Flotsam and Epiphany
 
     I continue to be fascinated by the subject lines of my spam filter.  There is something in the tone of these lines that is so American - simultaneously brazen and hopeful, naive and manipulative, lovely and gauche.  It is a modern medicine show; a traveling cyber-wagon loaded with wizard oil - except that there is no driver, just a stupefying list of fictional names.  It is a testament to the human spirit, that even this cynical exercise in mindless greed holds the seed of poetry, passion, longing, belief . . .
 
BEAT THE SYSTEM FOR A PLEASANT LIFE
 
You’re a recipient of the global economic recovery program!
Do not pay for another electric bill.
Stop worrying about health insurance.
Beat the system for a pleasant life,
White water rafting. . .
Italy travel deals . . .
Work from home at your own pace.
Get the music you love,
Fly a private jet,
Claim your cruise now!
Don’t pay your next cable bill without reading this.
Why go to Harvard?
Starbucks is at your door.
 
 
 

Flotsam and Epiphany
May 13, 2010
Letter to the Editor of the Monadnock Ledger-Transcript
 
 
     Just before Mother’s Day, two Monadnock Region mothers lost their daughters.  One died in the kind of movie that plays in the back of every mother’s brain as she watches her teen-ager climb into a vehicle with friends.  One died in the movie where some deeply disturbed person enters the house with a gun. 
     The horror and anger and grief are almost unimaginable.  But these families have been inspiring.  “As painful and enraging as it is to lose her in this tragic way, neither she nor we would ever want her death to lead anyone to succumb to hatred or violence," said a family member of the murdered daughter. 
     And when the driver of the fatal vehicle visited the grieving mother of the teen-aged girl, she hugged him.  “I love you,” she said. 
     We cannot control what happens to our loved ones.  We can look for “reasons,” but our reasoning is limited by our longing.  We can plug tragic events into a ready-made template of meaning – xenophobia, revenge, despair, religious platitude.  But this denies us entry into the personal meaning of the event.  We can be filled with regrets or blame.  But this attitude simply insures that the tragedy stays with us  - as a knot in the stomach, a lump in the throat, a rock on the heart.
      I feel the tears on my cheeks as I write these words.  But I have learned a great deal from these mothers and families.  I have learned that it is possible to hold grief and anger, and to still let the love flow through.
     It has been a very difficult Mother’s Day.  But these mothers and families have shown us that we can meet tragedy with love.  And that when we do, love is what propagates.

Flotsam and Ephiphany
May 8, 2010
 
MORE SPAM POETRY
 
An email made it through my spammer into my inbox – and the longing in the subject heading caught at my heart . . . Each voice creates a complete story on its own, and the third story is the dialogue – and isn’t it so with any relationship!
SPAM: left margin; ME: indent.
 
 
I AWAIT TO HEAR FROM YOU SOONEST
            Oh my love, my dearest love
I would like to apply through this medium
            through the density of longing
I honourably intend to invest
            My heart is yours to play with
I have substantial capital
             I have a vision
            of coconut palms and white
            white sand
Become my partner
            In the country of longing
If you so desire
            all objects are made
            of desire
Please do not take undue
            Through green green leaves, a magenta
            blossom
advantage of the trust I bestow
            I hold it in both
            my hands
Your urgent reply is highly needed
            Yet I cannot hold you
Yours faithfully
            oh heart of my heart
AND PLEASE CAN YOU GET IN CONTACT THROUGH MY PRIVATE EMAIL
 

Flotsam and Epiphany
May 3, 2010
 
I was just cleaning up my "unverified"  folder, when it occurred to me that the lines of unwanted messages read rather like a poem!  The following is completely created out of this week's SPAM:

Dear Beloved in Christ,
Feel the revolutionary 3D feature
Of the branded watches today!
Claim your degree.
Dear respectful
Dear respectful
Dear respectful
Bold Progressive, contact me now.
You have a new personal message.
Everyone hurries for a great selling.
Alcoholic?  Don't despair.
Need a diploma?  Call us.
Hello, my good friend,
I greet you in the name of the Lord.
Big desires but little money?
The pill form gives you a unique
Rock solid
increase in
******SPAM******DIPLOMATIC
******SPAM******SEE INFORMATION
******SPAM******My name is Mr.
Your help, please!
KIND ATTENTION
Viagra without fraud.
 
