"Snow Sifting Down"

Snow on the ridge ~ a few winters ago.

Today there are flurries on the ridge and a scurry of activity inside, too. Yesterday it was snowing starlings: thousands of them, in great whirls of blackness and clatter. I am reminded every year at this time of our dear Lucy, who the starlings seemed to lift heavenwards in the days after she died on December 3rd.

It is December, the darkest month of the year and yet a time of shining light within our hearts, within ourselves and our families, too. Let there be light and peace on Earth (please?)!

I just wanted to share this beautiful poem which arrived in my inbox today, as they do, every day, from The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor: a most wonderful compendium of literary tidbits and poetry.

Manna

Everywhere, everywhere, snow sifting down

a world becoming white, no more sounds, 

no longer possible to find the heart of the day,

the sun is gone, the sky is nowhere, and of all

I wanted in life – so be it – whatever it is

that brought me here, chance, fortune, whatever

blessing each flake of snow is the hint of, I am

grateful, I bear witness, I hold out my arms,

palms up, I know it is impossible to hold

for long what we love of the world, but look

at me, is it foolish, shameful, arrogant to say this,

see how the snow drifts down, look how happy

I am.

"Manna" by Joseph Stroud, from Of This World. © Copper Canyon Press, 2009. 

October

Our creek pasture in the fading late afternoon October light.

Concord grapes in NH.

O hushed October morning mild, 
Thy leaves have ripened to the fall; 

Tomorrow's wind, if it be wild, 
Should waste them all. 
The crows above the forest call; 
Tomorrow they may form and go. 
O hushed October morning mild, 
Begin the hours of this day slow. 
Make the day seem to us less brief. 
Hearts not averse to being beguiled, 
Beguile us in the way you know. 
Release one leaf at break of day; 
At noon release another leaf; 
One from our trees, one far away. 
Retard the sun with gentle mist; 
Enchant the land with amethyst. 
Slow, slow! 
For the grapes' sake, if they were all, 
Whose leaves already are burnt with frost, 
Whose clustered fruit must else be lost-- 
For the grapes' sake along the wall.

~ Robert Frost

I Tremble With Gratitude

In recent years our table has been a "groaning board" of good friends, our immediate family and beloved kin who "enter and pass among us in living love and in memory." As one of my friends likes to say, "as we get older, we make our own family."

Yesterday, a quote I posted by Wendell Berry on "pacifist chickens" led to all sorts of other great quotes over on Facebook. One of my favorite readers of this blog (and a local friend on Facebook and in person, even though we have met only a handful of times) shared a favorite quote with me. It turns out it is an entire poem from Berry's Leavings collection. If you have never read Wendell Berry in any genre, you can't go wrong with anything he writes: he is one of our finest environmental essayists, poets and novelists and he happens to live and farm here in Kentucky where he was born and raised. His essays have always been ahead of their time and they speak of sustainability, the dangers of living outside of our means, of the beauty and power of simplicity and honoring our land. He is like a humble sage of our time, quite unknown by those who should know of him, beloved by those who do.

Wendell Berry–a man of letters and the land.

The owner of an independent bookstore group, Willard Williams of The Toadstool back in New Hampshire, said he always judges a bookstore by its inclusion of Wendell Berry in the poetry, novel, philosophy, environment and essay sections. When I read this poem today it reminded me of my "Sunday Dinners" blog post, below, and the poem that inspired it, the other day. It is also of note that Berry composed the poems in Leavings on a series of Sabbaths over the course of several years. The Sabbath is something we are trying to better honor in our family, returning it to what it should be: a completely suspended day of only essential work but more importantly, to have fellowship with our family, friends and our spiritual selves. To find the quiet within the center of who we are or the place around us and then to carry that into the rest of our week. There is just too much pace and not enough pause in our world any more.

Not having read Leavings, I can only assume that the poems are, as this one is, the best kind of prayer or spiritual moment, perhaps Berry's own benedictions:

VIII.

I tremble with gratitude
for my children and their children
who take pleasure in one another.

At our dinners together, the dead
enter and pass among us
in living love and in memory.

And so the young are taught.

