Ozarks 18.10.03: Crescent Moons and Moss-Clad Alders

At Kat's Rest, lying on cushions on the porch.  I definitely feel her spirit here, and want to have a formal dedication ceremony for the cabin.  As we drove on the road up to the creek, a sudden image of her in my mind, and the thought--as if I were in inner dialogue with someone who had just asked which of my aunts influenced me the most--that her spirit was so strong.  It's that that has influenced me.

I don't know precisely what I mean by strength of spirit.  I don't have it.  What she had was rare.  It wasn't fierceness, precisely, but a quiet determination that could be fierce if necessary.  Self-determination: she knew her mind, what she wanted and needed, and never wavered once her mind was fixed.  She was not selfish, though the partiality of her excuses for those to whom she was devoted could appear selfish.  But she herself never benefited from that lavishly bestowed loyalty.

Her convictions and determinations were hammered out in the depths of her soul, presumably.  I say presumably, because she kept her own counsel.  Pensive as a nun: no one was privy to what went on in those depths.  She was not garrulous, and had the dignity of a queen addressing commoners: just this much and no no more might be said; just this far and no further.

I am very unlike her.  I blab all.  My soul struggles are spangled across the front pages of the paper, as with my grandmother.  Never a secret anguish, never an unaccentuated sigh (and the watching eye to see how my drama affects my audience).

Kat loved nature because she knew how to be: silent, impassive, patient, soaking it all in without appearing avid or rushed.  She would have liked this place.  She would not have admitted it.  She would be very happy we could obtain it by her gift to us.  

And here's what I see as we arrive and settle in: deep blue sky.  A crescent moon is high in the west, though it's just past noon.  From where I lie, I see the green pine-clad western slope, the brown and yellow oaks to the north swaying in the slight breeze, the mahogany red dogwood with its enameled red berries on the south side of the creek.  The wind chimes tinkle a haunting, faint tune.

In the shade on the north bank of the stream is the alder close to the porch, now bare of leaves.  Its black and silver limbs are an intricate tracery, the moss on its trunk a beautiful thing, but an ominous indicator of the tree's soon demise, and an explanation of its unhealthiness.

Klinkenborg, Rural Life: "In April what you see are our own intentions.  In October you see their unexpected wreck and fulfillment" (p. 171).  And: "A garden is so full of cheap sermons" (p. 172).

Ozarks 27.9.03: Beggars' Lice and Crisp White Wine

Aster vying with goldenrod to be the prettiest flower of the glads; hickory nuts falling with huge whomps on the tin roof; squirrels scampering after such nuts; evening light making sumac a red hardly to be believed; daddy long-legs capering in advance of the cold snap; beggars' lice hitching rides on any inch of clothing they can grab; wind chime slowly singing in the west wind; mushrooms gold, red, brown, some spotted with green and one a yellow filament affair like a sponge or an American form of shiitake.  

As the day goes on, more of the front comes through, making the late-afternoon air and sunlight that wine air and sun of autumn.  And we're toasting it with glasses of white wine, crisp and gold in the afternoon sun.  Why white when it's green gold embodied?  And to think that the grapes that yield this glass of sunlight caught grew along the Mosel in Germany and their wine's being drunk in the Ozarks in Arkansas.

I eschew time, here.  It could be 4.  It could be 5.  Who cares?  If I tip my head down to watch Brassie, her nose just off the porch as she surveys the creek, I catch the sun beneath the porch roof, just in eyes and face.  Not the sun of summer--a friend, not foe.  I can feel in my bones how welcome its warmth and light will be come winter.

And just now, I see its angle will catch the northern slopes before it dips any lower, bring evening to our tiny valley long before day ends on higher ground.  The north side of the creek is suddenly in shade, one triangular rock on the south side of the waterfall pool gloriously illuminated, every pock in its face cast in brightness and chiaroscuro, its lichen like something intricately carved by a master craftsman.

Brassie, unusually self-assertive, is at the pool drinking and dabbling, now rolling luxuriously ion her back.  I hope the thick grass and cool ground heal the itch that seems these days to trouble her.

Thoreau, Walden:

We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking.  I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else I knew as well.  Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience.  Moreover, I on my side require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men's lives; some such account as he would send to his kindred from a distant land; for if he has lived sincerely, it must have been in a distant land to me.

Rafferty's The Ozarks says that summer nights are notable for the cool air that streams down hillsides an hour or so before sunset.   I've seen this just now.  Looking up, I could see the few wispy clouds motionless, but the trees atop the south hill began to sway noticeably in a wind I began to feel on my face, as I watched the setting sun illuminate that hillside.  Fall yes, but late summer still, judging by the wind.

Ozarks 14.9.03: Gilded Pines and Dragons in the Deeps

Sun comes late in the morning to our little valley.  It's like being in the bottom of a bowl, or underwater, and seeing light touch the top before it slowly creeps into the depths.

As I've been sitting, it has finally illuminated the little opening--a very tiny meadow, mostly water--through which the creek flows to empty into the waterfalls.  On the south side of the cabin near the east corner, I look up to see if I can catch sight of a bird high in the sunny trees, chortling repetitively.  I see a pine whose top is beautifully gilded, and a dead tree whose trunk now looks like an uplifted horse's head, watching the cabin.  It's like being at the bottom of an ocean, with the complex rich life of down there, and looking up startled to discover there's an equally complex rich up there, going on independent of down here.

