Alexandersmap

    Category: Poetry

    • The Schooner Ardelle on a Celtic Sunset Cruise

      These summer clouds she sets for sail,
      The sun is her masthead light,
      She tows the moon like a pinnace frail
      Where her phosphor wake churns bright.
      Now hid, now looming clear,
      On the face of the dangerous blue
      The star fleets tack and wheel and veer,
      But on, but on does the old earth steer
      As if her port she knew.
      — William Vaughn Moody, Gloucester Moors

      We know when we are in the midst of something extraordinary. Anticipation creeps up on us as the minutes pass by, awaiting our participation. Awareness floods in as the magic unfolds. Joy and gratitude edge in, provoking other emotions. There comes a time when we must simply put away the camera, stop searching for just the right word or phrase, and simply be a part of all that is happening around us.

      Gloucester, Massachusetts has a long history with the sea. Its famous harbor has long welcomed home fisherman and sailors from passages as far and wide as the ocean’s reach. One feels the history sailing in this harbor, and you play some small part in the play for having been here at all. The fleets of old are mostly all gone now, ghosts of what once was. But there are a few holdouts, and newcomers built in the traditional way, to offer some hint of what it was like long ago.

      Harold Burnham has built several schooners in the traditional fashion. For a couple of centuries the Burnham’s have built ships in Essex, Massachusetts. Two of his schooners are harbored in nearby Gloucester, and Harold himself captains sunset cruises. You simply have to put yourself in the way of beauty and sign up to participate. And if you’re especially fortunate, you may join on a night of Celtic music to offer a proper soundtrack for a September night when the clouds are just so to harness a bit of heavenly magic.

      Maritime Heritage Charters offers many opportunities to learn and experience a few hours on a schooner sailing in Gloucester Harbor. One not to miss is the Celtic Music Sunset Sail with Michael O’Leary & Friends cruise, when traditional music and song fill the heart and soul as you slip past history and witness the divine dance of fading light. The experience is one that will stay with you forever.

      The Schooner Ardelle, Gloucester, Massachusetts

    • Framing the Day

      Come, read to me some poem,
      Some simple and heartfelt lay,
      That shall soothe this restless feeling,
      And banish the thoughts of day.
      — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Day is Done

      This blog may ultimately stand for something, or perhaps it will simply be a lifetime of favorite poetry, lyrics and prose quoted as prompts for the words that follow. We all write for our own reasons. To share it at all is the audacious act. The words, cherished while embraced, are simply allowed to float away into infinity, where we will one day join them.

      I’ve grown weary of debate. It doesn’t matter a lick when each side is dug in and unwilling to consider common ground. To reach across the aisle is considered weak. So we learn to ignore each other’s radical ideas. And we are collectively the lesser for closing the door on each other’s most passionate pleas. Instead we get bland exchanges about the weather. How lonely is a life devoid of meaningful engagement with the larger world?

      I may have it all backwards. I begin my day with hopefulness and close it with resignation that the work didn’t change much of anything. That’s no way to end the day. We must bookend our days with aspiration and hope. The trivial thoughts of the day will not be remembered—they will dissolve as all the rest have before them. It is only the way we frame our days that will have the structural resilience to hold together the story of a lifetime. Choosing the right material for that frame thus becomes a critical affair.

      And so I build my frame of poetry and song. I glue it together with philosophy. I make it rigid through engagement with the world, beginning in the garden and venturing outward as far as the travel budget allows. All of this living means something, I’ve come to understand, mostly to me. But that doesn’t make the frame any less solid. Or any less a part of someone else’s frame for having shared at all.

    • Of Blossoms and Stars

      Silently one by one, in the infinite meadows of heaven,
      Blossomed the lovely stars, the forget-me-nots of the angels.
      — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie

      Here’s to the stargazers among us. We tend to walk with tilted heads, with eyes towards the infinite. Time is marked by the celestial dance. We are but brief witnesses—spectators watching the play unfold and yet knowing we are a part of it just the same. The masses are busily scurrying about, thinking the universe wraps around them. Look up on a crisp September night to find the truth of the matter. We are nothing but fireflies to the universe. And yet we burn brightly for our brief moment.

