June 28, 2006
Farewell New Hampshire
Well, if I have to choose one or the other,
I choose to be a plain New Hampshire farmer
With an income in cash of, say, a thousand
(From, say, a publisher in New York City).
It's restful to arrive at a decision,
And restful just to think about New Hampshire.
At present I am living in Vermont.From R. Frost, "New Hampshire"
Posted by pavel at 1:16 PM | Comments (3)
June 2, 2006
Nothing Gold Can Stay
I have not been writing this spring.
During the course of my father’s illness, and since his passing last month, my walks have continued to meander on nearby trails through the woods, following the same paths I’ve grown to know these past eight years, and even now, ideas still bend toward me like this year’s new growth, still bright green, at the ends of beech boughs arcing over the trail, but they seem always to spring again away, before ink or pencil can make its mark on my notebook page. Essays half-written eclipse one another on my desk and precipitous heaps of books teeter threateningly underfoot. Not unlike those slender branches of beech, I wait for my thoughts and feelings to grow solid under the cover of hardened bark, ready for the colder weather of a winter that seems already too close. I sense the urgency of growth beneath the waning gold of early spring.
As I’ve been seeking solace elsewhere than in my own words, walking the fragile, frayed edge of unfamiliar emotion, I’ve sought comfort in the words and sentiments of others. Though I am not wont to resort to cliché, my own boughs have sometimes been bent toward T.S. Eliot’s invocation in “The Wasteland” that
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
But such an outloook can spiral no where but down, until, with Eliot, after footnotes measureless to man, we enter the ninth circle of the Inferno at Dante’s heels (e io senti' chiavar l'uscio di sotto a l'orribile torre). In an effort to re-ascend, I have of late been retracing the softer contours of footsteps taken by the poet Basho as he wandered his native Japan more than three centuries ago, having chosen a wayfarers life in his later years. He writes, in the timeless tercets of haiku,
A wren of a single branch:
The fragrance of its plum blossoms
Throughout the worldSo many many
Memories come to mind:
Cherry blossomsFrom what tree’s blossoms
I know not:
But such fragrance!With sun darkening
On the blossoms, it is lonely –
A false cypress
Passion lies in these words, the poet’s language able to describe feelings I somehow can not. But these verses from a different time and different place frustrate me here, today. I cannot find myself in Basho’s peripatetic muse nor, thankfully, in Eliot or Dante’s somber verse. The poet can only mediate the place he or she knows and I can but try to meet those verses halfway.
On Sunday, I wrote to a friend of my belief that art – good art – can both slip unbidden into a person’s soul and, at the same time, draw that person outside himself.
For me it is like this: just beneath the surface of things, there is the fact of change. A shallow enough plough this spring can indeed scratch painfully into these furrows impossibly long. Change is a fact we all front.
Of an 1839 trip that found Thoreau passing only a few miles south of our home here north of the White Mountains, he wrote,
Go where we will on the surface of things, men have been there before us. We cannot now have the pleasure of erecting the last house . . . and our boundaries have literally been run to the South Sea . . . But the lives of men, though more extended laterally in their range, are still as shallow as ever. Undoubtedly, as a Western orator said, "Men generally live over about the same surface; some live long and narrow, and others live broad and short"; but it is all superficial living. A worm is as good a traveller as a grasshopper or a cricket, and a much wiser settler. With all their activity these do not hop away from drought nor forward to summer. We do not avoid evil by fleeing before it, but by rising above or diving below its plane; as the worm escapes drought and frost by boring a few inches deeper. The frontiers are not east or west, north or south, but wherever a man fronts a fact, though that fact be his neighbor, there is an unsettled wilderness between him and Canada, between him and the setting sun, or, farther still, between him and it.
Across the road from our door, just before the left-hand bend where the frost-cracked pavement turns to gravel, the pink and white petals of an apple tree, all but forlorn at the edge of the wood, have begun to wither and yield themselves to the coming autumn’s fruit; off to the east, the snow of last month’s storms slips deeper into crevices high on Mount Washington, dandelions everywhere are turning to seed – facts of change front me everywhere.
I have been counting down the last few walks Pemi, Pika, Orion, and I will take through these woods, the times we will pass through our doors, anxiously waiting for the next step and the next place. In these past weeks, as my own departure from these White Mountains to the Green Mountains next month has become more immanent, as I face a ragged emotional ridgeline nearly each day, I realize that my strength lies in the facts of place, and I fear still more change of this time, of this place to another.
Stumbling as I often do with words as through pendulous morning spider webs – where I sometimes crouch low to preserve the spider’s work, and other times pluck them from my clothes to watch them abseil onto a tuft of balsam fir – what I suppose I mean to say here is that in this time when I find the comfort of the familiar largely lost, it is in the experience of the every day that I am challenged to find the cairns and blazes that mark the new path I find myself on. Without those who walk this path with me, I fear I might be truly lost, and for that guidance and comfort I am grateful beyond words.
Posted by pavel at 11:41 AM | Comments (1)
January 20, 2006
A Tramp in Winter
Dust of Snow Robert FrostThe way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock treeHas given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.
Brilliant sun and biting cold greeted me each morning earlier this week, and I’ve had to curtail my walk with Orion and the dogs to only fifteen minutes in the woods across the road. I held Orion tightly in my arms to keep both of us warm in the single digit temperatures; his face peered out from under a thick hat and behind his mother’s scarf while the dogs tumbled though clumps of spruce still heavy with snow from our last storm and left clouds of fine flakes in their wake.
Monday, we ventured a bit farther to the crest of Wedding Hill, which overlooks the school’s orchard and farm with Mount Washington and its neighboring peaks framing the eastern horizon. The angle of light that morning illuminated the peaks from the southeast, so the details of their western slopes – finely veined with ridges and ravines descending to meet the rising inter-mountain plateau at their feet – lay occluded behind a shadowy subfusc mantle.
At the crest of the hill, the four of us stopped in the still air to listen, first to little more than our own breathing – mine a bit ragged from carrying a little boy who seems far too big for his age (or mine) – and then to the exploratory taps of a woodpecker near the top of one of the maples that border the sloping meadow to the east. I pointed to the bird for Orion, and after a moment, he craned his neck to follow my gloved hand upward toward the intermittent tapping. I don’t know if he saw what I saw, or if he was able to connect the sound with the bird, but he continued to look skyward for longer than I would have expected, perhaps trying to see the tiny figure nearly hidden in a labyrinth of barren branches.
He turned his eyes back to the snow, searching again for the dogs, whose large black shapes are easy to spot against the white ground, even in the twisted undergrowth of the third or fourth generation woodlands around our house.
On our way back down the hill and home, Orion seemed to point toward a tree alongside the trail. Of course, I’m sure I was projecting my intentions onto his own, but he made me look at the tree nonetheless. The red maple was one of the larger trees in the vicinity, and its gnarled trunk of braided furrows was overgrown with a bounty of lichens and mosses. We stepped off the trail to the tree to look closely we’ve passed together at least a dozen times. This tree’s story was seeded in this patchwork of pale greens, browns, and grays, and as Orion and I stood there, I traced my bare hand across the uneven surface of roughly textured bark and smooth lichen, and I tried to tell him what I felt under my fingers – not so much the physical touch of fingers on bark, but the sense of what lay beneath the surface, the stories that encircled the maple’s dense heartwood and that would lay hidden until the tree passed on. For now, I marveled at this ordinary tree while Orion looked at the bark for the same stories I saw and, if nothing else, humored me for a short while before we both walked back down to the house for his morning nap.