I now realize why it always seems there are so few birds here.  The waterfall and creek are so loud, you hear only the most vocal birds.  And with trees so thick and the darkness well after dawn, it's hard to spot them at the time of day birds normally call loudest.

Gorgeous light.  What would one do without it?  I think this as it just catches, glances off, the gilded blotches of the picture on the front of the volume of Rumi's poems beside me.  I've just read there:

Dear heart, you are so unreasonable!  First you fall in love then worry about your life.  You rob and steal then worry about the law.

You profess to be in love yet still worry about what people say.

Every morning we pray, "In his hands are the depths of the earth, and the tops of the mountains are his."  The down below and up above connect (re-ligion, tie back, etymologically) because of God.  They co-exist.  One cannot live without the other.

The beautiful jewel-green patches of moss scattered on the rock at my feet would not be jewel-green without the light from above.  And the light would have no reason to be, if it did not illuminate what's down here.

The hummingbird I saw last week, which zoomed up to a flower in front of me as I sat creekside, won't be here much longer, and may well be gone.  Gusts of north wind at my back, sending yellow leaves from the mossy failing alder at water's edge spiraling into the stream, spent for the year and ready to rise again as humus downstream.  The dogwood on the south bank has red berries, a fall temptation to the cardinals.  The wind catches and snatches out of my open journal Rumi's poem re: seeking the wisdom that unties one's knot.  Steve, sweet violet of a friend, retrieves it for me.

I just told myself to shut up and stop writing, but how can I not record these lines from the psalm to which I just happened to open:

Praise ye the Lord.  Praise ye the Lord from the heavens: praise him in the heights.  Praise the Lord from the earth, ye dragons, and all deeps (Psalm 148: 1,7).

Dragons?  Really?  King James can be so fanciful.  But liturgy is play, foolish, thrown-to-the-wind actions that have no place in the life we love to call "real."

Ozarks 13.9.03: Pilgrim Mothers and Dryasdust Shells of Reality

Mary Oliver, Winter Hours (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999):

This is called happiness.  This is called: stay away from me with your inches, and your savings accounts, and your plums in a jar.  Your definitive anything.  And if life is so various, so shifting, what could we possibly say of death, that black leaf, that has in it any believable finality? (p. 78).

When I read Mary Oliver, I want to stop writing.  How can any word of mine say it so precisely, so gracefully?  Or, better yet, stop writing and reading, and simply look.  But with her eyes--and there's the trick: not just eyes, but heart.

There's that New England tradition of the passionate engaged hermit, the one who will go her own obdurate way, and see what others don't--Dickinson, Thoreau.  It's an inherited refractory mystical strain, the Pilgrim mothers straining on tiptoe to catch a glimpse of New Jerusalem on the rocky coast of these new shores.  Emerson--sweetest Emerson, Oliver calls him--has it, too.

It's a Platonism woven into the fabric of Anglicanism, a spiritual path of seeing what's inside it all--to change senses, of sucking sweet nectar from the dryasdust shell of reality.  And that requires--that passionate eremitical enterprise--a social commitment, oddly enough. A political commitment: the willingness to live at peace with obdurate others as unwervingly set as seeing it their way as one is oneself.

The two arms of Anglicanism at its best, perplexing to many outsiders: passionate mystical engagement with life in its ordinariness; and passionate sociopolitical engagement founded on an instinct for welcoming (or at least bearing with) the other.  Thoreau exemplifies it, and is thus the Enigma to many interpreters.

We in the South have no such tradition.  I am not sure why.  I read Mary Oliver (and Thoreau, and Dickinson) to catch a glimpse of a way to cranny my own neck towards Jerusalem.  But how to do that effectively, short of selling all and heading to nethermost Maine?

Or is this my Maine, these 80 acres?  A breeze nudges my neck from downstream as I ask this, the soft wet wind from south and east, furry like a cat's tongue cleaning my earlobes.  I spent much of my young life looking for such a refuge, and now I have it, gratis (due to the grace of) Kat.  Kat was, in her own way, a mystic-hermit with a heart passionately engaged in the lives of those around her.

I keep asking about vocation--my vocation--expecting the bolt of lightning to strike.  But perhaps it did many years ago, and now I'm in the midst of it, where there are no more flashes, just dogged fidelity.  Perhaps this hermitage comes just as I need it.

And I can never be here--watch here; write here--without thinking of my great-grandfather's uncle Wilson Bachelor and ow he, too, watched and wrote.  He manged to carry on that looking for Jerusalem tradition on the western frontier of Arkansas.

This place immerses you in it, because it's a bowl through which a stream roars after rain such as we had yesterday.  The roar of the water drowns hearing.  And as I age, I'm less and less able to smell.  I'd better use what sight I still have, while I have it.

Ozarks 12.9.03: Glistening Gold Stubble and Unbroken Circles

Mary Oliver, Winter Hours (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999):

Anxiety for the lamb with his bitter future, anxiety for my own body, and, not least, anxiety for my own soul.  You can fool a lot of yourself but you can’t fool the soul.  That worrier (p. 14).

Describing Arkansas.  This day.  This unrepeatable moment.  It matters that summer lingers.  It's not beside the point that  fall is nudging summer aside.

