Hosanna

I've been searching for a writer to remind me why I love to read, why I love to write. Sometimes I go through a dry spell; a longing where I pick up 10 different books and put each down. Books and words are right when they are right. Mood, time of year, what my soul is seeking.

Hosanna. Yesterday was Palm Sunday. Hosanna is a word that takes me back to St. James church services, "Hosanna in the highest, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord." Just before communion.

It's a word I've always dug. Just the sound of it, to say, to hear. Hosanna.

March 18 was Franz Wright's birthday. He died last May of lung cancer at age 62. It's not a name most people will know, despite winning a Pulitzer Prize. Poets don't get to be on Oprah or make the best seller list.

Wright is one of those writers, who lights up my soul, points it in different directions.  Yesterday I picked his "Walking to Martha's Vineyard," up off the bookshelf. He is a writer who has been to, lived in, the depths, the mud, the suck, and found religious transcendence; used his struggles to fuel him:

This sky like an infinite tenderness, I have caught
    glimpses of that, often, so often, and never yet have
    I described it, I can't, somehow I never will.

Hosanna. Palm Sunday. The crowd is going crazy. Rock star Jesus is coming in to town and Hosanna is the word they are using to sing his praises, thinking he is going to overthrow Rome. But they got it wrong. That's not what He was up to. Yesterday's sermon in church touched on the crowd, waving their palms, waiting and pleading for the wrong thing.

Back to Wright, last night, on the couch:

Rilke in one of his letters said that Christ
is a pointing,
a finger pointing
at something and we are like dogs
who keep barking and lunging
at the hand

Spring is rebirth. Renewal. It's a return. Saturday was a return, on a cold, rainy afternoon, to Tuckahoe State Park, and a 10-mile trail run loop that we've done countless times over the years, but I'm not sure when I'd run the full loop last.

I went out there to put a hurting on myself, to make good on a promise to log some trail miles and find something in me that I haven't found another way to access. And there were times on the trail, particularly the parts I hadn't seen in some time, that I found myself smiling, laughing, for having returned. I found some part of myself that maybe I keep out there as a reminder.

Hosanna. I was playing with the word like a puzzle, like a challenge. I was repeating it in my head, the sounds, the word, the language. But mulling the meaning. A friend pointed out that "Hosanna" is frequently translated as, "Lord, help us."

And then I saw someone talk about how the word has changed over time: "It used to be what you would say when you fell off the diving board. But it came to be what you would say when you see the lifeguard coming to save you... the word moved from plea to praise; from cry to confidence."

During the course of a run, during the course of years, during the course of a day, perspectives, words, meanings can change. When I am active, exploring, paying attention, I can have something to do with that. The weekend was/is a journey of meals, runs, worship, dog walking, reading, reflecting. It takes getting my feet wet, metaphorically and literally, to get on that path.

As I came down to the creek in the middle of Saturday's run, a Great Blue Heron flew horizontal to and parallel with the creek. One of my favorite things to experience while running.

Wright, in his searching, in his writing, in my reading...

Still sleeping bees in the grove's heart
(my heart's) till the sun
its "wake now"
kiss, the million
friendly gold huddlings
and burrowings of them hearing the shining
wind
I hear, my only
cure for the loneliness I go through:

more.

I believe one day the distance between myself and God will
              disappear.

Hosanna.

Bare Handed

Bare handed the man contends with spring...

It's a slow conversion, it's taken maybe 40 years, and the last two, to realize I'm becoming a spring soul, rather than fall. Last year was the first time it really hit.

This year, walking home for lunch with no jacket; warmer temperatures and t-shirt sweat for running; sitting out on the deck for happy hour and reading, after shunning it for the winter. There is both a calm and an energy in the warmer weather, the sun on my face. I've dug into William Carlos Williams's "Spring and All."

Bare handed the man contends with home...

Sharing deep, unscripted conversations with the girls is one of life's profound pleasures.

Home is.... Since July, the girls and I have been fortunate to call a great house in Oxford, "home." They have taken to Oxford. They have taken to the community center in town where I work. Anna and I were talking this week about looking forward to spring and summer in town. Riding bikes, paddleboarding, the Strand (beach), Schooners Landing and the Masthead (dock bars/outdoor restaurants) re-opening, along with the Scottish Highland Creamery (best ice cream on the planet). We got talking about the house, which is our second in two years, and not wanting to/having to move every year. Then we both said the house hasn't felt like "home" yet. That's a curious feeling to both have.

Maybe it's inherent in not knowing if you can put roots down in a house. Maybe it's a part of renter's remorse. Maybe the girls living between two parents and two houses has shifted the notion of what home feels like. Probably it is all of those things. I fully believe that home is a feeling; home is a mindset; home is a community; home can be people. But the physical home of where you put your stuff, where you lie down at night, where you cut grass and eat meals, that has a big role in being "home." Oxford is a place that goes quiet in the winter, especially for 11 and 14 year olds. After moving in last summer, Ava spent a month in a Pittsburgh hospital to end her summer. Hoping the return of spring, of bike rides, swimming, ice cream and sunsets in the Oxford Park; of grilling in the yard, will stoke some homey vibes.

In "Spring and All," Williams writes, "Bare handed the man contends with the sky, without experience of existence seeking to invent and design."

Bare handed the man contends with the sky...

I fully love that, and feel it. We don't have the tools or experience to fully grasp it. We are bare handed, minimally equipped to take it all in. I've had this feeling a few times this week already. Walking down the street to the shore line on the cove with my morning coffee to watch the sunrise. And two nights ago, standing out in the field next to the house, taking in the clear, spring night sky, and seeing two shooting stars in about 15 minutes time. Contending with the sky can overload the soul.

Bare handed the man contends...

On Noticing: Cops, Kings, Life

We were in middle school, it was dark, and we were bombing our skateboards down the grass hill/dip next to the Oxford Bellevue Ferry dock. Get up a little speed on the road, and see if you could stay on your board bumping down the grass.

Standing back just a ways in the shadows, was the late and venerable Oxford Police Chief, Wally Jones. No one ever accused him of being stealthy. We all saw him there.

"We NOTICE you!" called one of our crew, with his hand cupped around his mouth. Chief Jones, perturbed, came out of the shadows and let us know what he thought about our new nighttime activity and our attitudes.

I have had that quote, "We notice you," in my head ever since. It was funny, because it came from a kid who none of us would have guessed to say it, and because he used the word notice instead of see.

Yesterday, the girls and I were bombing that same hill/dip, though on our bikes and during the day. It made me think of that night. And it also made me think of noticing things.

Over the past year, I've been noticing birds. Birds I never gave much thought to. A month or so ago, as I sat drinking morning coffee on the couch, I noticed Ruby-Crowned Kinglets in the pyracantha hedge in the yard. Kinglets (along with Cedar Waxwings) are one of the birds I had been waiting to see there. Two years ago that would have been just another bird in the bush.

A few weeks ago, driving over Trippe Creek bridge, sitting on the telephone pole wire next to the bridge, there was a Belted Kingfisher. Clear as day, it was like slow motion, how obvious, like having a flash card perched there. Again, for those who cared to notice.

I had stopped by chair at that exact place, coming out, because right there the spice of wisteria that hung around the house was invaded by the freshness of apple blossoms in a blend that lifted the top of my head. As between those who notice such things and those who don't, I prefer those who do." 
- Wallace Stegner, "Angle of Repose."

Stegner was on to something. Being around folks who notice the odd, the novel, the sublime moments, events, people, smells, sights, around them. Those that notice life. They help me do the same.

And that is something I have tried, over the course of 43 years, to cultivate. Noticing things.

When every day seems the same, it is because we have stopped noticing the good things that appear in our lives. - Paul Coelho, "The Alchemist."

Sunrises. The warmth of a sunny day in February. Wind against my face riding bikes through town with my daughters. Ava's laugh as she hangs upside down for split seconds on a park swing. Laughter while bike bombing grass hills. Searching for and skipping shells on a beach, even one I've seen more times than I can count.

Tuning Up

Think of this as one of those tune up runs, when you haven't been running. Thoughts unspoken, unwritten, seem to pile up, turn in on themselves, get cramped up. Thoughts need to stretch out on a page, screen, become words, and let new ones step up.

"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold...," I have had those lines from Yeats in my head. He goes on:

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

But revelations aren't so easy to come by. At our best we don't know what we're doing; at our worst we do it madly anyway. How many of us are lucky enough to find and recognize those things, people, that we can hold on to; centres that hold?

The writer who has been most on my mind of late is C.D. Wright. She is on the short list of my favorite writers, but in a span that lost Lemmy of Motorhead fame, David Bowie, Alan Rickman and Grizzly Adams, Wright's death is relegated to New Yorker postscripts and Arkansas retrospectives. Her words are back roads rural, gritty and high-minded, deep and soaring, sexual and erotic, fragmented and confusing. She is one of the writers who taught me that you can put words and thoughts together that you didn't think made sense together, in the gumbo of language and life, and they can touch someone deeply. Her words:

My first words--I've been told--were obscene. My highchair was handed-down and painted over white. I remember the hard heels of my white shoes chipping at the paint of the rung... Throughout my childhood I was knife-sharp and aquatic in sunlight. I read.