While I was finishing one of the earlier chapters of my dissertation, I was also working as a docent at the Robert Frost Place, a small museum in Franconia which hosts an annual poet in residence and a writing program each summer. After closing up for the evening, I would set myself down to write in the farmhouse that Frost and his family had occupied full time between 1915 and 1920, and which has been home to a different resident poet every summer since 1977. Although I wrote by the west window, which was in a newer part of the house, and which did not look upon the mountains to the south, as I sat in the yellowing autumn evenings, I couldn’t help but feel a part of the poetry of the place.
Sometimes, when writing was slow (which was often), or visitors were scarce (which was rare), I would meander along the poetry trail that wends for a half-mile or so through the mixed hard and softwood forest of what remains of the original property. One of the first poems on the trail I could walk to and almost still keep the barn in view was “A Dust of Snow,” which is just about as close as Frost gets to haiku (though perhaps more so without second stanza). It is in the unexpected moment of winter’s day, after days of cold, or more recently, of fierce wind and rain, have forced a retreat inside, that I can find even the briefest of stories to lift myself above the long dark winter nights.
I imagine Frost, whose tempestuous darker moments have fallen under scrutiny among his many biographers, tramping, as he often did, in his winter wood alone, bending under a low-slung hemlock bough, maybe reaching with a stout leather mitten to pull back the snowy screen and steady himself as he stepped across an old fallen mountain ash he chided himself for not bucking up into firewood in the fall, suddenly finding himself surrounded by a cloud of fine sugary snow as a caw caw echoed in the woods and sleek black wings steered off toward his barn.
I see that I’ve steered off a fair bit myself here, but after all of my own tramping through memory and metaphor, I return to the little boy who joyfully lets me take him along on my walks through the winter woods and who started a year ago to let me see through his eyes what I had been missing out there all along.
Posted by pavel at 9:50 AM | Comments (3)
January 7, 2006
Farewell to Orion's First Year
Posted by pavel at 12:45 PM
December 9, 2005
Shadows of Venus
There are so many islands!
As many islands as the stars at night
on that branched tree from which meteors are shaken
like falling fruit around the schooner Flight.
But things must fall,and so it always was,
on one hand Venus,on the other Mars;
fall,and are one,just as this earth is one
island in archipelagoes of stars.
From "After the Storm" by Derek Walcott
Late Thursday afternoon, shortly after 4:30, I stepped out into the cold with the dogs, and I walked, unexpectedly, into a moment of beauty. The western sky longingly held the last memories of the sunset, a spectrum of muted light from umber to umbra hanging above a slope of darkened trees, while Venus, Mars, and a waxing crescent moon worked in unison to keep night at bay. This celestial triumvirate was brilliant enough to occlude most of the early evening stars and cast delicate shadows on the snowy, matted field across the road.
I understand that this year, specifically in late November and early December, Venus has been particularly bright -- indeed, bright enough, according to some, to cast shadows here on earth. Even as its brilliance begins to wane, our sister planet is bright and distinct enough to help me ease into the late autumn darkness of ever-lengthening nights.
Lately, as I find life filled with family, teaching, writing, thinking, I have found that the days become stories written in the shorter verse of moments rather than in the expansive prose of books. I recall reading once that the writer John Updike often moves daily from poem to essay to novel, juggling his ideas as inspiration warrants. In my own daily rituals -- waking with Orion before the dawn, walking with him and the dogs to the pond each morning, and stealing a few minutes in the evening to seek my son's namesake hunter, rising ever earlier in the east -- I find in these glimpses of sudden beauty inspiration for the more challenging times of the day.
A slight crescent moon appearing for but an instant over a craggy alpine ridge, Orion's wide laughing grin as we slide together over the frozen pond, Pemi looking up at me from behind her snow-crusted muzzle after a trail run, the arcing shadows of a snow-laden fir on a windy night. A day composed of verses like these is poetry enough to carry delight throughout this darker season.
It has been snowing a little almost every day this week, and though the accumulation around the house has been slight, subtle snow-limned pentimenti nonetheless make the world anew every day. Days which can resonate with the frustration or joy or disappointment or peace that I carry with me.
Over the past year, I have often looked to metaphor and poetry to try and explain my feelings about being and growing with my son. But there are, of course, no words that could paint a picture as complete as the one I see in Orion's eyes when he looks into my own. The bright broad strokes of color, the subtle shades of light, depth, and shadow -- I see the full harmony of meaning looking back at me each time I lift him from his crib in the morning, when we play in the bathtub together, or when I look back at him snug in his pack during our walks in the woods.
Every glance is full to overflowing with love.
Posted by pavel at 6:19 AM | Comments (3)
November 23, 2005
Sledding
The Snow-Storm by Ralph Waldo EmersonAnnounced by all the trumpets of the sky,
Arrives the snow, and, driving o'er the fields,
Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air
Hides hill and woods, the river, and the heaven,
And veils the farmhouse at the garden's end.
The sled and traveller stopped, the courier's feet
Delated, all friends shut out, the housemates sit
Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed
In a tumultuous privacy of storm.
Come see the north wind's masonry.
Out of an unseen quarry evermore
Furnished with tile, the fierce artificer
Curves his white bastions with projected roof
Round every windward stake, or tree, or door.
Speeding, the myriad-handed, his wild work
So fanciful, so savage, nought cares he
For number or proportion. Mockingly,
On coop or kennel he hangs Parian wreaths;
A swan-like form invests the hiddden thorn;
Fills up the famer's lane from wall to wall,
Maugre the farmer's sighs; and at the gate
A tapering turret overtops the work.
And when his hours are numbered, and the world
Is all his own, retiring, as he were not,
Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art
To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone,
Built in an age, the mad wind's night-work,
The frolic architecture of the snow.
Posted by pavel at 8:21 AM
November 22, 2005
Shades of Snow
There is neither heaven nor earth
Only snow
Falling, endlessly.Kajiwara Hashin
I sometimes wonder what it must be like to live in a climate where the seasons actually correspond to the dates of the solstice and equinox that cleave our year into four equal and distinct stories. It is tempting to think that here in northern New England we live somehow outside the neat rectangles and numbers of the wall calendar, and, when I have found myself struggling against driving snow in September or sporting a t-shirt in January, I have felt that sense of separation. The calendar is, of course, driven by our own earth's tilting axis, and the earth, in all its billions of years of practice, certainly can't be entirely wrong.
Yet here I am, writing as the snow flies outside our window, exactly one month before the winter solstice. Four inches in as many hours, much of it now seemingly melting off the dogs' fur and onto the living room floor as they lie at Jen's feet as she nurses Orion. The woods, quieted by their sudden frosted quilt, were bright enough to walk through without a headlamp when I took Pika and Pemi for their evening walk. As I wove my way through beech and striped maple saplings bent across the trail, I would occasionally spring some larger tree and dump a load of snow on myself -- the dogs are smarter and more nimble in these conditions, though they are kind enough to wait, albeit smugly, for me to catch up.
I am a collector of symbols, of harbingers, of images, and as much as autumn lingers in my mind and prose from the mid-August appearance of the first goldenrods to the late October morning when I notice the tamaracks have lost their ochre glow, it is the coming of snowfall that abruptly changes my sense of the season from fall to winter.
