Catching My Breath

It has been so long since I wrote or posted anything in my precious little blog.

This year has been packed and my fatigue has been quite challenging. The year was packed because I didn’t want to have all of my activity be the necessary and neutral-to-unpleasant stuff, but there has been lots of that, so when I crammed in all sorts of things I also wanted to do, time got a bit stretched.

I’m not sorry for that decision: it pulled me up out of a year of illness and sorrow that had knocked me for six. So I am grateful to myself for insisting on all of those wonderful things: meditation, yoga, singing classes, poetry writing meetups, Irish language classes (two different ones, concurrent), dance, improv for seniors, plus a number of classes meant to help with health, stress, insomnia, and so on. And on top of that, visiting friends, helping family with various things — and hanging out with them, too.

A very full year.

I am still busier than I like to be, what with the ongoing medical (nothing life-threatening, just chronic bits needing attention) and other annoyances. The decision to offer a couple of workshops, as I did last year, and contribute some writing to an anthology have added the pressure of more deadlines, which I really don’t like. But I am happy to be doing those thing. (And planning a trip, for heaven’s sake, just when I had decided I don’t want to travel for the next fifty years…)

But there is still time for sitting in my garden every few days with a pile of books and a cup of tea, for taking a walk or sitting in the courtyard in the still of the night, watching one big raccoon make its way into the vegetable gardens there, for spray-painting my wonderful old St. Francis statue, who was losing his paint and I feared he would wear down in the elements. There is time for reading YA novels and Buddhist texts and sorting through the odd drawer — a pastime that always pleases me. I'm not doing much in the way of “creative” writing, though I am a little (mostly revising poems I had written a single draft of, and sketching out the odd one, fresh). It’s good to have a break from the structure of all those classes, and to have the gentle weather that allows the enjoyment of so many outdoor moments.

I read a poem by Rumi this morning. It isn’t as inspiring as most of them, and looks a little critical, but I like it. It speaks to the grumpy side of me, or to the peaceful side who gets buried under the grump.

People Want You To Be Happy

People want you to be happy.

Don't keep serving them your pain.

If you could untie your wings

and free your soul of jealousy,

you and everyone around you

would fly up like doves.

Rumi

 

from A Year with Rumi - Daily Readings by Coleman Barks

Images: Two photos of my Saint Francis statue, the first showing his head and shoulders and the second showing the full statue of a man standing with face uplifted, one hand on the head of a crane, one on a wolf. There is great affection displayed in his gestures and their closeness to him. He is in a garden with two more sculptures showing, a cement cat and kitten and a metal crescent on a circle. Ferns and other plants are growing around them.

“Irish Poetry” by Eavan Boland

 

for Michael Hartnett

 

We always knew there was no Orpheus in Ireland. 

No music stored at the doors of hell. 

No god to make it. 

No wild beasts to weep and lie down to it. 

 

But I remember an evening when the sky 

was dark at four. 

When ice had seized every part of the city 

and we sat talking – 

the air making a wreath for our cups of tea. 

 

And you began to speak of our own gods. 

Our heartbroken pantheon: 

 

No Attic light for them and no Herodotus 

but thin rain and dogfish and the stopgap 

of the sharp cliffs 

they spent their winters on. 

 

And the pitch-black Atlantic night. 

And how the sound 

of a bird’s wing in a lost language sounded. 

 

You made the noise for me. 

Made it again. 

Until I could see the flight of it: suddenly 

 

the silvery, lithe rivers of your southwest 

lay down in silence 

and the savage acres no one could predict 

were all at ease, soothed and quiet and 

 

listening to you, as I was. As if to music, as if to peace.

 

 

 

Eavan Boland, 1944-2020 – “Irish Poetry” from New Collected Poems

Image: Two Sheep on a wet and windy day on Arranmore Island Cliffs - Black & White by Camcool11, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

"My Father's Hands That Winter” by Paula Meehan

My Father's Hands That Winter
      Paula Meehan   

That year there was cold like no other winter.
Every morning
going out was a gymnastic affair.

