Alexandersmap

    Category: Poetry

    • Mountains

      “the mountain before you
      is just a symbol

      what you climb
      step by step
      is yourself”
      – Kat Lehmann, Small Stones from the River

      I was going to save this poem and the one that follows for hiking days, for they obviously pair well with trail work. But then I thought to myself that life is a climb all its own.

      Thinking smaller, the year is also full of challenges and wonder, mingled together like four souls coexisting in a house next to the woods hoping the Internet service measures up today.

      “a mountain
      becomes smaller
      the longer it is climbed

      by the time
      the summit is reached
      all that remains
      is a valley”
      – Kat Lehmann, Small Stones from the River

      On some hikes, the return back to the car is far longer than the trip to the summit. How does that happen on an out and back hike? One way is discovery and anticipation. The other is reflection and seeing the same things from a different perspective. Shouldn’t we marvel at them both?

      The answer lies in summiting. And then turning back. We’re never the same, are we?

    • White Cap

      “I am in love with Ocean
      lifting her thousands of white hats
      in the chop of the storm,
      or lying smooth and blue, the
      loveliest bed in the world.”
      – Mary Oliver, Ocean

      I anticipate a white cap day on Buzzards Bay as a Nor’easter rolls through. For now the bay is restless but content to let the rain fall in abundance to its surface instead of rising up to meet it. For the march of thousands of white hats the current and wind must be more contentious than this. It will come in time, as it always does on Buzzards Bay.

      Nor’easter days are meant for hunkering down, catching up on reading and sipping hot beverages. On Cape Cod the storm will bring heavy rain and high winds. The salty water will surely rise to greet her fresh visitors. I’m a visitor myself; like a river forever moving between the mountains and the sea. I want to leave the comfort of the warm house to walk on the beach. You don’t come this far to look at it from afar. For I’m mostly water, shouldn’t I rise up to meet it too?

      Up in New Hampshire all this water will mean white hats of a different kind, with heavy snow in the mountains and clever swirls of white donning posts and mailboxes in the lower elevations. I’ll welcome the grace of snow-packed trails covering the ankle-breakers when I return to the mountains. Whenever that might be – I really don’t know. But they’ve heard my silent promise to return. We have unfinished business, those mountains and me.

      I laugh when I read polls asking where you would want to live forever. How do you choose between the mountains and the sea? Its a Sophie’s Choice question; asking one to pick between a mountain waterfall and the crashing surf. Instead I look to the Abenaki who moved for generations between the White Mountains and ocean fishing villages. They didn’t choose one over the other, they chose a life in between. And that’s where you’ll find me too.

      So today as the white caps rise, I’m reminded of the Mary Oliver poem above. I’m on the very edge of that in between for this Nor’easter, and the chop of the storm has begun. Who’s up for a walk?

    • Small and Green and Hard

      “At first the fruit is small and
      green and hard.
      Everything has dreams,
      hope, ambition
      – Mary Oliver, Someday

      I was thinking about a post I made on social media three years ago next month. Newfoundland. I’d gotten up early, as I usually do, and drove to the eastern edge of the continental North America for sunrise. A month after that photo I was on the western edge of continental Europe taking in the the crashing ocean and looking back towards where I was from.

      I looked like quite a world traveler on social media, but a week after that trip to Portugal I was unemployed. I didn’t post that on social media. I just scrambled to reach out to my contacts and find meaningful work as quickly as possible. We tend to amplify the positive: trips, events, big meals, relationships… the highlight reel stuff.

      That month of unemployment transformed my writing from a once in a while thing to an every day thing. I switched from Blogger to WordPress, found my voice through repetition and trips to local places, read a lot, and mostly just wrote. The fruit of my labor is still small and green and hard, but I see it ripening. At least I believe it to be so.