Orion continues to astonish us with his growth from a baby into a little boy, and the images with which I try to anchor those changes move past so quickly that I have difficulty believing he was ever any different than he is at this very moment. He is fast approaching his first birthday, and even now every week is a new season of change, growth, and of becoming accustomed to a different part of our son's nature. There are days when he moves around our apartment, circling from kitchen to living room to hall, secure in his world. Other days, as he struggles to stand or tries to climb on the sofa, a sudden nor'easter of frustration can send his world tumbling in space. Like me, Orion, too, seems to be trying to frame his life -- and his growth -- in ways he can understand. As I read him Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" before my walk, I hoped that he might learn to understand the seduction of both the dark, depth of the woods in winter and the beauty that a late autumn snowfall leaves in its wake.
Please note: Interested readers may want to look at the newly uploaded entry for October.
Posted by pavel at 5:29 PM
October 31, 2005
Adagio molto
Fà ch' ogn' uno tralasci e balli e canti
L' aria che temperata dà piacere,
E la Staggion ch' invita tanti e tanti
D' un dolcissimo Sonno al bel godere.
from The Four Seasons by Antonio Vivaldi
I woke last Saturday to the unmistakable strings of a Vivaldi concerto -- one of his Dresden Concertos, I later learned. The slipping of time from the season of daylight to one where night outpaces day this past week made me pause and think about Vivaldi, whose Four Seasons is surely among the most played (perhaps overplayed) piece of baroque music on classical radio today.
Although I am no expert on Antonio Vivaldi, nor on the music of his era, his oeuvre has always had a certain resonance for me. As I lay in bed and the timbre of the final notes gave way to a moment of silence, I reflected on my last connection with Vivaldi when Jen and I visited Venice a few years ago.
Among the uneven cobbles of the piazza before the San Giovanni in Bragora (where Vivaldi was baptized), we sat before a stately building, which stood out from the many other facades of peeling paint the colors of sunset with its detailed scrollwork and window boxes overflowing with red flowers, still brilliant in the evening light. Through a row of open high windows, we could only see the top of an ornate chandelier, but we could hear the strings of Vivaldi easing their way through the open window and into the Italian evening air.
I was thankful for such a serendipitous radio broadcast to transport me across the seas and across the seasons in the still dark of a mid-autumn dawn.
Vivaldi's Le Quattro Staggioni, The Four Seasons, is a series of four concertos, each of which echoes one of four sonnets, most likely also written by Vivaldi, which portray appropriately seasonal tableaus. Each concerto is divided into three movements, shifting tempo from -- in the case of Autumn -- the upbeat dance of a harvest celebration to a reflective slumber after the last of the wine is gone and the farmers take a deserved respite to, finally, the drama of hunters chasing down their quarry.
This morning of "falling back" into slumber is eerily reminiscent of the adagio molto of Autumn's second movement, though I wait, too, for the sounding of the horn and the harried march to winter in the coming month.
Vivaldi's violin concerti, with their playful resonance between orchestra and soloist (or select group of strings), draw on the echoing repetition of the ritornello, resounding like the rhythmic movement of branches deep within a field maple as they match the push and pull of the tree's trunk against the cold, matted ground below. The clear, discrete melodies of the single voice both echo and guide the sound of the full orchestra, each learning from the other and drawing on the other to create the final harmony of the concerto.
As the memories of Venice fade from my mind and I think about today, the coming darker months, and my son's fast-approaching first birthday, I cannot help but see in my relationship with him the sounds of a concerto as he learns to tune his own instruments and I wait to follow whatever melody he brings to me to share.
Passar al foco i di quieti e contenti
Mentre la pioggia fuor bagna ben cento
from The Four Seasons by Antonio Vivaldi
Posted by pavel at 7:46 AM | Comments (1)
August 18, 2005
Etesian Winds
He is an inlander
who loves the margins of the sea,
and everywhere he goes he carries
a bag of earth on his back.
Stanley Kunitz, from "The Mulch"
For someone whose connection to place is most often through the sight and the sound of trees and sweeping mountainsides of granite, spruce, and balsam fir, an island, ringed by dunes and sand and sea can be disconcerting. Like the mountains of my more northern winter home, though, Martha's Vineyard can be a place that demands an inward focus as much as it invites one to gaze out toward the watery horizon where the sea curves away and folds into the distant sky.
As Jen, Orion, Pika, Pemi, and I were retreating from Chappaquiddick’s East Beach late last Thursday evening, I was suddenly moved to turn toward the familiar sound of wind playing through the upper branches of a small cluster of red pine trees that overhung the road. The gust passed quickly through the trees on its way toward the dune grasses and waves beyond, but it was enough to bring me back to the world I knew I would be returning to soon.
These late-summer gusts, perhaps our own echoes of the Etesian winds of another place and time, herald the coming change from the languid, eternal afternoons of summer to the more hurried, harried pace of the coming academic year. Etesian winds also mark, significantly, last Thursday’s end of summer's dog days. The end of the dog days is heralded by the heliacal rising of the star Sirius, when the star becomes visible before the dawn after a nearly five-week absence. The event marked the celestial close of summer for the ancient Egyptians, who based their entire calendar on this day. Sirius, also called the Dog Star, appears in the constellation Canis Major and is the brightest star in our sky. Sirius’ rising was given great significance in the ancient Mediterranean and the Etesian winds that follow continue to be important to sailors from Greece to Egypt. The winds were once thought to cause the flooding of the Nile by pushing back the great river’s current with their power (this idea was summarily rejected by Herodotus in his History). For me, this day gives me pause to look ahead to the reappearance of both Canis Major and Minor along with the whole of Orion's seasonal story as it arcs across the night sky.
Last week, Jen and I sat on the beach at Long Point on the Island's southern shore and watched a metaphor declare and explicate itself in the currents that unfurled just below our sandy, outstretched legs. While the sun drifted slowly toward the dunes to the west, we watched the brackish water from Tisbury Great Pond, which had found its way around a sand bar into the open sea, change its course, and, in a single instant, cease its seaward flow and begin to flow inland, finally overcome by the ocean's rolling waves. Although this moment of both earthly and celestial drama repeats each day, I don't recall ever having seen this moment of change so clearly played out before.
I understand that the opening from pond to sea at Long Point is impermanent, and needs to be regularly persuaded to remain open, so finding it open is always a pleasant surprise. As we sat alongside the gap and watched children of all ages enjoy the flow of warm water out from the Pond, I recalled having visited here nearly twenty years ago with my parents and my father's parents, and I clearly remember my grandfather standing knee deep in the gentle current watching me float by toward the ocean, stopping myself on a protruding sandbar before reaching the incoming ocean waves.
As I watched eight-month old Orion play with Jen and her parents in that same brackish flow, I came to recognize in the changing tidal current the beginning of a new stage of our own lives with our son, as he becomes more and more a part of our lives and our extended family. I feel as though I have only begun to understand each phase of my life with our son, but as autumn looms on the horizon, and Orion's story reappears even more brightly and clearly in the minutes before morning dawns over the Atlantic, I hope that his stars will help to guide us all.
...I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
Stanley Kunitz, from "The Layers"
Posted by pavel at 7:25 AM | Comments (2)
August 2, 2005
Oak and Sky
We should have started from this: the sky.
A window without a sill, frame, or pane.
An opening and nothing more,
but open wide.
I need not wait for a clear night
nor crane my neck
to examine the sky.
I have the sky at my back, at hand, and on my eyelids.
