impalpable sustenance of me

And since I am still moving and haven't had time to write more, here is another gem. Re-stumbled upon this tonight.

  

From "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry"

...The impalpable sustenance of me from all things at all hours of the day,
The simple, compact, well-join'd scheme, myself disintegrated, every
one disintegrated yet part of the scheme,
The similitudes of the past and those of the future,
The glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and hearings, on
the walk in the street and the passage over the river,
The current rushing so swiftly and swimming with me far away,
The others that are to follow me, the ties between me and them,
The certainty of others, the life, love, sight, hearing of others.

Others will enter the gates of the ferry and cross from shore to shore,
Others will watch the run of the flood-tide,
Others will see the shipping of Manhattan north and west, and the
heights of Brooklyn to the south and east,
Others will see the islands large and small;
Fifty years hence, others will see them as they cross, the sun half
an hour high,
A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence, others
will see them,
Will enjoy the sunset, the pouring-in of the flood-tide, the
falling-back to the sea of the ebb-tide.

It avails not, time nor place--distance avails not,
I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many
generations hence,
Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt,
Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd,
Just as you are refresh'd by the gladness of the river and the
bright flow, I was refresh'd,
Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift
current, I stood yet was hurried,
Just as you look on the numberless masts of ships and the
thick-stemm'd pipes of steamboats, I look'd.

I too many and many a time cross'd the river of old,
Watched the Twelfth-month sea-gulls, saw them high in the air
floating with motionless wings, oscillating their bodies,
Saw how the glistening yellow lit up parts of their bodies and left
the rest in strong shadow,
Saw the slow-wheeling circles and the gradual edging toward the south,
Saw the reflection of the summer sky in the water,
Had my eyes dazzled by the shimmering track of beams,
Look'd at the fine centrifugal spokes of light round the shape of my
head in the sunlit water,
Look'd on the haze on the hills southward and south-westward,
Look'd on the vapor as it flew in fleeces tinged with violet,
Look'd toward the lower bay to notice the vessels arriving,
Saw their approach, saw aboard those that were near me,
Saw the white sails of schooners and sloops, saw the ships at anchor,
The sailors at work in the rigging or out astride the spars,
The round masts, the swinging motion of the hulls, the slender
serpentine pennants,
The large and small steamers in motion, the pilots in their pilothouses,
The white wake left by the passage, the quick tremulous whirl of the wheels,
The flags of all nations, the falling of them at sunset,
The scallop-edged waves in the twilight, the ladled cups, the
frolic-some crests and glistening,
The stretch afar growing dimmer and dimmer, the gray walls of the
granite storehouses by the docks,
On the river the shadowy group, the big steam-tug closely flank'd on
each side by the barges, the hay-boat, the belated lighter,
On the neighboring shore the fires from the foundry chimneys burning
high and glaringly into the night,
Casting their flicker of black contrasted with wild red and yellow
light over the tops of houses, and down into the clefts of streets.

These and all else were to me the same as they are to you,
I loved well those cities, loved well the stately and rapid river,
The men and women I saw were all near to me,
Others the same--others who look back on me because I look'd forward
to them,
(The time will come, though I stop here to-day and to-night.)

What is it then between us?
What is the count of the scores or hundreds of years between us?...

~ Walt Whitman 

Click here for the whole poem 

still occupied

I moved yet more stuff into my little cabin last night, and yet I still have a few more boxes to go. The goal, nay promise to RugbyGirl, is that I will be entirely moved out by tomorrow afternoon. Working at the new library gig tonight (not so new anymore...over a month now :) and then off to a holiday party at a fellow farmer's house, then tomorrow begins my 3 day weekend.

And so, while I am still occupied and not posting much, enjoy this gem from myfirstdictionary blog.

living my dream

I am finally living the Thoreau dream...well, kinda..I am not totally apart from others...though was he really? More on this soon, but it is late and I work at 6:30am and need some zzzs!!

