Three

I'd like to talk about a symbol that's become important to me for a number of reasons. This is a triquetra withing an interlaced triangle and circle. A friend and I came up with a proposal recently for a circus training and alternative health facility that would utilize warehouse space in Brooklyn. It would also boast a rooftop garden and a juice/snack bar. We dreamed big, and no surprise that this plan will not be carried out. But the exercise was far from wasted, and we worked out some very important components while envisioning our future lives (in a warehouse). One of the things we thought was most important was a really cool name, Trifecta, which led to a whole discussion of what the three subcategories should be, body, mind, world, like the different spheres of influence we want to be moving in? or heart, soul, spirit, like the different layers of energetic imprints that surround our body? What I like the best is the illustration above, Body, Mind, Soul. It focuses my attention on maintaining a balance between those concepts as a stable equilateral triangle.

The name of our hypothetical, moonbrainchild circus? The Threefold Circus. Again, the fun would be in telling everyone who asks three completely new things that the name stands for.

I've also been toying with the idea of my own stage name, especially after meeting such cool folks at Wildfire. A name sets you apart and gives you a clear identity, a clear presence, so I have been thinking hard about what it could be. I came up with Delta, which is the greek letter d, represented by a triangle. In scientific notation it denotes change, as in temperature, slope, moisture content, etc., but basically a reaction or a transformation, it's the shifting variable. And I'm also enjoying the association with a river delta, the land mass at the outflow of a river where it joins the ocean. I like the changing and mixing aspects of that environment, and it's a fertile ground for the proliferation of the ideas I sow. I think I would be an edge species, so an estuary is a great place for me, dynamic.

I'm enamored with the three-petaled antispin flowers that poispinners call 'triquetra', which really do look exactly like the above.

And I've been looking for a symbol to put on a business card. And in my journeying work with sage, I joined with two other aspects of the plant spirit or myself to form a symbol, we held hands like we were in freefall and wove this design around us. Welcome welcome!

trust the water

What can I meet you with, holding out in my open arms? If you told me, would it be as freely given, or as highly prized? I could open my flowers for you, and you could feel the saffron-threads of my tender joys. Love the light, I love. My love. But not any exception keeps you from meeting. Lovers interrupted in a half-grove of moonlight and attention, vying for significance in each others' hearts, still very much a dance, two roles, the moon and tide, but no question as to who responds, who sets and wanes. In an instant I am moving beyond the better part of doubt into knowing that a certain center of the self is always present, watching, a voyeur in the game of love until the undulating body prudently closes its eyes. Unbeknownst, unknowing, it waits balanced like an egg, to fall on either side. The better part of valor is hope. And each encounter makes one more sure that the beginning is time well spent. How can something end if nothing ever begins? Has the courage to begin? wet.

I knew there was a reason. That vague unsettling feeling that led me three months ago, the dissatisfaction, the burn of things not lining up, of too many things jostling for attention, coincidence upon haphazard colliding with force, simultaneity and synchronicity impacting, and the collisions were too forceful within my warring selves. I wrote apocali (?), not one, multiple apocalypses, saw the wrongness of that word, the lack of it, the very wrongness an unease I couldn't pinpoint. How could it not encompass the multiplicity of endings being drawn together? That noticing made me afraid. The bling-sightedness of all those prophets. Mass hysteria and conspiracy, all singular and selfish. And here, just on page 84, something I didn't know was true, yet, has just been confirmed by China Mieville. A bit dramatically, but all the same. The right chord is struck. The brush takes the next stroke. Is it any wonder then that I feel... vindicated? relieved? Someone else noticed and wrote to my fears. Made them sane. Made them fictive and poetic, spelled them out in myth. Which has its roots in the collective unconscious and without reason, beyond reason, draws us in from the night of logic. Here you're not alone, he whispers, here the world is raving mad. Some comfort.

"It's the ends of the world."
"End of the world?"
"Ends."--- Kraken, by China Mieville

I awoke to find the world windy in its grey cloud cover. What a day it will be today. I thought that it was my imagination. Those owls of the mind that never swooped except in self-recrimination, levelling loneliness into a silhouette with tufted ears, but maybe there WAS more, a creeping, inching enjoyment growing from a shadow to cover the moon, who had his intentions elsewhere. What does an intentional community really mean? The rustle of the open wind gave no answer. Instead, the whole sky was a shepherd, and gusted about sheep clouds, fat-bodied in their layer of the atmosphere. At night the stars went deep into the rich velvet of the sky. But no one stayed to watch them long. Everyone tried sleeping and found that they were waking to another time, the dreamtime. If there were any approximation of luck in the universe, the measure of its joy would be all in carelessness, care-free-ness. So we will see how soon I become someone warmer. I am not the most solar of creatures. Maybe I can be you though. Maybe the act of writing makes me large. If there was ever a way to go from here, I would be borne upon a paper flying carpet with a big pen in my hand. What do I want you to say, my friend? Words of praise, comfort, criticism? But you stay silent. You are wise. I don't want those things. You cannot address the question of what I want. You are not my god, my muse, the big thing that calls me in form the universe to do it honor. I am rolling with the air above, I am pictured in the halls of mountains. Their valleys pine for me, leave a negative space for me to fill, like the gently curving back of the lover, wishing to be held. I am coming home. I am coming home. I am coming home into myself.

