Yule New (Stock Show) Moon
There Will Be Stars
“There will be stars over the place forever;
Though the house we loved and the road we loved are lost,
Every time the earth circles her orbit
On the night the autumn equinox is crossed,
Two stars we knew, poised on the peak of midnight
Will reach their zenith; stillness will be deep;
There will be stars over the place forever,
There will be stars forever, while we sleep.”
By Sara Teasdale
Imbolc Black Mountain Moon
“Come, fill the Cup, and in the Fire of Spring
The Winter Garment of Repentance fling:
The Bird of Time has but a little way
To fly–and Lo! the Bird is on the Wing.”
– Omar Khayyám
March 1st is the beginning of meteorological spring. The three coldest months of the year are over and the next three are a transition between the cold of winter and the heat of the growing season, the three warmest months of June, July, August. Meteorological spring, though, is a creature of averages, a soulless thing with no music. I prefer the emergence of the bloodroot (in Minnesota) as the true first sign of spring.
On March 20th Imbolc will give way to Ostara, the Great Wheel’s spring season, on the day of the vernal equinox.
I do not yet know the traditional first signs of spring for the montane ecosystem, but I will. Nor do I know the tenor, the rhythms of the seasonal change here in the mountains. I look forward to learning them.
I’m reading the Thousand and One Nights again, a new translation, so right now Arabic and Persian stories, poetry fill my head. Khayyam’s Rubaiyat was my earliest introduction to Persian culture and one I found magical from the beginning.
There is, today, the slightest touch of spring longing in me. And so I wrote this.
Imbolc Settling Moon II
Phillip Levine died yesterday. Here’s a stanza from his poem: Our Valley. Seemed apt to me.
“You probably think I’m nuts saying the mountains
have no word for ocean, but if you live here
you begin to believe they know everything.
They maintain that huge silence we think of as divine,
a silence that grows in autumn when snow falls
slowly between the pines and the wind dies
to less than a whisper and you can barely catch
your breath because you’re thrilled and terrified.”
Lughnasa New (College) Moon
Things to do in Colorado: write poetry. Read about the new U.S. Poet Laureate, Charles Wright. He sits in the same place, sees the same view and has done for over 30 years. While there, he notices his moods, captures them in his way.
It’s been a long time since I’ve written poetry regularly, a very long time. Over 45 years. Then, all I’d written got stolen along with my 1950 Chevy panel truck, a favorite vehicle that truck. It had three on the column, a sticky clutch and burned oil. Somehow, though, it stole my heart, just like that blue Volvo station wagon and that red Toyota Celica.
Somebody stole it, or else I parked it while drunk and never remembered I owned it. Coulda happened like that, too, I suppose. Life was like that back then in Muncie, Indiana. Poetic and chaotic and political. Another college memory, coming under the college moon.
(could be it. now if that file of poetry is still under the seat.)
So anyhow I think I’ll find a study in the mountains with a window where I can put a table and a pad of paper, a mechanical pencil. And I’ll sit there, noting what passes beyond the window and within my mind, jotting it down, see what the mountain air conjures.
The other kind of writing, this blog, fiction, I can do at a typewriter (oops, there’s an anachronism. I meant, keyboard.) but poetry has been manual for me, maybe because I started writing poetry before I knew how to type. I learned typing in high school, my senior year.
You know, I’d like to have that Chevy panel truck back. Wonder if whoever took it is done with it now?
Summer Most Heat Moon
“so I wait for you like a lonely house
till you will see me again and live in me.
Till then my windows ache.”
― Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets
A good while back I sat down and wrote a list of my saints. These are writers, political activists, artists, naturalists, poets, film-makers, scientists, philosophers and others who have influenced my thinking, moved me toward various arenas of action. They are my mentors.
A bit later I sat down and began entering their birthdays onto my Google calendar so I could acknowledge them at least once a year. That’s why my calendar for today, July 12th, has three names on it: Julius Caesar, Henry David Thoreau and Pablo Neruda. What an odd threesome, a Roman general and the first emperor, a New England Renaissance naturalist and writer, a socialist Chilean poet.
Someday I plan a post that will feature most of my saints, a blog version of the Book of Saints, only these will be mine, an idiosyncratic list with very few outright religious folks on it.
Beltane Emergence Moon
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go. Mary Oliver, Blackwater Woods
This life here. This land. These friends. The memories. All mortal. And I love them all. For forty years I have held this life, in its glad moments and its sad ones, against my bones, knowing I did depend on it. For twenty years I have held this land and the life here with Kate against my bones knowing I depended on both of them. For twenty-five plus years I have held the Woollies and Kate against my bones knowing my life depended on them. The dogs, too. Later, the docents, friends from the Sierra Club and elsewhere. All against my bones.
Now, and here is the gray cloud lying close to my mental ground, the ravens and the crows flying there, the catafalque. The weight. The heaviness. The mudstuck boots. Now, the time has come to let them go. All but Kate and the dogs.
