seedy sunday

Who knew goldfinches are such little pigs? While the purple finches peck politely, not to mention dignity, at the offerings in the birdbath I use as a bird feeder, the goldfinches stuff themselves silly with seeds we can’t seem to pour fast enough into a feeding “sock” we hung from the Podocarpus bush. The goldfinches come dozens at at a time, making their approach from the Colorado blue spruce, like tiny planes backed up in the airspace over New York or San Francisco. They land at the top of the sock, one at a time, hopping downwards, pushing the ones below them further down, then off the “sock” completely. Those who loose their positions, fly on to the other end of the deck, where they hang around the “watering hole,” the plastic tray of planter no longer in use. Some of them, like this one, derail from their course and fly straight into the window, landing unexpectedly on the ground, where they become “food” for my camera for the 10 minutes or so it takes them to regain full consciousness:

And, talking of food and seeds and stuff for the birds: my dehydrator is loaded with sheets of a mixture of sweet potatoes, almonds, flax seeds, and spices undergoing a bit of alchemy to turn into crispy crackers. The house is infused with the heady smell of coriander and a few other secret ingredients:

tough nuts

Ana Forrest straddle to handstand

That’s just a small sampling of what she does in another clip for minutes on end. But as someone commented already over at YouTube, what is amazing is not what she does, but what the others around her don’t do….

aromatherapy

The search engine terms that brought one reader to this blog recently was “old people stink.”

Oh yes, we (for young though I may be to be truly old, I am old enough to no longer side so easily with the young), stink.

So, I dedicate what follows to the Googler who wants to know why old people stink:

♣

We stink like the colony of yeast that makes your daily bread rise.
We stink like the rain-soaked stubble in the fallowed fields.
We stink like like a full-bodied wine inside the wooden cask.

We stink like the noxious mix of gunpowder and charred flesh
that drifts over our heads while we draw new maps.
We stink like the stagnant pools of amorphous waste,
those oases in the vast sands of our greed.
We stink like mildewed stacks of paper, nest to wasps,
those ideals willed into a heap of words.

We stink because we have taken in the world, each day.
And each day, the world gave us sugar, as if we were yeast.
And each day, the world gave us loam, as if we were stalks of wheat.
And each day the world gave us sun and rain, as if we were the vineyard.

And each day the world turned over the soil with the honed plow,
and we buried the dead of wars and pestilence and neglect.
And each day the world gave us another chance to sow,
and we scattered the seeds into the fancy of wind and our breath.

We stink because we have done what we thought
we could with the world. We stink because we are
done for. Because the world has gone through us,
as much as we have gone through it.

We stink because the world, finding us
too tough, spit us out. We stink of this spit,
sheathed as we are in secretions.

We stink like sorrow, resignation, and regret….

It’s enough to gross you out, to make you
wretch and heave. Get used to it.
Because what you smell inside
your quivering nostrils is just
your own dissilient fear.

aviary

This bird flew into the glass doors of the deck and fell, stunned, to the ground, where it stayed unmoving. I rushed out, worried about cats and other predators in the vicinity, but it was strangely quiet everywhere I turned. I picked up the bird, which didn’t struggle, but opened one eye, then the other. I stroked it gently, feeling for broken bones, as if I knew what I was looking for. I felt nothing but the soft down of feathers on a delicate lattice work of bones. That, and the beating of its heart. I held it for a while longer, until it moved a wing, first cautiously than with more force. I put the bird down, but it didn’t move, so I picked it up. This time, there was a lot more energy in the flutter of wings. I was afraid my trying to help it would break its wings, so I put it down on the deck again. I settled in, thinking it will take a while before I knew if it could fly. I barely stretched my legs before the bird took, at first teetering a bit, but soon it was flying straight and fast into the shelter of distant branches. Just like that it was gone.

