Another Sunday Rolls Around...

This morning's prompt involved poet David Whyte and writing whatever came to mind after reading his work. There's no accounting for what comes into my mind sometimes.

Coming Home with David Whyte

When my mind is weary from

too much thought,

I go out of doors

and fall in love.

Beyond my doorstep

the green grass woos me,

beckons bare feet to

touch the earth

feel the earth,

and if I should lie down

in a meadow

the grasses whisper the same

love songs that the bees

hum and the sparrows chirp,

a song of longing and satisfaction

of heartbreaking beauty,

of the comings and goings of all

living things, of the dance we all

dance, of the joining of hands

and minds and cells,

and the conversation between beats,

the sharing of secrets that, once known,

 open eyes long closed.

and

Not What I Thought

There is your path,

and there is my path,

and everywhere everyone

is walking a path unknown to me,

unknown to you,

paths of light, paths of darkness,

stony, steep paths,

paths that run downhill.

We are not all on the same path.

We are not all the same,

but I can shout out when something

I’ve discovered on my path is

too good not to be shared,

and you can call out from yours

over something too awful to face alone.

And so its seems we walk the same path

because we can hear each other calling.

We walk through the same bands of fog

or sunshine. Nonetheless you are on

your path and I am on mine

and everyone else is making a

solitary trek, and only our voices

are blending and joining,

making it seem like we are all one.

Sunday Writing

Hal Borland is one of my favorite authors. He lived a mere five or six miles from my home but I didn't find that out until he passed away. I often walk down the dirt road where his farm is located, trying to see what he saw through his eyes and through his words. My Sunday morning writing partner is also a Borland admirer. Here's her prompt for today's effort.

Balancing the Year.

"The short days are upon us. It will be another week before the Winter solstice, but the day's change now is slight. Daylight, sunrise to sunset, will shorten only another two minutes or so before it begins to lengthen. The evening change, in fact, has already begun; the year's earliest sunset is past; but sunrise will continue to lag on through the year's end....We come to a long Winter night when the moon rides full over a white world and the darkness thins away. For the full-moon night is as long as the longest day of Summer, and the snowy world gleams and glows with an incandescent shimmer.

Year to year, we remember the short days, but we tend to forget the long nights when the moon rides high over a cold and brittle-white world. Not only the moon nights, but the star nights, when it seems one can stand on a hilltop and touch the Dipper. Who would not cut wood and burn a candle for a few such nights a year?" - Hal Borland, Sundial of the Seasons, Dec 16

PROMPT: Have a conversation with Hal, responding to his statements.

My Conversation with Hal

Hal. The short days are upon us.

Me. I’ve been noticing. I sit with my book of an afternoon or I glance out the kitchen window and darkness is swallowing the blue so I check the clock and it’s only 3:45 and I think, “Already?” Of course full dark doesn’t descend until 4:45 or so but the daylight gives way to dusk far earlier at this time of year. The earliest sunset was on December 8^th, almost two weeks before the solstice.

H. It will be another week before the Winter solstice, but the day's change now is slight. Daylight, sunrise to sunset, will shorten only another two minutes or so before it begins to lengthen.

M. And that’s why this is my favorite time of year. The change is negligible but consistent – it’s more than hopeful, it’s a certainty that the earth is turning once again toward spring.

H. The evening change, in fact, has already begun; the year's earliest sunset is past; but sunrise will continue to lag on through the year's end....

M. …and that’s okay with me. I like to waken in the predawn hours and watch the light spread across the sky. Even on snowy days like today, the light creeps up the edges of the earth and spills in my window.

H. We come to a long Winter night when the moon rides full over a white world and the darkness thins away. For the full-moon night is as long as the longest day of Summer, and the snowy world gleams and glows with an incandescent shimmer.

M. I’ve been out of doors on such nights when the earth seems to hold its breath and the only sounds are of my own breathing and the pulse of my own warm blood. I walk the moonpath then, ever watchful for night creatures – owl, fox, coyote. Only once have I seen an owl, ghostly, silent, gliding from its perch in a tree I passed.

H. Year to year, we remember the short days, but we tend to forget the long nights when the moon rides high over a cold and brittle-white world.

M. Not all of us forget. You don’t. I don’t. There are times I would have been happy to meet you in the cold stillness and stand looking across the moonlit snow, knowing that this was as right as the longest of summer days, this time of rest, of dormancy, of renewal.

H. Not only the moon nights, but the star nights, when it seems one can stand on a hilltop and touch the Dipper. Who would not cut wood and burn a candle for a few such nights a year?

M. There is a sharp satisfaction in being both inside and outside on such nights. The cold is bracing, shivery, even cruel. To return to the warmth of a house where a fire burns and a candle stirs the darkness is to know heaven in two realms.

Today

The snow is coming gently down, as though someone aloft was shaking a feather pillow. Small gusts of wind whirl it up and around and it settles again on the ground, on the fence posts, on tree branches and the backs of the juncoes waiting their turn at the feeder. The hundreds of geese that peppered the surface of the pond just a couple of weeks ago have fled south ahead of the cold and the snow. The mornings belong now to the jay and the crow and the silence that even their strident calls can't shatter.