The Money Tree

- a story I wrote when I was 11. The best story I've ever written, in my opinion.

Susan came running back to the house breathless. She gasped out "Tree!" and pointed toward the trails she had been on near their summer house. Mark asked if she could show him the way and Susan only nodded. She walked slowly up the trail and began to recover her breath. She told Mark that she had decided to explore the grounds around the summer house and had followed this trail for about a quarter of a mile, and then there was a little clearing, with a single little tree in the middle. It was a kind of tree the children had never seen before, and it had beautiful flowers on it. They were silvery with golden centers. They brought a bouquet home for their mother. They went there every day until summer was over and it was time to go to school. They went back to the tree for the last time and saw that the tree had seeded over and now had bright green pods. They opened some, and a silver dollar fell out of each pod. "Quick," Mark said, "gather lots of the pods and open them all! It might run out soon and we could be rich!" They did become rich and next summer they went back and got more money. They had enough to get both of them through college. They got an early retirement plan and lived in a mansion in the winter and they always went to the summer house in the summer.

I'm moving along the color of a honied dream.

how peaceful the rain

Put me in a painting from Japan.
Hiroshige, maybe.
I'll be a figure carrying water.
I'll push back my hat.
I'll say how lovely the sunrise looks
through the clouds around Mount Fuji.
And all of my extra lines will disappear,
the lines of hope, tangles of fear.
I'll be in the tender brushstrokes of a master:
quiet and serene as he loads ink on brush,
a curl of steam, his companion,
rising from the clay teacup at his side.
I'll be his creation while he makes ripples out of rain,
and then I'll carry home the bundle tied on my back,
sandals flipping away,
shedding the waters of contemplation.

souvenir de printemps

Past Danielle seems to be conversing with my present state, leaving hints and clues of what is happening now, premonitions of what is to come. This was written two years ago, April 16th, and is still true:
Every day of spring is better than the last. I love that about it. Each day I say, "This! Here! This is really spring! Today is the first day!"
And more flowers are unveiled and the sky gets more and more blue, and everything--even the air--becomes delicious.
Warmth, vibrant colors, the feel of grass.
It is almost easy to miss the changes on campus, because we are so walled in by buildings. I have to remind myself to look up, look around, look out, listen to those birds. And once you first start, you cannot believe the noise the birds can make, and it becomes amazing to you that anyone could sleep soundly through all that.
A week and a half ago, I drove my car off campus just to get away from school and to notice spring. It is hard to notice in the place where you spend all your time, like the way you don't notice that a friend you see every day has grown taller. There was classical music on the radio, WMHT I think, it was a cello concerto by Dvorak, and the strings became the telephone wires singing down the road, the pavement and later the dirt flowing out beneath my tires. I was driving because I didn't want to stop listening to the music, and while I drove anywhere, nowhere, I went, somewhere. It was a place where the music ran like sap through the veins of the trees and hints and promises and tempting glimpses of the finale appeared in the haze of flower and leaf buds. It is only in silence that a sound can exist and be observed, and perhaps likewise spring feels so joyous as a result of winter's hush and the stillness of snow. Spring would be diminished were there not the space and quiet of winter to anticipate its arrival. There is an injunction to stop, and wait, and observe what will unfold.

If we do some further archaeology, here is a poem scribbled on the margins of an article "The Trouble with wilderness" by William Cronon, 2 weeks prior to the above. It stands in response to a single line quoted from Owen Wister: "That moment in the year when winter is gone and spring not come, and the face of Nature is ugly."

The face of nature is not ugly
there are hints and happenings,
preparations for the spring, and the
gradual gathering of greenery behind the wings
it is so gradual that you don't know
until afterwards that it has been taking
place--you only know once spring
has sprung.
I want to fall in love that way,
the gradual budding and unfolding of the heart
until it seems so natural to open your
petals to the warm sun and blue sky,
and you are amazed that things could
be so green, and you, oblivious to the
change while it was taking place.
Every spring can only be the first
spring, the true one, all others buried in
layers of dust and dry leaves in the corners
of our memories, not quite as bright
and breezy as the one expanding
before us this moment.

Iceskating

There is that moment of fear
right before each skater lands;
your heart flinches to soften the
intended blow, tightens and
then releases with a sigh
as they land and float like
swans, across the frozen pond.

I wrote emo poetry in high school: Exhibit A

I steep in misery
the bitter brew secreted from my soul
diffusing into the cup
to linger at the bottom with the dregs and hopeless dreams.
It hangs on the back of my mouth
long after I swallow and grimace.
If I let the tea leaves lie long
after the steaming mug has gone tepid
will they mellow, losing their bite?
Can hopelessness and anxiety
be washed off with scalding water?
or will I only be damp and depressed,
borrowed British serenity fading away
as the tea cools in my stomach?

