Head Filled with Light

I press my eye to another lens in invitation and fill my head with morning. The three vases dance with reflections, tossing sparks like confetti. On the wall, a miniature aurora borealis ripples. I touch the silent waves as if to test their depth. They skitter over my skin, painting my hand blue. The angle of sunlight changes, clouds arrive, and I lose my hold. My will no longer bends the muted light.

The three blue vases were a birthday gift from Thea. (Thanks and love!) The photo was taken 1/20/12. Click on image to enlarge.

Last Day of the Year

The perfect last day of the year activity: a long, long walk at the reservation with a friend. It turned into a positively balmy, blue sky afternoon, so we wandered until dusk. Along the way, my camera was drawn to this rock wall decorated like a work of art with moss and lichens. What a great way to say farewell to 2011 and get ready to say hello to 2012. Happy New Year!

"Nothing is improbable until it moves into the past tense."
-- George Ade

Piece by Piece

"Piece by piece I seem
to re-enter the world."
-- Adrienne Rich, from Necessities of Life

The photo was taken 12/2/11 at Ward Pound Ridge Reservation. Click on image to enlarge.

Slowing Down Time

My current project: slowing down time. Today: successful. These milkweed seeds caught the afternoon sun in the most beautiful way. Watching them escape in the breeze changed time from linear to billowy.

"Give me the clear blue sky over my head, and the green turf beneath my feet, a winding road before me, and a three hours' march to dinner -- and then to thinking!"
-- William Hazlitt (1778-1830)

He also wrote:

"Horus non numero nisi serenas is the motto of a sundial near Venice. There is a softness and a harmony in the words and in the thought unparalleled." -- William Hazlitt

("I count only the hours that are serene.")

The photo was taken this afternoon at Ward Pound Ridge Reservation in Cross River, New York.

Tenderness

Thank you to Will Nixon, who invited me to be a guest blogger on his Hudson Valley Poetry Blog. I'm not sure exactly what Will anticipated, or actually wanted, but this is what I felt like writing about: Tenderness. In poetry. Here's how my essay begins:

Tenderness

"I want to feel my life. That unbidden line keeps circulating through my mind these days, reminding me to pay attention, to be open, to let the world in. To say yes. Toward that end, poetry widens and deepens what I feel. It colors and enriches my existence, joins me to humanity.

One of the ways a poem awakens the heart is through revealing our human tenderness. In a fabulous piece by Stan Rice, "Monkey Hill," there is a gift of a line: "Over and over the egg of tenderness will break in our hearts." That kills me.... " (Simply click on the "Tenderness" link to leap to Will's blog and finish reading the essay.)

Scrolling through my photos for an image to accompany the piece, I came across this picture. By contrast, the essay is serious, but somehow this bit of over-the-top visual silliness works in tandem. Look, apparently I'm incapable of keeping my camera away from my mother-daughter monkeys, one of my favorite gifts, from my dear CSJ, who knew I needed them.

Click on image to enlarge.

Fate

Here is a passage from a book that beckoned to me to pick it up the other morning, to let my finger (like a dowser's divining rod!) find a meaningful passage. It was an "aha!"

People have already had to rethink so many concepts of motion; and they will also gradually come to realize that what we call fate does not come into us from the outside, but emerges from us. It is only because so many ... people have not absorbed and transformed their fates while they were living in them that they have not realized what was emerging from them; it was so alien to them that, in their confusion and fear, they thought it must have entered them at the very moment they became aware of it, for they swore they had never before found anything like that inside them. Just as people for a long time had a wrong idea about the sun's motion, they are even now wrong about the motion of what is to come. The future stands still, dear Mr. Kappus, but we move in infinite space.

-- Rainer Maria Rilke, from Letters to a Young Poet, tr. by Stephen Mitchell

Just love Rilke's way of thinking.

The photo of the leaf was taken 8/30/11.

Swallowing a Cloud

White porcelain cup:
bindweed swallowing a cloud
The eye brims with light

The middle line arrived when I turned back to look more closely at the bindweed and noticed the cloud disappearing "into" the flower. Wednesday's line was joined by two others this morning, two days later. A gift. I don't generally use formal structures or rules in writing poetry; my pieces tend to evolve, creating (summoning) their own shapes. However, the haiku-like form's simplicity seemed to suit the snapshot's capture of an expansive August moment.