Alexandersmap

    Category: Poetry

    • 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.

    • Rooted

      “You lack a foot to travel?
      Then journey into yourself!”
      – Rumi, If A Tree Could Wander

      For all my talk of moving and travel, I found myself digging deeply into the rocky soil at home, rooting myself to the land with labor and that most valuable commodity of all; time. For this weekend was the allocated time to put a privacy fence up on the side of the yard that offered a view into the backyard for our neighbors, and a view of their garage for us. The fence answered a question in my mind: Is it time to move on from this place? Answer: Not just yet.

      So maybe it was while in this frame of mind that I should linger on this Rumi poem. A tree is deeply rooted to the place it sprouts from, living and dying in the same place. Its only option is to reach higher and wider to the sun. And to do so it must root probe deeper and wider into the earth for strength and sustenance. Those roots can grow as thick as the branches in the canopy above.

      The first post hole is the most important. It sets the tone for where the fence will be positioned, and like a tree, once its set it isn’t going anywhere easily. I chose the most logical position of all for a privacy fence to begin, adjacent to the fence that lines the rest of the property. Replacing a section of fencing with the new privacy fence and continuing it further along for the desired effect. That post hole, in theory, should have been the easy one once the previous fence post was removed. But the first probe of the shovel revealed a long-hidden truth that only the original fence installer knew: there was a massive root from a tree growing right through the spot I would need to dig. The original fence post had been cut just below ground level and screwed into the post that was staying. Thus began a three hour conversation with myself about the wisdom of staying in one place for too long, sacrificing a chain saw blade and three reciprocating saw blades to the fence gods.

      But the funny thing about manual labor is the time it gives you inside your own head. That journey three feet into a post hole was a long conversation with myself. The view might not have been the Presidential Range or a waterfall, but if it had been I would have been too far outside of myself to still my mind. Manual labor offers stillness of the mind even as it wears the body down. I’ve built a complete hardscape and renovated much of my home, and find the process rewarding even as I curse myself for not just paying someone else to do it. And the finished product stands as a reminder that you’ve done something of significance. There’s a love of fate that must be applied in the moment that the stoics would be very familiar with. It wasn’t the hole in the ground but the fence that grew from it. And the laborer who found a bit of clarity in the soil and rocks and roots. The time wasn’t lost after all.

    • So Many Mornings

       

      “This is the earnest work. Each of us is given
      only so many mornings to do it—
      to look around and love
      the oily fur of our lives,
      the hoof and the grass-stained muzzle.
      Days I don’t do this
      I feel the terror of idleness,
      like a red thirst.
      Death isn’t just an idea.”
      – Mary Oliver, The Deer

      Each morning I jot down one sentence that sums up the day prior in my Clear Habit Journal.  This one exercise alone has prompted me to be more creative in my days; to seek adventures worthy of writing down.  But there are plenty of days when I just go to work (which currently means walking downstairs) and maybe had a meaningful conversation with someone.  And sometimes that’s enough.  But in the back of my mind I feel that tomorrow morning I ought to write something down that was worthy of a day alive.  For as Mary Oliver says above, each of us is given only so many mornings, and death isn’t just an idea.

      Saturday morning brought tales of night swimming with my bride and hot embers warming cold skin.  Sunday morning brought soreness and a note about the magical Franconia Ridge Trail.  And this morning brings a summary of bottles of wine, grilled goodness and laughter with friends at a distance.  This was a string of worthy days and I work to compress the entirety of it all into one sentence that somehow may sum it up.  These are moments of quiet smiles and satisfaction.  Sometimes I write about adventures above tree line, but sometimes I write about installing a new toilet in my parent’s bathroom.  Both count just the same as worthy entries.

      Just as the blog forces me to reach beyond my comfortable place to explore and try new things, the daily sentence lingers as a cold-hearted judgement on the worthiness of any given 24 hours on this planet.  If that seems like a lot to live up to, well, so be it.  I believe we’ve got to live with urgency for all the reasons I’ve written about before that you already know too.  Someday I’ll have my last morning on this planet, and I hope the day that follows it is so epic that I wish I’d had one more to write down what I did.  Those single day entries will pass on to those who survive me, and I hope they’ll see the sparkle and shimmer of a life well-lived, one day at a time.

       

    • To Kindle a Light

      “Make of yourself a light,” said the Buddha, before he died.” – Mary Oliver, The Buddha’s Last Instruction

      Last night I lay quietly in the backyard well past my bedtime watching bits of billion-year-old space dust streak across the sky in brilliant dying gasps of white light. The dust is debris from the comet Swift-Tuttle, which takes 133 years to orbit the sun. The Earth, orbiting the sun every year, meets this debris field every August.  I won’t be alive when the comet Swift-Tuttle visits again, but every year I look for her cosmic wake in the form of the Perseid Meteor Shower.