This is the hunkering down time of year, when everything that lives seeks shelter or stands stoically against the winds. I walk the snowbound meadows and see the bones of last summer's flowers - the delicate brown cups of Queen Anne's lace, the empty seedpods of the milkweed, the delicate stems of long dead asters. There is beauty in austerity if you look for it, and colors that are overshadowed by summer's riotous shades - the buff and fawn of spent grasses, the muted scarlet of red dogwood osier and blackberry canes, the rich mahogany of oak leaves, the greeny-black of pines and firs.

To know the land when it is quiet, to see the promise of spring in the tightly held buds already set but sleeping, is to know hope.

From a Sunday Morning Writing Prompt

The hemlocks grew behind the left corner of the house. Sadly I have  no photo of them.

Most Sunday mornings I write with a friend. She provides the prompts, we write for half an hour, then read our efforts to one another over the phone. The prompt today was taken from John Hay's writings regarding a tree he grew up with. (A Beginner’s Faith in Things Unseen: “Fire in the Plants”)

One afternoon when I was five my father called my brother and sisters and me out to the back yard. It was really two yards divided by a stone wall with a rose arbor. The cesspool was also located out there so summertime found two vastly different scents competing for our attention.

On this day dad stood at the corner where rose garden and cesspool occupied the same bit of earth. Four small hemlock trees surrounded him. “Pick a tree,” he sang out, his face one big smile. My mother often accused him of being less than a landsman – he’d grown up in New Rochelle, NY; he was a city boy, after all – and being surrounded by farmers on all sides made him a bit defensive. He decided to prove his worth as a country man by planting trees for his children, trees that would grace the corner of the yard for years after we’d all grown and gone.

One by one we held our trees straight as Dad shoveled dirt over the roots. My brother’s tree was tucked directly into the corner of our property, mine stood slightly tilted next to his with the twins’ trees crowding close to avoid getting their feet wet in the murk of the cesspool.

My mother came out to inspect the proceedings. She was a city girl herself but her own mother had been born and raised on a farm. Mama knew a thing or two about gardening. “I don’t know, Jay,” she said, shaking her head. "Those trees are awfully close to the cesspool. Plants don’t like human excrement.”

The cesspool had always been a bone of contention between my parents. In the 40s, when they married and moved to the house my city-escaping Granddad had called his summer home, the modern leech field had not been in existence. Instead, a long pipe led from the house to the far reaches of the back yard where the effluent collected in a scum-covered pool before sinking into the surrounding earth. Though it was barely visible behind its shield of tall, rank grasses, it stunk in high summer when the air was hot and still. Only the roses planted in great sweeping pink swaths offered the nose any comfort.

My mother’s observation made us children anxious. We’d interrupted our play to help Dad plant our very own trees and in the space of half an hour had become very possessive of them. “They’ll grow just fine,” my father assured us, waving his hand at the surrounding woods to make his point. “Look at all those trees. They don’t mind a little sh… .” Intercepting a black look from my mother, he didn’t finish the word.

“It,” my brother muttered under his breath and scampered off, brandishing the wooden sword he’d been threatening my sisters with before Dad had summoned us. We whooped after him, leaping the lowest of the rose bushes that separated the two yards.

Those trees did grow, but slowly. In my teen years the branches of my tree were finally high enough off the ground to shelter me and on those days when hiding was a stronger urge than dodging the awful smell of the cesspool, I would take a book or my sketchpad and crawl under its sheltering branches. In winter I loved trying to sneak under the branches without disturbing the snow so that when I looked up, it was like being in the Snow Queen’s castle.

One by one my siblings and I left the home place for college and new lives but every time I returned I took time to visit my tree. The cesspool was filled in by then, replaced by a holding tank. I brought my first born to the back yard to play under the hemlocks and then the other children as they arrived. We had picnics there and built tiny houses of fallen twigs. Often we’d bring a book and I’d read aloud. Stories read in the company of trees seem more real somehow.

The trees grew for twenty-five years. Their spires reached high into the blue. I noticed a few bare spots here and there on the branches, accentuating the brown needles that still clung to the branches but it was a warning I missed. Several months later, a letter from home brought the news of my father’s illness. I returned in time to say goodbye and before leaving, stumbled out to the back yard to seek solace under my tree. I stood beneath its branches and looked up. Only then did I realize that my tree was dying, too. In fact, all four hemlocks were turning brown, their needles falling in sad puddles on the ground.

The summer following my father’s death, all four trees had to be cut down. My mother and I stood watching with tears in our eyes. Taking my hand she turned to me and said, “I’m glad I was wrong about these trees. Your father would always point them out to me when I had doubts about something.”

The home place has gone out of the family now. The rose bushes are gone, too, and many of the trees that surrounded the house of my childhood. But in my mind’s eye, those four hemlocks we planted with my father so long ago rise up out of the corner of the yard, growing between the roses and the cesspool, proof that life finds its own way to flourish despite unfavorable conditions, despite our doubts.