Dozed off in the middle of 'Alice'

Dozed off in the middle of 'Alice'
dream'd of things wild and wet
and woke to just a hint of Carrollian imaginings lingering on the tongue and crusting about the eyes.

a heads-up

I'm digging out journals from four years ago, and I will be cringing as I (mostly) faithfully copy them out. I really did compare my soul to a teabag. I was in some distress at the time. Share with me the humor of some of my early works when viewed in hindsight, and critics, please realize that the writer was an extremely shy sixteen- or seventeen-year-old with a great deal more books than experience, who would probably take comments very personally, and internalizing them, would write more bad poetry on her yearning for a turtle's shell! Thankfully I am a bit more sturdy now.

lines written inside a gift and then forgotten

This is a camera.
Use it to capture the wide sweeping landscapes and close-ups of glittering trash in a gutter, the laugh-wrinkles on an old lady's face, and a sweaty, adolescent embrace.
Sow a garden in the mind of your reader, of ideas to burst into fruition.
But write always with an old-fashioned fountain pen. It's the secret to really good writing. Something about the ink flowing with your creative powers. The closest thing to goose-quill.

sensitivity

Right now I drink
the slightest sound.
I am a still pond
and my whole being
is dizzy with listening,
waiting, watching.
I am so wrapped up
in sensation, so wrapt
in my attention
the slightest dip of a robin's wing
is enough
to fill me completely.
I am a pregnant tummy
so full of my own being,
that funny egg-question of a soul,
tapping on the shell, hearing
echoes from the world, dreaming
of no time at all, resting
in the dark and quiet, changing
ever so softly.

Changing.

While the golden egg
of my mind waits,
I need not say or do
anything of import.
That waiting itself
holds a gift.
I will bear my mind's treasure
on some sandy shore
and swim back out
to the milky stars of silence.
I have no room for anything else.

wink

Here it is, the poem
towards the end of the book
about fireflies.


Go into the twilight.

autumn's ghost

Crisp sky and the crunch of gravel,
leaves slip through the air in an
evasive dance around my hands,
the scent on the wind hints at frost,
And the uphill climb stretches unused leg muscles.
My mind's eye sketches your outline
against the falling leaves,
tracing the ghost of your footsteps.
Your imagined presence warms me
as much as the climb
and a small hope twinges as the leaves
spiral through the space
where you could stand.
I keep walking, but I glance back
to watch the shower of yellow,
sundappled in the empty road.

Ritualized verse for everyday occasions

The inspiration for these little couplets or single lines I owe in part to Jason, and his recommendation for finding lost objects. Now it is not only Catholics who utter a short couplet prayer to St. Anthony:
"St. Anthony, St. Anthony, please look around,
my _____ is lost and cannot be found."
St. Anthony takes his time, but he has never failed me yet.

Anyway, the concept behind this little ritual struck my fancy, and I've been dreaming up little singsong rhymes for more occasions than I can count. The rhymes may not be very good, but I think what is important and healthy is opening up one's mind into prayer, addressing the universe in a formal-humble-intimate way using 'thou' and 'thee,' and taking a moment to say something beautiful about the world. Prayers of gratitude are shown to be much more effective than prayers of supplication in changing our perception of goodness in the world. The words you speak have never been used before in the exact same combination, so each of your sentences is a new creation. Might as well say something that has a positive effect, at least in yourself if not in the world around you. Here are some lines I have come up with recently:

When watering plants: Thou gentle spirits of earth and air, be well.

When in the shower:
To thee, o power of water I yield
myself to be cleansed; my wounds to be healed.

When picking up a musical instrument: O beautiful instrument, grant me congress with the air.

When lighting a fire:
Flame of the Earth,
strong before our birth
begin with a spark
from the deep and the dark.

When moving into a new house: This dwelling is dedicated to the Earth, whose shrine all homes are.

Arrivals & Departures

I looked across the grey
water to where white wings
splashed on the grey sky,
and I thought how grey it
must all look to people in airplanes:
grey and sleeping.
And I thought how Liz would
have us, once she got off, and
it wouldn't be grey anymore for her.
And I thought that everyone
should have someone, you know,
for color. To brighten up
their grey terminals.

history from inside the bars

It's important to remember that our agricultural industry is our war industry. Chemical fertilizers were generated by our war engines and pesticides were converted from nerve gases. Beat our swords into ploughshares, have we? Then instead of buying war bonds, we buy cereal. We feed our animals subsidized corn, and grow fat with surplus. We won a war but lost ourselves. We consumed the battleground and now are eaten by it.

Just after 1

The unholy hours just after
one in the morning
are irretrievably tainted
with a wide-eyed
discomforting electric guitar buzz
the hoarse, desperately thirsty
tones of a blues riff
grinding somewhere
behind your eyeballs
as your common sense rages against
a buzz of a different kind
caffeine burning away at your soul,
baring mechanical clockwork
laboriously and painfully grinding out the latest
in a lone pocket of wakefulness
a pinpoint of halogen or fluorescence
holding vigil
against the enveloping sea
of unconsciousness.