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion."
 ~ Henry David Thoreau

dignified tall firs and fish

"At the fishhouses"

Although it is a cold evening,
down by one of the fishhouses
an old man sits netting,
his net, in the gloaming almost invisible,
a dark purple-brown,
and his shuttle worn and polished.
The air smells so strong of codfish
it makes one's nose run and one's eyes water.
The five fishhouses have steeply peaked roofs
and narrow, cleated gangplanks slant up
to storerooms in the gables
for the wheelbarrows to be pushed up and down on.
All is silver: the heavy surface of the sea,
swelling slowly as if considering spilling over,
is opaque, but the silver of the benches,
the lobster pots, and masts, scattered
among the wild jagged rocks,
is of an apparent translucence
like the small old buildings with an emerald moss
growing on their shoreward walls.
The big fish tubs are completely lined
with layers of beautiful herring scales
and the wheelbarrows are similarly plastered
with creamy iridescent coats of mail,
with small iridescent flies crawling on them.
Up on the little slope behind the houses,
set in the sparse bright sprinkle of grass,
is an ancient wooden capstan,
cracked, with two long bleached handles
and some melancholy stains, like dried blood,
where the ironwork has rusted.
The old man accepts a Lucky Strike.
He was a friend of my grandfather.
We talk of the decline in the population
and of codfish and herring
while he waits for a herring boat to come in.
There are sequins on his vest and on his thumb.
He has scraped the scales, the principal beauty,
from unnumbered fish with that black old knife,
the blade of which is almost worn away.

Down at the water's edge, at the place
where they haul up the boats, up the long ramp
descending into the water, thin silver
tree trunks are laid horizontally
across the gray stones, down and down
at intervals of four or five feet.

Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,
element bearable to no mortal,
to fish and to seals . . . One seal particularly
I have seen here evening after evening.
He was curious about me. He was interested in music;
like me a believer in total immersion,
so I used to sing him Baptist hymns.
I also sang "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God."
He stood up in the water and regarded me
steadily, moving his head a little.
Then he would disappear, then suddenly emerge
almost in the same spot, with a sort of shrug
as if it were against his better judgment.
Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,
the clear gray icy water . . . Back, behind us,
the dignified tall firs begin.
Bluish, associating with their shadows,
a million Christmas trees stand
waiting for Christmas. The water seems suspended
above the rounded gray and blue-gray stones.
I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same,
slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones,
icily free above the stones,
above the stones and then the world.
If you should dip your hand in,
your wrist would ache immediately,
your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn
as if the water were a transmutation of fire
that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.
If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,
then briny, then surely burn your tongue.
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.

Elizabeth Bishop 

secret ministries

Frost At Midnight 

The Frost performs its secret ministry,
Unhelped by any wind. The owlet's cry
Came loud--and hark, again ! loud as before.
The inmates of my cottage, all at rest,
Have left me to that solitude, which suits
Abstruser musings : save that at my side
My cradled infant slumbers peacefully.
'Tis calm indeed ! so calm, that it disturbs
And vexes meditation with its strange
And extreme silentness. Sea, hill, and wood,
This populous village ! Sea, and hill, and wood,
With all the numberless goings-on of life,
Inaudible as dreams ! the thin blue flame
Lies on my low-burnt fire, and quivers not;
Only that film, which fluttered on the grate,
Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing.
Methinks, its motion in this hush of nature
Gives it dim sympathies with me who live,
Making it a companionable form,
Whose puny flaps and freaks the idling Spirit
By its own moods interprets, every where
Echo or mirror seeking of itself,
And makes a toy of Thought.
But O ! how oft,
How oft, at school, with most believing mind,
Presageful, have I gazed upon the bars,
To watch that fluttering stranger ! and as oft
With unclosed lids, already had I dreamt
Of my sweet birth-place, and the old church-tower,
Whose bells, the poor man's only music, rang
From morn to evening, all the hot Fair-day,
So sweetly, that they stirred and haunted me
With a wild pleasure, falling on mine ear
Most like articulate sounds of things to come !
So gazed I, till the soothing things, I dreamt,
Lulled me to sleep, and sleep prolonged my dreams !
And so I brooded all the following morn,
Awed by the stern preceptor's face, mine eye
Fixed with mock study on my swimming book :
Save if the door half opened, and I snatched
A hasty glance, and still my heart leaped up,
For still I hoped to see the stranger's face,
Townsman, or aunt, or sister more beloved,
My play-mate when we both were clothed alike !
Dear Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side,
Whose gentle breathings, heard in this deep calm,
Fill up the interspersed vacancies
And momentary pauses of the thought !
My babe so beautiful ! it thrills my heart
With tender gladness, thus to look at thee,
And think that thou shalt learn far other lore,
And in far other scenes ! For I was reared
In the great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim,
And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars.
But thou, my babe ! shalt wander like a breeze
By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags
Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,
Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores
And mountain crags : so shalt thou see and hear
The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible
Of that eternal language, which thy God
Utters, who from eternity doth teach
Himself in all, and all things in himself.
Great universal Teacher ! he shall mould
Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask.
Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,
Whether the summer clothe the general earth
With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing
Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch
Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch
Smokes in the sun-thaw ; whether the eave-drops fall
Heard only in the trances of the blast,
Or if the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.
~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

I read Samuel Taylor Coleridge in college, but all I remember of him was the albatross in the "Rime of the Ancient Mariner."  It was pleasure that I stumbled across this poem tonight.