      We’re all works in progress, they say. Mastery is elusive. Ten thousand hours elusive. Lifetime elusive. But the art is in the doing, day in and day out. When the fruit is small and green and hard and you’re hungry it seems like it will never ripen. But being a bit hungry is where the art comes from. There’s nothing burning inside when you’re well-fed and satiated. The mind says maybe this is enough.

      In the spring my apple trees were a wonder of showy blooms. I was thrilled and dreamed of a rich harvest. But the dry summer transformed that bounty of blooms into a few deformed, tiny apples. By contrast the grapes were bountiful this year and fed the birds and yellow jackets when I couldn’t keep up. Funny the way two plants of the same age react to the same conditions, isn’t it?

      Everything has dreams, hope, ambition. We never know what will ripen and bear fruit. How the seasons will shape us. But fruit withers without focused energy. So we must keep at it.

    • Bold Living

      “There is freedom waiting for you,
      On the breezes of the sky,
      And you ask ‘What if I fall?’
      Oh but my darling,
      What if you fly?”
      – Erin Hanson

      Salto mortale, means the dangerous or potentially lethal leap. Mortale is the potentially bad outcome. Salto is the tricky part: the leap. We humans tend to dwell so much on bad outcomes that we never get around to leaping. And then we regret the leaps we didn’t take more than we celebrate having not leaped. And that suggests another Latin phrase that stirs those quivering leaping muscles: Quam bene vivas refert non quam diu, or “It matters not how long but how well you live”.

      “I don’t believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.” – Joseph Campbell

      Alive time means being out there, taking chances, doing things that make you a little bit uncomfortable but thrill you just the same. Not frivolous risk-taking, but leaping into the calculated risk of bold living. The art of being alive while you’re here and vibrant enough to spring to action.

      Live boldly. Leap. Fly.

    • The Lifting Fog

      “Opinions are like nails: the stronger you hit them, the deeper inside they go.” – Decimus Junius Juvenalis

      Or maybe in 2020 it’s “the more you express them the more your friends mute you on Facebook”. Or look at you funny when you see them in public. The lesson, I suppose, is to stop hammering all the time. And, as we all know, you can’t change other people, only yourself. So focus your energy in the right place.

      We begin another work week with deep fog outside. The heat of yesterday gave way to a cold, clammy fog that descended into the woods and surrounds the house this morning. It inspires me even as it drives nails into the ankle I thought was healed. The fog offers lessons: This day marks a new beginning, as every day does. Enough hammering opinions and defending positions.

      If you’re wondering, Decimus Junius Juvenalis, AKA Juvenus, has a wealth of wisdom/great quotes you’re familiar with in The Sixteen Satires (like “who watches the watchmen?”). Worth a search if you geek out on such things (as I clearly do). There are days when I wish I could just read all day just to catch up on things that I skimmed through in school because I wasn’t mentally developed enough to fully grasp what they were saying at the time. But that’s what lifetimes are for.

      “You can never step into the same book twice, because you are different each time you read it.” – John Barton

      And so we change, day-to-day. The fog slowly lifts, and a new understanding develops. I’m clearing out the fog of politics and rancor from the last several months and looking ahead with clarity and purpose. To grow in the new light emerging from the fog. To begin again.

    • Walking the Frost Farm

      Sunday restlessness prompted a short road trip up to an apple orchard for some apples and pumpkins. This proved to be too brief, so it seemed a good day to revisit the Robert Frost Farm. Maybe it was his poem October that inspired me, or maybe the beautiful fall day, but either way he whispered to come over and stay awhile.

      The last visit to the Robert Frost Farmhouse was during a different time when you could actually walk about with a group of strangers and not think about the risk associated with doing so. This time we skipped the farmhouse and just walked the property and the adjacent Grinnell Farm conservation land. Walking slowly, reading the poems and biographical information that lined the path on the Robert Frost Farmhouse property, it was still a quick walk even with the extended walk through the conservation land. But still altogether necessary to be outside in the world, and especially in Frost’s former world.