 

Flotsam and Epiphany, on Music
May 2, 2010
 
   I was handing out flyers for my upcoming concert, and the woman, partway up the stairs, said, "I can't take one, I'm playing the piano and singing -" and suddenly she stared at me.  "I have your poem on my wall!  With the picture of Luise!  I cut it out of the Radcliffe Quarterly and framed it - it's the only poem I have in my studio!"
   Luise Vosgerchian, longtime Harvard music professor, changed a lot of people's lives, including mine. I probably would not be doing anything I am not doing if not for Luise.  She gave me permission to ask my own foolish questions, to settle for no answer less than the quintessence.
    At Harvard, ingenousness was not the name of the game; status meant playing to the most advanced and erudite audience.  Luise just didn't care.  Her questions were utterly simple - and finding satisfactory answers took her years of careful listening and analysis.  The audience that most intrigued her was not the trained, professionally-bound musician - but the "general student," the one who knew no terminology and had little background in classical music.  She  coming from a place of intellectual rigor.  She believed that once she could take a piece of complex music and explain it in terms that a beginner could understand, that only then had she penetrated and communicated its essence.  She wanted to know why Mozart sounded like Mozart and not like Beethoven or Haydn.  She wanted to know how she always knew that she was hearing Brahms and not Schumann.  She wanted to crack the code; she would not rest until she had identified the composer's unique thumbprint, the intimacy of that beating heart.
    After the concert, the woman and I reminisced.  Luise Vosgerchian was the consummate classical pianist, and it is interesting that the two of us have been able to take what we learned from her into such different directions.  Tina deVaron (www.tinadevaron.com) is a singer/songwriter who signature CD's are jazz-flavored explorations of motherhood; my interest is in extending the classical idiom into improvisation of all flavors - new-age, jazz, folk, atonal . . . perhaps perhaps when you learn to explore music with the kind of intellectual intimacy Luise demanded, you are more likely to find the originality of your own voice.
   Here's the poem.  I wrote it a day or two before Luise died, and although I was not in the room with her that day, this poem was.
 
URTEXT
for Luise Vosgerchian
March 13, 2000
 
Luise, what is the thumbprint
of  Death?
Does she charge in
with Mendelssohnian motor?  Or
loop-de-loop like the deep
and stately hemiolas
of Brahms?  Surprise
with a belly laugh,
like Papa Haydn,  rage
and relent through the endless
cellular structures of Beethoven?
Or does she spin an infinite
chain of Mozartean melodies?
 
Standing
with your ear against that door
which none of us yet has opened,
we rely once again upon
your curiosity,
the brilliance of your fearlessness in asking
the fool’s question.
 
I remember you
poised, hawk-like, over
the piano keyboard,
your mind plummeting
down, down, straight
down to the moving target –
until with a
shriek!
you nailed it.
 
 
Now
you are preparing yourself
to unravel the mysteries
of that other music.
As the door
cracks open, and the new
sounds explore
your ears alone,
will you carry for us
this question?  Luise, what
is the heartbeat of God?
 

