"Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. And as you ring,

what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change."

Rainer Maria Rilke, excerpt from Sonnets to Orpheus

Hollow heart...

"The more hollow a heart, the more resonant it can become. I would make of this body, this life, a sounding board, tuned to that sympathetic vibration, which is sympathy, which is feeling together, which is compassion for all the world." (Kathleen Dean Moore, Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature, 139.)

Constancy of change

"Contraction changes into expansion, and expansion changes into contraction; physicalization changes into spiritualization and spiritualization to physicalization; movement changes into rest and rest changes into movement; solidification changes into decomposition and decomposition changes into solidification; prosperity ends in poverty and poverty in prosperity; success into failure and failure into success; joy changes to misery and misery to joy; love becomes hate and hate becomes love. Day becomes night, night becomes day; winter turns into summer and summer turns into winter; darkness turns into light and light into darkness, health changes to sickness and sickness changes to health. The rise of civilization brings about it's decline. Difficulties produce strength and happiness. Tears lead to smiles. War results in peace, life turns into death and death turns into life." (Michio Kushi, The Dõ-In Way: Gentle Exercises to Liberate the Body, Mind, and Spirit. Square One Publishers, 2007. 9.)

My friend Elissa McCarthy sent me the above quote. Kushi is an important voice in the macrobiotics for wellness movement, and Elissa has been a student, searching. Are we not all life's students, searching? I am always so thankful for every friend with whom I experience a sharing of the search. Such sharing, it seems to me, leads to that comfort in the deep, inner knowing of continuation.

Yesterday all day and again this morning the skies are gray, the clouds heavy with moisture, light rain falling frequently, rain a persistent possibility. Tuesday morning, though, I noted how mist delineated St. Omer's Creek, and the pond in the meadow, and billowed over Deer Creek where I know it curves out of sight from the house between the hills. The forecast is for the clouds to blow out this afternoon as a cold front comes in. The clouds are heavy now, but the sunshine is coming again.

Okay, I admit it, I'm sick with some sort of sniffly, sneezy, coughy, chills and sweats and achy junk. This too, this too. One real blessing I carry with me from the time illness brought me to a standstill is a sure knowing that I have the ability to notice what doesn't hurt, and what does still work. I have not fallen, I have not been unable to rise and stand and walk, I have not been unable to help myself. So I have noticed, experienced the deep knowing that this is not so bad, I got through worse, and this, too, will pass. There it is, the blessing of the constancy of change. Let me always be one who notices and accepts the life of this hour, to notice it, to experience the gift it carries, to bless the constancy of change.

Persistence and Change

This poem developed in the fall of 2004, a Presidential election year, and one during which the United States was, indeed, at war:

Persistence
...there is nothing new under the sun.
I have seen all the things that are done under the sun;
all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind.
Ecclesiastes 1:9b, 14 (NIV)

Seasons have turned again. Shiny
wild grasses wave free as flags
and proud as the banners of war.

Multi-flora rose canes, thorny terrorists,
grab and gouge the unwary, the greedy
roots tunnel deep, spread, cleave, hide

in earthy parts that would rather cling
together. See the constant river, corduroy
pattern subtly changed from yesterday.

Wind stings my cheeks. My sweatshirt
hood, black, comes forward like blinders.

I stand under the sun, stare at the world, wait
for any thing to unfold for me today.

On the huge, ancient, reliable rock—
the one rising from the water, shaped like an icon
of the turtle that carries the globe on its back—
shadows hint of growing fissures.

I may live to see it split as a family divided
in one wild moment, edges sharp and bitter
for decades but gradually wearing away,
the breaking pain buffed and smoothed

into pebbles and grains of sand laid down
side by side, one with another, like all
that has gone before, the floor beneath
the flow, the ever shifting ripples.
~Carol Bindel~

Now, in the spring seven years later, I continue to observe that ancient, reliable rock. For a few years after I wrote the above poem, fierce and also slow currents did continue to undercut that turtle rock, wearing it away, making the image of the shell with an opening for the turtle body even more real. About three years ago, though, a large tree fell just upstream, roots and all, and was washed downstream to where it came to rest in such a way that much of the water flow was diverted away from that rock. Pebbles and sand piled up in the lee. By last summer it looked to me as if a new island might be forming, that rock a sturdy, part-buried element included.

