Titmice in the can

Titmice in the can

originally posted at the Daily Neurotic on January 30, 2011

Titmice in the can. Morning doves in the box.  It all sounds like a secret code based upon birds and indicating a place where the action is taking place.  It is about place more than action. What is happening is a kind of falling in love with home and the sweetness that simple sights, sounds and the objects that bring pleasure can bring to you when you are surrounded by winter and safe at home

A qigong proverb says that ‘When the mind is distracted the qi scatters.”  But when your mind is centered at home, and you are safe, you can bring all that good energy, which is loving and supportive, around you and feel the opposite of scattered. You can feel loved and centered even though you might be alone and in the midst of a whirl of thoughts or a project. Many of us have had a variety of whirling experiences. Some of these, no matter what it might appear like on the outside, take place on the inside where you are in the sweet spot; the center of the whirling and swirling and life is moving with you the way water flows down an untroubled tributary. All seems essential to what is taking place.

In other words, it might seem like a contradiction of sorts because you feel so calm and centered inside but on the outside it is your home and whatever you might be doing or enjoying that is full of energy.  Energy isn’t always movement. I guess.  I do not know this with any certainty.  I am a typical human in that I’m here for such a short time and the world has been here so much longer. Measured against geological time, which is sometimes a good way to look at yourself, I am a toddler and have so little certainty. Although today is a day without questions.  

What I have come to love, again, I know it is like that terrific form of amnesia, which should have it’s own special name, I come to fall in love again and again with where I live. I always mention or often write in the phrase “if you’re safe” because the world let’s us know how fortunate we are, if we are, to be safe.  That is not a disclaimer but an understanding that the sweet place I can and do find myself in today is truly a gift and I wish all in turmoil resources that they need and peace to surround and protect them. 

The sweet amnesia, if there were a name for it, is when I remember again what I felt moved by and loved yesterday. The sky was low, snow was just nearly in the air but not so that I could say the air was foggy but the truth was that snow was there but invisible. As I went down along the river I realized how in love I was with where I lived. Again. That is the sweetness of amnesia. The river of forgetfulness that Odysseus crossed caused troubles. This one causes us to remember our sweet moments.  The complexity of life often disturbs our senses and we can’t see to see.  When we forget it’s a lot like storing acorns all over the place. The squirrels don’t remember where they are. Instinct tells them to save them. Their fine sense of smell works to find them. When sweet amnesia let’s another memory wash ashore it is from our store of good things that we either deliberately or forgetfully accumulate. 

On the long stretch home I thought of my friend that walks the beach every morning.  I love the ocean more than anything but on a daily basis I actually spend more of my time with the wetlands. It is where I live. In the winter I can see groups of the black and white bobbing birds, or the birds that whistle, the swans that look like the boats we used to ride in Asbury Park when we were kids. They’re all there along the way home. I didn’t have to remember them. But I did remember how lucky I feel to live here. It is so beautiful. To top it all off, a gentle snow began to fall. This wasn’t going to cause more aches or groans so you could go through it and appreciate how it came through the air onto the river and road, coated the surfaces all the way along and touched the different groups of shorebirds. We come home so many ways to ourselves.  Ain’t it sumphin?  John Burroughs wrote, “To find new things, take the path you took yesterday.” I did take the same path home and I remembered.

In the morning, I looked out, still a lot of snow from the blizzard covering everything. We had cleared a path for the birds so that the ground feeders and the others could get some seed. It’s not a code, just to remind you how all of this began. The titmice are in the can of seed hanging from the shepherd’s crook and the morning doves are in the box lid we put on top of the snow and filled with seed. The squirrels can’t remember where their acorns are so they also make runs at the box. Their sweet sense of smell will wake with the spring.

Hiroshige’s dream

Hiroshige's dream

Foxes waiting under a moonlit tree to become human

have only parcels of land and the domed shadows of trees.

Do you know this as despair?

We all learned that the West was the frontier.

As the sprawl goes, the waters go and as the waters go

so goes the rest.


My mother never knew shamans.

Her friends played cards and Mah Jong

while I talked enough about Jacque Cousteau

they thought he was my friend.

I wish I knew him and the prairie dogs,

and the thunder herds of buffalo.

Will the young know enough to turn things around?

Which ever way it spins, we’ll be passing it down.


If all goes right, the foxes’ paws will sink into the soil

until the dampness wakes them from the woodblock dream;

when they will move out of the shadows into their night.

I wouldn’t wait to be human.

Knowing without knowing, they still have their freedom


freda

[This poem is based upon a wood block print by the  great"poet of rain" Hiroshige - 1797-1858]

every river

Every river is probably as much a story about birds and other lives as it is about water and tides or wetlands relationships. Ever river is about the trees running up the water into their heights and pulsing the water back down as well. It's been a long while since posting and I regret that. Some streams take your attention but they all belong to the path. When you see the water trees that the tide leaves on the beach, all the branches that note water was here, it reminds you that each leaf is tidal, both on the beach and high up on the hardwood trees. And each journey we take, following one relationship to the end, is also tidal. Grief comes back and folds in on itself, life continues but sometimes the bittersweet leave a taste in your mouth for a long time. It's supposedly sophisticated to love dark chocolate. I can see the allure. But as a kid i had a rare chance to have good chocolate every day, milk chocolate, and I did.  It's still my favorite. It's wholesome. It lands on your tongue and talks to your brain in plain talk. No cursive, block print letters that tickle your thoughts into oneness. Some friends and some conversations to that. The years have take some of these voices from me, but last night the wind was talking and at eighteen miles an hour, in July, it had a lot to say. I think everyone whose talk i missed was part of that. It's why I couldn't sleep. It was the wind, and like the old man said, "If the wind means me, I'm here.  Here."  Amen Theodore Roethke.  Amen everyone.  Thanks to the winds, the great Atlantic, the tides in every living thing and the conversations with and without words.