Mind/Body Connections 2, Flotsam and Epiphany 4

 
            I’m walking briskly down the dirt road that runs by my house, and suddenly, I feel an absence.  My little dog is not at my side. I turn around to look back, and he’s cowering by the neighbor’s mailbox.  He won’t budge, no matter how encouragingly I call to him.  He’s hit a sticking point.
            We pretend that information is objectively received, and that our minds operate in a compartmentalized way.  For example, spelling a word is simply the iteration of an abstract piece of information, right? The same sequence of the same letters can be found in any dictionary. 
            But the experience of knowing how the word is spelled is different for everyone; because no two people have received that information in exactly the same way.  The visual memory of that word is not a closed compartment; it is linked to a particular moment in time, and it is open to the information that wafts in from all the other senses.  Was the word drilled into us from the blackboard before a spelling test?  Or did we first read it in a novel we were clandestinely devouring under the covers by flashlight?  Did we look up to see it carved in granite over a museum?  Or was it eye-level on the kitchen table, in goofy red script on a cereal box?
            The whole body/mind experience of encountering the word is not normally separable from the visual memory function of how to spell it.  The spelling of that word is not separate from the smell of the chalkboard it appears on, or the print secretly revealed under the covers, or the dead leaves being blown across the granite letters, or the sugary taste on the tongue as the eyes peruse the cereal box.  If the experience is memorable – even (especially!) at an unconscious level - it can become a sticking point.
            So what is my little dog’s sticking point?  Why won’t he follow me down the road he’s been trotting down almost every day for his entire life?
            Simply reaching a point in the road can remind you of something that happened at that spot.  If that experience was powerful enough, it can pull you right back into that other time. 
 
     The year my son was one year old, almost every day we would walk next door to visit his two-year old neighbor.  One day, we met at the halfway point at the edge of her driveway.  My son was carrying a bottle of juice, and the little girl demanded one, too.  “We drink juice from a cup,” said her father.  The little girl was inconsolable; that ended the visit for the day. 
     Then, two months later, we happened to meet at the same point in the driveway, around the same time of day.  My son had nothing in his hands.  The little girl looked at him, and suddenly cried:  “I want a bottle of juice!”
 
            What had happened?  For our young neighbor, time had telescoped. She was suddenly navigating with the same neuronal map that had been created, under stressful conditions, two months before.  At this particular location, with this particular group of people, she had been refused that which her small heart desired, at that particular moment, more than anything else in the universe! That experience of traumatic intensity was now, quite literally, her “now.”  And so, we replayed the scene we had written two months before – even without the instigating prop.
            When we realize that our companions have reached sticking point, it is useless to reason with them.  “Logic” has nothing to do with it; the system is navigating an internal landscape rather than the external, shared one.   They have tesseracted to a parallel universe. 
If we want to bring them back, it can be helpful to guess where they have gone.  It is even more helpful to know them, to know where they feel met and supported, and what reinforces the self who would rather grow and be happy.
             We have options.   First we meet the other.  Some children feel met by a hug, or by being rocked.   If this child feels met by information, we might attempt to join them in the past and bring them forward to present time. “You used to be little, now you are big, you used to drink from a bottle, now you drink from a cup!”  For many children, doing both these things at once would be more powerful than either alone.  But for some, the negative reaction to one might cancel out a positive reaction to the other.
             Sometimes, creating a diversionary event is a way to meet the other, and bring them forward into present time.   Some children like to be picked up and swung.  Sometimes you can meet a child’s eyes and do something that always makes them laugh – raise one eyebrow, wiggle your ears, make a funny sound, tell a joke.   (This tends to work best when the child still between worlds – with one foot still in present time and one foot in the old trauma.  If a child is more than 50% gone, this tactic doesn’t usually work).
             The most important thing we can do is to be present with them without judgment or anxiety of our own.  This creates a safe space in present time to return to, when the child is ready.  Sometimes a gentle physical touch helps – to stroke the child’s hair, or touch the child’s shoulder.  We might begin a low-key conversation with the others present, creating a normal present time that will eventually draw the child into the “now”.   This can help to let the energy run its course. 
             It is important to remember that, when old traumas re-surface, it is an opportunity to heal the past.  When we push through the difficulty without awareness or empathy, the sticking point retains its power.  It can even grow in power, collecting these re-enforcing traumas like burrs on a dog’s coat. 
            But to empathize is not to wallow.  Our job is to create a compassionate environment that makes it possible to let go and move on.  This requires both acknowledging the past, and keeping our eyes on the prize.
             My little dog is still cowering by the mailbox.  I remember that a week before, a neighbor was power-walking by.  My dog wouldn’t stop barking.  I was embarrassed; I exhorted him to stop.  
             My dog was put in a situation of fundamental conflict. His biology was telling him, “Bark your head off, protect your pack!”  His superior in the pack was telling him, ”Be quiet, run away!”  He was being shamed for doing his duty.  It must have been awful for him.
So when he returned to that sticking point in the road, all systems broke down again.  He couldn’t go forward, or back.  He froze.
            I know my dog.  I walked over, picked him up, cuddled him, said nice things, and carried him over the sticking point.  I set him down some feet further on and ran forward, calling encouragingly.  He ran raced ahead of me, tail wagging, ears flying, released.
            Acknowledge the past, keep your eyes on the prize.  Freedom.