Now, in the floods a couple weeks ago, the tree and the collected pebbles and sands all washed away. The tree, I believe, was diverted by the power of high water from the right bank where it had been shielding the big rock, to where it now rests high on the left bank, the Y of its trunk collapsed, yet the roots and color still identifiable. The pebbles and sand surely lie redistributed, unidentifiable. The notion of a new island, of growth, of a family newly and strongly growing in unity without first a break from the old, all that now again looks unlikely.

Yet the metaphor continues to feel sturdy to me. We cannot know, day to day, cannot predict exactly what event comes next. All we can know with surety is that change will continue and continue, and we can rest in the comfort of knowing that life is change. I rest assured that life and change and flow will carry us all.

Noticing the Wounded Healer

No fully conscious adult can fail to notice that we are in a time of tumultuous change. The great unraveling. A shift in consciousness. A paradigm shift. A few years ago, I didn't even know that word, paradigm.

Simultaneously, many voices of observant people are now decrying how for centuries we have treated our Mother Earth like both an inexhaustible storehouse of supplies and also a sewer or garbage dump, pouring out our messes and poisons. Mother is sagging under the burden of our demands.

I heard someone, maybe Coby Beck, make a comment to the effect that we are the first species who could choose not to go extinct but we have not yet done so. We are as children, demanding, and Mother makes her responses. I wonder, do we know how to listen to and hear her?

A cluster of five pines grows by our mail box. In yesterday's damp air, the smell of resin wafted around me like a tonic. I stood there and breathed deeply, soothed.

This morning it is good to see a new dawn.

Anita Barrows, "Heartwork"

Do you know the poetry and translations of Anita Barrows? If no, you have a treat awaiting you in her work. Here's just a taste:

Heartwork by Anita Barrows

Monday. Bronze sunlight
on the worn gray rug
in the dining room where Viva sits
playing her recorder. Pain-ripened sunlight

I nearly wrote, like the huge
vine-ripened tomato
my friend brought yesterday
from her garden, to add to our salad:
meaning what comes

in its time to its own
end, then breaks
off easily, needing no more
from summer.

The notes
of some medieval dance
spill gracefully from the stream
of Viva's breath. Something
that had been stopped

is beginning to move: a leaf
driven against rock
by a current
frees itself, finds its way again
through moving water. The angle of light

is low, but still it fills
this space we're in. What interrupts me

is sometimes an abundance. My sorrow too,
which grew large through summer
feels to me this morning

as though if I touched it
where the thick dark stem

is joined to the root, it would release itself
whole, it would be something I could use.


There were colts with their mamas in the warmest meadow across the road this morning. The sweet freshness of new life is blooming all around us in the natural world. Whoever looks may see.

"No measure of human grief can stop Earth in its tracks. Earth rolls into sunlight and rolls away again, continents glowing green and gold under the clouds. Trust this, and there will come a time when dogged, desperate trust in the world will break open into wonder. Wonder leads to gratitude. Gratitude opens onto peace." (103)

Kathleen Dean Moore, Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature. Trumpeter, Boston, 2010.

Yesterday was sunny and in the low 60s, and I kept finding reasons to go out into the day. Clear more winter debris from the lawns. Take a walk. Take the pruning shears and wander in the woods, hunt poison ivy climbing tree trunks, and the invasive multiflora rose. Be sure to greet everything.

Some of the skunk cabbage plants are already standing tall, in vigorous green leaf. Some are still at blossom stage, and some of those as pairs looking almost like praying hands.