Alexandersmap

    Category: Poetry

    • Twice Beautiful

      Beauty is twice
      beautiful
      and goodness is doubly
      good
      when
      it concerns two wools
      socks
      in winter.
      — Pablo Neruda, Ode To A Pair Of Socks

      There are two kinds of people in this world. Those who complain about the weather and those who dress for the weather we’ve been blessed to experience this day. The former tend to shelter in place. The latter tend to step out into it. I don’t judge either camp, but I’m clearly in the latter.

      While snowshoeing Saturday morning, I came to a split in the trail. I went to the left that morning, breaking trail and returning with the thrill of having been out in it, doing the work of being fully-alive on a bright clear morning. But all that evening I thought about the path not taken. It remained unbroken and unexplored, and with that, I felt incomplete. Those paths not taken have a way of haunting us, don’t they?

      The only thing to do was to go out again Sunday morning to see what was left for me. I silently hoped it would be unbroken still, that I might finish what I started. I saw footprints in the snowshoe tracks I’d laid and thought to myself that the opportunity was lost. But the footprints crossed the bridge and then turned back, indicating someone inclined towards common sense. Why continue on trails without the proper gear?

      The thing is, I had the proper gear. And so I kept on walking to that fork in the path and turned right onto a gloriously unbroken trail, blazing a path for any who might follow. There is sheer delight to be found in the cold stillness of a pristine snowy forest, so long as you’re prepared to be out in it and have the tools to make your way back out again no matter what.

      Having completed that walk, I doubled down with another, bringing the pup to the beach for a second winter walk. That proved far colder with wind chill cutting through our gear. Cold is one thing, cold wind is something else entirely. Even proper winter gear will let you know when it just isn’t enough. We simply have to listen to what nature is telling us.

      The pup loves the beach and could have stayed all day but for the wind. Even clad in a winter coat of her own, she knew when we were having too much of a good thing. Sometimes the best thing to do is to step out into it. And sometimes it’s best to simply turn back with stories to tell. Two stories in fact. Twice beautiful, simply for having ventured out to meet them.

      Two paths diverged. Hampstead Conservation Land.
      Snow on dunes. Hampton Beach State Park.

    • Another Day Forgoing Mortal Nature

      Four Seasons fill the measure of the year;
      There are four seasons in the mind of man:
      He has his lusty Spring, when fancy clear
      Takes in all beauty with an easy span:
      He has his Summer, when luxuriously
      Spring’s honied cud of youthful thought he loves
      To ruminate, and by such dreaming high
      Is nearest unto heaven: quiet coves
      His soul has in its Autumn, when his wings
      He furleth close; contented so to look
      On mists in idleness—to let fair things
      Pass by unheeded as a threshold brook.
      He has his Winter too of pale misfeature,
      Or else he would forego his mortal nature.
      — John Keats, The Human Seasons

      I’ll admit that I don’t often revisit Keats poems, but when I do, it’s usually in the cold, dark winter months. This morning the dog food stored in the garage was frozen (frozen!), so I had to bring it in to thaw so the pup could have a bit of wet food mixed in with her dry. These are first world problems I admit, but on the last day of January 2026, let it be known that I fasted in sympathy with the dog until her food thawed out.

      Today is just another day forgoing mortal nature, but there are only so many days. We ought to live like we were dying, as that twangy formulaic song goes. To kick mortality down the curb with a better fitness routine and better choices about what we eat. To read and learn and sharpen the senses while sharpening is still possible. To go and do while going and doing are still in the cards for people in our particular season. Our routine determines the season we find ourselves in as much as the accumulation of years does. We mustn’t get old before our time.

      Consider that Keats poem again. The man was frisky! Delighting in lusty Spring and satiated Summer, acknowledging that in Autumn he was more inclined to let the fair things pass without some inappropriate gesture from the aging poet. It’s only in Winter that he calms down, recognizing that growing old and brittle is a trade-off for death’s final embrace. For all our human nature, it’s eternity that we will sleep with forevermore. We just don’t have to be in a hurry to get there.