Mind/Body Connections & Music 1
February 13, 2010
 
     Seven month-old Allison is nursing in her mother’s arms, while year-old Mimi is crawling around the rug, cruising for objects that might fit in her mouth.  Nora is almost two; she can walk!  She toddles over to the piano, reaching up to the high keys to play a series of delicate little riffs. Eight month-old Kaya is sitting bolt upright between her mother’s knees, flapping her arms and cawing with excitement. 
     It’s a village.  It’s my office on Wednesday mornings.
     Parents often bring children to my office for one-on-one craniosacral therapy*. This gentle technique tracks the pulsing rhythm of cerebrospinal fluid.   As I lightly follow its current with my hands, bones can shift gently back into place.  Tissues may relax and release their stress.  The effects can seem magical, and it is very well suited to the delicate and malleable bodies of babies.  So parents bring me babies who have one eye bigger than the other, or have difficulty latching on to nurse, or a complicated birthing history, or symptoms of colic, or difficulty sleeping . . . as well as babies that could just use a little extra TLC.
     But there are a lot of ways that any caring adult can stimulate the flow of cerebrospinal fluid.  These are the songs and games babies have loved for millennia – bouncing, jiggling, tapping, swinging, singing, chanting, and lots of eye contact and nonsense words.  By holding your baby with one hand cradling the head and the other cradling the bottom, you are stimulating the two ends of the craniosacral pump.   And simply by holding your baby with awareness, listening with open attention - in any position – you may begin to communicate in a new and intimate way.
     The parents who make their way to my office are loving and intelligent and informed, committed to doing the best for their babies.   But I have found that many of them don’t know some of these basic techniques. 
     So I have begun to spend some time in these craniosacral sessions teaching them. Interestingly enough, the technique that usually creates the most objections is singing.  It is a tragedy that many parents are afraid to sing - even to their babies, who crave the sound of their loved ones’ voices more than any other sounds in the world!
     We pick some simple and familiar songs – Twinkle Twinkle Little Star is a standard; I have yet to find someone who doesn’t know it!  And we sing, while we rock, jiggle, bounce, swing, or simply hold the baby with awareness.  When we get tired of repeating words, we make up our own, or sing nonsense sounds.  The baby doesn’t care.  The baby just wants to be encompassed in that wonderful experience of sound and movement.
     One baby came to me at five weeks old. He cried almost constantly. He had been injured during the birth process, and he seemed to be in a continual state of trauma.  So while I did the craniosacral work, I also jiggled and rocked him and sang Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, over and over. 
     His mom said that she had “the worst voice in the world” (of course, she didn’t!)  But she sang and jiggled him, too, and it worked! When I met the dad a few months later with his son – who was now smiling and sitting up and playing with toys - he said, “You know, the most important thing you did was to show us how to rock and sing to David.”
     So why don’t we adults just naturally rock and sing, bounce and jiggle and swing our children to the full extent of our mutual energies?   I think it’s partly a cultural issue.  My mom and dad had a dog-eared copy of Dr. Spock’s famous paperback on their shelves.  They – along with many of their generation - followed advice about not “spoiling” their babies.  This was often interpreted as not holding the babies when they needed comfort!  You can’t model what you don’t experience.  Handling babies is a visceral knowledge; you need to have it in your body to pass it on.  
     It’s the kind of information that is best communicated as women talk and work and sing and move together; the babies in arms, the children playing on the ground.  So every Wednesday morning, my Cambridge office becomes a village.
 