      A lot changes over time. The farm was used after Frost sold it as an auto graveyard for a time, with the top soil scraped away and car parts scattered all through the property. Thankfully all that is gone now, and though the farmland itself isn’t what it once was, it’s grown back into a field that feels largely feel like you’re walking the land that Frost would have known. The land that inspired his writing. The auto parts are gone, but the wildlife, the farmhouse, and especially the stone walls remain largely as they were for Frost during his formative years as a poet. Having visited the farm on several occasions, I manage to draw something new out of the experience each time. I’ve toured the farmhouse and recommend it for a first-time visitor, but for me walking the path is what makes you feel like you’re a part of Robert Frost’s world, if only for a short time.

      Frost lived at the farmhouse from 1900 to 1911, honoring his grandfather’s wish to maintain the farm for at least a decade. It proved formative for him as a writer: “the core of all my writing was probably the free years that I had there.” He would leave this farm and rise to fame and relative fortune (for a poet) in the years that followed. He would read a poem he wrote at John F. Kennedy’s inauguration. And his words would ring in the minds of millions, including mine. And really, it all started here at a little farm in Derry, New Hampshire.

    • What Place Is This?

      This form, this face, this life
      Living to live in a world of time beyond me; let me
      Resign my life for this life, my speech for that unspoken,
      The awakened, lips parted, the hope, the new ships.
      What seas what shores what granite islands towards my timbers
      And woodthrush calling through the fog
      My daughter.
      – T.S. Eliot, Marina

      I’m heading for granite islands and likely a fair share of fog this weekend. In a year of revised expectations, I remain hopeful that this will play out as planned. To travel once again, even if regionally, is a blessing. It’s been a long year, and we’re only 3/4 of the way there still. Local trips sprinkled onto the calendar offer a bit of seasoning when needed. So why don’t we head towards adventure instead of nesting in the house for yet another weekend? Who doesn’t want to be counted amongst the awakened?

      This poem begins with a quote from Seneca from Herculus Furens that sets the tone: “Quis hic locus, quae regio, quae mundi plaga? ubi sum? sub ortu solis, an sub cardine glacialis ursae?” which means (I’m told) “What place is this, what region, what quarter of the world? Where am I? Under the rising of the sun or beneath the wheeling course of the frozen bear?”

      When you come across a reference like this it confirms that we’re all building off each other, as I read and draw from Seneca so did T.S. Eliot in his time. There’s that Great Conversation turning up once again. And it reminds me that we’re all roughly the same, just born at different times in different places. With different challenges, overcome or overwhelmed, but part of our story either way. Herculus Furens was a tragedy, full of darkness and moral questions. This year seems to be a Seneca tragedy unfolding before us, only partially read. How it ends is anyone’s guess. But I’m an optimist, and hopeful for brighter days.

      Quit hic locus, quae regio, quae mundi plaga? The questions of a traveler and also every person living in 2020, not completely sure where they’ve ended up. Or where they might end up. And I find myself asking the same questions, wondering about where I am and, if fortune smiles, the places I will go. And more and more, I look northward for answers.

    • That Fire Was

      “Ashes denote that fire was;
      Respect the grayest pile
      For the departed creature’s sake
      That hovered there awhile.
      Fire exists the first in light,
      And then consolidates, —
      Only the chemist can disclose
      Into what carbonates.” – Emily Dickinson, Fire

      I once climbed into a cave deep in the Grand Canyon and observed the soot accumulated on the ceiling from fires generations years ago. I’ve had similar observations in fireplaces in the castles of Scotland and the old forts of North America. And I’ve come across old fire pits deep in the woods. And I’ve often wondered, who gathered around this fire? What was their story?

      With Autumn we start gathering around fires more often, warmed by the glowing embers and infused with smoky thoughts. Inevitably I think back on other fires I’ve gathered around, sometimes with the same cast of characters, sometimes with their echoes, and wonder where the time goes. The burning coals I stir become the ashes I scatter when they cool, like memories cooled with time. And I wonder, who will come across my own fire’s ashes?