    • More Than Crumbs

      “Joy is not made to be a crumb.” — Mary Oliver, Don’t Hesitate

      It hasn’t been lost on me that I’ve largely ignored the joy in the abundance of snow we’re having this winter while focusing on the chores that come with that abundance of snow. There ought to be more snowshoeing. There ought to be more walks in frozen woods. There ought to be more snowy play dates with the pup, who’s got enough joy to fill a barn. We can learn a lot from joyful souls, whether they’re human or otherwise.

      Winter is far from over in this frigid land, and at the risk of making plans, I will find my way back to play. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All play and no work makes Jack a poor boy. But money in and of itself is the pursuit of fools and empty suits. Get out and live before the buffet closes for that long night. Before all that’s left are crumbs and thoughts of what might have been.

    • The Glorious Thing

      “Your mind now, moldering like wedding-cake, heavy with useless experience, rich with suspicion, rumour, fantasy, crumbling to pieces under the knife-edge of mere fact. In the prime of your life.” — Adrienne Rich

      What a glorious quote. A poet struggling under the weight of identity, breaking away from the storybook life expected of her, stepping into a new narrative. We are transformed by thought and action, or we will remain forever imprisoned by expectations.

      No matter how much we replay it, our past is dead and gone. Our present is tenuous but malleable. Now is always the prime of our lives! To break free of now and create a bold new future is audacious. May we find that within ourselves and steer towards a course that makes our heart race with anticipation.

      It’s easy to feel frozen in place in the dead of winter. Every day is cold and dark. These last few days I’ve had flights and the plans related to them cancelled. Meetings fall away one-by-one, and empty spaces take their place on my calendar. These are merely facts of time and place and winter weather. The easy thing to do is nothing. The glorious thing to do is to seize the opportunity. Each day offers the freedom to crawl into old, familiar habits or leap into a new identity. Be bold today.

    • Third Things

      “Third things are essential to marriages, objects or practices or habits or arts or institutions or games or human beings that provide a site of joint rapture or contentment. Each member of a couple is separate; the two come together in double attention. Lovemaking is not a third thing but two-in-one. John Keats can be a third thing, or the Boston Symphony Orchestra, or Dutch interiors, or Monopoly.” — John Hall, The Third Thing

      We have our self, we have our selves, and we have what we are mutually focused on in our time together. Like being on teams, whether sports or companies or projects worked on with mutual focus and effort, that thing we focus on together becomes a link that bonds us in the moment and forever after. A long-term relationship is simply coexisting with someone else with mutual attention on a series of third things we carry with us for the rest of our days.

      Our hiking friends have the mountains and expanding red lines on trail maps as their third thing. Our sailing friends scheme of bigger boats and tropical anchorages. Our lake friends are quietly carving out a life as snowbirds and the idea of growing old in a forever summer lifestyle. My sister and brother-in-law have found pickleball a useful third thing bringing them fitness and an expansive social life. We’re all different, and so too are the things we give our lives to in mutual focus.

      Third things capture a time in our life that we’ll remember one day when the math is no longer one plus one plus one more thing. We may be aware of such things as subtraction without dwelling on it. We all know the score. For it’s a thing too. Sha-la, la-la-la-la, live for today…

      What do we—together—focus on other than ourselves? The list comes easily at times. The frisbee-loving pup. The house and whatever the latest project is that my bride has deemed essential to our well-being. Always, the children, then aspiring student-athletes, now adults. Increasingly, the parents, and all that aging parents mean for them… and for us. Travel and collecting experiences once deferred for other third things. Third things are our common ground, focused on together yet differently. A part of us, yet not us.

    • Shake the Grass

      And the days are not full enough
      And the nights are not full enough
      And life slips by like a field mouse
      Not shaking the grass.
      — Ezra Pound

      There is a compulsion to fill my days and nights with experience. Perhaps you share this too. There is an equally pressing sense that time is slipping past us at shocking speed. Tempus fugit. We humans are bound to notice it eventually.