This poem made me think of the quiet of night. Having difficulties sleeping lately I occasionally wake in the dead of the night, and until I can fall back asleep, have the opportunity to feel and hear--in our old New England house--what I can't see in the darkest part of the night: the hiss of my room's radiator and the occasional knock of the pipes, noises which once unnerved me now offer comfort; the slight whistle of air that comes through the tiniest crack, and a draft from a bad seal; the high winds occasionally rattling the screen door on our front porch; the other, odd, unexplainable noises which houses make. It feels as though, in this restlessness, that the only thing to do is heighten the senses, lay still and just be.

succinct

"Seeker of truth"

seeker of truth

follow no path
all paths lead where

truth is here

e.e.Cummings 

wild woman

 

I needed a shot of some girl power tonight and I found it in this kick ass picture by Amanda Visell. 

I have been feeling all of these things lately. And I have finally been feeling stronger, recovering from my week long cold; feeling buoyed and very supported lately by some great friends: Best friends L, K, College Kim and Mummy Dearest. Thanks ladies! Together we could run the world!

laughing the night away

Just found two hilarious blogs: Here on the Praries and My first dictionary, and have been sitting here (in the Alternative U Library for my last official shift) laughing my ass off for the last hour. 

These funny pics are from My first dictionary. Love it.

Ben Gibbard - Farmer Chords (Live Acoustic On KEXP)

I had the pleasure of seeing Ben Gibbard live once. In Detroit. In a different lifetime, it would seem. Ages ago. Ever since I was first introduced to Ben's music back in 2004/2005 I have been a smitten kitten. He is the front man of groups like Death Cab for Cutie and the Postal Service, and has produced more songs that I love than I can shake a stick at. Thanks Ben Gibbard. When I needed words for so many things, I've turned to you. And today was no different.

recounting happy moments

Reading other people's blogs always gives me ideas for blogs when I can't think of anything creative to write about. Reading What's New Pussycat, I liked this idea:

"Five Minutes"
Imagine you will completely lose your memory of 2010 in five minutes. Set an alarm for five minutes and capture the things you most want to remember about 2010.  --Author: Patti Digh

So, here goes:

• growing things in my garden, watching them grow, digging my toes and bare feet into the soil
• making pickles
• reading stories with Big and Little Fish, M & S, Monster Niece S and Nephew A
• my older brother A3 getting engaged
• my old, dear friend (and former roommate) College Kim getting engaged
• being at my godchild Viv's Baptism, celebrating with my best friends
• my godchild Viv's 1st bday (I couldn't be there but just knowing she is 1 and walking and happy and healthy is enough!
• HP7
• hiking more (not enough, but more than last year)
• knowing that I LIVE and WORK on a farm
• getting excited as our gardeners brought us fresh produce and knowing I got (get) to cook something SO FRESH!
• Thinking ahead and planning for two destination weddings this coming summer--I love planning travel
• getting a library job--which I already really like
• seeing my nieces and nephews healthy and happy
• my two nieces beginning Kindergarten
• listening to a lot of good music this year
• going on a cruise with friends
• turning 30
• laughing in a car with friends for about 10 minutes before we could even get on the road
• driving home alone   
• mini road trips
• good conversations with friends, over tea
  
  What are the things you want to remember about 2010? 

dressing appropriately for the holidays

I love reading A Librarian's Guide to Etiquette. If I knew this person, we'd be friends. I can picture us now, sitting at a bar somewhere, musing over ridiculous library life and laughing our heads off.

According to ALGTE:  "A good librarian should have enough appliqued holiday sweaters so that he or she can wear a different one each day from Thanksgiving to Christmas.  If you wear the same Rudolph sweater over and over, you may inadvertently subject your library coworkers to the condition known as festive fleece fatigue."
 

 

many nots

I woke up to the gentle patter of rain on a cabin roof.