Even the steps inside
the house, nearly to the door
of our flat on the third floor were iced

over. Mrs. Mac broke a leg
and Harry Styx (for the first time in his life he said)
found it much too hard to beg.

We became technicians of the slide
and forward propulsion,
of throwing your body, arms wide

open, out into some zone of contract
with the air, where corning to a stop
ever ever again was taken on trust.

The city looked good enough to eat
and weathervane was a new word
I picked up from a storybook. Our feet

were always wet and numb and blue.

         *

It's why I remember my father's hands so clearly.
He was out of work. It must have been through

desperation on the cusp of Christmas that he took
a job in Carton's as a turkey plucker.
For buttons, he said, and I saw a frock

like the girl's in the storybook, all fuddy duddy
in ribbons and flounces with black patent shoes.
His hands were swollen, scratched raw and bloody

from the sharp ends of feather, of sinew,
of tendon, from the fourteen-hour day,
from the bite of the boss. At the window

I'd watch each morning, impatient for dawn
and ice engineering. He'd boil up
a big pot of eggs, school lunch for us children.

He'd button down the younger ones' coats
gingerly, and tie up the laces of their shoes
and tuck in our scarves at our delicate throats

—an egg in each pocket to keep us warm,
old socks on our hands to guard against chilblains.
A kiss on his forehead to keep him from harm.

        * 

The city must have thawed at last
and unmagicked that winter when
I reached the age of reason. The past

was a new territory I would explore
at leisure and at will
by pushing on the unlatched tenement door.

I could hold in mind forever now
my father's hands that winter and
the city walls and railings freaked with snow.

Image: Bill Doyle, Children playing on Henrietta Street, 1960s. https://www.thejournal.ie/readme/dublin-tenements-6083918-Jun2023/

Why sing?

I wrote this piece in 2014, at his request, for a newsletter put out by a retired academic Bob Steele.

Why sing?

I fall off the rolling log of singing practice as often as I scramble back on. Embarrassed to be heard, and teased as has happened more than once, I’m the only person who sings in my apartment building, and have a voice that carries punch. It is hard to hide, and hard therefore to keep on the log, to keep my voice flexible and strong enough to climb the songs I feel most moved to sing. But...

As an infant, I cried without thinking, opened my voice and swallowed up the world with my sorrow and my rage. Unworried by my drooling, I gurgled happily, my meaning clear to me at least, and clear I am certain in my eyes, the texture of my voice, the wobblings of my limbs, to anyone who cared to understand. I was at ease with my body, inside and out, and the sounds I made were as natural a part of it as the skin that held me together, the hair that curled from my pate, the sensations that bubbled through me and rippled into emotion and from emotion, yes, into sound.

What were the sounds I made? Were they speech, or song, or some thing from which the two arise, a primitive ancestor of all the civilization of voice that surrounded me, embedded as it was in the mew of cats, the chitter of birds, the scrape of chairs on linoleum, the sound of my own sigh as I was falling into sleep?

It was only with instruction that I learned the strange idea that certain sounds were acceptable, even delightful, even beautiful, and other sounds outrageous, irritating, wrong. And as this instruction continued I learned as well that in the category of sound called singing, there were true notes, off notes, notes which hit me so sharply sidewise that I laughed in fear to hear them, and shrank in fear from making them. I endeavoured to be true. To be right and strong and delightful. To be flexible and controlled and Good. But knowing how close the wrong note sat to the right had me live in subtle fear.

Oh, there were many lessons regarding singing as I grew up. One strange one was that, outside of the enclave of my singing family, it seemed that any time I began to sing people would turn the radio on. Rather than, gods forbid, joining in, the reminder of music had them reaching for its proper type. Music, I learned, was being wrested from the familiar, the shared and the bonding, and plugged into the professional and remote. Only those with recording contracts were good enough to be heard to sing.

But. And here is the rub.