      “As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.” – Carl Jung

      If ever there was a year during my lifetime to bring more light into the world, its 2020.  I’m not sure yet how much light I have to offer, but I know the answer is…  more.  And so I’m going to double down on the writing for the next hundred days to get through the first draft.  And then do the work to make it sparkle, for surely it won’t sparkle in 100 days.  Ah, but writing kindles a light in me, and I must stoke that kindling until I get a good flame going.

      “A good book is [one] you can feel [is] alive.  You can feel it vibrating, the character comes alive, you can sense the brain matter of the writer is like flickering on the page.  They’re alive.  And a dead book the author doesn’t have any energy, the person they’re writing about doesn’t come to life, ideas have no sparkle to them.  So you have to bring energy and aliveness to the process.  It shows in your writing.” – Rolf Potts, from his Deviate podcast

      One thing I’ve often lectured myself about is a tendency to announce what I’m going to do instead of just doing it and talking about it later.  Yet here I am talking about the next hundred days like I’ve actually done anything meaningful.  A way of forcing my writing hand to fish or cut bait. I’m tired of cutting bait.  And holding my own feet to the fire seems to work for me.  I rowed a million meters in four months because I said to my world that I would.  And now I’m saying this will be done.  Sometimes a measure of audacity puts you on the spot just enough to get you over the hump.

      I’ve firmly established the habit of writing early in the morning.  Demonstrated by the consistency of published posts to the blog.  But writing a book requires a different level of focus.  I’m just not producing enough focused material towards the book…  yet.  November 19th is 100 days from yesterday, when I began this journey of 100,000 pages.  What’s that?!  Day one is already gone.   A lot can happen in the next 99 days, but only with sweat equity and commitment.  I believe it to be one of those five big things, so why not treat it as such?

      The comet Swift-Tuttle last visited in 1992, but was only visible with binoculars at the time (like NEOWISE last month).  I was cosmically indifferent to it then, but I’ve never been indifferent to the Perseids.  Comets seem more timeless and steady in their travels across the universe.  Meteors are only here for a moment of flash and streaking brilliance and then they’re gone forever.  We’re a lot more like meteors than comets, aren’t we? Why not kindle a light in the darkness of mere being in this brief time?

       

       

    • Getting Up and Looking Further

      “No doubt in Holland,
      when van Gogh was a boy,
      there were swans drifting
      over the green sea
      of the meadows, and no doubt
      on some warm afternoon
      he lay down and watched them,
      and almost thought: this is everything.
      What drove him to get up and look further
      is what saves this world,
      even as it breaks
      the hearts of men.”
      – Mary Oliver, Everything

      This will be the 773rd blog post for a total of 333,789 words (including quotes from others).  I wonder sometimes where the words go when I click publish.  And I wonder sometimes whether writing everyday matters.  But I snap out of it, remembering the words of Seth Godin:

      “Daily blogging is an extraordinarily useful habit. Even if no one reads your blog, the act of writing it is clarifying, motivating and (eventually) fun.”

      Daily blogging has indeed turned out to be all three of those things and more.  But it isn’t lost on me that I set out to blog about exploration and I tend to be locked in my own yard most days.  But that’s 2020 for you.  Above all, writing is clarifying.  And even if no one reads the blog, the act has mattered far more to me than anticipated.

      What drove him to get up and look further is what saves this world, even as it breaks the hearts of men.

      It also isn’t lost on me that few actually ever read it.  But I haven’t earned that following just yet (and don’t invest any time in self-marketing my blog).  Still, there are those WTF days when you bleed all over the screen and the world buzzes in complete indifference.  Like putting all that energy into a garden and having it mowed down by a groundhog while you were away for a few days, its the world telling you that your work doesn’t matter as much as you thought it did.  The ultimate exercise in humility.

      Someone told me recently that the blog is a gift for my children someday when I’m gone.  I suppose that’s true, but its also a living trust of sorts, with the writer being the primary beneficiary while he’s still around.  If I should keep this up for the next ten years that works out to be roughly 1.5 million more words coming out of my brain and onto the page.  If I push the average up I could make that 2 million words.  Godin also mentioned that the first 1000 posts are the hardest.  Frankly I can’t agree more.  The process of writing, of getting up and looking further, is moving me in directions that are enlightening and yes, clarifying.  And maybe that’s enough.

       

       

       

    • Five Things

      “Strategically, its better to do five big things with your life than 500 half-assed things.” – Derek Sivers, The Knowledge Project podcast

      This statement got me thinking.  I’ve done plenty of half-assed things in my life, but what are the big things, both accomplished and yet to complete?  That’s the real question of a lifetime.  I’m likely past the halfway mark on my own life (you never know), so what have you done with the time?

