Month: May 2012

A blur of white petals

I’ve often noted that I believe insight is everywhere, as long as you remain open to it.  I’m defiantly not an intellectual snob: recall my discussion of something I saw in Glamour magazine.

Lately, it’s the tree on a residential street that is near the end of my run.  This isn’t the first time things I’ve noticed something on a run that has made my think.  Maybe this is a series: seasonal reflections while running.  In winter, I was struck by the difference sunlight made.  One side of the street, in shadow, was crusted with ice and snow.  The other was wet, water flooding down the pavement.  Nothing took away the substance – water – but the power of light changed its form entirely.  Like inquiry, like honest discussion, I thought: in its light, things we fear lose their grip.

Last week I ran in the rain.  The world had a quality of light that I associate with a spring rain: clear, but vaguely pink-tinted, everything even crisper and more itself than usual.  I had to duck through the branches of the tree I mentioned because it was so heavy with white petals, soggy with water.  For blocks after I brushed through the branches, white petals flew off me as I ran.  The tree – and the world – was literally heavy with beauty, so replete with excess gorgeousness that it shed onto me, spread itself everywhere.  I kept hearing Kate Chopin in my head: “Pirate gold isn’t to be hoarded or utilized. It is something to throw to the four winds, for the fun of seeing the gold specks fly!”

A few days later the rain had dried and as I rounded the corner I saw that many of the petals had fallen off the tree.  I didn’t have to duck anymore; the tree, while still fulsomely dotted with white petals, had sprung back to the shape I was accustomed to.  I glanced down as my feet slipped, though, and noticed the sidewalk was a blur of white petals.

Beauty – physical, experiential, emotional – is evanescent.  Drink it in, and fling the petals all around you, while you can.

 

Crystal clear and chilly

On the very last full day of summer vacation last year I took Grace and Whit to one of my very favorite beaches, about an hour north of Boston.  We swam and built castles, wrote our names in the wet sand, and generally danced with the tides.  The day was nothing short of magical and remains one of my favorite memories of last summer.

This past weekend we went back.  It was crystal clear and chilly, and a fierce wind gusted over us.  The beach was nearly deserted and the tide was out.  Grace and Whit ran ahead of us, picking up driftwood walking sticks and leaning over to examine the empty, barnacle-crusted shell of a horseshoe crab.  We all admired the ripples in the sand, noticing with wonderment how quickly – and temporarily, because the tide comes back in and erases it – the wind leaves its mark on the earth.

My parents often took Hilary and me on outings like this when we were kids; I thought of that as I watched my own children run on the packed sand, their coats flapping behind them like capes.  The years collapsed, as they so often do, and I marveled at how enormous swaths of life can sometimes compress into mere moments.

It was cold, my eyes were watering, my hair was flying in my face, but I felt a tremendous, surpassing peace for that hour on the beach.  I love the coast, drawn as I am to liminal places, to the border where one world melts into the next.  I am happiest near the ocean, that much I know for sure.  The weather and time of year doesn’t matter – in fact in many ways I prefer the beach off season, when it is more likely to be empty.  I just need to stand beside the ocean, to listen to the roar and the murmur of water and land meeting, the boundary between them mutable, redrawn every moment as the tide shifts back and forth in an echo of the waxing and waning moon.  And so, on Saturday, I did.

The poetry all around us

It is not everyday that the world arranges itself into a poem – Wallace Stevens

There are those fortunate hours when the world consents to be made into a poem. – Mark Doty

A couple of weeks ago I had three Marks in my head – Doty, Nepo, Strand.  I went for an amble through poetry books and quotes, and for some reason these two lines jumped out at me.  I’ve written before that everyday life is a practice and a poem.  It is clear that one of my life’s central preoccupations is witnessing the poetry in the most ordinary days.

My first response on reading that line by Stevens was that I disagree entirely; I think if you look closely, watch patiently, there is poetry to be seen everywhere, and every day.  And Doty’s point about the world consenting to be made into a poem makes sense to me turned around the other way: it consents when we let it.  When we turn our attention to the world, and keep our hearts open, there is poetry everywhere.

See the poetry I found, just in the last few weeks?  All you have to do is look.  Remember, what you see is what you get.