Now that we are “empty nesters” I can’t help but think that childhood has something in common with this bird I held in my hand briefly and by accident — its own with the window and mine by sheer timing. Seems to me that I “had” my children the way that bird sat in my hand. They were here and I cared for them, but all along they were stunned by the repeated bumps against a pane of still images that reflected a world of breezes and winds an currents they could reach only by the power of their own wings. So once they felt that first breeze in their own wings, their eyes opened, if not completely wide, and they spread their wings, if not to the full span yet, and off they went.

Sorrow is an inadequate word for my stunning realization that where they flew off, I cannot follow. Joy is also an inadequate word for what I feel when I think of their flight.

chord in A minor

All night, the succulent peaches I bought at the farmers market were giving up their watery essence, imbuing the house with the aroma of sweet sorrow at the end of a season. It is the day before Yom Kippur, a time of reckoning and taking stock, and being held accountable. And yet, on this brilliant morning of sun after unexpected rain, is gratitude.

Which, after all, is a form of reckoning, taking stock, and being held accountable.

I have been feeding birds, not so much because they lack for food in the garden, but because, selfishly, I enjoy watching them come and go. This is a form of greed that hasn’t been lost on the birds who now posture and fight and jockey for position at the feeder.

In view of this, I have some atoning to do….

I have this feeling that when I am not looking out the window, my garden Buddha opens one eye and then the next. He looks this way then that, and then, just as suddenly he rises, with his arms waving, his feet stamping to let out a series of grunts and belly laughs that scare the birds into flight.

How else to explain that smile on his face?

diptych

1.

I came back from vacation and my boss went on hers. I am alone in the office, in a building that has lost a few tenants lately. When I climbed the stairs this morning, I felt like a castaway in this inner island of trees quacking their paling leaves in the first rays of the sun. For some odd reason, even the birds were silent. Soon enough, engulfed as I became in the mundane and the minutia of my job, I grew deaf to the wonders of this silence.

2.

Early this afternoon, all the lines at the checkout at the grocery store were long for some reason. I resigned myself to waiting, and thought what better opportunity to practice a bit of mindfulness than this one? But soon enough, I became distracted by the woman, two people behind me. At first, all could see of her was a skimpy dress with a lot of cleavage showing. She was struggling with a bag, from which she extracted the most enormous roasted turkey leg I have seen – and I have seen many of these in the years of Thanksgivings of my life. She bit into the flesh of that thing as if she hadn’t eaten for weeks. Her face lit up, and I was reminded of that famous eating scene from the movie Tom Jones… only this lustful look was turned inward. Soon enough, all of us staring at the woman found out for whom this spectacle of gorging was intended as she pointed, with the turkey leg, toward the bulge in the folds of the skirt of her dress.

Indeed, she was possessed – with child, as they say.

How distant it all seems now, the experience of appetites not one’s own, but one’s responsibility. Maybe it starts with that – I mean that blurring of boundaries, at first between child and mother, and later, much later, between mother and child.

The Bowery ~ September 8, 2007

Around midnight, it was time to tear ourselves away from the hearth of friendship that glowed in the apartment in Brooklyn. We boarded a train, the first one that came, since that late at night they all seemed to be heading to Manhattan anyway. There were four us: two heading for the Village, and two further uptown.

Once settled in the nearly empty car, I studied the small subway map given to us by our hosts in the Village and argued with my husband for getting off one stop before the already-known marker of crossroads we have used so far for orienting ourselves when emerging from the subterranean depths. We oscillated when it came to making the decision, but once the train pulled into the Prince Street station, we bid good-bye to our other two tired friends, hopped off the train, and climbed the stairs.

We emerged into the night of what might as well have been that of another planet. Above us the eerie radiance of lights from buildings that banked the wild flow of people and cars. The sudden strangeness of it all took my breath away. I felt disoriented, but sweetly so, wanting to linger to take in the mosaic of the night. My husband, it seemed to me, was having none of that and quickened his pace.

“Wait!” I said, trying to catch up with him and at the same time inhale the spectacle of the street.
“Isn’t that the Empire State Building?” I asked tentatively, or so I thought.

My husband didn’t turn around. He kept up his pace, moving ahead into the crowds.

“That’s north then. We have to go that way…” and he marched on, with me trailing behind.