I didn't read. That came much later for me. But I play back childhood memories frequently, collaging them with new experiences into this morphing, changing, yet constant self.

Whew, glad to get that shit out. If I don't run or write, it's easy to go bat-shit crazy in the between time. And I've been wrestling with some guilt over how to carve out my creative time. Reading and writing time has shifted, for now, to learning lines and trying to get my head around a character. 2016 brings with it my first shot at being on stage, as Dr. Corey Phillips in The Tred Avon Players' production of "House on the Cliff."

Words are easier for me to write than to speak. It is not easy or natural, but I am glad to stretch myself in new and different ways. Yoga for the soul. I like the notion that William Esper evolved from Sandy Meisner, "Acting is doing things truthfully under imaginary circumstances." And talking about creating a character as, "where an actor alters his or her native behavior so as to become unrecognizable from his or her normal persona, yet still be one hundred percent truthful," Getting into my head in order to get out of it. Or something like that.

Today has been a quiet gift. No alarms set. Coffee. Shoveling walks and clearing bird feeders. On the year's first snow day, Cedar Waxwings found the pyracantha bush out my window. The other yard and feeder birds today have been cardinals, robins, various sparrows (with fox sparrows, who I have come to dig seeing over the past week), red-winged blackbirds, brown-headed cowbirds, juncos, chickadees, mourning doves, and blue jays.

I've hardly spoken an actual word, though they've danced in my head, and come through my fingers.

Thinking of Shakespeare's thoughts of the world as a stage, one we perform on daily, ourselves as the role we want others to know us as. But I've spent more time with Camus than Shakespeare, so we'll close with Albert and not Bill:

...if the actor gave his performance without knowing that he was in a play, then his tears would be real tears and his life a real life. And whenever I think of this pain and joy that rise up in me, I am carried away by the knowledge that the game I am playing is the most serious and exciting there is.

Okay, well, not that serious ;)

Embracing 2015

When sitting quietly outside is a prayer I didn't realize I was praying. I took the photo above about almost exactly a year ago. On a feeling, I had come down to Oxford, rode my bike and walked around town on a cold day, feeling like a tourist in the town I grew up in. I was between jobs, separated, at peace, happy, hopeful. If you want the exact experience, you can reminisce here.

I was poised, ready, open, for something, but didn't know what. I fu**ing hate cliches, but in my mind this weekend, thinking about all this, "what a difference a year makes," is the phrase that kept dancing through my head.

Saturday morning, I went for a run around Oxford, covering much of the same ground I did on my bike-walk combo a year ago (it's a small town, there aren't that many places to go :) A bit later, I rode my bike back to the same stretch on the Strand to read, watch the water, and reflect. I stopped by work on my way home to help set up for a memorial service. I had quick greetings with four or five people by name in a town I again call home, the town where I also work.

2015 has been a year of living. Really living, in a way I lost touch with. It's been a year of re-connecting to a place and to a community. It's been a year of finding a job that resonates with my soul. It's been a year where a health scare for my 10-year-old daughter affirmed what is important in life. It's been a year of knowing, experiencing love in ways I didn't know existed. It's been a year of not only looking at life and the world more deeply, but of living it that way.

2015 is no Pollyanna year. Life hurts, knocks me down, asks more questions than it could possibly answer. I seem to know less as a parent each year (just ask the 13 year old). There are plenty of times I have no clue if I've gotten something right. But it's not for lack of living, or lack of trying, or lack of learning. It's been a year of feeling like I am where I am supposed to be. And paying attention.

Last year, I was making the move from residing to living. To embracing. That has happened. For this year's annual check-in, I want to throw out some words from Mary Oliver, a writer who seems to surface at interesting, if unexpected times:

When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full or argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

Amen.

Sunrise Theater

The sun hasn't made the horizon yet. Fog crawls along the ground, afraid of heights this morning. Geese call each other, or the sun, their conversation is unclear to me.

I got restless with the warmth and quiet inside on the couch this morning. As much as I dig the lights on the Christmas tree, and the sound of the ice skaters on the dining room table snow village pond, I needed to be outside. I pulled on boots, threw on a jacket, grabbed coffee, binoculars, Mary Oliver, and a notebook.

There is nothing out of the ordinary about it all. The fog is a novelty. The Mallards are drawn north, swimming in a manner of mass exodus. It's not a morning for revelation, except that this is every morning. It's routine Eastern Shore.