      The garden is fading rapidly, but some of its stars rise just in time to save the season. Sedum autumn joy blushes for all the attention it receives from the bees. Chrysanthemums, top-heavy with blooms, positively glow even as their neighbors bow with fatigue. The Montauk daisies (Nipponanthemum nipponicum) are just now budding, promising their own show in days to come. These are days we’ll remember, the garden reminds us, in the long nights of winter coming soon enough.

      Isn’t it strange how we feel most alive as the days grow shorter? Is it heightened attention or a building sense of urgency to squeeze more awareness into this brief fling with the sun? I think it’s appreciation for the beautiful dance and gratefulness for being a dancer ourself. To mourn the season coming to a close is to miss the sparkling rise of the next. We must be active gardeners in this life, no matter the season at hand. Look around, for magic is all around us.

    • Applied Exuberance

      “He who desires, but acts not, breeds pestilence.” — William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

      “Exuberance is Beauty.” — William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

      I write for creative expression (no shocker there), and also for the realization of a desire to write. To honor Mr. Harding’s proclamation in front of the entire class that I would be a writer one day while reacting to a bit of prose about balloons I’d handed in for an assignment in class. I don’t remember the names of most of my teachers in my K-12 education, but I will always remember Mr. Harding. Years have flown by since that slightly embarrassing, highly thrilling moment. I believe Mr. Harding would be pleased with my development as a human, but he’d likely wonder when I was going to finish the hero’s journey he set me out on that day long ago.

      Journeys happen at their own pace. I’m a late bloomer and an early riser. That means I always feel two steps behind and eager to get a good start to the day to try to catch up to where I perceive the rest of the world already is. Looking around, I know this is largely an illusion, but it’s a useful story to tell myself anyway. I’m farther along in my development than I otherwise would be. Still, there’s so much more to do.

      There’s a trendy movement on social media called “5 to 9 before 9 to 5“ that must be popular for me to have heard about it at all (so intently do I follow trends on social media). It’s simply a clever phrase for what many of us have been doing for years: lean into meaningful productivity early in the day, before the world wakes up and drags us into its agenda. Create, exercise, read, meditate, pray… whatever wins the early hours helps us win the day. The early bird gets the worm. Nothing new here, just great marketing of a great concept I happen to subscribe to. Tempus fugit. Carpe diem.

      The thing is, our days get away from us pretty quickly. The modern world wants us outraged, medicated, subscribed to multiple streaming services and dutifully paying our taxes. We must wrestle back our time if we wish to accomplish anything we truly desire. If we dare to strive for personal excellence (Arete), we must act, and carve out time for ourselves to do it. Exuberance, like excellence, isn’t reached by going through the motions. So we must apply ourselves to the task. Hurry now: for our time is flying by.

    • That Fierce Embrace

      It doesn’t interest me if there is one God
      or many gods. I want to know if you belong or feel
      abandoned.
      If you know despair or can see it in others.
      I want to know if you are prepared to live in the world
      with its harsh need to change you. If you can look back
      with firm eyes saying this is where I stand. I want to know
      if you know how to melt into that fierce heat of living
      falling toward the centre of your longing. I want to know
      if you are willing to live, day by day, with the consequences of love
      and the bitter
      unwanted passion of your sure defeat. I have been told, in that fierce embrace, even
      the gods speak of God.

      — David Whyte, Self Portrait

      To be ourself in a world that expects acceptance, or at the very least acquiescence, is audacious. Mothers, wanting the very best for their babies, might call it reckless. Best to fall in line, get a proper degree, leading to a proper job, offering a proper life. ‘Tis proper, we’re trained to believe, to focus on the score. Grades and status and titles and the right zip code.