      “Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
      Tell me, what is it you plan to do
      with your one wild and precious life?”
      — Mary Oliver, The Summer Day

      Raising two children to be good humans is one notable accomplishment.  An accomplishment that was decades in the making.  And if they’re a work in progress, they’re far ahead of where I was at their age.  Surely parenthood is one of the five big things.  When I look at my two I’m amazed at who they’ve become.  I played a part in that (perhaps only as an example of what not to do?).  If you have kids be a responsible kid with them, delighting in the world.  Most of parenthood is figuring things out as you go, but being a steady, reassuring presence in your children’s lives as they stick their own necks out into this crazy world.

      And if parenthood is one big thing, so too must a long, happy marriage?  Having gotten this one very wrong once, I celebrate the one I’ve gotten right.  And by right I mean I haven’t screwed it up just yet, despite my stumbling through the minefield of time.  I’m no expert on the topic, but I’ve learned a few things over the years.  Ultimately you get what you put into something, and if you invest the time and passion into a marriage you’ll have a healthy return on investment with the right partner.  Marriage is never 50/50 – sometimes you give 80, sometimes you give 20, but with the right partner it evens out over time.  So that’s two, for those keeping score, and where do we go from here?

      Career?  One’s career is a complicated journey full of half-assed things, but if you play it well there’s potential for that big thing over time.  If I’ve learned anything at this stage of my career its that relationships and trust built day-after-day matter more than skills accumulated or degrees earned.  It all counts, but nothing matters more than how you interact with others.  I celebrate being in a good place in a complicated time with the potential for great things should I do the work well.  Isn’t that what we all want in a career?  One of the key decisions you’ll make in your career is how much you want to sacrifice time with that family and in your marriage  for career growth.  Choose wisely, for balance is possible.  Life is too short to work for assholes.

      So riddle me this: Beyond family, marriage and career, what are the next couple of big things that you want to accomplish in life?  Starting a business?  Meaningful charitable work?  Environmental activism?  Writing that great American novel?  Athletic accomplishments?  And what of world traveler?  I like to think of myself as an unpaid American diplomat, going out into the world and demonstrating that what you see in the movies and reality television and (God forbid) politics isn’t the real America, but just a part of our story.  There’s a lot to be said for climbing the ladder and reaching a hand down to help others on their own climb.  The more you’re a student of the world, the more you learn and the more you can apply that knowledge towards meaningful interactions.

      “Life is like arriving late for a movie, having to figure out what was going on without bothering everybody with a lot of questions, and then being unexpectedly called away before you find out how it ends.” – Joseph Campbell

      Focus on the big things, and less on the half-assed things.  You’ll know the big things when you find them.  At least I’m counting on that as a guiding principle on my own path.  And if you don’t eventually get five big things accomplished, maybe one or two is enough.  But make them really big things.

    • Really Only Words

      “All things are really only words
      in a tongue of endless gobbledygook
      that someone or something is writing in a book
      that is the history of the world. In herds,

      you, I, everyone, Carthage, Rome travel,
      and my unfathomable life too, and this stigma
      of having been an accident, a cipher, an enigma,
      of being all the unmelodious dialects of Babel.

      But behind every name is what has no name.
      Today, I felt its shadow flicker and take aim
      in the blue compass needle, lucid and light,

      that points far away across seas that gleam,
      something like a timepiece glimpsed in a dream,
      or the stirring of a bird in the middle of the night.”
      – Jorge Luis Borges, The Compass

      This poem was originally written in Spanish, and I’ve read two versions of it that are completely different from each other, depending on the translation to English.  And such is the challenge of interpreting both language and poetry.  Words mean different things to different people, and I wonder sometimes at the words I’ve read that were interpreted by another and how close to the truth those words truly are.  The better path would be to invest the time to learn to speak Spanish fluently and read the poem as Borges intended.  Instead I rely on the interpretation of others.

      Isn’t that the way it is with the news?  We rely on the interpretation of facts by writers who put their own spin on it, often to feed people what they want to hear.  I’ve stopped watching the news so that I can hear my own voice instead.  And what of hearsay?  You hear a story about someone else from the viewpoint of the speaker and make up your mind about them based on what someone else said about them.  The question is how much do you trust the source of your information?

      The gist of this poem is the mystery of who we are, and our path to figuring that out.  Finding our true north in a jumble of lives and words and interpretation.  And that makes the different versions of this poem somehow appropriate, I suppose.  Brian Doyle called Borges one of the greatest writers in history, but with a limited grasp of Spanish, Borges’ brilliance is largely lost to me as I rely on others to provide meaning to his work.  If ever there was a reason to learn languages its to truly understand and to be understood by others.  I’m just scratching the surface with a writer like Borges in reading an English translation, and you could say the same thing about Homer or Nietzsche or Marcus Aurelius for that matter.  They’re really only words, but the way you put those words together matters.

      Doyle pointed me to Borges, who’s work is frustratingly just out of reach for me in its original form.  I have the same frustration with bird calls and plants in the forest and other such things I can’t figure out given the scope of my current knowledge.  But its all part of the journey, isn’t it?  The unknown is either a roadblock or a welcome sign, depending on your own interpretation.  And there’s that word again.  All forks in the road that lead us down the next path towards a greater understanding of the world and our place in it, should we be so bold as to keep moving forward.

    • All That’s Beautiful…

      “I heard the old, old men say, ‘Everything alters, And one by one we drop away.’
      … I heard the old, old men say, ‘All that’s beautiful drifts away Like the waters.’ – WB Yeats

      Most people don’t like change.  They want to stay in the same comfortable place indefinitely, go to a time share vacation at Disney World every year or to the same beach to have the same experience they had last summer.  Familiar and enjoyable, so why not do it again next year?  And that’s why people buy time shares and beach cottages and permanent camp sites for their Airstream.  There’s a lot to be said for the tried and true.  Immersion for one: Really getting to know a place by going there often.  I’ve really gotten to know a small corner of Buzzards Bay in this way, and find that I still don’t know it as well as I thought I did last time I visited.  Yes, there’s clearly benefit in returning again and again.

      But as Yeats points out, everything alters.  I look at the neighborhood I live in that once had a roving pack of 50 kids riding bicycles and playing games in each other’s yards (a rare phenomenon in the last 20 years).  All those kids are grown up and moved on.  Some new families have moved in, I don’t really know their names, and have started raising the next generation of kids.  Maybe someday the neighborhood will have those packs of kids playing again.  I hope so – otherwise all that Halloween candy goes in my mouth.

      In general I’m a big fan of change.  I’ve changed jobs when it didn’t feel right staying at a place and longer.  I moved primary residences ten times before settling on the place I currently live in, where I’ve been living for 21 years.  But I’ve painted every room in this house a different color at least twice, and some four times.  Change is part of the deal, whether we move or not.  Embrace the changes that happen around us and adapt in ways that make it work for you.  Nobody misses rotary phones, which made your finger numb when you had to dial a long number.  Nobody misses the days when you had to go into a bank to make a deposit or withdrawal instead of using an app on your phone or Venmo to complete a transaction.  Some change is good.  Its progress – the progression of humanity from one stage to another in our technological development.

      “I see my folks, they’re getting old
      And I watch their bodies change
      I know they see the same in me
      And it makes us both feel strange
      No matter how you tell yourself
      It’s what we all go through
      Those eyes are pretty hard to take
      When they’re staring’ back at you”
      – Bonnie Raitt, Nick of Time

      Then there’s the changes that happen with aging.  The progression of decline in our bodies as we grow older.  Aches and pains we didn’t have when we were kids.  Seeing those around us again as well and recognizing the path we’re all on.  I’ve got a heightened sense of awareness of this now more than ever.  We’ve considered moving to a faraway place just to change things up a bit.  Scotland, Iceland, the Azores, the Faroe Islands, Dominica and New Zealand all remain tantalizing places to relocate to for me.  Sailing around the world sounds attractive when the world is open for business, but what do we leave behind when we slip away from the dock?  I think a younger me might have made the leap had the younger me known the stakes.  The me before kids, before aging parents, and such things.  Now I’m not as sure.  But aging doesn’t mean you have to break down quickly.  Fitness is a way to stem the tide and live well in the time we have left.

      All that’s beautiful drifts away, whether we like it or not.  But its replaced by new beauty, if we only open our eyes to it.  We’re all breathing in the dust of eternity, and exhale a part of ourselves back into the universe, which makes us all connected, really.  All part of the timeless wave of humanity, surely, but also all matter.  We all have our minds wrapped around our own mind and body, but we’re just matter and energy with a soul.  The matter and energy move on in time.  Beauty doesn’t disappear, it just moves on down the chain.  We’re just links trying to jealously hold onto to it as long as possible.  But the soul is ours alone, here today, but where will it be tomorrow?  Time will tell.  Anyone who tells you they have the answer is conning you.

      My wife got a call from her mother yesterday, telling her the bad news about one of their neighbor’s kids who has cancer all over their body and isn’t expected to live more than another 18 months.  I suppose that got me thinking about old Mr. Yeats and his poem.  We’re all drifting away eventually, and sometimes much sooner than we’d prefer.  A good reminder to get on with living already, changes and all.  Life is more than a weekly paycheck and a house with a pool in the backyard and a familiar spot on the beach every summer.  Life is about making the most of ourselves in the time we have left.  Live beautifully alive, changes and all.