God is not in the details, God is the details. And maybe that's the revelation, if there is one. Each blade of grass; every feather on every duck and goose; every color on the pink-orange spectrum; the stillness of the water on the cove--it's all so much more than I can possibly take in. And yet, it's all here, every morning. Waiting for me, or anyone else, to notice. Or not. Maybe sunrise theater likes an audience. But it performs, regardless.

And with that, I put the cap on the pen and returned my notebook to the backpack. It was a good lesson or thought for the day. I picked up my coffee and watched as the sun rose above the trees. And then this happened...

Looking at the screen on my phone, trying to get a good sunrise picture, diagonal beams shot in both directions off the sun and were immediately mirrored off the cove. I literally laughed. It was like a conversation, a shared joke or laugh with Creation, "Oh, you think that's the message for this morning? You think you've got things figured out? Take a look at this. You're welcome. Now rethink things."

Step Away from the Fridge

I've never shot my refrigerator with a .357 magnum. Or any other caliber revolver for that matter. But I think we've all reached the level of frustration in life that Henry Lightcap/Edward Abbey outlines to begin "The Fool's Progress," (I love that the NY Times review is titled, "Beer, Guns, and Neitzsche") his autobiographical novel. The hope is that we don't get to the refrigerator-shooting point in our lives, or, that having been there, we know how to avoid finding ourselves there again.

We've got a habit we try to keep of around the dinner table, before we eat, saying some of the things we are thankful for in our lives. Not just at Thanksgiving, but any night we sit around the dining table (which isn't every night). For me it can be that I'm thankful for a great day; I'm thankful for a roof over my head and food on the table; I'm thankful for the girls' being healthy and making honor roll; I'm thankful to have a job where I look forward to going to work every day; I'm thankful to be outside in cool, fall weather that reminds me I am alive.

I'm thankful for books, movies, art, that transports my mind and opens my soul to the Universe. I'm thankful to be reading at present a couple heroes of mine in John Muir and Edward Abbey. Heroes not just in what they thought or wrote, but of living their lives outdoors, on their own terms, even if/when those terms weren't shared by others.

I recently watched "Into the Wild," the film version of the John Krakauer's telling of the life and story of Chris McCandless. It's freeing to see Alexander Supertramp slough off the conventions of modern life and live his life his way. But I got to the end and felt, no, where McCandless went wrong, someone like Muir had a handle on it. I'm an introvert, but not a hermit or a recluse. Life, love, adventures are meant to be shared. And Muir found something, being out in Nature, that he felt so passionate about that he had to communicate it to others. Muir wandered the country on his own terms more than McCandless, but still found ways to connect and make sense of it all without having to die alone in his 20s. This is not a knock on McCandless, per se, it's just seeing other paths to live life on my own terms, with deep meaning and connections to Nature, people, place, community.

"Into the Wild," sent me back to my bookshelves for Muir and Abbey; for Gary Snyder, and also for David Abram. And this is where the me that was going to be a philosophy professor loops back onto the scene. Abram's book, "The Spell of the Sensuous" has been calling me for a challenge for some time. Over the course of trail and ultra running, I came across Abram and the concept of ecophenomenology. Phenomenology (what I was going to get my PhD studying) sets itself the task of looking at how we find and make meaning in the world. If you add "eco" to that, you get the idea. It's a way of combining the natural world and our experience of it, and the value of being out in it, with philosophy. From Abram

As technological civilization diminishes the biotic diversity of the earth, language itself is diminished. As there are fewer songbirds in the air, due to the destruction of their forests and wetlands, human speech loses more and more of its evocative power. For when we no longer hear the voices of warbler and wren, our own speaking can no longer be nourished by their cadences. As the splashing of the rivers is silenced by more and more dams, as we drive more and more of the land's wild voices into the oblivion of extinction, our own languages become increasingly impoverished and weightless, progressively emptied of their earthly resonance.

There is a reason that Muir, Abbey, McCandless got the fu** out of Dodge and went their own way. Abram wrestles philosophically with that need and our need to be in contact with, connected to, the natural world around us.

Studying our surroundings. For me, that yokes together trail running, bird watching, paddleboarding, the various ways I dig exploring outside. It's a framework for examining life and the world around me.

It makes "outside" part of my reading list. It creates a space where reading sends me outside, and my experience outside informs my reading and writing. In the words of George Peppard's Hannibal on the A-Team, "I love it when a plan comes together." Creating existential reasons to avoid shooting the refrigerator.