The sky wraps me snugly
and lifts me from below.From "Sky" by Wislawa Szymborska
Five pairs of feet pad across islands of shadow and sun on the packed sand of the road as my two dogs walk with me under a canopy of low oak trees. It's before noon, but the heat of the day shepherds the three of us into the sparse shade at the edges of the road. The cloudless sky seems to melt into the shimmering horizon and in even seems reflected in the packed sand beneath our feet. We are a long drive (and short ferry ride) from the familiar mountains that define our horizon at home, though the same sky envelops everything here, its air thick with the humid embrace of high summer off the New England coast.
August has always been a time of reflection for me, as the dog days of summer slip slowly by and I begin to prepare for the coming school year. This summer -- Orion's first -- has seen us mostly at home, trying to share everything we love about the North Country with our son and finding new places and perspectives as we look through his eyes at a world we thought we already intimately knew.
Afternoons spent by waterfalls deep in the woods, where I would stand in the water with Orion in my arms, hoping the sun would hover forever above the ridge of white pines to the west; a day cycling through our beloved Notch; climbing to my old haunts above treeline; or just sitting in the shade of the cedars in our yard, listening to the chatter of red squirrels and watching clouds float over the peak of our roof. I have memories from the summer to fill volumes, though little time to record them; here, as Orion dips his toes into the ocean for the first time with a characteristic giggle and the dogs play beside him in the gently breaking waves, I would rather be outside with Orion than in here, lest I miss some laugh or hint of a smile half-hidden beneath the brim of his sun hat.
I cherish these days of sky, sand, sea, and dappled shade, though while I take time to think back on the summer, I also look ahead to bringing Orion -- my little mountain man -- back to the mountains where he became the center of our lives.
You ask me why I dwell in the green mountain;
I smile and make no reply for my heart is free of care.
As the peach-blossom flows down stream and is gone into the unknown,
I have a world apart that is not among men.
Posted by pavel at 3:00 PM | Comments (4)
July 27, 2005
Peace
Posted by pavel at 4:27 PM | Comments (2)
July 19, 2005
Answer July
On occasion in the heat of mid-summer, the whole of my childhood can be brought abruptly into the present by the smallest details of memory: a momentary glimpse, a touch, the heady smell of summer evenings, the buzz of cicadas in a forest of newly sprung goldenrod. Among these many intimate signposts are the tiny pale yellow crowns of the diminutive chamomile, pineapple weed (Chamomilla suaveolens) bursting from the gravel in front of my family's mountainside condo. While I played endless games of fetch and chase with our family's old dog, the distinctive aroma of these dense flowers permeated from underfoot and became for me the smell of summer. As they poke their pale heads through the gravel around our driveway these July days, I can't resist plucking a head and crushing it between finger and thumb to release the memories contained within.
...in vacant mood, one sultry hour,
Resting my eye upon a drooping plant,
With brow low-bent, within my garden-bower,
I sate upon the couch of camomile.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
As we pass the midsummer mark of Bastille Day, I have found that taking Orion with me has become a similar way to revisit places from earlier years with a new guide. It seems we have spent more time out of doors than in, hiking, climbing, swimming, or just exploring the yard and garden.
On a recent hike with Orion, his first visit to the schist-strewn alpine tundra above treeline, he mostly stared wide-eyed at Pika and Pemi as they explored the dwarf spruce (above which he towered!) and the many cascades of the Ammonoosuc River we crossed. At the top of our tramp, the wind picked up, and though not yet familiar with mountain winds, Orion would face into the wind and smile broadly.
On our way down, after many hours on the trail, we stopped to rest at Gem Pool. Jen and Orion sat on a flat rock surrounded by water, warm in the magic of a summer evening. "Do you want to take a picture?" Jen asked.
Not this time. I was more than content to watch Orion sitting in Jen's lap smiling and laughing, water falling languidly into the pool behind them, everything green and gold and light.
I wondered then, and at many moments in the past weeks, as I share some of my favorite places and memories with my son, which ones he will keep close to his heart, which smells or sounds will draw him back from adulthood to an experience from decades earlier. If he has trouble remembering, I hope that I will be able to remind him.
Answer July Emily DickinsonAnswer July --
Where is the Bee --
Where is the Blush --
Where is the Hay?Ah, said July --
Where is the Seed --
Where is the Bud --
Where is the May --
Answer Thee -- Me --Nay -- said the May --
Show me the Snow --
Show me the Bells --
Show me the Jay!Quibbled the Jay --
Where be the Maize --
Where be the Haze --
Where be the Bur?
Here -- said the Year --
Posted by pavel at 11:34 AM | Comments (3)
July 1, 2005
Moments of Glad Grace
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight 's all a-glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.
from "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" by William Butler Yeats
I returned on Monday from several days away (at the biennial ASLE conference) to find that I had been gone much longer than I had thought.
The field across the road had grown into a thicket of flowers -- apparitions of Vetch, Hawk Weed, shoulder-high Meadow Rue and Queen Anne's Lace -- the night air heady with their ghostly fragrance. The sky was clear, and, though my bed was calling me after my long trip, I watched as cascades of lightning bugs tumbled across the meadow seeking one another in the darkness, pooling only briefly in a dance of constellations. Even though Orion's constellation is guiding people elsewhere this season, the memory and strength of his stars surrounds me even here in our overgrown meadow.
Orion, too, has grown more than I could have expected in a week. He is regularly munching on root vegetables and peas, with the aid of two new (sharp!) teeth. In every hour of absence, I cherish the moments of presence all the more. In my free time, learn'd astronomer-inspired wanderings at the conference, I visited the Oregon coast one afternoon. I think I was looking for something there, in the dunes and sand and wind. I sought my goal in a sheltered cove where the Siuslaw River enters the Pacific. There, behind a jetty lined with driftwood, I found graying, wind scoured logs larger in girth than almost any living tree I had seen in the Northeast. The gnarled trunks, some thirty feet long, gray from their years in the sun, were maps of (and to) places I had not been and did not know. I traced the whorls, ridges, and valleys with my palm, trying myself to find a purchase in this place so far from home and family.
One trunk with its base exposed -- apparently submerged in the high tide, but now bare and visible -- revealed within the concentric ridges of its uncountable growth rings the vestigial sapling of the great tree's early years. Solid, spindly branches radiated out from the heartwood, trapped inside, but preserved by the outward growth of decades, perhaps centuries of rings. I think I found what I was seeking in the maps and metaphors limned by these ancient trees -- a guide to the way home to be with my own sapling before he grows up too much more.
Posted by pavel at 11:03 AM | Comments (5)
June 18, 2005
Balance
Nothing Gold Can Stay
Robert Frost
Nature's first green is gold
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
Our recent weather has continued to challenge any ideas we might have had of spring. Hot, humid days gave suddenly way to cool, wet days with frequent rain, at one point so violent that the lupines in our yard were all broken in half. I, for one, am waiting for the weather, and the season, to find its voice.
I received my first Father's Day card yesterday. For me, Father's Day has always been about my father, and it's still a challenge to see myself in that role. The card I got from my parents superimposes the following from Camus over a photograph of a cairn of smooth river stones: "But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?"
At times, and particularly of late, this precious, precarious harmony, shaped by time and shepherded by the love and support of others, nonetheless remains out of reach. Camus might well appreciate the Sisyphean potential in stacking water-worn stones, much as he might have an erudite (though ultimately futile – tout c’est absurde, non?) response to the challenge of balancing writing, thinking, loving, living, being -- all as a father.