The surprise, just north of the city, of blue misted mountains--no, never blue: green, and yellow in the linering summer--folded around the river, so that one rises out of urban expectations and dips down, totally unexpectedly, not the bowl of mountains, the wide twisting fields of the river.

Up and over the north ridge of mountains, the surprise, too, of the lovely little valley always planted to rice in recent years.  On this misty morning, the gold stubble glistens with droplets that can't be seen individually from the car, but that give a sheen to the whole field.  Through it all, twisting and snaking, the green veins that form the paddies, glowing so bright, so green, in the mist.

From there, the surprise of the lake, cypress trees keeping sentry, water lilies claiming its surface, slightly ruffled on this morning by the new fall winds.  Green gives way to brown as the water nears the shore.

For me, a lake fraught with history, since my father brought me to fish there.  Pictures of a tiny, earnest me in a cap with ear flaps, holding a pole as long as a small tree out from shore, expecting fish to find their way to my hook.

These thoughts as the second anniversary of my mother's death nears.  It would have been show who bundled me in the warm cap and jacket, against March winds.  She did try.

On the drive up, a memorial radio essay re: Johnnie Cash.  They play the selection of him singing "Will the Circle Be Unbroken?" that mentions the time-honored trope of seeing the hearse carry your mother away.  I break into tears.  More pain as I listen, in the cabin, to Chanticleer singing "We Shall Walk Through the Valley in Peace."  I chose this song to be played at my mother's funeral, as people entered the chapel.  Patrick, about whom I dreamt last night, said after the funeral, "That's a song I'll never hear again without feeling sad."

And the rain drives down from the skies.  And the water pours, pours, over the lip of the precipice in a thick white torrent stained with an ugly tobacco yellow.  I've seen too many loved ones die.  I wonder if I grow incapable of remembering and mourning.

Verlyn Klinkenborg, The Rural Life (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 2003):

The way to look at it all was to accept its passing.  To see something interesting you had to be looking right at it as it flew by.  If you didn’t see it, you wouldn’t see it, no matter how quickly you turned your head of how hard you looked back down the road.  There was no entanglement with the scenery (p. 73).

I implore the angels and saints: pray that I have a more grateful heart.  Pray that I live with time I have left with more awareness of the gift of my life. 

Ozarks 15.6.03: Whippoorwill Calls and Rock-Walking

Here I am, beside a swift stream in the Ozarks, turgid from yesterday’s rain. A spider, gold and fat, plays games in a web at my feet. Overhead a green canopy stirred by the breeze that’s clearing the rain, a cool northerly one rather than the sultry Southern one replete with Gulf moisture from yesterday.

Green: for some, the world begins with water or wind (And the Spirit/ruah of God moved upon the face of the waters). But for me, it begins (and ends) in green, the green of all the wildness I’ve ever known.

The whippoorwill that has sounded above the cabin on the east our last two visits called loud and clear last night about 8 and again at dawn. It brought back a memory. I’m 3. It’s Mississippi. Across the railroad track from our house are cotton fields. At the verge of the woods surrounding them a whippoorwill calls at dusk.

Daddy stops and tells us to listen. He explains that the bird is calling, “Whip poor Will!” a song I take rather personally, since I’m a Will once removed.

Only someone like God has mercy enough to figure out how all the disparate strands of our lives—anyone’s life—fit together into one tapestry. I can’t with my own life. Why have I had so little mercy on my father in my memories of him?

+ + + + +

There’s an art to walking barefoot on stones, a practice Steve doesn’t appreciate or approve. I’ve just walked down to the creek barefoot and down the rock basin.

To get there, you walk across a carpet of bright green moss more luxuriously thick than any man-made fabric. The toes sink with delight into it.

Then you rock-walk, one by one, choosing the largest (and, you hope, the most stable) you can find. This is tricky. The lichen can slip and send you for a tumble.

Once on the solid rock bed of the creek, cold water lapping your ankles, you walk a bit like an ice skater, unconsciously pushing your body’s center of graving as low as possible, for fear of a fall. The solid sandstone streambed is so smooth and continuous in spots, it is very much like skating along, with the lichenous or algae growth covering it—I suspect the latter, though it’s brown.

I wonder if my joy at barefoot rock-walking is a throwback to ancestral pilgrimages to Celtic holy mountains such as Patrick’s purgatory . . . .

Rumi (Maryam Mafi’s translation): “That’s why when the dervish withdraws/from the world he covers all the cracks in the wall,/so the outside light cannot come through./He knows only that the inner light illuminates his world.”
+ + + + +

Lace-cap hydrangeas, white, in bloom all beside the stream now, with black-eyed Susan and a lilac-colored bergamot, huge clumps of it among Queen Anne’s lace as we drove in. I also picked a beautiful wild petunia, purple, cup-shaped.

Ozarks 25.5.03: Goldfinches and Capering Goats

Woods full of birds as I sit on a rock watching the waterfall empty over the lip into the . . . can one say “mere”? Katesmere? The pool is the main feature of this place, where one gazes to find oneself, but which is never still.

Memorial Day. Jeff S. graduated Saturday amidst pomp, circumstance, more boredom.

Were it not for the noise of the water, the woods would be full of birdsong. Only birds I can see, atop a dead tree and in the sunlight, very vivacious, appear to be goldfinches.

