Alexandersmap

    Category: Poetry

    • Building Familiarity

      Everything that was broken has
      forgotten its brokenness. I live
      now in a sky-house, through every
      window the sun. Also your presence.
      Our touching, our stories. Earthy
      and holy both. How can this be, but
      it is. Every day has something in
      it whose name is Forever.
      — Mary Oliver, Felicity

      Recently I received a new laptop computer from the company I work with to replace a Surface Pro that was beginning to show signs of duress (blue screens and such). The nice thing about technology is it’s easily transferrable from device-to-device. Apple seems to have mastered this with iPhone and Mac. The PC world isn’t quite as elegant but the process of transferring your life from one device to another is largely seamless… and yet disruptive at the same time. Fingers tap at places once familiar and now foreign. Something as simple as the angle of your wrists makes all the difference in the world. And don’t get me started on screen sizes.

      We build familiarity in our lives through the action in our days. The chairs we default to when we sit for dinner, where we store the plates or the raucous collection of Tupperware. Which side of the refrigerator holds the ketchup. And of course, how we coexist with life partners, children and pets in this space are what make it a home. When things change, we feel it viscerally. Something is amiss.

      If we’re blessed with a good foundation and sound choices, we might build something that lasts for a very long time. But everything changes when you sprinkle enough days together. Most notably, we change. Our preferences and appetite, our bodies, and those of the characters around us too. We are at once shaped by our environment even as we shape it. Every day has something in it whose name is Forever.

      Every interaction with the world is an opportunity to linger, if only for a little while. Or maybe a lifetime. We have a say in what becomes essential to us. We can’t always control its durability. Familiarity is another form of seeing things through to its natural end. Or maybe ours. This, of course, is our forever.

    • Stories in Time

      Now through the white orchard my little dog
      romps, breaking the new snow
      with wild feet.
      Running here running there, excited,
      hardly able to, stop, he leaps, he spins
      until the white snow is written upon
      in large, exuberant letters,
      a long sentence, expressing
      the pleasures of the body in this world.
      Oh, I could not have said it better
      myself.
      — Mary Oliver, The Storm

      A rafter of wild turkey hens took up residence in the woods prior to the last snowfall. Likely anticipating the snow better than this human could, they opted for the scattered certainty of fallen birdseed from the feeders over the starkness of scratching out a next meal from the deep blanket of fresh snow. Who can blame them? Without a dog for longer than I care to think about, a turkey might find the backyard a relative paradise. This turkey nurtured the land to be just so, for children who have long since migrated. The tracks across the snow break up the blanket as children and Bodhi once did, and I quietly celebrate the contribution to my own tracks.

      Perhaps it’s time to welcome another dog to write its own story in time. Life goes one. We bring to it what we choose.

    • No Other Way

      when it is truly time,
      and if you have been chosen,
      it will do it by
      itself and it will keep on doing it
      until you die or it dies in you.

      there is no other way.

      and there never was.
      — Charles Bukowski, so you want to be a writer?

      Keep on doing it until you die or it dies in you. The writing continues for another day. Who it finds is anyone’s guess. But like a spouse bored of life with you it must find a way out. Nothing boring, nothing pretentious, nothing that doesn’t scream to leave you and meet the world.

      A high bar to clear. We’ve all slogged through countless boring books, tedious slogs through the waist-deep piles of words that mean nothing but a thesaurus referred to. And, if we’re honest, we’ve written our share of boring too. All to tempt the muse. All to find the magic and make ourselves a part of it. Join the Great Conversation once and for all, and maybe, if we might be so bold, find a place at the table one day.

      But not today. Not just yet. Today we work through the process. Truly, there’s no other way.

    • What Falls Away is Always

      Great Nature has another thing to do
      To you and me; so take the lively air,
      And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

      This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
      What falls away is always. And is near.
      I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
      I learn by going where I have to go.
      — Theodore Roethke, The Waking Poem

      We might agree that our lives are a brief accumulation of ideas and ritual, happenstance and things, that are ours today and a part of our history tomorrow. We’re all winging it, it seems, following instinct and a compass that is drawn to comfortable and habitual. Learning this about each other and ourselves, most of us hit our stride in time. Still, some chafe at life and constantly turn it upside down in the hope that there’s more on the other side. What is the right path? Doesn’t that change too? We’re a work in progress, each of us, wherever we are along the path. The view and how we feel about it changes as we ourselves change.

