Meditations on Water

August 5, 2012

Meditation on Water

I am water. 

I am the rain that fell on my upturned face last night. 

Life-giving, thirst-quenching rain swept up into clouds

To fall again and again.

To be dew and frost,

Snow and fog,

Puddle and flood.

I am the sluggish vernal pond that holds spring peepers and teems with life. 

I am rimmed with eggs and promises.

I am rich with swamp scents,

Protected by cattails.

I am the inland lake, 

sparkling with sunlight,

silver rippled surface in small breeze. 

Dark and cool in my depths, light and warmth in my shallows. 

Minnows breathe the air I hold.

 

I am the moving current

of the river and stream. 

My rocks are slippery with algae,

and crayfish tiptoe on my floor. 

The heron’s long legs pick delicately

along my borders,

and turtles sun themselves

on my fallen trees.

I am the Great Lake,

All colors and depths,

Turquoise and green,

Black and silver.

Lovely rocks tumble

With my crashing waves.

Wind whips me

While I am held cupped

In the hands of the continent.

I am water.

I change forms.

I stay the same.

I change colors.

I hold any shape you give me.

I have deeps no one has seen,

And shallows

Visible to all.

I am cold

And warm.

I overflow,

And I shrink away,

Becoming invisible at times.

I can be wild and loud,

And soft as a ripple,

Smooth as glass.

You may disturb me

Endlessly,

But I remain

In the end

Still.

Water.

T.

Running Away

Every woman knows the days that make you want to run away. All it took for me, today, was a single moment, a single line of letters, and that was all. Somewhere in the midst of considering how this could be accomplished, I found myself on the phone with a friend-who-knows-how-to-be-friends and I was complaining of how I don't run enough anymore. We ended the call and I began my ritual, exhausted, eating, and reading. But this time the book I was beginning was focused on the societal anger of women in general, and it hit me, I am not alone, and I CAN run away sometimes.
So, with only 2 pages, in, I laced up my new purple and silver running shoes and off I went. Tansy was only too happy to lead the way, her sassy rear end showing every bit of happiness that a dog can muster when her best friend has gotten her 36 year old, cellulite-ridden ass off the couch and put on those delightfully smelly running clothes.
Spring was waiting for me. She was even more beautiful than I remembered her from years past. It seems this way each April, when the willows cascade over themselves with greeny-yellow leaf drops, and the creeks dance along in the sunshine. Running away brought me to the edge of a swamp, filled to bursting with deafening spring peepers.
It was there in the woods that I found myself again. I found myself in the curls of the fiddleheads, the floating green duckweed, the smell of the change from oak forest to pine woods, and the white puddle of swan tucked away on her nest waiting for life beneath her.
I was no longer running away. I was found again. I could stay in that lovely woods or I could continue home, and either one was going to be just fine, because the woods and the springtime would stay with me, the packed dirt beneath my feet, the green and the frogs and the buds all sprouting away inside of me.
T.

Look Up, Look Down, Lock On

Today my students played a game of "Lock On". This is meant to practice eye contact, and it's fun as well. The way you play is to stand in a circle, and the leader says, "Look up, look down, lock on." and you all look up, look down, and then lock your eyes on someone in the circle. If they happen to be looking back at you, then you sit down with them. Otherwise, the game continues until all but 2 are sitting. I like to vary it by altering whether I say, "look up" or "look down" first.
Tonight in the ever-greening spring woods, I felt like I was playing a version of "Lock On" that kept me looking up, looking down, and locking on constantly! I couldn't make up my mind which direction to look. There were rewards either way, but if I looked up to see which bird was making that amazing sound, then I missed the frogs leaping from my toes to the swamp. When I looked down and saw that garter snake, I missed the flash of red wings that flew by my head. While I was gazing upward at the vine-choked trees, I didn't see all of the fresh wintergreen at my feet.
I felt like Owl at Home, when he can't make up his mind about whether to be upstairs or downstairs, and finally sits on the middle step. Except, on a beautiful spring night in the woods, there is no middle step. There are sticks to be thrown for Tansy, foam peanuts to get out of the swamp, logs to be walked on, moss to be patted, flowers to admire, mushrooms to examine, peepers to stalk, fiddle-heads to photograph... I cannot look only up; I cannot look only down. I need eyes in the back of my head and under my feet and in all of my finger tips! I want to lock-on with each of these, without missing the others.
T.

Use It While You've Got It

I could rant about video games and how very much I despise their existence at any given time. I can quote all kinds of statistics and research, and I can point to the evils of how it affects children so detrimentally. I don't really have anything new to add to that, but today I saw something that made part of my thoughts on this topic explode with frustration all over again.