+ + + + +

Dark, bitter, rich coffee: I inhale its aroma, sip its complex nectar, here by the stream, tasting it as I never do in the everyday. Thinking how this one cup connects me to an entire world: the Middle East and north Africa, where it’s said goatherds discovered its potency when they saw their goats eat the berries and caper (charming myth); the European epicenter of old coffee-drinking rituals—the Austro-Hungarian empire; Latin America, where our coffee’s grown at such cost to so many, so I can sip this luxury in the Ozarks.

+ + + + +

Flowers today: Coreopsis lanceolata, Rudbeckia hirta, Potentilla simplex (or is it Oenothera biennis?), Erigeron prunus, Baptisia leucophaea (moving to the end of its bloom), and two I can’t identify—Sphenoclea zeylandica and some kind of penstemon?

Ozarks 11.5.03: Young Eagles and Wild Roses

Just back from a long (3 hours) walk in the country at our cabin. Few wildflowers still in bloom—a bit of penstemon, potato or false dandelion, and the phlox that just won’t quit.

But the big find: up right as we reached the chimney rocks, a crop of wild roses, faint pink, single, and very fragrant. White rose on Mother’s Day if your mother has died, red if she’s alive. These are more white than red.

And, curiously, when we got back and I opened my computer case, there was my mother’s obituary, laminated, with the prayer of St. Francis on it. Don’t know where it comes from or how it happens to be there. May she rest in God’s merciful arms.

But strangest of all, as we got to the chimney rocks, we overheard three eagles, young but nearing full growth, riding the drifts of wind on this beautiful late-spring day as if it were a game. They were so golden, with their wings spread, and magnificent enough to strike just a bit of terror into me. I wonder if they’re the same three we saw on our first visit here, younger then?

This is a place for the spirit to soar, given to us by Kat and perhaps by my mother. Kat’s Three Eagles?

Ozarks 4.5.03: Riots of Wildflowers and Embattled Heart

Flowers that have come to bloom this week at the cabin—fire pink, phlox, wild geranium, crested iris, wood betony, horsemint (Monarda russelliana), and foxglove beard-tongue (Penstemon digitalis). Along the roadside, I saw a beautiful grancy graybeard/fringe tree (Chionanthus virg.) and red buckeye that seems past its prime. And oh yes, tradescantia. Didn’t see it up close, but seems to be Ohiensis. We’ll have to walk and see.

It’s good to be here, a misty cool green day. We’ve just arrived. Steve’s made coffee, all windows and the glass door open, the waterfall emptying euphoniously over its lip of rock crowned in wildflowers. My soul rests, even if this is a day trip. A respite from the illness that won’t seem to leave us—my persisting sore throat, which Steve also now has, the persistent ear infection, the cough. It’s a hard time, one of feeling embattled on all sides. . . .

This morning, an encouraging email from someone with inside information about the diocese of Charlotte. And one from a former Belmont Abbey monk, with truly horrifying information re: Abbot O.’s rageaholic tendencies, corroborating much I had forgotten, adding to it: C.’s constant presence in the dorms, his bad-boy behavior always excused by the monks, the firing of A.W. because of her lesbianism.

To tell the reporter or not? At this point, what’s to lose?

Ozarks 30.3.03: Bee Balm and Chimney Rocks

My 53rd birthday. When we got up at 6:30, it was 28◦ outside. Did it freeze in Little Rock? I hope not, or our new spring seedlings will suffer. . . .

Flowers blooming on my birthday this year at the cabin: bird’s-foot violet (V. pedata), rue anemone (Thalictrum thalictroides), and toothwort (Dentaria laciniata). Fiddleheads also coming up, tiny sprigs of bergamot, and some kind of flag all along the creek. I can’t wait to see what these look like.

I transplanted one bird’s-foot violet to the head of the outside steps. May it live and thrive. We found it in a patch near the chimney rocks when we climbed there yesterday. Amazing, eerie formations that seem to go on and on back from the road. Otherwise, bird’s-foot violet not nearly so common as in Pulaski Co. around Pinnacle Mtn. or in Grant Co. on the road to Orion.

There’s some lacy small fernlike plant coming up all over, which I’ve not seen before. The lichens and moss not nearly so spectacular as several weeks ago.

Ozarks 29.3.03: Sarvisberry Blossom, Ephemeral Gifts

This day thirty 53 years ago my mother was preparing to give birth to me. How afraid she must have been with me the first. And the pain. . . .

All these thoughts in the beauty of the Ozarks, where we glimpsed bird’s-foot violets as we drove near the chimney rocks yesterday. I see some kind of flag coming up along the creek, and am curious to know what it will turn out to be. Rue anemone is blooming everywhere—pink, white, pinky-white. And big bright sprays of sarvisberry blossom in the woods.

It’s a clear day, and if we climb high, we’ll no doubt see more of them at overlook points. I also want to see the violets again. Would it be kosher to dig some up? I think they’re almost impossible to transplant.

And all along, I’m talking around what’s in my heart. That’s in part because I don’t know what’s there. Elation, certainly, to have and be in such a place. Elation at the gifts that have dropped into our laps.

At the same time, the very receiving of them—the outlay of money, even if it’s money we inherited from Kat; the new balance (or unbalancing) they effect in our lives; this cabin, land, car—the very gift of them is unsettling and causes me deep anxiety.

I feel that, in growing to old age, I’m growing away from anything that has ever been familiar to me. My loved ones are gone—they recede as I go forward. . . .

