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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)