     Little Allison is watching big Mimi locomote on hands and knees. Allison pushes up on her belly to try it, too – her first attempt at crawling, ever!  I get on my belly and crawl, singing one of the reflex integration songs from Rappin’ on the Reflexes:
     I am a lizard, crawling on my belly
     Crawling, crawling, crawling, crawling,
     Crawling on my belly.
     Stick my tongue out, catch a fly!**
     The other moms try it, too.  Nora pays no attention; everything she is interested in is up high.  But baby Kaya is definitely intrigued, especially when I stick my tongue out.  She moves her little tongue.  Pretty soon she’s nursing again. 
      It’s time to go.  Nora’s mom catches me - she is concerned about Nora’s headlong rush into the world, which is resulting in lots of bumps and bruises.  I nod, remembering how we tried, more than a year ago, to keep Nora creeping on her hands and knees.  The determined baby would almost immediately flip to the side and begin to “scooch.”  Nora probably didn’t achieve enough stability on the ground before she started walking, so she relies on her momentum for balance – with some painful results!  We talk about scheduling some private time for cranial work.  Meanwhile, I’m thinking about some infant reflexes that we can explore in next week’s class, to help Nora pattern some more stability into her system – Babinsky*** for sure, and maybe Leg Cross Flexion-Extension.**** We’ll have a lot of fun with playing with baby feet . . .
       It takes a village. 
 
*For more information about my craniosacral practice, go to:
http://www.lydiancenter.com/services/craniosacral.php
 
Infant reflexes are an instinctual, universal language of movement that all babies know.  They are an essential piece in the whole puzzle of human development.
To learn more about Rappin’ on the Reflexes  and preview some of the songs:  http://www.evekodiak.com/rappin.html


For a general introduction to infant reflexes, click on the link below and go to these titles: “Infant Reflexes and Development”  and “Movements of Origin”
http://www.evekodiak.com/read.html
 
**  Rappin’ on the Reflexes, page 41 – Integrating the Bauer Crawling Reflex
***  RR, page 75 – “Four-Sided Feet”
****  RR, page 61 – “Walking on a Stony Beach”
 

January 25, 2010
Flotsam and Epiphany 3
 
            Last night, the temperature rose, and today rain is falling on the snow. As I walk up the hill toward the high field, the air is palpable, blowing like an enormous scarf in the wind.  White vapor chases across the snow like ghosts.  Each low mountain on the horizon is brushed across the next in graduating degrees of transparency; in the foreground, black pines stand in attitudes of supplication.
            The scene is automatically lonely. I think about all the Japanese prints I have ever seen, pines and mountaintops, a hermitage perched halfway up like the nest of some solitary bird.  As the wind blows across my face, I think about generations of monks meditating in those little huts. I’ve always wondered what the monks were actually doing, but today it occurs to me that they could have been acting as spiritual batteries, generating energy, clearing frequencies, charging the environs with positive feeling.
            Even so, those monks seemed pretty lonely a lot of the time.  When I get home, I pull out a volume of the 18^th century Zen poet, Ryokan, and read:
 
Deep in the mountains at night, alone in my hermitage,
I listen to the plaintive sound of rain and snow.
A monkey cries on top of a mountain;
The sound of the valley river has faded away.
A light flickers in front of the window;
On the desk, the water in the inkstone has dried.
Unable to sleep all night,
I prepare ink and brush, and write this poem.  
 