And as I write, sun suddenly reaches our valley, pale gold against the still bare trees, all shades of gray and gray-green. I’ll never see the sun on these trees just this way again.

And that’s perhaps what frustrates. All changes. All passes. All is new, and all is dying. I pore over Ecclesiastes, and I don’t know how to absorb that message of . . . acceptance? Impassivity and celebration of the ephemeral gift of life at the same time? I don’t know how to be a Buddhist accepting what is and at the same time a Jew or Christian struggling against injustice.

+ + + + +

Interesting. I read today Mary Oliver’s poem “The Return” in her What Do We Know? (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo, 2002), which says,

Rumi the poet was a scholar also/But Shams, his friend, was an angel./By which I don’t mean anything patient or sweet (p. 9).

Also this wonderful set of lines re: her lying back to back with a seal pup on a beach:

. . . and maybe/our breathing together was some kind of heavenly conversation/in God’s delicate and magnifying language, the one/we don’t dare speak out loud, not yet (ibid.).

+ + + + +

As we walked today, it occurred to me what it is in part, the great anxiety: it’s that things seem to be going too well, and I expect the boom to fall. The . . . I don’t know the word: success? luck? . . . is deeply unsettling. It demands something beyond my normal rut.

And I don’t know what.

I also find it very difficult to imagine good can come without evil following. Telling myself this is a typical emotional dynamic in the lives of people raised with familial alcoholism doesn’t help.

Can I expect, in the same year, to buy a marvelous cabin, land, car, and have anything else good happen to me (justice with Alice Gray, with Belmont Abbey)? Life seldom gives anyone such marvelous gifts all at once. And if it does, it exacts a terrible price.

Ozarks 16.3.03: Silver-Leaf Lichen and Starry Mosses

The new cabin—right outside our doorstep are at least five distinctly different mosses. One is the velvet green moss of lore, the kind you imagine when you read an English mystery novel set in a moss-covered cemetery.

Another—tiny light green stars in clumps, set among yet another brownish-red moss that runs from the base of a tree. Then there’s a slightly twiggy green moss with a pile like carpet, and one small splotch of a graybeard variety like Spanish moss growing on the ground.

Oh, and up the hillside, I see beautiful gray lichen like silver leaf to be applied to a statue, growing amidst the venerable green moss. And is that a separate variety up the hill, that seems to have tiny . . . blooms (does moss bloom?) . . . or is it the star kind again? My eyes are not good enough to see.

The stones on which I’m sitting are foliated with the lichen, but now on closer inspection it’s a very pale green with lacy edges. One could write a treatise on the mosses and lichens alone, which grow at the doorstep.

Ozarks 30.7.04: Magic Waterfalls, Healing Green Smells

The green, healing smell of a mountain woodland. Or should it be “the green holy smell,” since we forget the etymological links between heal-whole-holy? To fernes halwes . . . .

I woke thinking of the description of my great-great-grandfather Lindsey’s brother Thomas Madison Lindsey. A biography of this man in a history of Moody, Texas, says that each morning when he arose, he would go to his back porch, wash his face at the washstand, jump high into the air, touch his toes with his hands, and yodel.

I don’t have the energy of my forebears, but these stories seem to run through the Lindsey line. Where is my energy gone?

+ + + + +

Richard Adams, Plague Dogs: “If you can’t live by rotten rules, you have to find some of your own” (438).

+ + + + +

Our hottest day yet here, afternoon sun picking out the colors of the fine display ahead of me, turning the brown surface of the mere to lacquered old bronze displayed in glass with lights above.

The waterfall is magic in this light—gleaming, playing motion of light, water, rock—conspiring to seduce the heart, enthrall the mind. I could gladly lie upon a lichened, sun-warmed stone across from it. I’d gladly be the stone, no other world to occupy my time than silent adoration of the fall.

Ozarks 27.7.04: Water-Reflected Light, Paths of Mist in Pines

Sunrise at the cabin, compared to sunset: sunset ushers in a cool evening; sunrise touches the cool damp depths of the valley with fingers of warmth. Sunset catches to fire the leaves of the elm beside the mere. As beams of setting sun sparkle on the rippling surface of the water, the leaves and trunk of the tree dance with light, as if the entire tree is illumined by some artificial power source. With the diamond gleam of the green leaves in the setting sun and the play of water-reflected light, day ends in symphony sublime.

Morning sun traces paths of mist down through the pines, onto the cabin’s chimney. I sit now in the first beam of light as the sun rises over the eastern hilltop, though the far western lip of the mere has been lit up for some time now. And as I watch, drops of water fall through the light, evidently from leaves laden with moisture, as a breeze troubles the still air. Like sunset, a sight almost too beautiful for human eyes to see.

+ + + + +

Thoreau, A Walk on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers: “Alas, the poet too, is, in one sense, a sort of dormouse gone into winter quarters of deep and serene thought, insensible to surrounding circumstances; his words are the relation of his oldest and finest memory, as wisdom drawn from the remotest experience. Other men lead a starved existence, meanwhile, like hawks, that would fain keep on the wing, and trust to pick up a sparrow now and then.”

Which reminds me: the other day, as we drove, we passed a blind man standing very still and silent on the street. It was as if he were intently listening, concentrating on some inner reality to the exclusion of all outer concern . . . .