Have you ever run? Run, not just in panic for the bus, spleen stitching and lungs afire, but run often enough that your body builds in strength and you begin to feel the antelope in you stretching supple powerful muscles and coursing with the birds?  Have you ever learned to dig? Learned the placement of the spade and the pressure of the foot and the easy swing that bites the earth out of its bed and shapes the land? Have you ever played a sport, or immersed yourself in yoga, or taken to the mountains so many times your legs and heart and eyes grow bright and strong and you can breathe a giant breath and take the world into yourself and exhale it out again?

Well, that is singing, too. But it is inward exercise. Muscles no one sees, let alone thinks much about, a cage of muscles that supports and connects you to organs and bones and synapses you barely knew you had, orchestrated by the vast intake of air, the training of your lungs till they become not just flabby bags that keep you aerated but bellows capable of more than you had ever dreamed, instruments as precise as a jeweller’s tools.

Running that marathon with your breath and vocal chords, standing still or swaying in your place, fills out the last remaining territory of your body and wow—the strength you find in that. The joy in it. To feel utterly your own body from within and without and, just as in your infancy, to find no blank spots in your self: toe tingling from breath powered by note set free by diaphragm, and mind, and heart. An athlete of the voice.

I urge you, dig your garden, run your kilometre, bow and rise through your dozen vinyasas and then stand still and engage your voice. Discover the union of inner body and outer—both toned, both gleeful in their strength—of breath and stance and sound.

Another thing. Who sings? Who sings what? Who are you when you sing? That subject is as vast as humanity.

Long ago I wanted to learn something of my ancestors. The first thing I did was to listen to their music. To begin to learn the metre of their language. To link my voice with theirs and wonder, why was it sung that way? Why so much sorrow in their songs? Why so much hilarity? I didn’t even like the music when I first heard it, the strident fiddles and the driving rhythms. But that time is long since gone. Their music is in my muscles now. It is in my tears and my dancing feet. It rescues my vocal chords from disuse and brings past and present face to face in me. Over time, of course, I learned more of their story, fleshed out the breath of their music with grittier details. But the stories alone would be empty without their voices. I sing now with my great-great-grandmothers, warning of false young men, and I laugh and cry along with them. I sing with my great-great-grandfathers, who might never see land again, and I cherish their labour and their risks. I sing with the people I never got to meet, and find them in me, and love them still.

Why sing? So many, endless reasons. Better to ask, why live? What else can a child do?

Note: In Memoriam: Dr. Robert Steele (1925 - 2018)

Image: Cropped from "Dancing and singing to forget the pain of Syrias conflict.” Photo by Russell Watkins/Department for International Development. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

 

“Sky-Circles” by Rumi

 

The way of love is not

a subtle argument.

The door there

is devastation.

Birds make great sky-circles

of their freedom

How do they learn that?

They fall, and falling,

they are given wings.

Image: "Birds flying at sun set” by Chukwu Chibueze Pascal (Kingaustin07), CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Note: Translated by Coleman Banks. Collected in A Year with Rumi - Daily Readings (2006).

Readers Theatre on the Horizon???

I haven’t been active in my Casey persona in recent years (as a writer, that is!) for two reasons:

I have been focussing on my Brigit writings, as Mael Brigde, and this has taken a lot of time and energy. (You can find a link to my book, blogs, etc. here.)

VCon, our annual SF convention here in Vancouver, Canada, has been absent for several years. Over the last year or two, volunteers have been hosting events in order to rebuild toward VCon, and I’ve enjoyed these very much, but as a regular attendee, not as a panelist. In November, they are presenting a one day convention called CONnections, and I have decided to pitch a readers theatre, as we have done in previous years as the Pallahaxi Players Readers Theatre. 

I hope this happens. I haven’t volunteered this time around to be on panels, and with the very sad and sudden death of Fran Skene, there is not likely to be a Turkey Reading (one of the greatest delights of VCons past, for me, at least), but I would love to sit down with fellow writers and read out something delightful for the audience.

We may have something in the can already, but if you have a short, stirring or humorous, play that would suit readers theatre*, we would be happy to see if your writing would be a fit for us. Or if you know of something in the public domain that would work well for an audience of SF and fantasy fans, we'd be interested in knowing about that, too.