We were at a backyard concert on a beautiful, sunny, 65-70 degree June day. There was a plethora of kids available, and a climber, swing set, and foam thingies with which many boys were busily whacking each other, which is What Boys Do. Better yet, in my opinion, there was an inviting green hill, away from the boring grown ups, but still in safe sight. The hill had tempting trees all around and nearby it, and the mystery of what was on the other side of the hill as well. There was an enormous and beautiful evergreen tree, which just begged to be inspected, and the entire front yard which was also a grown up free zone. I heard tell there was a lake nearby as well.

As I stood up to stretch my sore, cramped, out of shape legs, and shake out my joints which cannot be in one position for too long, I turned around and my How Things Should Be temper flared. Sitting, or rather, growing, in two camp chairs, were two young boys. Their bodies were folded forward and their eyes were glued to the cute, portable, plastic video games in their hands. The only moving parts were their fingertips and possibly they blinked. I was outraged. I wanted to hunt down their parents and lecture them. I wanted to march up there and take those damn games and chuck them in the lake.

I wanted to shout, "WAKE UP BECAUSE YOU ARE MISSING YOUR CHILDHOOD!!!! Your body can still move and jump and run and heal with ease and beauty! Get your ass out of those chairs and go PLAY! Make trouble, climb a tree, have a sword fight with dangerous sticks and get your ankles scratched and mosquito bitten! Go breathe deeply from running hard, and just WONDER what is over that hill! Notice that the sky is clouding up and that the air is changing. Know the difference between the different birds and bugs that fly by you. You have who-knows-how-much of your life left and you are spending this precious time in a virtual world that means nothing and will not benefit you emotionally, socially, or academically. You will be old someday and all you WILL be able to move are your fingertips and your eyeballs! Use your legs and arms and muscles while you can! Go tame Nature or let it tame you. Or at the very least, TALK to each other! Giggle and laugh and find out what other people are doing or thinking. BE a child."

But I settled for staring and making one or two disgusted comments, which probably earned me some more "negative hateful" reputational perspectives.

Now, I have to get my ass out of this chair and my eyes and fingertips away from this computer, and go talk to my husband and watch my bird feeder.

T.

A Sunshiny Morning With Mushrooms

Normally I take pride in being able to find beauty on a gloomy, rainy day. I enjoy going out in my color-splashed rain boots and rhino coat to do things around the yard or take a walk in the dripping woods. Yesterday I went for a run in those woods, with rain loaded leaves drooping into my path. I was able to delight in the mushroom celebration that is going on at this moment in the dark of the woods, but I wasn't able to translate that delight into written words. Some days are just dark, and yesterday was one of them.

Today I woke, finally, to the sun and blue sky. I confess, despite my disdain for people's inability to enjoy anything but "sunny and 70", there are times when it is all I long for. This moment, with sun shining through my filthy windows and polishing up my dark hair, warming my arms, I am miles happier than I was yesterday or the many rainy days prior.

Now I am able to bring the mushrooms into the sun. They don't like it, which is why they are all out there joyously (for mushrooms) mucking about in the black wetness of the undisturbed woods. I have never in my life seen so many nor such a variety. For all that I know about my local nature, I know next to nothing about mushrooms. It is good for my brain to wonder about new things.

Along and sometimes in the path are fungi literally springing to life before my eyes. Wet, black dirt one moment, and at the next glance, tiny, electric yellow caps, elongated and surely poisonous. Further on my way I am halted by the appearance of a literal forest of what seem to be sea coral sponges! Pale, yellow-ish orange, with all the intricacies of coral, and they carpet the forest floor in multitudes. Most common are the flat mushrooms, capping the ends of longish stems, and with varying degrees of white and cream, they often have what appear to be bites out of them. I imagine some small elf trotting along munching one bite out of each mushroom, as we might out of a box of chocolates. To my hungry imagination, the next batch looks temptingly like large, whole wheat pancakes. I run by with syrup in mind. Sprinkled throughout the woods are startlingly beautiful red fungi, with curled lips and thick bases. They are the red of fall; the deepest red of maples and dusky apples. The most obviously poisonous, (though they may not be, for all I know), are what I think of as toadstools. They conjure what Disney mimics in its rendition of movies like Alice in Wonderland. Egg-yolk yellow with bumps and spots all over, perfectly shaped little umbrellas. I am without a doubt that fairy-folk dance 'round these each night while I sleep. 

Later I will take my camera into the woods and try for a mushroom photo gallery. I suspect they will hide from me then, not wishing to be exposed to the world in the midst of their fungus revelry. I shall have to be very sneaky.

T.