I see the sun set, rise, as a blind man does.

+ + + + +

Mary Oliver, Long Life: “Surely he was looking for something that would abide beyond the Tuesday or the Saturday.” This vis-à-vis Emerson.

And then this astonishing passage—astonishing because it encapsulates so precisely what I just wrote: “The lofty fun of it is that his ‘appearances’ were all merely material and temporal—brick walls, garden walls, ripening pears—while his facts were all of a shifty vapor and an unauthored good-will—the luminosity of the pears, the music of birds and the wind, the affirmative staring-out light of the night stars.”

+ + + + +

Thoreau, Civil Disobedience: “Action from principle, the perception and the performance of right, changes things and relations; it is essentially revolutionary, and does not consist wholly with anything which was. It not only divides states and churches, it divides families; aye, it divides the individual, separating the diabolical in him from the divine.”

Ozarks 26.7.04: Joe-Pye Weed and Tiger-Marked Butterflies

At the cabin. We’ve yet to name it Kats Rest. The old sign, Wildernest, still hangs by the roadside, flaking and cracked from gunshot wounds (as I started to write—but can a sign be wounded?).

Or would Katsmere be more appropriate? It’s that mere, constantly moving as water falls into it and wind passes over it, that’s the heart of the cabin.

Wind, water, heart, movement: religiously charged words. Hebrew makes no distinction between breath and spirit/Spirit: ruah serves for all. God’s breath passes constantly over the world, causing it to move with delight. Send forth thy Spirit and we shall be created . . . .

And as Kathleen O’Hara said to me so many years ago, to have a soul like water so still, it mirrors back perfectly sun and sky. Or a soul instantly malleable to God’s breath, to life-giving water flowing in constantly to replenish it.

Steve said it was 62º when we awoke. Amazing for late July. We slept very comfortably with only the fans, and in fact, I got cold in the night. It’s now overcast, heavy rain clouds scudding by but dropping no rain.

Thoughts of Philander constantly. I must shut it out of heart and mind and let inner work clear my soul enough, this vacation week, that I’ll know what to do. Anything I think now leads to a mathematical equation that’s like a vise: quit, and preserve sanity and integrity, but have no health insurance or salary, leaving Steve with the whole burden, and playing into their hands. Fight, take pride in doing so, but know it’s a losing battle, and self-destruct even as I fight. And how fight there . . . and at Belmont . . . and at RAIN? What’s left of me, for me, except all fight?

+ + + + +

Still thinking of that recent dream about Sophia. Is this a specific wisdom dwelling inside me? The specific wisdom that is an ancient Celtic or Druidic presence in my soul—if passed on from Kate Ryan to Hattie Batchelor, then Celtic?

It’s perhaps that old woman—perhaps even an actual ancestor—that I saw once in a dream, walking up an Irish field to a byre in mist; she turned her head, shrouded by a shawl, and I looked her full in her blue eyes. Or she’s the fey old woman, Nora Bonesteel, in Sharyn McCrumb’s novels.

I contact this wisdom here in a landscape so like ones my Irish, Scottish, and perhaps English ancestors would have known: the lichen-covered rocks, the tree-clad hills, the waterfall. Poulnassy waterfall is very near Inchacarran, whence the Ryans came here. I think often of Val Ryan when I’m here, and of the stone on which he carved or had carved Bridget’s memorial. It looks to have come from the mountains.

At the opening of his chapter on beans, Thoreau speaks of how he was actually re-visiting a childhood scene, in going to Walden. His flute was waking echoes of the very waters he had seen first as a four-year-old boy.

+ + + + +

The butterflies have been working the joe-pye weed from—when? sunup? certainly from full sun—until now, about 5 P.M., when I see them no more. They’re all shapes, sizes, colors—black with yellow marking; black with blue (iridescent) patterns; ditto with swallowtails; creamy bright yellow; a startling blue purple—the latter two very small; tawny orange with tiger markings.

They love to sit on the sun-heated sandstone and fan out their wings. Why, I wonder?

Oh, I misspoke. Here’s a latecomer, small, black with orange spots. It’s landing on a tad of paper on the porch. Brassie takes offense at this and snaps, repeatedly, thankfully not catching it.

Ozarks 26-27.6.04: Christianity and Candles

26.6.04

Kats Rest again—the boys, Luke, Colin, and Pat with us. And I have done research and confirmed I’m wrong about Walpurgisnacht. It’s actually May Day eve, I think, so April. So it competes with the Marian cult, the crowning of the Virgin, which sacralizes all those old pagan May customs.

Today would have been Simpson’s 53rd birthday. R.I.P.

Thoreau, Walden, “Solitude”: “I believe that men are generally still a little afraid of the dark, though the witches are all hung, and Christianity and candles have been introduced.”

27.6.04

“I believe that the more one loves, the more one will act; for that love is only a feeling I would never recognize as love . . .” (van Gogh to Theo, May 1883).

Sun just now in the pines atop the hill on the eastern horizon. Cool and clear—amazing for late June. A west wind came yesterday and swept the storms away—or at least the external ones.

There seems always one inside me. I awake at various times, pain and numbness hither and yon . . . .

I seemed at dawn to hear a howling in the woods—wolf? Aren’t they all gone from here (but can they migrate back)? Coyote? Brassie seemed to hear and be disturbed by it.