No, of course there will be times. Times back here. Times together. Moments driving down the same streets, sitting in the same homes. But then as a visitor, a man from far away. No longer here. But there.
Mary says when the time comes, let them go. Yes. I’m doing that. She didn’t say anything about being glad. And I’m not. I’m sad in the deepest reaches of my bones. But, it is time, and I will let them all go.
Beltane Emergence
Dancers. Kinesthetic wonders. The James Sewell ballet troupe are lithe, strong, fluid. Many of the things they did with their bodies revealed possibilities I had not kenned. Several a male dancer with take a female dancer on his back, then they would move, him bent over slightly, her resting on his back with no holds on either part, just weight and angle keeping her in place. Or, deadlifts of a prone woman on the floor to hip height. The Inferno was 70 minutes long and the number of calories expended by the troupe would keep me thin for a couple of months, maybe longer.
Then there was the audacity of it. The level of creative challenge in taking a solid, 800 year old literary masterpiece and interpreting it in an essentially silent, physical medium is immense. This was a brave work. The score and the dancers took on us on a journey through the Inferno, going lower and lower, down the New York Subway into the infernal regions. The Sewell inferno is set, loosely, in New York City.
This story of damnation and mid-life crisis is timeless and the Sewell Ballet has done it well. Worth seeing.
Spring Bee Hiving Moon
Ancientrails hits the road again today, heading back to Denver for Gabe’s birthday party on Saturday. Kate and I are driving out.
Forgot to mention in the post below Charlie Haislet’s wonderful “32 Ways to See A Mammoth,” an homage to Wallace Stevens’ “13 ways to see a blackbird.” It was funny, quirky, profound, moving. A memorable work.
Imbolc Hare Moon
“An angel…his whisper went all through my body:
‘Don’t be ashamed to be human, be proud!'” Romanesque Arches
Discussed Tomas Transtormer and his poetry today with two docents, Jane McKenzie and Jean-Marie. Shows how meager my grasp of contemporary poetry is. I’d not heard of him, a Swedish Nobel Prize Winner, and a damn fine poet. His work has a crystalline edge, images cut with words as facets.
“The man on a walk suddenly meets the old
giant oak like an elk turned to stone with
its enormous antlers against the dark green castle wall
of the fall ocean.” Storm
His poetry suggests a tour focused on image. What is an image? How do we know one? What is the same, what is different between the image of a poet and the image of a painter? Of poet and sculptor? Of poet and photographer? What is there about an image that makes us yearn to create them, remember them, see them, hear them?
The Matisse exhibition shows an artist focused on and struggling with this very question. How can I use paint, color, line to say woman, flower, wall? Is it different if I ask the same question of bronze and clay? Who might guide me? Van Gogh? Cezanne? Seurat? Monet? Early in his career he answers yes to all these guides and works to see the world through their eyes, yet imprint it, too, with his own vision.
Due to a collecting idiosyncrasy of the Cone sisters (patronnesses of both Matisse and the Baltimore museum) the show jumps from his experimental years and works in a mid-career but still formative stage to the bright lights of the last gallery, the wonderful prints from his book, Jazz, and other colorful pieces. This is a joyful painter who thought long and hard about his work, wanting it to appear effortless.
Matisse took line and color to reveal the essence of image. And he makes it look easy and the human beings in his work are proud, just as the angel whispered they should be.
Winter Seed Catalog Moon
Started another MOOC today. I won’t be taking a certificate in this one, just as I didn’t take one in the Modern/Post Modern class. This class focuses on Walt Whitman, ModPo piqued my interest in him and his work.
EdX is another of the MOOC providers, this one tends toward the more high brow: M.I.T., Harvard. The Whitman class is taught by a Harvard professor and I can’t tell you how many times she mentioned Harvard, Harvard’s resources and the number of poets who attended Harvard. That put me off. On the other hand she seems to have an interesting pedagogy in play, one congruent with Whitman which involves taking poetry to the streets and to other cities.
I plan to read the poetry, listen to the lectures and let the rest of it wash over me. In the climate change MOOC I’m going for the certificate which means all the quizes, two exams, required activities. I haven’t taken a mid-term or a final exam in over twenty years. Should be fun.
There seem to be more critiques than praises right now popping up about MOOC’s. Expensive to set up and difficult to maintain. Not as good as professor-student interaction. Confusing to students and employers about who is certifying a student’s capabilities. This is the anti-thesis of the revolutionary heavy breathing that began when they came out.
There is a synthesis down the line that will find MOOC’s do a great job of teaching disciplined students, especially such students geographically dispersed. There will be proctored exams and course series that function like college majors. A degree may no longer have only one institution behind it, but a coterie, an alliance, an association.
Will MOOC’s replace current colleges and universities? Probably not. Almost certainly not. Will some of them get replaced? Almost certainly. Bricks and mortar is not the only way to learn and the more options students have the better for them. This may not be best for the current geocentric system, but for whom was it built in the first place? The student. The issue is the education, its quality, availability and affordability. If a few campuses have to become housing complexes, that’s no great loss.
