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.

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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.).

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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.

Little Rock, Arkansas 28.3.03: Angels Again and Used Silk Shirts

All religious traditions have versions of the meeting-angels-unaware story. Yesterday after lunch, Steve and I stop in at Saver’s. As I paw through shirts, a black man, elderly, begins talking to me, showing me a silk shirt he’s bought for himself.

He tells me he’s 82, was at Ft. Roots (evidently as an orderly) from the beginning, before they found all the “zines” that control folks’ behavior. He shows me a book he’s buying that indicates health is in the mind, the attitude. He reads a blurb—two people can have the same diagnosis, and one lives, the other dies: it’s all in the attitude.

He talks and talks. He was in the Pacific in WWII. (He’d be my father’s age.) I become afraid, back off. To illustrate a point, he touches my arm, pinches me. I’m terrified.

Finally, Steve tells me we must go. My heart thuds as I walk away.

Perhaps I met an angel unaware, a version of my father on a day I’d just said to Steve, “Who ever cared about me as a child? Certainly not my father, who slammed car doors on my hands out of sheer carelessness.”

If it was an angel I met yesterday, lesson to notice: I’m terrified of angels. I do wonder if this poor man had been at Ft. Roots in another capacity.

Charlotte, North Carolina 21-23.3.03: Souls for Sale, Grits and Tomatoes

The text of Ecclesiastes I read today says that, of course, it’s better to have light than dark, to be wise than a fool. Then it undercuts that proclamation by saying both the wise man and the fool end in the grave. How to dispose oneself meanwhile?

As I fly to Charlotte, where I keep hoping to see justice shine—one day!—like noonday sun, why am I taking this trip now? The Observer just printed one of their fluff pieces yet again re: the Catholic church in Charlotte, almost exactly a week after the one announcing Doherty’s firing. This spoke of how Catholic schools are booming. This certainly conduces to making me feel defeated. Same old Charlotte: souls for sale, to anyone with money to buy.

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I watched a woman eat this morning, with great relish, a platter of grits with tomato slices and a fried egg. She carefully cut the egg and tomatoes into bits, mixed them into the grits, and ate. It looked delicious. She was a small gamin blond woman with a pixie haircut, mischievous shy smile, dancing eyes, and very wrinkled face and arms, like a smoker’s skin.

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.

San Francisco 24-27.11.03: Mary's Blue Cape, Swooping Gulls

In San Francisco now, or, to be exact, Oakland. We’re at the Dominicans’ house of study, which is perched on the rim of the mountain behind Our Lady of Lourdes church. . . . And here I sit. That lull that the day after Thanksgiving is, for the non-shopper. Outside, the spire (? Is it, or does a shape of this sort have another name?) of Lourdes church blue on blue, dark blue trim on light, with a Mary symbol, a capital M with a cross inside it, and 3 fleurs-de-lis beneath. It’s beautiful atop the white tower.

I don’t know what else to do today, except try to capture some of the flux, try to be the negative on which light leaves its fleeting photographic shadow. Below, the slatey brown-blue lake relatively unruffled, except for here a breeze, there a V a swimming duck leaves behind, amazingly larger and larger, for such a small thing. Where trees are, on the banks, dark smudges in the water like smoke, like bruises. Gulls alone serene in their ceaseless swoop above the lake, but they, too, self-involved, a predatory search.

Nothing stays the same: not the wind throwing its words away on the water’s nameless scrawl, nor the light that glances between scudding clouds on the face of the lake and is gone forever.

Buddhists would find here a life lesson. I find it simply, sheerly, appalling. How to be incarnate, incarnational,and see the flesh as mere flux? How to love at all, if one does so?

Washington, D.C. 23.7.93: Angelic Messages and Green Shutters

At Barnes Exhibit, National Gallery of Art: Van Gogh, “Joseph Etienne Roulin, 1889,” is van Gogh himself—red eyes staring out frankly, the unappreciated artist, with a stylized iconographic background moving from yellow-green to yellow, with flowers and flourishes—the angelic message is the artist’s reward.

Picasso, “Acrobat and Young Harlequins” (1905): and so another harlequin to add to my imaginative collection of that fascinating image . . . .

The Matisses: the great surprise. Color used to idealize rooms “decorated” as an ideal statement of how life should be—people bleeding green light, decked in garish colors no one can even possibly imagine, sitting in rooms suffused by lavender light through green shutters.