One faint trickle of sunlight on my journal now. I think of Wilson Bachelor’s eulogy for his sister Sarah, who had been blind and deaf many years, how he says she’d walk into the sun she couldn’t see and say, “Oh, the blessed sunlight!”

Sun now a radiant necklace, jewels of rarest glory, across the neck of the pines. The sky cloudless and cerulean blue except for a trail of airplane smoke streaking down the eastern sky, now illumined by the sun.

Again, the way I sit here and see first one tiny spot, one tree, one tuft of upthrust plants catch fire, makes me feel as if I’m in an inverted bowl. This green glade is the world. The sky’s its bottom.

+ + + + +

“There is commonly sufficient space about us. Our horizon is never quite at our elbows. The thick wood is not just at our door, nor the pond, but somewhat is always clearing, familiar and worn by us, appropriated and fenced in some way, and reclaimed from Nature. For what reason have I this vast range and circuit, some square miles of unfrequented forest, for my privacy, abandoned to me by men?” (Thoreau, Walden, “Solitude”).

+ + + + +

Ah. Blessed sun, now shining directly on my face. Must be about 8:45.

I dreamt somehow of work, the transition, dreams both foreboding and soothing, which I cannot recapture. . . . Of how some of the operators there would go so far as to erase the hard drives of their computers. Thought also of Andrews and his emailing Pelt to call me a perverted little weasel, and to speak of R.’s drinking. And of M.B. Ross and K. Mitchell and L. Chapman when we were in Salt Lake and news of the downsizing broke. What unadmirable human beings.

Thinking also of that catechism for Catholic voters which speaks of abortion as a “non-negotiable,” and Hoefling’s praise of Jugis, who protected Littleton right up to the audits—effectively lying. She also supports Solari in his lies.

Where is the center of moral gravity in such a church? For my money, the bishops’ willingness to lie is much more damaging to the church and morally reprehensible than those who support gay marriage.

This ecclesiology that seeks to turn the R.C. church into a Republican country club, with behind-the-scenes wheeling and dealing, and strategic lies: it’s utterly despicable. And yet these same folks claim they’re defending tradition.

Ozarks 21.10.04 and 24.10.04: Fall-Turning Cypress and Brown Rice Stubble

Going to the cabin today is crazy. We’re missing all kinds of things at the college. Yet I feel I can do no other. I feel leaden, locked into fate. I have to get away. I’m frantic for rest—for time to read, sleep, dream, write, pray. I am no use to the college if I let it and its problems consume me alive and ravage my soul.

And the gorgeous beauty of this day! Blue tones predominate in the palette, especially as we crossed the Arkansas River, where a fine haze shrouded the encircling hills, turning sky, river, and treetops into a wreath of blue into which muted fall colors were set.

The varied and rich beauty of this day—a day that never will be again, whose combination of light and moisture is unique to this day—praises the Lord. Rich stands of fall-turning cypress in Lake Conway and past Pickles Gap; glinting scimitars of water in brown rice stubble in the beautiful, fertile valley between Little Rock and Conway.

+ + + + +

Light: the unexpected gift. After three overcast days, to see bright sun beaming into our valley, illuminating the hillside across the creek with its carpet of brown leaves. The gray tree trunks are alive with light; every striation, every protrusion, every lichenous patch is sharply illuminated. The layers of sandstone, darkly shaded or brightly lit, etched in detail more exquisite than jeweler’s work.

Ozarks 20.6.04: Odd-Fellow Society and Summer Solstice

“But, wherever a man goes, men will pursue and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society” (Thoreau, Walden, “The Village”).

+ + + + +

Brassie almost stepped over the porch edge into the stream bed this a.m. With her cobby, compact build and age, it surely would have been the end of her.

It reminded me of the time Arabella tipped over a cliff’s edge in Allsopp Park. Far below was the creek, which she could see and evidently thought she’d amble to as she headed off the trail . . .

little realizing that the trail was atop a cliff overhanging the water. So she found herself instantly in mid-air, as we, screaming with anxiety, saw a very surprised-looking dog seemingly hang for a moment in the air, ears flapping at right angles to her body. Arabella was a big girl: with a whomp and a whoosh, down she fell into the stream, legs splayed apart in a last-ditch attempt to have some purchase on anything other than air.

Fortunately, she was not hurt, though her ego may have been a bit bruised. She came up the hill with a chastened grin on her muzzle, having proven, once again, how this particular golden retriever had no difficulty at all in being the dumb blonde of the canine family. All she needed were a pair of big sunglasses, a floppy straw hat, and a piña colada with a straw connected to her mouth, to complete the illusion.

+ + + + +

Do writers write their way through and out of misery? Or is it that the writing diverts a writer from facing the misery evenly and directly?

Ah! Sun and blue sky atop the mountain to the southeast, the first today. It’s like a crown. Some bird with a rake-like trill in a treetop on this north bank is ratcheting up its song as the sun seeks to break through the clouds. Sun means everything to birds, as it rises and sets.

Tomorrow is the summer solstice, St. John’s eve. Am I correct in remembering it’s also Walpurgisnacht? No, I don’t think so. Those fires—do they go back to the Celts? Is this day somehow connected to Lughnasa? I remember we were in the Oberpfalz one summer as the evening neared, and could see the wood stacked for the fire.