We turned this way and that, leaving the wide avenue for a grid of narrower and darker streets. Here the crowds thinned, though still moved — some in haste, others in a daze — under the garlands of lights strung across street lamps. Christmas and Mardis Gras in the dead of night.

It seemed to get darker as we kept walking, my husband quickening his pace.

“We must be going the wrong way,” I ventured.

“No,” he said, “you told me that the Empire State Building was this way. We are going in the right direction.”

“I never said that.”

Clearly we misunderstood each other. Neither one of us likes to be wrong, let alone admit to it. So we pushed deeper into the darkness and the shadowy figures of indeterminate gender that flowed around us.

Was I afraid? I don’t recall. What stays with me, even as I write this, is a sudden rush for adventure. Overwhelming, like the wave that rises, only to break apart in in the scattered foam of the surf meeting shore.

I wanted to linger. My husband wanted to get back to a place where we might have stood out less than we did in our drabness – a habit acquired from both age and the years of living in the provinces, in a manner of speaking.

I felt young, which was ludicrous. He felt old, which was also ludicrous. So we soldiered on, past crowds on Elizabeth Street, snaking our way through crowds lined up to get into clubs. There were young girls in bright white clothes and shiny shoes, who, though they were smoking and talking, seemed trapped behind death masks. There were young men staggering and pushing and shoving each other as if they had been ready to fight to the bitter end, or perhaps it was all dance, some other deadly serious ritual of the night. There was also a young man, a kid really, in a wheel chair, parked at an odd angle, facing neither the walls nor the street. His head hung low and everything about him was stony, yet that stillness throbbed with a haunting pulse.

There was no question about it. We went the wrong way. We were in the bower now, past the Village and past SoHo.

We were lost.

But that part was easy.

All it took was a cab to get us out and back on track toward the familiar. But what we had lost that night, like a depaired shoe — be it Cinderella’s slipper or the holey-soled sneaker of a bum – remains with the refuse in the gutter in the Bowery, as we go on faltering, no longer so sure-footed.

friday follies: sep 14, 07

While here in the good old USA we are all worried about the crumbling walls that shored up our unassailable sense to a right of privacy, our neighbors to the north take the business of keeping mum very seriously. To make the point, here is a small item from the National Post’s September 8, 2007 edition:

When a convicted murderer escaped from a New Brunswick prison on Thursday, officials refused to release his photograph, citing departmental privacy policy. [The inmate] was serving a life sentence for second-degree murder and is considered violent. Under its privacy rules, a photo of a convict cannot be released unless the inmate gives permission and signs a release form, said Corrections Canada. Even though he broke out of jail, Gromley [the inmate in question] still has a right to privacy as an inmate. “Unfortunately, that’s the policy we are dealing with right now. Until changes are made, we have to respect it,” said Maurice Leblanc of the Westmoreland Institution in Dorchester. RCMP eventually released the photo, after a media request.

pro(nuanced)

So this morning I had a job interview for a part-time position, to complement another part-time job I am enjoying but which leaves something to be desired in terms of financial compensation. When I first spoke on the phone to the person who was to interview me, I had one of those gut things that flutter their way into consciousness, only to be banished by pride, greed, self importance, and whatever else impersonates common sense so well on a regular basis. There was just too much of that little pronoun, the “I,” in the interchange on the phone, such as “I was trained by XX to do YY.”

At the interview, the “I” carried the conversation, so that I learned a lot about the interviewer, but little about the nature of the job. Taking this “I” approach seemed the best way for me to beat a hasty retreat and declare myself unfit for the job, even before the interview had a chance to come to a graceful finish.

back

Been on the other coast for almost two weeks now. I’ve spent time with relatives who became dear new friends, and old friends who became as dear as relatives. A string of images from Boston, Marshfield, Concord, Duxbury, Woods Hole, Mystic, Brooklyn, the Village, wound like malas around the wrist, heat up with each beat of the heart of memory.

And now, I am back in California — here where the inside and outside is always nearly on par with itself: