On, In, and Around Mondays: Loving Like a Couch Potato

"Please?"

She's been following me around for days. Asking me to read the introduction to Sherlock Holmes. I don't really want to read the introduction to Sherlock Holmes. I keep putting it off.

The truth is, she doesn't want me to read the introduction. She wants me to read the whole thing. Both volumes. All six inches of detective capers.

I'm not much of a fiction reader. As fiction goes, I'm not much of a mystery reader. What are the chances?

Last night I settled down on the couch. Dim light played across dark green and cranberry paisley. What should I do? Sitting felt good. Maybe that's how I would spend this last hour of Sabbath-gone.

I noticed a notebook on the arm of the couch. I don't usually read my kids' notebooks— kind of a privacy thing. But this one was open. I scanned the page. It was a record of stories from Sherlock Holmes. There were lots of questions, probing questions, and descriptions of high points.

Flipping through, I discovered that the whole notebook was dedicated to Sherlock. Each story, beginning at story one, was commented upon, wrestled with, questioned, sometimes quoted. It was like an English teacher's dream.

The house was perfectly quiet. And suddenly I understood what love needed to do. I cracked open Volume I of Sherlock Holmes, paged to the first story, and began to read.

Somewhere around chapter two, I heard footsteps coming down the red oak stairs. Soft, soft. It was her. She'd been getting ready for bed, I guess, and seen the light.

Soon, her face was next to mine. She was smiling, and her eyes were bright, seeking.

"You're reading it?"

"I am."

She leaned into me, so warm, and her long dark hair fell across us both.

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On, In and Around Mondays (which partly means you can post any day and still add a link) is an invitation to write from where you are. Tell us what is on, in, around (over, under, near, by...) you. Feel free to write any which way... compose a tight poem or just ramble for a few paragraphs. But we should feel a sense of place. Would you like to try? Write something 'in place' and add your link below.

If you could kindly link back here when you post, it will create a central meeting place. :)

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The Road to the Sea

Aubade

I still want you,
though it hasn't rained
in forever, and we have
lost our sun umbrella.
The road is closed, the one
that leads to the sea,
where no one cares about
the rain, nor the lost umbrella,
nor these words that whisper,
wanting.


Post in honor of One Shot Wednesday.

On, In and Around Mondays: Doubting My Existence

"I feel like Ma in The Long Winter," said my friend.

Yes.

For me, it is not just the snow (today I looked out the window to find that somebody made more, again). It is not just the cold, and the colds. It is not even just that my spouse has been gone for a month to faraway, unpredictable places. Or that every day another region of the Middle East bursts into flame. It is, somehow, all of it put together, and a sinking feeling that somehow my particular kind of existence does not matter.

Over the past few days, it's been coming to me— this thing about my particular kind of existence. First it came on a sled. (Bring beauty to the world, I said to the open air.)

Then it came in the car: I am a beauty activist...not a chase, root-out, fight-injustice activist. Does the world need such as me?

At certain junctures, I have tried to be the chase, root-out, fight-injustice kind of person. This is the most lauded kind of Christian, after all.

But the other night, the truth of my existence came rushing in. I had listened to a TED talk (the root-out injustice kind) and my Elder daughter said shakily, "I didn't like her voice." I asked why. "She made it sound like something terrible was going to happen any minute." My Elder daughter has always been like this: such experiences disempower her, make her hopeless. But give her a paintbrush and an ugly surface, and she'll wake up and color the world beautiful.

My younger daughter, on the other hand, loves danger. "Isn't life more exciting when people are against you?" she has said to me.

No.

When faced with the prospect of changing the world by chasing, rooting-out, fighting, policing, I (like my older daughter) quickly despair and become paralyzed.

So, you see, here where The Long Winter continues, I'm doing the only thing I seem made for and able to sustain over the long haul... focus on sharing beauty.

This weekend, I picked up Bill Strickland's book again, Make the Impossible Possible: One Man's Crusade to Inspire Others to Dream Bigger and Achieve the Extraordinary. Strickland counters poverty and crime with clay, jazz, and delicate orchids... breaking chains with beauty.

Thinking on that, I felt a small melting into hope... maybe such as me can matter in the world, after all.



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On, In and Around Mondays (which partly means you can post any day and still add a link) is an invitation to write from where you are. Tell us what is on, in, around (over, under, near, by...) you. Feel free to write any which way... compose a tight poem or just ramble for a few paragraphs. But we should feel a sense of place. Would you like to try? Write something 'in place' and add your link below.

If you could kindly link back here when you post, it will create a central meeting place. :)

<a href="http://seedlingsinstone.blogspot.com"><img src="http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5083/5217906589_c7120874ca.jpg" width="308" height="69" alt="On In Around button" />

Finding Yourself in Someone Else's Poem

This morning I sat down with The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry, and began reading the chapter on families.

I had no intentions of taking up the writing challenge.

Then I began reading a poem by Li-Young Lee, called "The Gift." One stanza in, I knew that a poem had found me, despite my refusal to engage.