~ Wendell Berry [From Leavings, Counterpoint Press: 2009]

Where Would I Be Without Emily?

I have always appreciated the poetry and life of Emily Dickinson–especially since I discovered when writing The Pantry that she had a penchant for writing poems in her pantry and kitchen. Today I thought, mmm, I wonder what Emily had to say about spring? She wrote about so many things, often in allegory, that I also like to muse about: the weather, gardens, hope, faith, God-in-nature, birds, beauty, virtues, the presence of God or the spiritual realm, oh so many things. To think that she wrote from her home in Amherst, Massachusetts, where I have been as it is preserved as a museum, without ever hardly leaving it or traveling much further than Boston (and I believe that was only once for medical issues)! Yes, it is possible. The mind is a marvelous thing and Dickinson was the ultimate arm-chair traveler through books and her glorious imagination.

I think of Emily as this Zen-master poetess, beyond time and place, really, ethereal in her earthly presence. Her words are timeless and even transcendent. We are blessed to have them today, thanks to the efforts of her sister-in-law who found them and published them after Emily's early death. Imagine–writing for writing's sake and nothing more? I often wonder if Emily would have embraced blogging or delighted in the anonymity of posting on other blogs. I'm almost certain she would have preferred email to the phone, however a voluminous correspondent she was in her day. She may have Twittered but Facebook would have been too public for her. I don't blame her for wanting her solitude or embracing her home and gardens. I often feel the same way in a kind of self-imposed seclusion, at times. Perhaps she was a reclusive agoraphobic or depressed (or had S.A.D.) or maybe she just got all that she needed from books and her own place in the world.

Here is a poem (812.) that she wrote about spring (I just discovered that the Emily Dickinson Museum has also posted it as their "poem of the week"):

A Light exists in Spring
Not present on the Year
At any other period —
When March is scarcely here

A Color stands abroad
On Solitary Fields
That Science cannot overtake
But Human Nature feels.

It waits upon the Lawn,
It shows the furthest Tree
Upon the furthest Slope you know
It almost speaks to you.

Then as Horizons step
Or Noons report away
Without the Formula of sound
It passes and we stay —

A Quality of loss
Affecting our Content
As Trade had suddenly encroached
Upon a Sacrament –

~ Emily Dickinson

NOTE: Here is a very early blog, one of my first, written back in the spring of 2005 about Emily Dickinson and her pantry poetry. Part of this blog was turned into an essay on cleaning my kitchen that appeared later that year in Old-House Interiors [I will have linkable PDFs of most of my published writings up very soon at my website.] The photo in this early blog (I am still updating and tweaking early entries with links and minor corrections–these were back in the day when it was more difficult to make formatting changes) is of one of the early, original built-in cupboards from our former historic home in Hancock, New Hampshire (c. 1813). Oh, how I miss that kitchen and my pantries!

Her Kind

Tonight a very good friend of mine mentioned wanting to live in a cave one day. Well, not really, I don't suppose, but there are days I can relate to that idea. And then I remembered a poem by Anne Sexton: Her Kind. So here it is, for no particular reason other than that it is one of my favorite poems–and that it mentions a cave pantry, of sorts. And yes, even though this poem flirts with the idea of madness and death, which both took Sexton in the end, there are times that I have been that "possessed witch": rearranging the disaligned... misunderstood. I have been her kind. [Here is a recording of Sexton reading "Her Kind".] PHOTO of Anne Sexton, 1973–© Nancy Crampton.

Musician Peter Gabriel wrote "Mercy Street" about Sexton, which appeared on his "So" album in 1986, twelve years after her suicide.

Her Kind

I have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind.

I have found the warm caves in the woods,
filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,
closets, silks, innumerable goods;
fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:
whining, rearranging the disaligned.
A woman like that is misunderstood.
I have been her kind.

I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved my nude arms at villages going by,
learning the last bright routes, survivor
where your flames still bite my thigh
and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.
A woman like that is not ashamed to die.
I have been her kind.

~ Anne Sexton

NOTE: "disaligned" is not an actual word in the English language but here its meaning seems to be self-evident.