      Forever chasing experience. Forever working to be here, now. It’s a blessing and a curse to be aware. Mostly a blessing, for awareness offers a glimpse of all that flies past. Awareness locks a few moments in amber, that we may cherish them for the rest of our vibrant days. Awareness makes us do things like getting out of a warm bed at 3 AM to attempt a glimpse at the northern lights, or to plunge into a cold mountain stream or the bay late in the season—simply because we may never pass this way again.

      Don’t waste a moment. We ought to spend the time as we know we should. We ought to avoid distraction and waste whenever possible. And be bold and daring when we least expect it of ourselves. Shake the grass and dance all night. For today will fly by like all the rest.

    • Emerging Possibilities

      How long did all those possibilities sleep
      during the years
      before this emerging
      — Michael Ondaatje, The Then

      There are hints of our future together all around us. We may see some version of ourselves emerge from the habits that we develop, or those that hold on to us (try as we might to break from them). We are what we repeatedly do, and so it is that we become what we surround ourselves with. There will always be a gap between who we are and what we want to be. Is that gap closing or becoming a chasm?

      We see in the world possibilities emerging that we never imagined. We may share mutual disgust and dismay. But I’m here to tell you that there are other possibilities hiding right in plain sight, possibilities that we can control, should we become aware of them. Life is what we make of it—it has always been this way and always will be. Fight the good fight, but for the love of God start within.

      What we tend to see is that which demands our attention, be it a heart attack or an autocrat or the waiter asking us what we want to drink. Immediacy demands focus. Do we remember the Eisenhower Matrix? Right next to that “urgent and important” quadrant lies the “not urgent but important” quadrant where the real work of becoming resides. Our future lies in seeing what might be, not forever reacting to what is thrown on our shoulders to somehow carry.

      Everything begins with awareness. When we are self-absorbed we don’t see the soulmate standing right in front of us. When we are distracted by the despair machine, we don’t see the pendulum swinging towards decency. When we are wrapped in the comfort of easy, we don’t see the path to personal excellence available when we become inclined towards harder. Possibilities are all around us, simply waiting for opportunities to emerge. Feed them the attention they need.

    • The Slow and Difficult Trick of Living

      It isn’t very far as highways lie.
      I might be back by nightfall, having seen
      The rough pines, and the stones, and the clear water.
      Friends argue that I might be wiser for it.
      They do not hear that far-off Yankee whisper:
      How dull we grow from hurrying here and there!

      Many have gone, and think me half a fool.
      To miss a day away in the cool country.
      Maybe. But in a book I read and cherish,
      Going to Walden is not so easy a thing
      As a green visit. It is the slow and difficult
      Trick of living, and finding it where you are.
      — Mary Oliver, Going to Walden

      It isn’t very far at all for me to visit Walden. I could be there in about an hour, accounting for rush hour traffic in that general direction. I’ve gone there before, just to be there on some random Tuesday or Wednesday or whatnot. While others worked I would play hooky for an hour or two, just to see the water, just to feel like Thoreau in the interlude between responsibilities. Inevitably I’d return better for having been there. Some might argue that my nose to the grindstone for those couple of hours would have been a better use of the time. Let them think what they want. We’re all different people, aren’t we?

      I can feel that it’s almost time to re-read Walden again, just as I felt today it was time to revisit Mary Oliver. There are other voices beyond the hustle culture that ought to be listened to. There are other ways to spend our precious time. The trick to living is awareness and presence in the invaluable now. To learn and grow and become at a pace that we can maintain for the long haul, even as we know that the time slips away so very quickly.

      You won’t find me at Walden today. I assure you it will be just fine without me. For a Monday I ought to be in more of a rush somewhere, but what is on the other side of that hustle? Just what do we arrive at when we go from here to there anyway? Maybe that’s why I keep writing—to remind myself to be aware of the time going by, or to simply remind myself to cherish the view along the way. To be here, now feels like more than enough. Why would we ever rush away from it?