I guess I should mention that I requested and was granted a week's stay in a currently vacant cabin on the Farm, not far from my own house. This has been an interesting experiment of silence and solitude and a reawakening of my senses. Staying in a slightly foreign (foreign in the sense that I only ever spent minimal time there when TSO lived in this very cabin) place has given me the opportunity of getting used to new sounds: heater hisses, house groans, rain falling on moss and brush; has shown me how different and new the very same stars can seem--maybe it is the very clarity of mind which makes these stars appear more luminous?

I woke up to rain softly falling on said roof, and a tightness in my throat. I have a sore throat and ear ache, and on my day off too! I stopped by the kitchen to do a weekly order and wound up doing some quick dough batches for them because they are short staffed today and just got another call of problems. I trudged over in the coat-slicking rain and gave a dough tutorial of sorts, and now back at home and I just want to go to sleep and wake up when I feel better. At least, and thankfully, I called in already to Alternative U and was lucky enough to get someone to cover my late night shift! Thank you God.

Feeling sick always makes me feel sorry for myself, so I tried to cheer myself up with poetry. It didn't seem to help today, but I will share some of Uncle Walt's lovely words anyway:

"Not heaving from my ribb'd breast only"

 Not heaving from my ribb’d breast only; 

Not in sighs at night, in rage, dissatisfied with myself; 

Not in those long-drawn, ill-supprest sighs; 

Not in many an oath and promise broken; 

Not in my wilful and savage soul’s volition; 

Not in the subtle nourishment of the air; 

Not in this beating and pounding at my temples and wrists; 

Not in the curious systole and diastole within, which will one day cease; Not in many a hungry wish, told to the skies only; 

Not in cries, laughter, defiances, thrown from me when alone, far in the wilds; 

Not in husky pantings through clench’d teeth; 

Not in sounded and resounded words—chattering words, echoes, dead words; 

Not in the murmurs of my dreams while I sleep,

Nor the other murmurs of these incredible dreams of every day; 

Nor in the limbs and senses of my body, that take you and dismiss you continually—Not there; 

Not in any or all of them, O adhesiveness! 

O pulse of my life!  

Need I that you exist and show yourself, any more than in these songs.

~ Walt Whitman 

my life in art

Yes, yes, I am still stuck with art on the brain. Stumbled across these gems. The above picture reminded me of work, titled: KITCHEN, Pablo Picasso. The other painting, Woman with a cat, Fernand Leger, looks like me on the weekends--reading with Bravo our cat.

this ain't Tolstoy

I loved the way that the sun felt on my face in southern Spain; much like my surroundings, it felt foreign. The sun there even seemed to seep into my skin and brain and be speaking in a foreign tongue. It browned my skin as it whispered to me, wandering alongside me--a companion--as we explored Moor-inspired old towns; over bridges, old and new: "hola amiga, te extrano mucho." I wish I could be in Spain right now, instead of glued to this desk chair in the library. *Sigh.* I am feeling wanderlust again...hmm...

I am thinking of Spain because I was reading about/ooking at paintings by Picasso because I was reading e.e. cummings',  "Picasso." (My mind sometimes reminds me of the Laura Numeroff series, If you give a moose a muffin, et alia. Picasso is someone I have always admired--we met when I was a Spanish student in high school--because he always told the truth of what he was seeing. Picasso painted beautiful, breathtaking things: dancing, love, music, food, but also, and maybe more importantly, translated his concerns and frustrations with the world: war and destruction. It is easy to paint lovely things like dancing and love, which we can all enjoy; a real challenge can lie in painting what disgusts people, showing the ugly, naked horrors of life.

In my wanderings I learned of some paintings Picasso did in the early 1950s. According to this site,  “He was painting a deconsecrated 14th-century chapel at Vallauris. Outraged by the Korean War, he had decided to make the chapel a temple of peace. From April to September 1952, in over 250 sketches, he designed two huge murals for the chapel, on the subject of war and peace. The murals (WAR and PEACE) were completed that December, though they were not installed till 1954..."

Below: WAR (top)

PEACE (bottom)

"Picasso"

Picasso
you give us Things
which
bulge:grunting lungs pumped full of sharp thick mind

you make us shrill
presents always
shut in the sumptuous screech of
simplicity

(out of the
black unbunged
Something gushes vaguely a squeak of planes
or

between squeals of
Nothing grabbed with circular shrieking tightness
solid screams whisper.)
Lumberman of The Distinct

your brain's
axe only chops hugest inherent
Trees of Ego,from
whose living and biggest

bodies lopped
of every
prettiness

you hew form truly

~ e.e. cummings 

hmm

I love e.e. cummings. Some of his poems make me sigh and smile,
some make me feel jumbled up and confused, and some poems 
just make me think...hmmm...

