travels

tributary

I fell asleep and immediately started dreaming about two rivers coming together, cutting a ravine through stone strata. It was a romance.

my mother's weird whisk

Merry Christmas!

Happy baby solstice sun! One strange thing I've learned lately, there are directions within directions, and seasons within seasons. So maybe this is the spring of winter?

belated solstice medly

present for clam

red tree

This little birch grows in a pot in front of 125 Prospect Park West, where we were kindly invited last week to make gingerbread. The color of the bark struck me enough, I'd say, but when I noticed the branch collar that looks like a heart, I had to check my eyes. It turns out I know the woman who potted and cares for this tree and its twin, which are red on the East side which faces the park and yellow on the side where it gets the building's shade. Red in the East and Yellow in the West, the color wheel always does as it likes.

chasing the sun over the hill

de hydrangea

porous

milkweed

It was strange to hear from Vernon Foster yesterday, the same day I relayed the kernal of the substance of my experience with him to my father, who called me when I was shopping at Save on Fifth. We spoke about talking to God. My father had spoken with a Trappist Priest that week who'd told him, you don't talk to God, God talks to you. So I told him about Vernon, about how he taught me to talk to God - or the Great Spirit in Vernon's vocabulary - with great intimacy in regards to my feelings. I'm not seeking deliverance from them, even when they torment me, I know they are doing important work. Slowly I am learning that a feeling is a kind of sacred enzyme that has to be carefully held, and where better to do it than in the silent altar of prayer, where it's not about the drama of the affliction but the intimacy of recognizing the truth.

Dec. 13

It's a tragic day in Windsor Terrace, where a man stabbed his parents before throwing himself in front of a G train (story). Here's a candle for all the souls involved. And for the Maddoff son who hung himself in the room next to where his 2-year old son slept, and the Swedish terrorist who blew himself up and those he took out. If there is a strand of value in this grisly trifecta I'm wondering what it is. My mind wanders back to Fatima with the cord around her waist, begging that we restrain a little, or sacrifice a little of our joy and indulgences in observance of the struggles of so many, those whom Black Elk described as walking with the wind in their faces. It seems depraved to even entertain hope at these times, but neverthless I read the words of Juliana of Norwich yesterday when I opened her writings at random and took heart. In her despair over the despair of the souls of men, she lamented, but God said to her "What is impossible to you is not impossible to me. I shall save my word in all things, and make all things well." Just because how that could happen is beyond anyone's imagination doesn't mean it can't happen.

Corrosive Infinity

What Merry Christmas Means Now?

Yesterday I was in Borough Park for a doctor's appointment and while there two people wished me a happy holiday. Which means something like "I recognize that the world is a large place and human belief is manifold, so go in peace, whoever you are." Meanwhile "Merry Christmas" is coming to be an extorted greeting along the lines of "I've been forced to concede this statement by a group of people hostile to diversity and so insecure you have to mirror there exact beliefs or they may strike at you in some way." Is "Judge Not" really so hard to understand? Do people worship the holy or themselves? What are the aggressive hiding? Is reality Good or Evil? How large is the plank in the eye?

among the wreckage

With the strong winds blowing everyone's trash into my yard lately I finally got myself on the other side of our excessively high fence and picked through the summer's dry canes, fishing out, let's see, a Macdonald's bag, an empty bag of balloons, plenty of cellophane, along with lots of yellowed newspapers that had molded to the form of the rose bush. It had been awhile. Once in that small plot of earth that packs too much wildness I was surprised to find a small, pale gourd that had dropped off the now shriveled vine, this skeletized poppy pod and half a dozen milk weed pods, as rough and knobby as winter, but through the open slit a dove's breast of the most delicately compressed and staggered softness starting to unleash itself into the air. Does hardness contradict softness, I wonder? At times it is easy to think so.

Snail Dreams

I like the thought that if we keep trying, things will get better. I'm not always optimistic enough to wear it, though. How strange that a thought that's a matter of course to some might break over the horizon of one who is in the dark like the dawn breaks the night. Like love broke death.

I dreamed Jesus was showing me a spiral in a dark sky. At first the stroke of its outline was course and unarticulated with only a single revolution. As if synchronized with a silent drum beat, the spiral kept changing. With each beat its form developed, became more refined, incorporated fine details as an intricate order came to be, as the number of revolutions grew, the strokes became finer and deeply feathered with fern-like rhizomes. I wondered why I saw this, perhaps it has something to do with perseverance, another quiet voice whispering "don't. give. up."

Incandescent

I can't remember where I was recently when I came across a small tree barely holding onto a few last leaves, the small and papery lance-shapes hung straight down from petioles barely attached to their leaf axils, each leaf gradiating from the palest yellow at the base to the slightest wash of pink. Each leaf hanging in that windless moment promised to disperse as delicately as a breath calmed by peaceful sleep. These last leaves that fall now, the ones the wind keeps corralling in front of my door step along with people's discarded tissues, plastic bags and cup lids, heave down in tons of the most delicate sighs, the last sigh of the season, a sigh that feels loaded with the pain of heaving back towards so much beauty.

Harpers Ferry

We spent a gloomy day in Harpers Ferry while in Virginia for Thanksgiving. Everyone seemed to be in the mood to see ruins, including the youngest, and these, flanked by the confluence of the Shenandoah and Potomac Rivers, look like they've seen some pretty high water.