Flutter

Hollow bones in their feathers clothed
Lift up frail wings to mount the air
To climb the invisible stairs
And flutter to their sometimes home,

Arriving in my dark moments
With morning's backwards lullabies
To coax my closed and dreaming eyes
To flutter to their sometimes home.

What strange migrations of the soul
Repeat their circuits every night!
What hollow apparatus might
Conduct this flight we take alone?

For like the birds, we build our homes
Inside a world that's not our own.

So...... Does anyone else have a dead lumberjack who haunts their dreams?

Ok, so this one time maybe a decade ago, me, my husband and my aunt and uncle went camping down at Griffis Sculpture Park. We slept in one of their two cabins. It was for my uncle's birthday and his then-girlfriend had gotten us into the cabins, which they do not usually rent out, by sheer charm, to celebrate my uncle's birthday. We ate hot dogs, we played kalimba, we talked extensively about sweeping, burned things- you know, camping. Then, the next morning, as we were walking our way out of what was barely a camp, back toward the sculpture park filled with enormous metal women and unmowed grass, we came to a clearing in front of the other cabin. We were hauling heavy things, backpacks full of whatever, when we saw Simon Griffis, a name which I imagine adorning the credits of a 1970s cartoon with a sunshine emblazoned behind it, chopping wood with his waders on. He was way over 6 feet tall, just some young Paul Bunion. He built the two cabins, he owned the park after his father. He was that place. We chatted for a few minutes and went on our sunshiny way.

About two years later, I heard on my frosty morning commute, in my little car filled with the fog of my breath for a suspended moment, that the police had identified the body of someone who had been hiking alone at Zoar Valley. It was Simon Griffis, the owner of Sculpture Park. The iconic image of artistic country living had plummeted to his death in an accident while he was out exploring

The Girl Raised By Wolves

On top of a hill with a view
Of the woods and the valley below
Where the grains touch their toes in the wind
Is a fine place to mark your beginning--

Where every day calls your small feet to explore
The uncharted paths stretching out your back door,
Which are carving their shapes in the map of your brain
Just as you make your mark on the terrain.

There's something about the vastness of Space
And the way that it rhymes with that other word, Grace,
That makes them the same sanctuary to those
Who have dwelt in their absence behind closed doors--

Where the walls listened in for the secrets but heard
Only childhood poems carving space between words
For the ache to which language can only aspire,
And the darkness which only tells truth when it lies.

It is thus that life calls to us, thus that we follow
The path through the thicket, the map of tomorrow.
Wherever the space opens up to contain us,
We open our doors to the path that awaits us.

The Effort of Stasis

There is a simple realization that I keep having over and over again throughout my life. And maybe it's no different than the Buddhist concept of "flux." It's just the idea that everything you see is in motion, on a course or a path, and that our perceptions are as immediately artificial as a snapshot. You gather a concept of a person or a thing in your mind and refer to it as if it were fixed, when in reality, it never is.

As a child, I used to see a thin or fit person and think, "Wow, they don't have to worry about what they eat," not realizing that every person's body is the shape of their habits, that what I see when I look at a person's shape is the accumulation of thousands of little actions, the routines by which they conduct themselves.

As I have become a home owner, I've learned that the same is true of buildings, that the picturesque homes through which I've walked are in a constant state of repair, one piece or another always being taken off and replaced. They hold their shape and appear fixed only because of constant effort.

All things are like this. In order to maintain the appearance that something is unchanged, we must change it constantly. Nothing requires more effort than stasis.

Merciful

The only virtue of some things,
Like February and this poem,
Is that they're mercifully short.

The World as Proxy

I live on a very hilly road where I like to run. There's something satisfying about knowing exactly why I feel terrible half of the time during those runs-- it's the half of the time when I'm going uphill instead of downhill. And when I feel good it's because I'm going downhill. There's a very obvious external reason for all of my feelings.

When I run on the treadmill though, as I have been doing during these sub-zero January days, I realize my positive and negative feelings run through the same cycles, despite every step I take being exactly the same. I have learned to abide with the feelings as they come and go, understanding that each one will pass. But something in me deeply prefers what I experience out there on those hills: I think we gravitate toward life situations that validate our inner dynamics, the flow of our feelings. I think there is a pattern to how we feel even in the absence of external stimuli, that sometimes we go seek out the stimuli to give our minds external reasons to latch onto for why we feel the way we do. But the truth is, some feelings just arise because we are who we are.

 

Living On

Recently, a beloved member of the Buffalo running community passed away unexpectedly. Thomas Donnelly was a genuine leader, filling the role of President of WNY's largest running club, Checkers AC, as well as acting as Race Director for the Buffalo Marathon and the annual Turkey Trot race at the time of his death. He had an incredible energy and touched many lives with his enthusiasm. 

Listening to the praise that is all around me given to him, for the moments in his life, great and small, I feel surrounded by a chorus of beautiful grief. I feel fortunate to be able to raise a glass and a voice in such a number as this-- people who have together admired a great leader, who share an appreciation for the beauty of small moments shared with a single life that, like a wine glass that slips out of a hand at a party, spilled itself out unexpectedly.

Tom is not yet gone, as we all will be one day. So much of who we are even while we are living is contained in the people who know us and love us. We do not exist within the confines of our own bodies. Babies who are not nurtured with frequent touch die. We are born into bodies that seek connection with other people. It is the nature of our spirits to spread out, to exist primarily in the connections that we intuitively forge with other receptive souls. We are mostly spirit. So it makes sense that when we pass on, only the part of us that existed in that body goes. The part that was alive in other people lives on as long as they do.