It was eerie to see, and I was glad to be shot of it as the day itself neared. Shades of Shirley Jackson’s “Lottery”: we, the two Ausländer, the tight-knit little village with its Denkmal marking the spot where a sizable group of Hussites—men, women, and children—were slaughtered during the Hussite period.

There is that need of human communities to target someone: the thirst of the dirty institutions and desperate odd-fellow society to assure conformity, often by picking a hapless victim to demonstrate what will happen if one refuses to belong. That need makes one anxious when the tight-knit community with a history of slaughter celebrates rituals of belonging.

And with St. John’s eve competing with ancient memories like Walpurgisnacht and Lughnasa, Christianity with paganism, how can the fires not recall the Inquisition? We need our witches—someone to pin the blame on. We cannot permit midnight revels of scantily clad women. Allow that, as the sun shines at midnight and nature appears to have turned itself inside out, and anything might follow.

Catholicism has barely begun to reflect on these mechanisms, and the sin they so seductively enfold, because it has only begun to discover the social sciences. The great liberal theologians of the 20th century—Rahner, Tracy, Longergan, even Metz—all presume a model innocent of such social-anthropological insights.

As a result, their doctrine of sin is attenuated. Yes, celebrate God’s redemptive, sacramental presence everywhere in the world. But do so with an awareness of what original sin really means—of what it is we need to be redeemed from: not merely the sin that turns humans individually from the mark, but the sweet, sickening carrion whiff of corruption that inhabits all human associations, including the church. All are born in sin. Every human society is built, somewhere, on bones, on blood.

Ozarks 19.6.04: Warning Bullfrog, Yellow Palette

At Kats Rest. First time we’ve been here since fall. When I watched Steve walk across the creek yesterday evening—hobble is more accurate—I realized how old we’re getting, how our days are limited and precious. May they not be spent in tedious and wasteful bickering.

Yesterday would have been my father’s 84th birthday. Requiescat in pace.

He died so young. What would his life have been, had he lived? It hits me so strongly today as I sit facing east, listening to the creek babble, and what must be a bullfrog warning me it’s his territory, I think: life is a gift. Each day. To sense/acknowledge that, to feel the deep green enter the bone: even the recognition is a gift.

Of my family, why are Philip and I left? Philip must ask the same, but I doubt he thinks of the question in familial terms.

I feel . . . almost spared, as if an epidemic such as the smallpox has swept through, and only I’m left. Why? Why me? No illumination breaks forth. I read this morning the passage about Jesus as the light of the world, from John. What does it mean, concretely, vocationally, for me to hear this? How am I sent forth as light-giver and light-bearer?

These questions acute because in three weeks, the president is effectively gone. Our last visit here, we had no expectation of such crisis. Now we’re in it—again.

+ + + + +

The Appalachians have more blue and green, the Ozarks more yellow in their color palette. The Ozarks are clearly drier, something one recognizes as summer nears and the creek beside Kats Rest diminishes.

Ozarks 15-16.10.04: Red Enameled Berries and Wagging Fingers

The phrase “refulgent splendor” was made for today’s sunrise. It needs a Greek Orthodox choir chanting in that excited, ecstatic way—a pulsing, pounding crescendo—to celebrate it. The sunrise seems to flow from my dreams . . . of going into a Presbyterian church whose interior is all hammered bronze, or the Episcopal church, which is Baroque, white plaster with intricate pastel ornamentation.

+ + + + +

Sitting at Kats Rest watching the waterfall, which keeps cutting deeper into the overhang that forms it, so that now it’s a chute. Soon it will be a gully of some sort.

Thoughts in the dark of the moon. Another church dream last night—this time that old trope of going to communion. I get to the communion station, and, without warning, there are no more hosts. No announcement—only a switch to another place . . . .

+ + + + +

Purple stars and spikes of aster. Wind pouring from the south as the sun westers, presaging change, rain again in a day or so. Still, the sky’s brilliantly blue and the air crisp and spicy as newly picked apples, or pumpkins touched by frost.

Along the road, red leaves and cones of sumac. The dogwood on the north side of the creek has brilliant red enameled berries.

Listening to Ella Fitzgerald sing “Goody, Goody” as we drove up here, a sudden ray of illumination of my parents’ murky past. I think of this as one of those warm, fuzzy songs my mother sang to us when we were children, akin to “Little Brown Jug” or “Three Little Fishes.”

I can see her now, how she’d wag her finger as she sang, “So you gave her your heart, too, just as I gave mine to you. And she broke it in little pieces . . . . Hooray and hallelujah, you had it coming to you . . . . Goody, goody.”

As I listened carefully to the entire song for the first time in years, I suddenly realized my mother was singing those jubilant (those bitter and reproachful) words not to us children, but to my father.

How many other Southern children my age cut their teeth on that song, imbibing generous doses of maternal poison along with the mock gaiety of the finger wagging, the jazzy beat? How many other Southern women of the post-World War II period sang this song for their husbands, dancing on their heads with glee?

+ + + + +

It’s the poetry of Catholicism I miss—simple homely things turned holy, frail plain earthy vessels of the divine: water, fire, salt, oil, bread, wine. A listening ear becomes the portal to God’s heart in confession, gentle caressing hands a sign of God’s sending forth and commissioning in confirmation, or of God’s healing and promise to abide with us in our journey in the last rites.

But the hands now administering these rites! And the mouths now speaking the words!