Four Walls Vs. The Elements

Today my husband and dog and I went for a ski in the woods. We chose the "red" trail, which was new to us and a bit challenging in terms of curves and hills. At one point as I stopped to rest on a little, wooden bridge over a dark and cold stream, I just stood and breathed. I could hear the softness of a light snow on the trail, the sounds of Tansy splashing into the creek, and the flutter of wings in the lower branches of nearby bushes and trees. My cheeks were cold and the rest of me beat in time with my heart and was toasty warm. I felt like lying down on that snow-covered bridge and just becoming part of everything around me.

The interruption of Doug's cell phone was a text message from his youngest daughter who was "getting to go bowling". Instantly my mind was transported to one of those places and I felt like shuddering the image away. No wonder bowling is an activity I have always abhorred. For me, the dim, smoky, airless room filled with the smell of fried food, cheap beer, and people's socks is one of my worst nightmares. To be trapped without a window or light, beneath ceilings that feel as if they are closing in on me... I pushed the mental image away and let the white light of the woods enter me again, and I knew then that I will not spend a minute of my life in places that make me unhappy unless I am forced to do so. My soul feeds on the movement and stillness of my body through places that have plants, earth, water and air.

The older I become and the more often I find myself contrasting places that I love with places I avoid, the more I realize what is essentially me. Even in my own home, during the hours I spend between walls, I choose to have living plants draping over my arm-chair, ivy crawling up my curtain, photographs of Lake Michigan and tree tops, and when there is light to be had, my curtains are flung wide to capture as much as possible. There are no artificial scents to be found, and so my nose can smell the earth of my plants, the coming of snow, and the scent of my own skin, so that I know myself to be non-artificial and whether clean or unclean, I am real.

These things which grow and die, and are silent in their purposes, though their purposes are obvious, are where I find myself and my spirit. I am ever more convinced that this is the critical connection for all people, but I can only make this choice for myself, and watch as my loved ones struggle with all that is between four walls.
T.

Swamp Concert

I should not write incessantly about spring. I do it every year. They say that all writers succumb to springtime and the follies of writing it inspires, and so I, being oppositional, want to prove Them wrong. Perhaps truly gifted writers find and give inspiration on those dullest of February Michigan days when dirty snow piles are all that remain of winter, and grass refuses to consider the color green. I must not be gifted, because I can’t. If I write on those days, it is because something else has inspired me, and usually it is my own fury over the state of society or the idiocy of certain members of my community.
But Spring. I can’t help myself. Out There, I feel things that the poets have already used up. Alive, connected, thrilled. It’s a chorus of earth things calling, croaking, trilling, singing, exclaiming. Something even laughed, and while I’d love to think it was laughing at my leaky polka-dot muck boots, I don’t disillusion myself that I rank as anything other than a mild disturbance out there in the swamps. Peepers peeping away like mad. Cranes warbling somewhere nearby. Red-wings trilling and flirting. Cardinals, robins, chickadees all change to their spring dialect. I found fern clumps starting to swell, and a fallen tree that was collapsing last fall is now only soft red, fibrous dirt snuggling down to become new flooring in the woods. Ducks don’t seem to belong somehow, in their colorful, carved looking perfection. The wood duck sits awkwardly in a tree momentarily, trying to balance on those silly feet. I tell it that ducks don’t sit in trees, so it obligingly flaps down and finds its way to the water with a great deal of commotion.
Tansy drops her stick and bounds into the swamp to chase a surprised muskrat. Muskrat disappears beneath the water and swims her way through the murky stems while Tansy looks after her in surprise. What kind of cat or squirrel can jump into the water and swim away?
I see Deb’s tent is up, blending greyly into the tree trunks. She must be watching the fox den again. I wish I could take a week off from work and do the same, but Tansy would ruin the experience, I am sure. I wonder if the foxes know?
Where once we skated, now bugs skate on black water. The ice is gone and duckweed rims the edges. I spy a delightfully lowered tree trunk, curved to form a swing and just skimming the water’s surface. Knowing my boots will be full of water in seconds, I decide it’s worth the wet to find a perch on that curving trunk. Feet wet, but soul is content. I am sitting on the water and the swamp settles into its un-practiced, unharmonious concert again.
I am torn between wanting to share it and wanting to keep it to myself. I want to tell you not to miss a moment of it, but I want to own it exclusively. It is mine, and it should be everyone’s. Today it sat in my boots and under my palms. Every sense was engaged, including one that only happens in the spring. The sense to come home and write, to strive to capture what no camera, video, or paintbrush can. It is hearing the birds and frogs, plus seeing the green things, plus feeling the bark under my hands, smelling the black muck on Tansy’s fur, and tasting the wild chives as I walk past a tree festooned with white fairy mushrooms… it equals … This.

T.