            Over twenty years ago, I used to sit Zen.  My teacher was a professional pianist and Zen master; to me, she felt powerful and steady as a mountain.  But after undergoing a painful divorce, she became sick with cancer.  I was angry.  I had believed that enlightenment protected you from dying of ordinary human foibles, like broken hearts. 
            When I was a teenager, one of my fantasies was to become a forest ranger, perched in a hut on the mountaintop, watching for fires. The forest below would be the koan.  I would become so intimate with its rhythms that the slightest change would be noticed.  Remembering this, I ask my son if he has ideas about what he might like to do in his life. 
           “I want to get married,” he said.  These are the conversations that remind me that I have brought a truly different soul into the world.
            Now, I tell him about Ryokan.  I tell him how the monk moved into a little hermitage halfway up the mountain of his childhood village, how he stayed all there all winter, and came down in the spring to beg for rice, play with the children, drink sake (rice wine) with the farmers.  I read him about Ryokan’s meeting with Hosai, the philosopher, and how he left his hut after a long conversation to get them some sake:
 
            Hosai waited, but Ryokan did not return.  When he could stand it no longer, he went out . . . to his astonishment, he saw Ryokan about a hundred yards from the hermitage, sitting under a pine, gazing dreamily at the full moon.  “Ryokan!  Where have you been?  I’ve been waiting for you for more than three hours!”
            “Hosai-san!  You have come just in time.  Isn’t the moon splendid?”
 
            My son is laughing.  “No offense, he sounds like you,” he says.
            When he leaves, I read some more of Ryokan’s poems. It has been a lonely few days for me. Underneath my life I have felt a continuous running stream of anxiety, separating me from my experience, from others, from myself.  Reading, I fall asleep on the couch.
             But when I wake up, somehow, the anxiety is gone.  The monk on the mountain has done his work.
 
            O, that my priest’s robe were wide enough
                        to gather up all the suffering people
            In this floating world.
 
 
quotes from One Robe, One Bowl:  The Zen Poetry of Ryokan
translated by John Stevens
published 1977 by John Weatherhill of New York and Tokyo
pages 29, 13, and 75
 

Flotsam and Epiphany 2
January 18, 2010
 
            Arcing down into the white field, the snowball exploded upon impact.  The little dog was confused. Every inch of his body had been preparing to chase it - and without warning, the object he tracked had completely disappeared. 
            My son leaned down, scooped up more snow in his bare hands, and tossed it upwards.  The dog’s nose transcribed the curve of the projectile.  He poised, ready to run - and stopped again, looking up at us.  Where had it gone?
           The third snowball remained whole on impact.  The little dog bounded to the spot and began to dig.  The white sphere disintegrated in a general upward shower, and the olfactory memory of my son’s fingers was attached to no object.  The little dog stopped again, befuddled.  There was nothing to retrieve. 
            It was one of those moments when the big cameraman in the sky zooms out for a long shot.  I saw everything with perfect clarity – the white field sloping up toward the sky, my laughing teen-aged son, the expectant little dog.  Metaphor hit me like a snowball.
             Yesterday’s laundry didn’t get folded, on my desk is a month-old letter that never quite made it into the mailbox, and sitting on the shelf is a beautiful solo piano CD that has been 90% done for years, but I can’t seem to justify the money needed for the final production.  And the things I do finish never yield the results that I had in mind when I began.
            For example, last year, on a lark, I entered a contest to play with the famous cellist Yo-Yo Ma.   It turned into a fifteen-minute set of piano variations, a 4-part movie on You Tube, and about ten days spent camped at my computer, emailing everyone I could think of to vote for me.  Chasing that particular snowball, I did not retrieve the hoped-for recording session with master.  But I was left with the provocative, shifting scents of possible meanings.  And writing about it now, I realize that that experience continues to change me. *
            In the eighties, a book came out called “A Course in Miracles.”  It included 365 exercises, one for each day of the year.   “A Course in Miracles” is one of the many things I’ve never finished.  In fact, I’ve never gotten past the first exercise.  It involves looking at everything you see, and saying something like, “That __________ has no meaning.”   I’m still working on it; I doubt I’ll ever graduate to the other 364.
            If experience is the snowball, then meaning is the scent that lingers once the snowball has dissolved.  It is hard to imagine a world without meaning, but even the effort gets us a little closer.  One of my favorite methods is to enter the exquisitely impersonal world of Wallace Stevens:
 