      Looking back is most striking. Old photographs and videos from another time in our lives betray who we were once, and that wave of change breaks over us, soaking us in memories. We recognize that we are not any one moment in our lives, we’re the sum of it, a character study transforming. We each see where we’ve been, but we learn by going. Who we were always falls away. The only way is onward to the next.

    • Little Things

      Elle est retrouvée!
      Quoi? -l’Éternité.
      C’est la mer allée
      Avec le soleil.

      She is found!
      What? -Eternity.
      It’s the sea gone
      With the sun. — Arthur Rimbaud

      Sunsets are routine, often ritualized. Little things, really, repeated daily. I’ve been known for carrying on about such things as the position of the sun relative to where it was in warmer days. Most people, it seems, could care less about where the tilt of the earth is. We are what we focus on.

      “Little things in life, which afford what [Daniel] Kahneman calls “experiences that you think about when you’re having them,” provide a great deal of everyday enjoyment. Because you’re apt to pay more attention to your remembering than your experiencing self, however, it’s all too easy to forget to indulge yourself in these small but important pleasures on a daily basis, thus depriving yourself of much joy.” — Winifred Gallagher, Rapt

      I should think life would be less enjoyable the very moment one forgot to savor the little things. We get used to things that once delighted us, looking for the next big thing to replace that feeling, always chasing. Never really savoring.

      Most writers have an eye for details, and linger in them longer than the average bear, seeking a deeper understanding. There’s pleasure to be derived from digging deeply into what seems trivial. Consider Rimbauld’s twelve words, arranged just so, that draw so much out of what someone else might think of as just another sunset. Poetry itself might be thought a little thing. Ah, but what things they are, sunsets and poems! I think I’ll stick with little things, thank you.

    • Each Page

      All of Time began when you first answered
      to the names your mother and father gave you.

      Soon, those names will travel with the leaves.
      Then, you can trade places with the wind.

      Then you’ll remember your life
      as a book of candles,
      each page read by the light of its own burning.
      — Li-Young Lee, Become Becoming

      Recently, I spoke about travel with people who aren’t traveling right now for the same reasons I once didn’t travel. Different chapter of life, as the saying aptly goes. Each page offers value and helps complete the story, but we don’t always see that when the story is incomplete.

      The thing is, the story is always incomplete to the very end. We live a novel life with the last page ripped out. There’s simply no knowing how this one turns out until we get there ourselves. Each page is ours to write, mostly ours anyway, edited by the troupe that presently surrounds us. Our task is to make it a hell of a story.

      Page-turners tend to be thrilling but lack substance. Weightier tomes sometimes feel plodding and a chore to get through but leave a mark long after we’ve tucked them up on the shelf. Somewhere in between is a life’s work that is meaningfully appealing and often reflected upon.

      Ultimately there will be other chapters. Aware of this, we might choose to weave magic and depth into this one. When we arrive later in our story, the pieces may finally all come together. It’s then that we’ll remember the true meaning of each page.

    • Be Whole

      To be great, be whole;
      Exclude nothing, exaggerate nothing that is not you.
      Be whole in everything. Put all you are
      Into the smallest thing you do.
      So, in each lake, the moon shines with splendor
      Because it blooms up above.
      — Fernando Pessoa, Poems of Fernando Pessoa

      An early morning. Out the door long before the dawn brought me deep into the heart of New York City commuter traffic. I still tell myself that this is the price of greatness, something I’ve told my children more than they want to hear, something I don’t always want to hear myself. Yet it still applies, and should for a lifetime. For don’t we owe it to ourselves to put all we are into everything we do?

      The price of greatness is consistently showing up and doing the things we know deep down that we must do. We might never reach greatness even paying the price, but we’ll surely get closer than we might otherwise. Mostly, we honor a commitment to ourselves to at least reach for it. Without this honor, we aren’t quite whole are we? We’re incomplete because we left something of ourselves out of our work. We owe ourselves something more. To be whole.

    • Simply Do

      “I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous, or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular, but because it never forgot what it could do.” — Naomi Shihab Nye (with a nod to @MayaCPopa for showing the way)

      Fame is overrated, contribution is where it’s at. We are utilitarian at the root of it, here to be productive in our time, whatever our calling, lighting the way until we pass the torch.