So I put Li-Young's poem (and my curiosity) aside before finishing, and wrote this poem in response. The end of Li-Young's poem actually answered my question to him in my own poem, so I've included it as an afterward.


Li-Young Lee's Metal Splinter

Your father enters the poem
early,
storying past
the metal splinter
in your palm.

I set your paternity, and the poem,
aside,
to reach back
for my mother
and try to remember

what kind of day it was
when I played by
the barn where I have heard
that my own father
raised pigs
(I do not remember this).

And what kind of day it was
when I found the barn,
door open,
silent

and tried to pluck silver
lines from silver webs
long-left,
then tendered my hand
on noiseless silvered wood

until my palms
were rife
with the evidence
of my trying,

and mother
spent the night
with a silver tweezer,
counting as she went...
ninety-eight
ninety-nine
one hundred—

a ritual for my
tears. And now
I wonder,
Li-Young, did you cry,
and who was in the story,
and how many times
have you counted it since,
to forget, and to
remember.


Afterward, from Li-Young Lee's "The Gift"

And I did not lift up my wound and cry,
Death visited here!
I did what a child does
When he's given something to keep.
I kissed my father.

Post in honor of One Shot Wednesday.

On, In, and Around Mondays: The Keeping Phrase

"I want to be thinking about dancing again, and paper art, and how we will never have enough wall space for all the beautiful art we love," I told my friend.

We'd been talking about something that saddened us both. And it was good to talk. It is always good to talk.

But when we were done talking about the sad thing, we moved on to other things: dance, paper art, and the fact that we both own more art than our wall spaces can accommodate.

For my part, the art comes in a constant stream from my daughters. I was reminded of this as I tidied for a visit from Bradley Moore and his wife. (Yes, we had to have tea, and I had to show them my copy of the beautiful Neruda's Memoirs: Poems.)




Anyway, as I tidied for Brad's visit, I kept thinking...

we will never have enough wall space for all the beautiful art we love.

And suddenly it became this statement I wanted to say again and again. Because, it's so easy to stay with the sad things in life, to focus on the negative, to forget...

we will never have enough wall space for all the beautiful art we love.




we will never have enough wall space for all the beautiful art we love.




we will never have enough wall space for all the beautiful art we love.




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On, In and Around Mondays (which partly means you can post any day and still add a link) is an invitation to write from where you are. Tell us what is on, in, around (over, under, near, by...) you. Feel free to write any which way... compose a tight poem or just ramble for a few paragraphs. But we should feel a sense of place. Would you like to try? Write something 'in place' and add your link below.

If you could kindly link back here when you post, it will create a central meeting place. :)

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This post is also shared with Laura Boggess, for...



All art pieces in this post are by Sara, 13. Used with permission.

Voicing Neruda

Just lovely, from Diane Walker. She reads the title poem from Maureen Doallas's new collection, Neruda's Memoirs.

Art taken up, from one person to the next, recast and lovingly turned. To me? This is the true heart of poetry.

Waking Up Metaphors

I was poking through my new indulgence, The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry, and came across this statement...

'Love is a rose' would not be high on our list as a poetic metaphor.

Of course if it was not high on the authors' list, I had to tackle it— to see if I could find something different in a long-dead metaphor. Maybe I did, and maybe I didn't, but I had fun trying to do CPR in any case...

Wake

And what of the rose?
That pink shell
we suppose reveals,
through layer
of softness and curve
upon layer of softness
and curve. What of
the rose that morning
drowns, forgetting
all
we supposed.


Rose Clothes photo, by Sara. Used with permission. Post in honor of One Shot Wednesday.

On, In, and Around Mondays: Eternity in My Back Yard

They have been sledding, and I with them. But now I am sitting on the porch, watching. I don't know what I love better. The way they laugh, or the hot pink gloves, or them throwing snow balls at the house.

My Eldest makes an art of it. "This is clouds," she says. "Mountains. A rainbow. Rain!"

Splat, splat, splat, the snow balls pile up on stucco, stay. She sees shapes. I see a girl beautiful, beautiful.




Now she picks up an icicle from the ground. I am sure she might throw it too, delight in the splintering. Instead she tiptoes to a barren Rose of Sharon, stands looking, starts touching branches to test their curves.




Gently, she places the icicle on a tenuous cradle. It stays. She walks away.

I sit and sip, watch the icicle, think of artist Andy Goldsworthy. My Eldest has pored over his books, seen him play with nature in just this way—unconcerned with how the sun or the water or the wind might reclaim his art.

Ephemeral beauty, somehow speaking of eternity. Like her, like you, like me.




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On, In and Around Mondays (which partly means you can post any day and still add a link) is an invitation to write from where you are. Tell us what is on, in, around (over, under, near, by...) you. Feel free to write any which way... compose a tight poem or just ramble for a few paragraphs. But we should feel a sense of place. Would you like to try? Write something 'in place' and add your link below.

If you could kindly link back here when you post, it will create a central meeting place. :)

<a href="http://seedlingsinstone.blogspot.com"><img src="http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5083/5217906589_c7120874ca.jpg" width="308" height="69" alt="On In Around button" />



This post is also shared with Laura Boggess, for...