    • Dreams, Friends and Beginnings

      The sun was in his bathing suit,
      the moon in her pajamas.
      They played all day
      until the two
      were called in by their mamas.

      The sun went home and climbed in bed,
      his mama sang a tune,
      and soon the sun
      was fast asleep
      and dreaming of the moon.

      The moon decided not to go;
      instead she stayed outside.
      She danced and played
      and laughed and sang
      and stayed awake all night.

      When morning came the sun arose
      and went outside to play,
      but could not find
      his friend the moon,
      who slept inside all day.

      So now these two are best of friends,
      apart in dark and light.
      The sun turns in
      at evenfall —
      the moon stays out all night.

      The shining moon sees no sunlight,
      the sun sees no moonbeams,
      but when they each
      are fast asleep
      they’re in each other’s dreams.
      — Kenn Nesbitt, The Tale of the Sun and the Moon

      The ringing of the New Year necessitates staying up late. We early birds struggle, and must choose whether to sleep in or begin the New Year with a decent night’s sleep. The alternative is to simply go to bed early like it was any other night of the year. Whatever the choice, we often resolve to make changes to our routine going forward. Forever improving, forever seeking better things for our selves, forever optimizing. Such is the curse of the modern soul.

      I begin the year with a poem that delights me to read. Does it offer a hint of what’s to come? Perhaps, but sometimes simply finding things that delight us is enough for any given day. Why not kick off an entire year with a bit of magic, a bit of wonder, a bit of delight? We have tomorrow to be stoically focused on productivity and key performance indicators and such things that sound awful to mentioned when we began with friends and dreams. Can we resolve to simply live joyfully aware of the blessings around us?

      I will write more this year, I can feel that it’s all still there within me, bursting at the seams, awaiting release to fly away in fully-formed verse. The words keep coming to me—more sometimes than a blog post can contain. Time will tell whether dreams come true or if they simply fade into memory, like old friends we don’t see anymore but we smile when thinking about. To embark on a New Year is either an adventure or simply another day on a limited timeline. Isn’t it up to us to decide which it will be?

    • A Change in Inclination

      Rain and wind, and wind and rain.
      Will the Summer come again?
      Rain on houses, on the street,
      Wetting all the people’s feet,
      Though they run with might and main.
      Rain and wind, and wind and rain.

      Snow and sleet, and sleet and snow.
      Will the Winter never go?
      What do beggar children do
      With no fire to cuddle to,
      P’raps with nowhere warm to go?
      Snow and sleet, and sleet and snow.

      Hail and ice, and ice and hail,
      Water frozen in the pail.
      See the robins, brown and red,
      They are waiting to be fed.
      Poor dears, battling in the gale!
      Hail and ice, and ice and hail.
      — Katherine Mansfield, Winter Song

      With the winter solstice come and gone, I thought it timely for us to consider a winter song. For the days are short, cold and dark, but aye, they are once again inclined towards longer. To be on the other side of the shortest day may mean little when the harshest winter days are ahead of us, or perhaps it means everything. As with all things, the choice is ours. And isn’t our perspective on life mostly based on what we choose to focus on?

      Winter Song reminds us that there are people suffering in the cold and dark of winter. Consider this a call to action to help those less fortunate than we are—surely the world needs more people focused on raising the average instead of spreading the gap. We cannot solve the problems in this world by ourselves, but we can make each person we interact with either colder and darker or warmer and brighter by the way we treat them. Again, the choice is ours to make.

      We may have almost nothing in common with each other, but we have some things in common, and something is a foothold to more things. Footholds lead to connection, so long as we aren’t pushing someone away. Abundance is a mindset, just as scarcity is. As the days begin to grow longer again, perhaps that tilt of the earth may offer a change in inclination within—an inclination towards connection. ’tis the season, after all.