These stones do not always sit solidly together.
As I prepare to leave Jen and Orion for a conference next week, I already find myself missing them, as though my mind has been elsewhere, perhaps preparing for other responsibilities. Fortunately, I am here yet, and in this moment, as Orion sits on my lap while I type, I can lean over, kiss his head and thank him for reminding me what it means to love, live, and be on this, our first Father's Day together.
Posted by pavel at 7:43 PM | Comments (3)
June 6, 2005
Spring and All
Song from Pippa Passes
Robert BrowningThe year's at the spring
And day's at the morn;
Morning's at seven;
The hill-side's dew-pearled;
The lark's on the wind;
The snail's on the thorn:
God's in his heaven --
All's right with the world!
In the pre-dawn morning of a day when spring seems poised to slip suddenly into summer, I wake early and head out for a short bike ride before Jen and Orion begin to stir. As I turn the bicycle downhill toward the mountains to the south, the sky in the east is painted with broad vivid stokes the color of roadside clusters of hawkweed – orange, vermillion, and yellow – while to the west, mist rises slowly from the surface of a placid pond, just as the sun crests the high ridge. I pass the remains of an old iron furnace, a reminder of the early nineteenth-century mining industry in what is now a quiet rural village, and turn right past the farmhouse, which Robert Frost “had to take by force rather than buy,” straight past several country inns built before tourism’s heyday – one of which, hosted Henry David Thoreau and his brother John during their trip to the area more than 160 years ago. Turning back north and uphill toward home, I squint against the now bright eastern sky and think about returns and cycles, and coming back home to ground myself.
This has been a spring of budding affections. While it feels as though summer has abruptly draped our woodland world after a month of wet and cold spring in which we nearly lost our affinity for this place, nature is doing all it can to catch up with the season. Orion and I have also shed our indoor selves and wandered about the woods, fields, and streams nearby.
Of late, I have felt within the world outside much more than I can ever recall. The moments of engagement stretch into longer, hazy afternoons as we stretch our own limbs to the sun (despite our prodigious black fly and mosquito entourage) and, recently, seek a cool respite from the heat we have yet to grow accustomed to.
Although Orion hasn't been quite sure what to make of the new warmer world, he appears to join me in my appreciation for the new freedoms brought by these sunny days. He may wish, however, that his parents wait until the water warms a bit more before taking him swimming again.
Perhaps it is Orion that leads me further into the woods; as I move his hands across the bark of different trees and through the soft new growth on fir and larch, and we tease the rings of hobblebush petals with our fingers, we wonder about the trees together. His vision of the world is what brings my thoughts back home and helps to show me the glory of something wondrous that I had missed all those years before.
Posted by pavel at 7:58 PM | Comments (4)
May 29, 2005
Green
Nothing is so beautiful as spring—
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.
From "Spring" by Gerard Manley Hopkins
Over the past two weeks, the dogs and I have lost our long views through the woods, replaced instead by leaves of beech and striped maple unfurling their summer standards -- even the tips of balsam fir have erupted into feathers of brilliant green, and the few white oak that thrive here have tentatively spread small leafy curls. Gazing off into the woods lately, I have found myself drawn toward these nearby leaves stretching out into the (finally) warming spring.
Although a bit behind more mild regions in this part of the world, our woods have burst upon spring with a well-watered vigor. Our walks often arc through the fields across the road, and today, I could hardly make a step without tromping on the cinque-feuille of a feral fraise. Even the much-maligned dandelion was a specular spectacle before the sun dried its dew-laden petals.
Orion, too, has found a renewed capacity for stretching himself on these sunny days -- after two weeks of nearly perpetual rain and cold, there are few who don't cherish at least a few moments in the sun.
As the leaves bring my own focus out from the periphery and toward more immediate concerns, Orion places himself squarely in the center of each day, and while accomplishing the necessary tasks of the day can sometimes prove a challenge, he reminds me of the real value of each moment in the day -- whether playing or reading together inside, laughing out loud together, or sitting quietly among the dandelions on the lawn as Orion touches his first real flower.
I measure myself
Against a tall tree.
I find that I am much taller,
For I reach right up to the sun,
With my eye...From "Six Significant Landscapes" by Wallace Stevens
Posted by pavel at 2:41 PM | Comments (2)
May 12, 2005
One Hundred Haiku
From this year on
just carousing...
this world of blossoms
Issa
--
May morning
the door opens
before I knockJohn Stevenson
--
amidst the deep mountains
on my hat
only the sound of falling leavesKikusha-ni
I spent the first part of this week in the woods just southeast of here with seven high school students and Larry, a fellow instructor. Our trip itinerary included rock climbing, hiking, haiku, haibun, and renga poetry, and some discussion and practice of Zen, the later facilitated by Lorianne, who had graciously agreed to join us for our last night and morning.
One of the images I shared with our group, and which I took with me from the trip, came to me during a solo hike on our first day. The steady rain and low temperature had kept the whole group fairly sedate, as though we were simply waiting for the next day and better weather. I walked out in front of the group for several minutes, my ears attuned only to the sound of the river, still swollen with spring snow, and the rolling of gravel underfoot. As, I, too, began to think of reaching the campsite and finding respite from the rain, I caught only the briefest glimpse of a red trillium flower, bent in the cold morning – also waiting for the sun. I carried that intimate moment in my journal and my mind throughout the trip, and, soon, the students added their own moments of personal connection with the world. By the end of the trip, as we packed our things in warm sunshine, the students read the haibun they had written, and their words about our days in the woods together simply left me – uncharacteristically – speechless.
Accompanying Lorianne and her dog Reggie on the four-mile hike in to the campsite, much to everyone’s surprise, were Jen, Orion, and our dogs Pika and Pemi. I was in the midst of describing an activity to the students when, in an unexpected moment, there was my son, smiling on Jen’s back, perhaps wondering where he was, but certainly happy to be outside and among friends.
The warmth of the next morning drew everyone onto our cooking platform. Some of us sore from the previous day’s climbing, some looking forward to the return to school, we learned something also about staying in place. The “pearl” I found in the trillium blossom and the moment I saw Jen and Orion arrive in camp rooted me firmly in place on this trip. As the hiking and climbing become memories, I hope the collection of moments that becomes Orion’s life continues to grow but not outpace his ability to connect with and fully live each day.
I have walked this trail six times this spring, and every time the world seems remade – snow recedes farther upslope, streams “too lofty and original to rage” wend their way alongside the trail, their courses changed as snow melts back. Today, the tight dark green spears of new growth unfurled themselves to declare themselves in the rising chorus of spring’s arrival.
New blossoms in afternoon
pendulous yellow flowers
each day a new season.
--
Who says my poems are poems?
These poems are not poems.
When you can understand this,
then we can begin to speak of poetry.
Taigu Ryokan
Posted by pavel at 11:14 AM | Comments (2)
May 1, 2005
Yellow Wood
The Road Not Taken
Robert Frost
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
I've been teaching this Frost poem again, and I always love my students' reaction to the ambivalence they inevitably read in the speaker's contrariety toward his choice. I also like the poem for its attention to woods with which I am myself intimately familiar; like many Frost poems, this one helps lead me on my daily tramps through the woods behind our home.
Yellow has long been the color that frames my seasons; late August's flames of goldenrod are bittersweet harbingers of autumn, and the final colors to fade from the landscape in late October are the yellow, downy needles of the tamarack.