If you are interested in participating at CONnections, you can pitch your idea here:

https://www.zeffy.com/en-CA/ticketing/connections-program-guest-inquiry

* Unlike actors memorising lines and acting with a set, we sit at a table together and read out our parts.

Image: “Alien Amor” by Laura Molina (Laura Molina/National Museum of Mexican Art) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Lava Cameo by Eavan Boland

 

Lava Cameo

by Eavan Boland

I like this story -

My grandfather was a sea captain.
My grandmother always met him when his ship docked.
She feared the women at the ports -

except that it is not a true story,
more a rumour or a folk memory,
something thrown out once in a random conversation,
a hint merely.

If I say wool and lace for her skirt and
crepe for her blouse
in the neck of which is pinned a cameo,
carved out of black, volcanic rock;

if I make her pace the Cork docks, stopping
to take down her parasol as a gust catches
the silk tassels of it -

then consider this:

there is a way of making free with the past,
a pastiche of what is
real and what is
not, which can only be
justified if you think of it

not as sculpture or syntax:

a structure extrinsic to meaning which uncovers
the inner secret of it.

She will die at thirty-one in a fever ward.
He will drown nine years later in the Bay of Biscay.
They will never even be
sepia, and so I put down
the gangplank now between the ship and the ground.
In the story, late afternoon has become evening.
They kiss once, their hands touching briefly.
Please.

Look at me, I want to say to her: show me
the obduracy of an art which can
arrest a profile in the flux of hell.

Inscribe catastrophe

Image: Italian Bracelet 41269, Walters Art Museum, LA. Public domain. Diana, Pompeii.

Wolves Don’t Live By the Rules

Listen to this. It always makes me think of you when I hear this because of that band you were in so long ago, man does not become wolf. I have so many things I want to say and and nothing, all at the same time. I have nothing at all to say because everything I have said up until now has been meaningless. It's never exactly what I want it to be and how do I even know what it ought to be let alone what I want? I just wish I could play this song for you and have you be as enthusiastic about it as I am.

Wolves actually do live by very strict rules. But they're not the rules we put on them. And man never does become wolf. Quite right about that.

Fuck, I miss you. Now, listen to this.

Wolves Don’t Live By the Rules

Willie Thrasher 

[Chorus]
Wolves don't live by the rules
Wolves don't live by the rules

[Verse 1]
Down eastern hills you can hear them crying
They have to fight to stay alive
No one can change it
Mother nature knows the reason why

[Chorus]
Oh, wolves don't live by the rules
Wolves don't live by the rules

[Verse 2]
They're born to kill and to be free
Their lives are hard but they're meant to be
The cry of the wild and the unaware
They can't see

[Chorus]
Oh, wolves don't live by the rules
Wolves don't live by the rules

"Wolves Don’t Live By the Rules" by Willie Thrasher on Spirit Child album. 1 January 1981.

Image: Christian Mehlführer, User:Chmehl, CC BY 2.5 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5>, via Wikimedia Commons

A Reflection on the Five Remembrances

 

The Five Remembrances

I am of the nature to grow old.

There is no way to escape growing old. 

 

I am of the nature to have ill health.

There is no way to escape ill health. 

 

I am of the nature to die.

There is no way to escape death. 

 

All that is dear to me and everyone I love

are the nature to change.

There is no way to escape

being separated from them. 

 

My actions are my only true belongings.

I cannot escape the consequences of my actions.

My actions are the ground upon which I stand.

The Five Remembrances is my very favourite gattha. It might seem gloomy but in fact I find it very reassuring. I think for me the scariest thing is feeling like I might fail to prevent something (illness, etc.) or fail to do something important. This gattha tells me that I can't truly prevent them and so I am allowed to stop trying.