      The score is memento mori. The score is tempus fugit. If we are to melt into that fierce heat of living, we must go against the grain more often than our tribe may be comfortable with. They only want the best for us. We know this, and we must learn to be bold anyway. A lifetime is far too short for all that we want for ourselves, let alone all that our tribe expects of us.

      The real question, the one we’ve avoided all along in this tribal dance, is why won’t we simply embrace it?

    • Release the Dancers

      “He was weary of himself, of cold thoughts and intellectual dreams. Life a poem! Not when you perpetually went around inventing your life instead of living it. How meaningless it was, empty, empty, empty. This hunting for yourself, slyly observing your own tracks—in a circle, of course; this pretending to throw yourself into the stream of life and then at the same time sitting and angling for yourself and fishing yourself up in some peculiar disguise! If only it would seize him: life, love, passion—so that he wouldn’t be able to invent it, but so that it would invent him.”
      — Jens Peter Jacobsen, Niels Lyhne

      There’s a fine line between imagination and invention. We dream big dreams, or perhaps simply a wee wish or two, and they each dance about happily in our imagination until we do the work to realize them or eventually get sick of being teased by the dancers and find something else with which to fancy for awhile. Life isn’t meant to be a dream, it’s meant to be a gradual realization of our potential. It’s a matter of turning imagination into reality through deliberate and purposeful work. That line is crossed through action.

      “Decide what to be and go be it.”… —The Avett Brothers lyric that lives rent free in my head.

      Incremental experience—the experience that Jacobsen’s character Niels is pining for—in turn forever reinvents us. The person we’ve become is far more capable of doing this next thing than the person we were then. We imagine possibilities we couldn’t imagine from our previous vantage point, and we move along a timeline of steady progression.

      It’s natural to chafe at the limitations of our current level of experience. This discomfort is a catalyst for change—if we allow it to be anyway. Unless we’re forever paralyzed by inaction and low agency. We must develop our voice over time and learn to use it to realize possibility:

      Alas for those that never sing,
      But die with all their music in them!
      — Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Voiceless

      We are forever inventing ourselves or settling into the stasis of an under-developed character. We must raise our voice and sing! This life is flying along with or without our active participation. By all means, step away from the mirage of dreams and do something with this day. Release the dancers!

    • The Wave

      We do one thing or another; we stay the same, or we
      change.
      Congratulations, if
      you have changed.
      — Mary Oliver, To Begin With, the Sweet Grass

      Anyone who survives a day at the beach learns quickly that waves are meant to be faced one at a time—fully present with the one we’re in, but aware of what’s coming next. The one that has just washed over us is has already receded as undertow as the next rises to meet us. We learn not to dwell on what has come and gone when there’s another wave rising before us. To dwell on the undertow of what’s already receding serves no purpose but to fill our bottom with grit.

      We are nothing more than the routine with which we wrap our days in, and we become nothing more than the changes we embrace for ourselves. We know that change is constant. We accept that it’s often unpredictable. And we grow at the pace with which we adapt to it and learn to seek it for ourselves.

      Indeed, we’re grittier than we once were, and built to face what’s coming next. Life is always the next wave, and if we survive it, the one after that. Learn from all that is receding, but focus on what’s rising to meet us. We are changed, and we are changing more still.

    • The Master

      The reaper’s story is the story
      of endless work of
      work careful and heavy but the
      reaper cannot
      separate them out there they
      are in the story of his life
      bright random useless
      year after year
      taken with the serious tons
      weeds without value humorous
      beautiful weeds.
      — Mary Oliver, Morning Glories

      The garden begins to fade, and really, who has the time to manage it all, what with so much going on these last few weeks of summer? Life washes over us, and we look up and the crab grass and clover and bittersweet have all gained a foothold once again. And the irritatingly cheerful morning glories, relentless in their persistence, rise seemingly out of nowhere to mock the overwhelmed gardener. We all suffer the same fate: Thinking we’re in control and finding out we were merely apprentices. The master was always time.

      I write every morning, that’s my moment of glory. The payoff isn’t in views or likes or shares, it’s in doing what I promised myself I’d do day-after-day. I forget sometimes that people do read this blog, because I don’t want to think about people reading it while I’m writing it. That kind of thinking makes a mess of us. Flow happens when we forget what happens when we eventually click publish.

      I write that knowing this all could have been anonymous, but ego had its way, and now the secret is out. Ego is its own master, if we let it be. But things like gardening and writing make a mockery of ego eventually. We learn we’re not all that important in the big scheme of things. We just do what we can with the time we have. That in itself is glorious.

    • The Art of Bridge-Building

      I am dead because I lack desire,
      I lack desire because I think I possess.
      I think I possess because I do not try to give.
      In trying to give, you see that you have nothing;
      Seeing that you have nothing, you try to give of yourself;
      Trying to give of yourself, you see that you are nothing:
      Seeing that you are nothing, you desire to become;
      In desiring to become, you begin to live.
      ― René Daumal, Last Letter To His Wife

      We learn to see gaps as we grow. Gaps in our understanding. Gaps in our skillset. Gaps in wealth or education or social standing. Gaps in our disposition. Gaps are forever telling us where our current story ends. And having seen a gap, we either turn away from the edge or begin to build a bridge across it. Either choice leads us somewhere. But far too many of us simply focus on the gap and live their life going in circles. What might be is always on the other side of a gap, while what is remains familiar but fragile ground.

      Some of us spend a lifetime learning the art of bridge-building. We begin as apprentices, closing small gaps in school or sports or with tasks our elders assign to us. If we’re lucky, we align ourselves with those who guide us gently towards ever-larger gaps. If we’re not lucky, we choose a person wearing a t-shirt that says “If you’re not the lead dog the view never changes”. It takes time to move away from a person like that, even when the view was never all that good following them.

      When we learn to see, when we become aware of all that there is on the other side of gaps, we are provoked to become better bridge-builders. Decide what to be and go be it. It’s always on the other side of a gap, awaiting our applied effort. So it is that we must do great things today, or remain on the wrong side of the gap. The choice was always ours to make. There’s no time to waste! Build the damned bridge.

    • True Before You

      I want to unfold.
      Nowhere I wish to stay crooked, bent;
      for there I would be dishonest, untrue.
      I want my conscience to be
      true before you;
      want to describe myself like a picture I observed
      for a long time, one close up,
      like a new word I learned and embraced,
      like the everday jug,
      like my mother’s face,
      like a ship that carried me along
      through the deadliest storm.
      — Rainer Maria Rilke, I Am Much Too Alone in This World, Yet Not Alone

      One need not be religious to reach for the divine. We may aspire for a level of consciousness and growth that prods us along on our journey through life, reaching ever-higher towards something more than this. Arete, or personal excellence, is a human aspiration for the divine, for which we know we’ll fall short. But reaching for it is the thing.

      We have this one shot at things. We’re told that if we do it right once is enough. It’s the doing it right part that’s the trick. What’s right for you may not be right for me. Life is a deadly storm with no survivors. To know this and still set the sails for a journey of a lifetime is audacious and liberating. Decide what to be and go be it.

      Truth is discovered through awareness and a ritual of keeping the blinders off. It’s cleaning the hazy film off the mirror and having a closer look. Truth is something that unfolds before us. We write it down, think it through, move towards something more visceral. Repeat. That’s where this writer has lingered lately (as if you had to be told). With every blank screen, with every word pondered and debated (Is this too much truth?) Just where are we taking this? How close to the truth do we dare to go anyway?

      If that sounds too serious and self-absorbed, well, believe me, I think so too. Blogging is simply the laying of breadcrumbs along this path of discovery. We’re on our way to find out. Have a laugh at the imperfections even as we strive for some measure of improvement. We’re all doing the best we can given the spoiler of how it all ends. That, friends, is the truth.