school – her only joy – to work a full-time office job (pretending to be 17) and be the primary bread-winner for her family. She’s known poverty and hunger her whole life, her beloved father died a drunkard, and her proud mother loves her brother better than her. So much day-to-day struggle, and yet still, she says: Let me be hungry, have too much to eat / Let me be ragged or well dressed. Not: Let me be stable, let me be secure, let me be middle-of-the-road. Let me be something.

War has just been declared, and upon learning this, Francie is having a kind of visionary moment – of seeing herself in history, of recognizing the profundity of her existence in that moment. She is a young woman, hungry for life and love and beauty, reading for the first time that the world is officially on fire. She consciously seizes the moment, tries to capture it – by taking the time to notice every detail about herself and her environment, and then sealing some things in an envelope (a lock of hair, a penny, a Whitman poem, the news clipping about the war). She writes her name, her age, and the date on the envelope and imagines herself opening it in 50 years. I don’t want to remember, she says. I want to live. I don’t want to reminisce, I want to re-live.

I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise
Regardless of others, ever regardful of others
Maternal as well as paternal, a child as well as a man
Stuffed with the stuff that is course, and stuffed with the stuff that is fine...

(from "Leaves of Grass")

Francie’s spirit is clearly that of a romantic – Emersonian, Whitmanesque, Proustian. At such a young age, she understands something that only a young person who has had a very short youth could understand: that the passage of time is an utter tragedy. And that every moment we are alive on this earth is a miracle worth bottling for eternity (in Francie’s case, sealing in an envelope) - a living phenomenon bursting with beauty and possibility. On some level, Francie, who at 15 is both still a child and more adult than most adults, understands her mortality.


Let me be something.
Let me share the silence of first snow with no one but the doe
Let me wake to the sound of city garbage trucks and car alarms
Let me burn the wood I’ve chopped and stacked, and warm my hands by the fire
Let me rebel against urban radiators, strip naked and open all the windows in January
Let me see and hear no one but God for days
Let me see and hear all the peoples of the world in a subway car
Let me smell the sweetness of grass and damp tree bark
Let me smell the smells of the street - fancy downtown bakeries, Puerto Rican oxtails, urine, and all
Let the stars show me how black is the night sky
Let the city lights own the skyline and the heavens
Let me till the earth and bring forth fruits
Let an orchid grow in the Bronx.
Let me be something.

The Rustle of Autumn

More richly and more recklessly,
Leaves, leaves, give tongue and whirl away,
Fill yesterday's cup of bitterness
With the sadness of today.

Impulse, enchantment, beauty!
Let's dissolve in September wind
And enter the rustle of autumn.
Be still, or go out of your mind!

-From "Autumn," by Boris Pasternak

I spent part of the country weekend with the Russians - Pasternak, Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova. Random? Even more so: after a day of Russian poetry, I sat down to watch OLD SCHOOL - an adult(ish) frat movie starring Will Ferrell, Vince Vaughn, and Luke Wilson.

A strange stretch in the country. Quiet and unbothered, yet work-ful. Not particularly restful. If I were to oversimplify the city-country dichotomy, I would say city=intellect, country=body. Lawn & yard, cooking, cleaning, laundry, hauling fire wood, climbing the hill with the dog, car maintenance... in the country, I mysteriously turn into a farm woman. The Russians were I guess a mini-antidote to all that. (OLD SCHOOL a mini-antidote to the Russians.)

The physical work is how we get ready for the change of seasons, I suppose. Putting away summer things, getting out sweaters and wool socks and space heaters, the last mowing of the season, the final harvest of lettuce and spinach, raking the leaves and covering the garden with them...and changing the clocks, of course. We enter the dark of winter. Everything smells of burning wood (hair, clothes, dog).

I am not sure if I have quite yet entered the rustle of autumn. Be still, or go out of your mind! We are facing translation issues here, I would imagine. And yet, the sentiment speaks to me - be still, be still. The chores will always be there. More richly, and more recklessly...

Homecoming

Nighttime temps dipped into the high 20’s last night here in the country. The furnace installers were here all day yesterday, back again today to finish up. Had to make do with space heaters and the wood-burning stove. I’ve got enough wood in the shed for a couple weeks but will need to stock up soon. To chop, or to buy: that is the question.

Between October travel and awaiting furnace parts, it’s been a month since I’ve been here. Driving out, I noticed both the slowness and steadiness of change. Two of the boats that were for sale along the roadside all summer are still there, the third is gone – sold or carted in for the winter. Pretty much every real estate for sale sign is still up. The “Cuban Sandwiches” billboard is still there, though no Cuban sandwiches have been sighted in at least a year. There is a new traffic light by the Citgo, where once there was a blinking yellow light. The deer are out, too close to the road, in groups of three and four. There is a new soup self-service area at the General Store, and the coffee shop in S-burg has expanded to include some organic groceries. C. the Postmistress has put her garden to bed with piles of grass clippings, and across the way are about six cows new to the neighborhood.

(In the city, after a month's passing, 1/3 of the apartments in the building would have turned over, advertisements at every bus station and in every subway car would be different, people you know would be now divorced, pregnant, and/or dead, stores would be filled with product lines for the next nearest holiday (chocolate Easter eggs in early-February)).

I arrive at my house - every time, but especially this time - braced for whatever calamity may have befallen. This time, most everything (thankfully) in its place. The wheelbarrow knocked over, a small tree fallen into the backyard, the grass long but not too long, medusa-like sugar snap peas (no actual peas) toppling over their supports, unidentified feces in the front yard. Inside, a few fly carcasses on the windowsills, spider webs and cobwebs of course (Happy Halloween). Leftovers in the fridge grown fuzzy as newborn chicks. No phone messages.

The transition from city to country is always something – something to be undergone. Energy ringing, mind racing as mental space is created, and thoughts – real ones and garbagey ones – migrate from crowded spaces into more open ones, look around the metaphorical room to see if there’s anyone to talk to or good food at the buffet table; then either plant themselves somewhere strategic or go along their merry way. It takes some time to settle in. This time, even more intense after the long absence. During the summer, a long sit on the porch, or ceiling-staring from the couch will do it. But in the cold, sans furnace, the ringing turns in on itself, seeps into the skin and blood and fat, becomes, I think, physiological.

Somewhat defenselessly, I made a fire and ate. And ate. And ate some more. The pup stared accusingly, but oh well. The body needed something, and I gave it. It would take more time for the mind to find its breath and air, but time – here in the country – I got. There is the generosity of slowness, of knowing inaction and waiting not as laziness, not as poor productivity, but as tending to the aliveness of body and soul. Paying attention. Letting. The pup rolled around in the front yard feces, his greatest indulgent joy (qua pup), and I thought: Let him. Just let him.

Let's Try This...

Yes, there need to be orchids in the Bronx, one way or another. I'll think of these as distant cousins to Ella (RIP)- the lovely phalaenopsis who inspired this blog (for those of you just joining).