Among my favorite signs of spring -- not that I don't cherish the snowdrops, crocuses, and now daffodils that have poked their heads above the warming soil -- are the wild yellow violets that speckle the trails across the road in astonishing clusters of tiny petals on sunlit slopes. Starved for color, I get on my knees on the black-trodden leaves both to cherish the discovery and to think ahead to the cycle of seasons that begins with this intimate moment on the damp earth beneath still leafless trees.
Last weekend, Jen, Orion, and I attended Jen's grandfather's unveiling. As the sun broke through wind-driven clouds and a chime on a nearby maple measured its own time, we remembered the man from whom our son takes his middle name. I thought about Jen's grandfather and about his great-grandson, and the life that he might now lead -- of which paths he will choose that he might live as rich and long a life as his great-grandfather.
For now, I'll hold him close as we look at the first yellow petals of spring together, and maybe take some guidance from him before I enter my own autumn's yellow wood (perhaps as my Virgil sometime after nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita). The choices may indeed not ultimately be that important, but attention to the path we walk together -- with its flowers underfoot -- is essential.
Posted by pavel at 4:18 PM | Comments (3)
April 22, 2005
Frog Run
A Prayer in Spring
Robert FrostOh, give us pleasure in the flowers to-day;
And give us not to think so far away
As the uncertain harvest; keep us here
All simply in the springing of the year.
Oh, give us pleasure in the orchard white,
Like nothing else by day, like ghosts by night;
And make us happy in the happy bees,
The swarm dilating round the perfect trees.
And make us happy in the darting bird
That suddenly above the bees is heard,
The meteor that thrusts in with needle bill,
And off a blossom in mid air stands still.
For this is love and nothing else is love,
The which it is reserved for God above
To sanctify to what far ends He will,
But which it only needs that we fulfill.
While work and other responsibilities (Orion foremost among them) have expanded beyond the limits of time, the seasonal dance that is spring in the North Country has begun in earnest:
Over the past week, the steady dripping of maple sap into buckets that accompanied our walks to school was replaced last week by a growing chorus of frogs from across the road.
This morning, a heavy frost covered an inchworm that drifted above the trail at head-height on its silken strand.
Snowdrops pressed their way through the still yellow mat of unkempt fescue, drowsy in the chill of morning.
From afar, the forest is clad in faint echoes of its autumnal hues (in "that other fall we name the fall").
Spring is composed of daily impressions; it is not one season, but a crescendo of countless intimate encounters. Orion has been able to join me on many of these forays into the forest, and he rarely slumbers while we saunter, his eyes darting from light to shadow, from tree to sky to field in a silent, specular cadastral survey. He, too, cannot help but greet the beauty of each morning with laughter.
Posted by pavel at 8:59 AM | Comments (3)
April 8, 2005
Faith in a Seed
Wednesday evening, while Orion was out on a walk with Jen and Pika (Orion, at not quite four months, was not doing much of the walking, of course), I went out with Pemi to the school farm across the road. In the stillness of sunset, I lay out on one of the boulders that had been too large to move with a team of horses or oxen and now stood as an island in a cascade of light, capturing from its vantage both sunrise and sunset each day. A light green tapestry of lichen did little to soften the hard granite cushion I used for my brief reverie. Pemi's excitement at being outside in the warm field roused me after only a short while, and we set off down toward the newly dug beds of the farm on our appointed task.
Across the small orchard where I had posted "Goodbye and Keep Cold" during a warm spell this winter, I added Frost's "Putting in the Seed":
You come to fetch me from my work to-night
When supper’s on the table, and we’ll see
If I can leave off burying the white
Soft petals fallen from the apple tree.
(Soft petals, yes, but not so barren quite,
Mingled with these, smooth bean and wrinkled pea;)
And go along with you ere you lose sight
Of what you came for and become like me,
Slave to a springtime passion for the earth.
How Love burns through the Putting in the Seed
On through the watching for that early birth
When, just as the soil tarnishes with weed,
The sturdy seedling with arched body comes
Shouldering its way and shedding the earth crumbs.
Walking by the moist, dark cakes of freshly dug soil and delicate green shoots burrowing upward toward the sun inside their cold-frames, I couldn't help but think of this poem, and of Thoreau's essay, "The Dispersion of Seeds." And although the farm's seedlings need a bit more help getting along than Thoreau's self-propagating pines, the faith -- almost a suspension of disbelief -- required to accept that a world of green will soon rise from a handful of hard, dry seeds sprinkled haphazardly in the slowly warming soil is considerable.
For me, it takes a similar faith that all that I do for my son in these early months will have some lasting effect on him as he grows. Already he has begun to show us a distinct character -- his often contagious ebullience making his father smile and laugh much more than he is used to, and his inquisitive wide eyes making everyone long for his sense of wonder. Will all the play, the warm moments in the rocking chair, the poems we read together (Tess Gallagher most recently) somehow blossom from what we think is careful nurturing? I can only have faith that the seeds we plant will sprout and reach heavenward, like seedlings that limn the contours of their parent, long-since decayed and itself part of the fertile, nurturing soil.
Posted by pavel at 9:43 AM | Comments (4)
April 5, 2005
Spring Snow
A Winter Morning Ted KooserA farmhouse window far back from the highway
speaks to the darkness in a small, sure voice.
Against the stillness
only a kettle’s whisper,
and against the starry cold
one small blue ring of flame.
Orion and I drift to and fro in our rocker, our breathing a somnolent metronome to this moment of morning stillness. My eyes slowly open as Orion stirs in my arms, and I can't help but smile at our small, perfect world inside -- for now, nothing to wait for, nowhere to hurry to.
Outside, earlier, the pre-dawn grey was all sugar and snow, confected by last night's storm. The spring declares itself here despite the persistent ice and cold; the smell of boiling sap and wood smoke lingers heavy and sweet in the cold air, birdsong is slowly edging into our woods, a few tentative moths alight at dusk, and this morning, threads of spider's silk hung low, weighted with garlands of snowflakes. Signs of spring are subtle and precious; the university where I teach, some 40 minutes south, devotes a webpage each year to cataloging spring blooms on campus. Yesterday was their inaugural entry for this year: snowdrops (snowdrops!).
Although the season seems slow to change (according to many, the maple sugar harvest is late and somewhat below average in our area this year), the small changes of each day bring details of beauty, even in the midst of winter's brief return.
a shell patiently waits for the warmth of spring to arrive at the beach
Posted by pavel at 11:00 AM | Comments (3)
April 3, 2005
The Outermost House
A Spring Morning
Meng Hao-janI awake light-hearted this morning of spring.
Everywhere around me the singing of birds --
But I remember the night, the storm,
And I wonder how many blossoms were broken.
After two weeks of travels, and an extended retreat from the digital world, we are finally all back together under our own roof. As I search for last night's missing hour in a mug of green tea, Orion stirs beside his mother and Pika pads slowly across the kitchen linoleum, stopping to stretch before nosing at me for a scratch. Things are again as they should be.
Our week off the southern New England coast was a kind of spiritual appassimento, a drying out of the soul from the drenching late winter of our more northern climate, a drying which is only one step in the gentle process of distilling a delectation of spirit. Our welcome retreat was without plan or reflection, more the moment of a haiku than the procession of verses that is our everyday routine.
To go south for the vernal equinox is to embrace the northward march of spring head on. But our southward shift was as much about meeting the spring as it was about reconnecting with one another in a warm(er), springtime slant of light.