"i am a beggar always" 

i am a beggar always
who begs in your mind

(slightly smiling, patient, unspeaking
with a sign on his
chest
BLIND)yes i

am this person of whom somehow
you are never wholly rid(and who

does not ask for more than
just enough dreams to
live on)
            after all, kid

you might as well
toss him a few thoughts

a little love preferably,
anything which you can't
pass off on other people: for
instance a
plugged promise-

the he will maybe (hearing something
fall into his hat)go wandering
after it with fingers;till having

found
what was thrown away
                                      himself
taptaptaps out of your brain, hopes, life
to(carefully turning a
corner)never bother you any more

~ e.e. cummings 

not quite restless

When I can't sleep I sit in the quiet and dark of night: book-less, cover-less, companion-less. Having crept from my bed; stolen from my room; quietly emerged into the skin-tingling cold of the early winter, snowless nights; sit.

I draw from my inner stores of silence, not allowing a muscle to move, lest I break the magic of the witching hour. I sit entranced, wrapped as tightly as I can manage, cradling myself; a mother-less baby.

Minutes? Hours? Days? A seeming lifetime was spent in this very fashion this very morning. I owned the night-turning-early morning. I was thanked for my solitude, my watchfulness by a falling star; burning out as I too burnt out, spending the last stores of the previous days' energy.


Sonnet 14 ("Not from the stars do I my judgement pluck")

Not from the stars do I my judgment pluck,
And yet methinks I have astronomy;
But not to tell of good or evil luck,
Of plagues, of dearths, or seasons' quality;
Nor can I fortune to brief minutes tell,
Pointing to each his thunder, rain, and wind,
Or say with princes if it shall go well
By oft predict that I in heaven find.
But from thine eyes my knowledge I derive,
And, constant stars, in them I read such art
As truth and beauty shall together thrive
If from thyself to store thou wouldst convert:
Or else of thee this I prognosticate,
Thy end is truth's and beauty's doom and date. 

~ William Shakespeare

this little light o' mine

So much about this time of year speaks to light and darkness, even for those who don't believe in Christmas or God. While many Christians believe that Christ, the light of the world, comes at Christmas time--helping usher us out of this time of darkness--Pagans believe that at this time of year, the winter solstice is a something which allows us to celebrate light and the rebirth of the sun. Whatever your belief, how can you not be absolutely enthralled by the presence of so much light?: holiday lights sparkling, twinkling; or if you are sans-city lights, just look at how bright the stars seem to shine against the black sky of winter!

I was seeking inspiration, and as I always do, turned to poetry, this time to e.e. cummings (another old favorite who seems almost a friend). This poem made me think of light and glory and the vast hugeness that this time of year can feel like to me; a dark world just waiting to swallow me whole. Go find some of your own light out in this beautiful world!

"i am a little church (no great cathedral)"

i am a little church(no great cathedral)
far from the splendor and squalor of hurrying cities
-i do not worry if briefer days grow briefest,
i am not sorry when sun and rain make april

my life is the life of the reaper and the sower;
my prayers are prayers of earth's own clumsily striving
(finding and losing and laughing and crying)children
whose any sadness or joy is my grief or my gladness

around me surges a miracle of unceasing
birth and glory and death and resurrection:
over my sleeping self float flaming symbols
of hope,and i wake to a perfect patience of mountains

i am a little church(far from the frantic
world with its rapture and anguish)at peace with nature
-i do not worry if longer nights grow longest;
i am not sorry when silence becomes singing

winter by spring,i lift my diminutive spire to
merciful Him Whose only now is forever:
standing erect in the deathless truth of His presence
(welcoming humbly His light and proudly His darkness) 

~ e.e. cummings

when things ain't been going your way

Sometimes it is hard to feel unique. It is hard to feel special; to not be swallowed up in a sea of people who seem to be more talented than you; better at their jobs than you, better at friendships or love or laughter than you. But, that is precisely when you have to stop yourself and remember the things that you are good at: smelling flowers, making weird faces at kids, imagining what animals clouds resemble, lying in bed with a book and getting totally immersed in it the same way that you did when you were 8.

Sometimes curing that need to just feel unique means lying in bed in your pjs, listening to songs which inspire you to kick butt or make you feel happy or make you feel something. And sometimes...well, that's all you can ask for...