      We tend to lean into complicated. This is a distraction from the beautiful truth, a collective turn away from the briefness of being, a wish before the song fades and we blow out the candles. It’s contribution that lives beyond wishes.

      Poetry stares the truth in the eye, wanting nothing more than to face it. I wished somedays I was a better poet, a better writer. I’d forgotten what I could do. Now I simply do.

    • What to Do With Our Time

      you will never catch up.
      Walk around feeling like a leaf
      know you could tumble at any second.
      Then decide what to do with your time.
      ― Naomi Shihab Nye, The Art of Disappearing

      I’ve fallen in love with the bullet journal again. It’s not so much because of a love of organization, it’s more a need for organization that draws me deep into the pages of a blank notebook. Each X drawn through a bullet is uniquely satisfying, each habit represented as a filled in square that designates a day when I did what I told myself I was going to do fuels a desire to keep the streak alive one more day. As lines grow on paper day-after-day like a sideways bar graph, lies we tell ourselves become as apparent as the promises kept. How we reconcile each line tells us who we really are.

      If there’s one fatal flaw in the life of a busy soul, it’s following through on all that we want for ourselves. There’s only so many things we can say yes to, and endless things we must dismiss with a no. The yes’s seem so trivial stacked next to the no’s, but we forget that the collection of no’s is ours too. No’s matter a great deal in keeping us from tumbling. We aren’t leaves in the wind, to borrow Nye’s lovely analogy, we’re purposeful humans finding our way in the world.

      We must decide what we won’t be good at in this lifetime. We must see the path through the wilderness that carries us to a place where we might thrive. Breaking up is hard to do because we don’t want to let others down, but when we don’t break from things that don’t matter to us we’re letting ourselves down. Just who are we breaking up with? We must choose identity over misguided altruism. The world will ask for everything we’ve got. The best response in such moments is “Thank you, but that’s not for me”.

      Decide what to be and go be it. No isn’t fun, but it’s not ours to hold onto. The trade-off, becoming, is where the real fun is, for this is where we set our sights on big yes’s and watch them grow.

    • Kindred Contributors of Light

      Kindred comes from a combination of kin and the Old English word ræden (“condition”), which itself comes from the verb rædan, meaning “to advise.” — Merriam-Webster Dictionary

      Talking to a friend about poetry, I mentioned a poem by Li-Young Lee, and paused our phone conversation while she read it, waiting for the payoff when one reacts to great poetry. We do this now and then; find some magic in the world and bring it to light for others to see. We each find our fellow torchbearers by the light they bring to the world. We learn, don’t we, that our light alone is not enough in the darkness? But just as the stars bring light and meaning to the infinite void of the universe, kindred spirits bring hope to us back on earth.

      Another poem, discovered in the infinite darkness of social media, drew me to Lee, and I in turn put his work out there that others may see:

      So we’re dust. In the meantime, my wife and I
      make the bed. Holding opposite edges of the sheet,
      we raise it, billowing, then pull it tight,
      measuring by eye as it falls into allignment
      between us. We tug, fold, tuck. And if I’m lucky,
      she’ll remember a recent dream and tell me.

      One day we’ll lie down and not get up.
      One day, all we guard will be surrendered.

      Until then, we’ll go on learning to recognize
      what we love, and what it takes
      to tend what isn’t for our having.
      So often, fear has led me
      to abandon what I know I must relinquish
      in time. But for the moment,
      I’ll listen to her dream,
      and she to mine, our mutual hearing calling
      more and more detail into the light
      of a joint and fragile keeping.
      — Li-Young Lee, To Hold

      We are co-conspirators, you and I, each kindred contributors of light to the universe. We wrestle with the why, make the most of the how, and reconcile our when. It’s a fragile grip we have on our moment, but our hold feels more secure when the load is shared. Eventually we all must release our hold, but think of the light we might pass along before our torch burns out.

      But let’s not talk about fare-thee-wells now
      The night is a starry dome
      — Joni Mitchell, Carey

      Thanks Joni. Yes of course, there’s more: Hope. Meaning. Dreams realized. To be a contributor of light in the face of infinite darkness is to illuminate possibility. To live a full and wonderful life requires the friction of active engagement with all that this world offers us. We must wrestle with thoughts and ideas and opinion and find a greater truth than the myths we were taught to calm us in our moments of doubt. Friction creates a spark that, nurtured, brings light. Here we may warm ourselves in the glow of our potential, realized in this, our moment of fragile keeping.