Morning
The leaves of the predominant oaks -- a mix of white, black, post, and scrub -- are still months away from unfurling, so the low canopy of grey branches only lightly filters the spectrum of blue above -- coloring the tangle of huckleberry bushes beneath with the radiant warmth of a new season.
Afternoon
Orion is snug against my chest, looking out at a world he has never seen; perhaps his view lacks detail, but the expanse of mottled green waves, the sound of pebbles tumbling along the sand, and the salt spray of early spring meet his senses as they do mine, and we trace the line of the horizon together.
Evening
Calls rippling across a watercolor sky,
Two geese low over the pines in fading light,
The world starting us with its sudden closeness.
Posted by pavel at 11:25 AM | Comments (3)
March 17, 2005
A Lion on the Lam
Brezen
Jaroslav SeifertPozdravte jeste jednou zimu,
Sklonte se k snehu tajicimu.
Kus jara uz k nam padlo z vysek:
Podleska, modry vetrnicek.Otvira ocka jeste spici,
Jako kdyz dite na polstari
V den jiz se rozednivajici
Diva se po matcine tvari.A ta, jez nemuze se vynadivat,
Musi se smat a pocne zpivat.
MarchWelcome once more the winter,
and gently kneel beside the melting snow.
There, sent from the heavens, a herald of spring:
Delicate petals of yellow and blue unfurl.A drowsy spring flutters open wide eyes,
like a child resting on a pillow at dawn,
searching for his mother’s gentle face.And she cannot take her eyes from him;
Smiling, she begins to sing.
Thanks to my mom for collaborating with me on this translation. Also, please forgive the absence of diacritics in the Czech and any liberties taken with the translation.
It seems as though the snow has been falling steadily for days. On my morning ski eastward toward the dawn, large flakes hung suspended, gently shepherded downward by unseen currents of a late winter breeze -- they appeared as constellations against their lightening universe of fir, spruce, and pine.
I am reluctant to let winter go.
The vernal equinox arrives in less than a week, though spring will not begin to green the fallow fields across the road until nearly May, and snow will line the higher ridges until June. But, much as the snow-laden boughs of balsam fir spring upward when they slough off their snowy vestments in these longer days, the season will as well release me into the warm colors of spring.
Orion has been outside more these days and has noticed the brilliance -- and warmth -- of the sun overhead. Today, he complained only when I shaded his eyes, wanting to feel sun on skin, which he has done far too little in his short life. He pushed back from my chest and looked wide-eyed around the woods, maybe listening, like I was, for the melodic drip of sap into bucket from each of the school's forty spiles. None yet today, but of course, it's still winter.
Posted by pavel at 8:50 PM | Comments (1)
March 13, 2005
A Conscious Stillness
This present moment
that lives on
to become
long ago
Gary Snyder, from "One Day in Late Summer"
This morning I found myself circling a tree -- a mountain ash -- slowly counterclockwise, like a dog that has treed a squirrel and follows its spiraling, chirping form vainly round and round. As my snowshoes punctuated the silence with a resounding whompf in the deep new snow, my search was for the lingering voice of last night's storm, for the tall, narrow line of white etched into the shallow furrows of the bark that adds a verse to the poetry left by the storm's wind. In the memory of trees, the storm continues to rage.
In this morning's post-storm hush, the only movement is that of the sun, slipping above its refuge behind the mountain range to the east, and playing hide-and-seek with the smooth lenticular cloud suspended in the lee of the north woods' highest summits -- the cloud itself a visible echo of the wind that has left our own hilltop scoured and reshaped.
I am drawn inward by Orion's long, quiet, seemingly thoughtful moments looking out at the cold world through our windows -- the brilliance of sunlit white framed by our shadowed interior appealing to his love of contrast.
These times of mindful stillness I would not exchange for all the strength and dance of the wind that I know already I will long for in later years when the house is filled with the joyful din of a growing child. For now, I cherish these reflective, quiet moments that erase any moments of frenetic frustration from earlier in the day. Watching the sun complete its arc behind illuminated firs with Orion on my lap steadies me for whatever may come next. Sitting snugly in my lap, his hands moving slowly, limning the outlines of thoughts he has yet to make conscious, and calming any whorls of worry -- the memory of any storm forgotten in the conscious stillness we share.
Posted by pavel at 7:09 AM | Comments (3)
March 10, 2005
Wind
Winds are advertisements of all they touch, however much or little we may be able to read them; telling their wanderings even by their scents alone. . . . Most people like to look at mountain rivers, and bear them in mind; but few care to look at the winds, though far more beautiful and sublime, and though they become at times about as visible as flowing water.
John Muir, from "A Wind-Storm in the Forests"
In everything there is the wind. In a quiet moment today, I could not help but think of the wind; the only sounds were the rattling of our old farmhouse's windows in their frames and the sweep of uneasy wind and downy flake springing the snow-laden boughs of the cedar tree outside. Orion was snug against his mother, the two of them guarding each another from swirling gusts of different sorts.
Drift is much too passive a word for the piles of snow that persistently press against our front door, presenting me with a sculpted mountainscape when I stepped across the threshold for my morning walk.
The shifting identity of place is at the whim of this late winter storm. The wind reshapes yesterday's landscape into strata -- though ephemeral -- of wind-packed crystals, each layer unique in its color, weight, and feel. I dig through the layers to find the solid earth beneath, an unyielding mat of yellowed grass nearly two feet through fine snow that sifts like sand coaxed by the day's incessant gusts back into the hole.
Orion is only as old as this winter, and with spring's arrival in less than two weeks, we will begin to add yet another layer to the shifting record of this new life. I think that for now, at least, Orion is content with winter. He is already no stranger to the cold; in the height of the storm, as we made the short walk to school for class, Orion insisted on pushing back from my chest and gazed intently up into the falling flakes. I nearly walked off the path as I looked at him looking at the snow. Flakes would flit across his cheeks and lips, and rather than complain, he almost seemed to smile at the snow, the wind, the winter that will forever be his season.
Posted by pavel at 12:13 PM | Comments (1)
March 7, 2005
Straighter Darker Trees
This village is forgotten by the whole world. Buried in the snow, with more snow and more snow, nobody comes here.
Carl Wilmore, from a 1916 interview with Robert Frost in Franconia, NH
Late Wednesday afternoon, as Jen, Orion, and I drove to the eastern side of the mountains for my slide show, snow was still flying across the road, shepherded by persistent gusts into drifts that seemed to grow higher even as we watched from behind the windshield. As I coaxed the car a bit farther north, we crossed into Coos County, part of the Grand Bois du Nord, which runs unimpeded to our state's border with Canada a few hours' to the north. Against a gray dusk canvas, spires of balsam fir punctuated the forest canopy, their green tinted nearly black in the waning light. From behind the dashboard glow, the trees gathered in the near darkness, sentinels of the wilds beyond the headlights.
The following evening, a friend and I skied on the trails across the road from our house, making wide loops through a shadowy wood. At our circle's farthest point, we crested the top of a hill, which had once been cleared for timber and was now left for sale (an all too typical pattern here). The old woods road we skied on was defined more by its dense border of blackberry than any vestigial track, though this certainly once was (and will again perhaps be) someone's road home.