      And now, what coals are you stirring?

    • Willing to be Dazzled

      “Still, what I want in my life
      is to be willing
      to be dazzled—
      to cast aside the weight of facts
      and maybe even
      to float a little
      above this difficult world.”
      – Mary Oliver, The Ponds

      Maybe it’s the dulling effect of years staring at screens, where every moment is designed to dazzle you into staying. Don’t click away! Stay! Wait, look at this! I believe too many people have lost their willingness to be dazzled by the world. And that’s a shame. The world can be dazzling indeed.

      I quickly fall behind when people start listing the shows they’ve watched. I’ve watched a few, but I just can’t commit to binge-watching every episode of every series that’s been recommended. I feel like I’m missing out when I watch an early afternoon football game, not because I don’t love the game, but because its three hours of time that I might have spent outdoors or in conversation with someone of significance. I recognize that this makes me a bit different than the norm. I never professed to be normal.

      We’re halfway through September. Personally a rough month in a year so rough many would soon forget it. The weight of facts are overwhelming. There’s far more on my mind than being dazzled this week, but that’s the very time to open your eyes to the world and find the magic. For its out there waiting for you should you take the time to see. The sun still rises and sets, mountains and oceans still mark time and the world keeps spinning. There’s a Carolina Wren singing to me even as I write this as if to remind me the world is still here. And so must we be.

    • The Seven Daughters of Atlas

      “Many a night I saw the Pleiads, rising through the mellow shade,
      Glitter like a swarm of fire-flies tangled in a silver braid.”
      – Lord Tennyson, Locksley Hall

      Orion and Taurus, the hunter and the hunted, have a long-standing adversarial relationship in the skies above us. If the Hyades are the face of Taurus turned towards Orion, the “body” of Taurus is a cluster of stars known as the Pleiades or the less magical M45. Looking up well before the dawn this morning they took my breath away. I carefully ran into a dark house for my binoculars for a closer look. While Mars and Venus and the Waning Gibbous moon setting in the west dominated the sky, the Pleiades drew most of my attention this morning.

      The Pleiades cluster has many names across the globe, but my favorite is the Seven Sisters. The Seven Sisters, all daughters of Atlas, dance in place, forever hunted by Orion (but just out of reach!) as their father holds up the heavens. I have but a sketchy knowledge of Greek mythology and rely heavily on Wikipedia and Google to help me out (the Tennyson above and the Hesiod poem below were both posted originally on Wikipedia). But the cluster was familiar to me, having always been there waiting for me to pay more attention.

      “And if longing seizes you for sailing the stormy seas,
      when the Pleiades flee mighty Orion
      and plunge into the misty deep
      and all the gusty winds are raging,
      then do not keep your ship on the wine-dark sea
      but, as I bid you, remember to work the land.”
      – Hesiod, Works and Days 618–623

      This poem serves as a warning, for in late October and November when Pleiades is seen setting in the western sky it signals that winter is coming, and with it storms. Get your ships off the ocean and work the land instead. It’s September of course, but there have been plenty of storms already in 2020. And more change is in the air as the days grow shorter and we pivot towards Autumn. Our lives are nothing but change, no matter how much we sometimes wish to just dance in place forever like the Seven Sisters. But that’s not our fate.

      Pleiades reminded me that I need to get up earlier more often, for the brilliance of the sky above is wasted on me in my sleeping ignorance. The magic hour between 3 and 4 AM seems to be the time with the most to see, but how rare it is for me to be outside at that hour to witness it! I feel like an overnight passage or a night awake on a summit are required in the near future. Sleep is essential, but the stars silently dance without you while you’re blissfully dozing. Like Orion, those Seven Sisters are just out of reach for me, but I swear they flirt back at a fellow Taurus. And stir my imagination.