I'm really not explaining that well. Perhaps it makes better sense to say that they reassure me that all of these things are natural and not disasters to be prevented. So I can begin to accept them more. I can say that the first time I started reciting it to myself, when I was driving on a highway I didn't know and was feeling anxious, it calmed me right down. Well, not right down. But it helped. The thing I fear most in that situation is having a car crash and dying or suffering greatly. In that moment, allowing myself to accept that death is inevitable helped me let go of some of my fear in driving at that moment.

I decided when I was extremely young that since I couldn't know whether or not there was life after death there was no point in contemplating it further. It seemed like there were enough things to worry about that were more concrete. As time went on even that fell away. I just can't believe in heaven or hell or any sort of afterlife. And I'm actually fine with that.

For me, when I say goodbye to this life, and everyone and everything in it, that is final, which makes it all the more poignant. Being able even for a fraction of a moment to see my death in the context of all those other deaths, the small and vast deaths that are happening all around me every moment of the day, even the small and larger deaths that are happening inside my body every moment of the day, to see time unroll before me and after me, makes it less sad and more beautiful.

I do like the focus of taking care of yourself so that old age is as pleasant as possible. I don't manage to do all of the things I know would help me in that regard but I do keep it as a main focus, if not the main focus. Shifting more and more to that being the main focus as time goes on. Mama needs more rest!

For Sr Thuận Nghiêm's dharma talk on the Five Remembrances, click here.

Image: of Irish crane, back after 300 years of their absence on the island. From ireland.com

"You must set out now” by Anne Kathleen McLaughlin

 

You must set out now.

Gather your belongings.

Take only what you need:

A journal, a pen, water colours,

A change of clothing, warm socks,

Woollen cloak with hood.

The currach awaits you.

Show your bundle.

Climb in.

Here are the oars.

Push away from shore.

Leave what holds you.

Seek no promise of safety.

Set your face to the boundless sea,

The wind in your left eye. Go.

In the pre-dawn darkness

One light shines:

Seven pointed star.

You do not know the way.

There is no way to where you must go.

Trust your life to this star.

Here is a journey prayer:

Star of the Sea

Seven arms encircle my soul.

A body to dance

A heart to know

Inner light to guide

Inner fire to impassion

Earth to birth me

Sea to hold me

Wind to carry me Home.

From Singing the Dawn – Rebirth of the Sacred Feminine

by Anne Kathleen McLaughlin 

Image: "Sea at night” by Władysław Ślewiński.

When the Old Oak Tries to Emulate the Willow

 The sun sets on another day.🌄

It's been such a hard week and a half. I will tell you what's gotten me through: my spiritual practice, my teachers’ wisdom, which I have heard over and over again until I've integrated a tiny portion of it into myself; listening to a LOT more of it over the last few days; my friends – some of whom I didn't know before this week; reaching out for help instead of curling up into a ball and waiting to die. (I did curl up for half a day. I needed to absorb the shock before beginning to act. And then I needed help looking at everything from different perpectives till I decided what I would do. I was still more intensely stunned because the worst of this news arrived on the morning after the US election, when I was already rocked back and struggling against despair.)

I won't go into the details of what upset me so much these two weeks, but I will say that I end this week stronger and — key here — more flexible than I began it, because I got to decide from a position of wisdom, acceptance, and support whether I was going to fight a particularly hard unfairness or whether I was going to shift in myself. In this case I decided not to fight but not to lie down and be rolled over either. Not to frame choosing my mental and physical health over fighting a war with my landlord — someone who holds great power over this aged, unwell, and, most importantly, moneyless person — as submission on my part, not to frame it in a way that shamed me for “failing” to fight. That left me able to agree to some things and — !!! — to negotiate others.

It may still transpire that I “win” nothing, but at the moment some of the worst of the order is possibly withdrawn. I wrote it all up, too, in an email, and the landlord’s sheriff didn’t disagree with my summary of our agreement. Fingers crossed.

Slowly my perspective shifts until I begin to see myself as a person with choice even when it doesn't seem like it, a person with help around me even when I can't see them right away, or can’t see what they can do.

Thank you to my friends and my communities. You are good. We are good together. 🫂