Like the memory of this place, the sun, too, had not yet slipped behind the western ridge, and, climbing back up the hill, I was guided by a single mature birch left to blaze in the sun, its upper branches now painted gold and holding steadfast in the rising evening wind. Beneath the tree's spread arms, a sculpted sastrugi landscape of canyons, ridges, and layered shadows of violet beside iridescent peaks of orange flame.
Too often it seems, I find myself speeding by legions of pointed firs at dusk, great swaths of darkness with nary a sun-flecked hill in sight. My solace is in the details of the world, and I find that even in a week of continuing transition, with Jen and I both at work, and my new class starting tomorrow, although the encircling pointed firs can confound and even frighten, the flames of light--a run at sunrise, a moment in the fleeting gloaming of alpenglow, at least momentarily quell my worries and spread a circle of warmth like Orion's smile at waking.
We walked in so pure and bright a light, gilding the withered grass and leaves, so softly and serenely bright—I thought I had never bathed in such a golden flood, without a ripple or a murmur to it. The west side of every wood and rising ground gleamed like the boundary of elysium, and the sun on our backs seemed like a gentle herdsman, driving us home at evening.So we saunter toward the Holy Land; till one day the sun shall shine more brightly than ever he has done, shall perchance shine into our minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light...
Posted by pavel at 7:02 PM | Comments (6)
February 27, 2005
Moyo
Although I am a Go novice, it is one of the few board games that I play with any regularity. Among the aspects of the game I find particularly appealing is how it mirrors the movements, relationships, and passions we are challenged with each day. Placements flow across the wooden board in serpentine rivers of contrasting stones, sometimes gathering in pools of black or white, but always ending in a unique cartography of play. As the map of the game grows, it becomes as much a reflection of a player's frame of mind as it is of any strategy.
Toward the beginning of a game, players often sketch broad swaths of territory that they may later wish to control. This potential territory is called to as Moyo in Japanese (literally, a framework in which a player has influence). As in life, such a framework of interests or emotions can be build thoughtfully or put together haphazardly, with stones used well or wasted.
Late Friday night -- after playing a game of Go with Jen -- I took the dogs outside and, as has become my habit, look’d up in perfect silence at the stars, trying to find Orion's namesake in the heavens. To my surprise, I found him tilted forward, marching through the maples that line the field's western edge; Lepus was already lost beneath the horizon, and Sirius, winter's brightest beacon, hid behind the straight, dark trunks of trees as Orion's companions all slid behind a low ridge out of sight.
Soon, sometime in April, Orion will rise only after the sun, and thus be obscured by daylight until he once again begins his nightly trek in late autumn. Since my son's birth, this constellation and all of its stories have accompanied me on every clear night; I felt more than momentarily adrift, somehow, knowing that for half the year we will be without Orion's guiding light.
My own days have also shifted since Jen returned to work on Monday, and I have found myself outside more at dawn than after dusk, and more active with Orion at play in the mornings, and so, I suppose, all things move forward. This winter, my son has done much to sketch out his emotional moyo, and we are still learning how tightly it is interwoven with every facet of our own lives. And even if his stars are out of sight, as he works to understand and inhabit this world more fully, the lights of the Great Hunter will guide him.
Posted by pavel at 10:20 AM | Comments (1)
February 24, 2005
A Path to Place
Winter solitude--
in a world of one color
the sound of wind.
When we reached the top of Wedding Hill this morning and stepped out into the field, the dogs and I found ourselves in the brilliance of sunrise on this clear morning as the sun just crested the southern shoulder of Mount Agassiz. The snow at my feet, still untracked since the last snowfall, was every color but white; violet swales and golden hummocks were punctuated everywhere by dancing stars that reflected the rising sun; every crystal of ice warmed the cold morning with a delighted spark. I "linked a line of shadowy tracks across the tinted snow," down toward the darker shadows of the forest beyond the raised beds and orchard. There were compelling reasons to hurry home, but more persuasive were those that left me standing still, my eyes searching among the stars in the snow for something familiar, a constellation to offer some direction in the field's trackless expanse of color.
In the cold, snow-blanketed days of winter, offers Aldo Leopold, "observation can be almost as simple and peaceful as snow, and almost as continuous as cold." There are no distractions from seeing the reflections of sunlight in a snowflake, from following gossamer clouds of spindrift sailing across an open field. "Winter holds up objects in high relief for our most careful regard," adds John Elder. I wonder if winter's sparse secretive nature draws us likewise into our selves to explore field as yet untrammeled within.
I have been searching in the past several days for some path through older fields than these, both familiar and foreign. I have spent most of my fragments of free time putting together a slide show about our trip to the Czech Republic last summer for the AMC's international dinner series. Poring over the hundreds of pictures from our trip, many of places and people dear to me and my family, I have been trying to assemble a coherent narrative that might interest a roomful of strangers. How does one tell the story of a place so tied to one's own life? What lessons can I learn (and perhaps impart -- next week, or, later, to my son) from the stories of my family's history?
I am reminded, somehow, of the long-abandoned "pecker-fretted" apple trees across the road from us that still stubbornly persist beneath a canopy of taller maples and bear fruit every fall. The variety of their apples was forgotten years ago, but the cider they make is still sweet. Preparing for the slide show, I think more about Orion than the audience for next Wednesday's program, and wonder whether he will feel the same pull from the places in these photographs that I do. I hope that when he is a little older he is able to make some sense of all of these unfamiliar twinklings of light and, with my help, find his own way to the stories and places of his past.
Posted by pavel at 2:25 PM
February 21, 2005
Morning Earth
Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.From Walden, Henry David Thoreau
Tiny snowflakes hung suspended in the overcast dawn like a fine frozen mist when I took the dogs for their morning walk. Our tracks in the field across the road from the night before were still there, yet they had lost their fine details beneath a fresh snowy veneer (like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather). The dogs bounded across the trail and through the understory of young fir trees searching for squirrels, both real and imagined, but our time was short this morning; we had to be back at the house by seven o'clock, as this was Jen's first day back at work since Orion was born.
This morning began a new routine, one about which we have both been a little anxious. As our worlds shift once more, I'm glad we have Orion to take us by the hand and heart and remind us what is at the center of our lives as we continue down this new path.
In the late morning, after Orion finished a bottle, we sat together, Orion on my lap, both of us looking through the window at the flakes floating slowly past. Fragments of Copland, Chadwick, MacDowell the soundtrack for our morning meditation. My mind drifted sometimes to the work pulling at my sleeve from the other room, but I soon came back; there was nowhere else to be this morning but right there -- sitting with my son, hand warm on his chest, thinking about nothing but the feeling of that moment.
Le stelle, il cielo et gli elementi a prova
tutte lor arti et ogni extrema cura
poser nel vivo lume, in cui Natura
si specchia, e 'l Sol ch'altrove par non trova.Francesco Petrarch
Posted by pavel at 8:01 PM | Comments (2)
February 18, 2005
The Peace of Wild Things
The Peace of Wild Things
Wendell BerryWhen despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
I saw my reflection in Orion's eyes today as they pooled and overflowed with tears. His eyes stared up at me from between quivering lids, and I felt my own breath grow ragged and throat tighten at the sound of his imploring cries. I suspect the first (if not every) time parents see their child in pain, even if the cause is not traumatic -- like a first set of inoculations, such as Orion had today -- an infant's cries stop the world.
When his crying returned after we returned home, even the dogs offered their comforting touch, licking salty tears from Orion's cheeks. Gradually, and with the dogs' help, Jen and I held Orion and he grew quieter and responded to the warmth of our touch and voices with a comforted sigh.