            You must become an ignorant man again
            And see the sun with ignorant eye . . .
                                                            (from Notes Toward A Supreme Fiction)
 
           Our meanings separate us from our origin, the eternal activity of Creation.  Our lives fall in and out of that fundamental tone like waves, like wind, like drifting snow.  Everything that we do and feel and are is an arc of desire - released from, returning to, that snow-white vibration.
           Stepping through the thin curtain of bare trees, and over the low stone wall, I leave the white field behind.  I feel a pang - I am walking out of a clarity I won’t be able to hold.  I am walking from a pristine realm of no-thing, into a brown world of objects that maintain their sometimes difficult shapes, into feelings that have the power to exalt our hearts and dash our hopes, into thoughts that can be complicated, troubling, and potentially dangerous.
           But my son is laughing, and the little dog has already forgotten his disappearing prize.  He is dancing around us, happy that my son is happy, happy that he is outside in winter with his favorite people and a thousand wonderful smells.  
           I have a choice.  I can worry about the things I need to take care of, and the thoughts and feelings that attend them. 
           Or I can be happy.   
 
* Click on the link below to watch Part 4 of the Dona Nobis Pacem Variations, and the way I told my contest story on January 22, 2009
http://www.evekodiak.com/watch.html
 

I'm really combining 3 blogs in one, so I'll tag and number each entry as it flies out:
 
ON MUSIC gives you Eve the musician:  performances to share, reflections about music and musicians, improvisation ideas, practical tips on the technique and practice of an art
 
MIND/BODY CONNECTIONS  gives you Eve the practitioner:  stories about people, information about developmental movement, dealing with trauma, the mystery of communication, parenting, children, ad infinitum . . .
 
FLOTSAM AND EPIPHANY just gives you Eve on vacation in her mind.
 
            Email me through my website if you’d like to be notified when a new blog entry appears.  And your reflections will be appreciated!
                                                                                                            eve
 

December 27, 2009
The Journey of the Magi


Late afternoon, and I am out walking with my little dog, realizing that somehow this holiday season we never got around to exchanging cards and cookies with our neighbors.  I am vocalizing, as I often do in the privacy of these back roads, and when I round the corner I hear a voice call out:  “A singer!”  It is Mrs. K., who is in her eighties, standing in her driveway, wearing a long mauve down coat.  Except for a stray wisp she keeps tucking back in, her plain gray hair is hidden under a mink hat.  “The cat wanted to come out,” she explains, “and then he wanted to go right back in again. But I didn’t.”
 
My little dog is impatient to move on, to investigate the smells that are tantalizing his nose in the sudden December thaw, so I invite Mrs. K. to come with us.  As we walk between banks of snow on the muddy road, she asks me how I like her hat.  It was a gift from an alumna at the private school where Mrs. K. has been teaching pottery for more than fifty years.   “It’s so warm and light,” she tells me.
 
I ask Mrs. K if her family is still keeping bees, and she says, no.  A few years ago her daughter looked out of the window to see a black bear sitting on the front steps, licking the tarp that had covered the hive.  “We never used to have bears,” she says.
 
“As the area gets more built up, I guess the bears need to find new places to live,” I say.  If I were a bear, I’d certainly consider this mountain to be a plum piece of real estate.  Forming the unconscious backdrop of our lives, the mountain holds acres of woods, little streams, berry bushes, rotten trees filled with grubs, and lady’s slippers that arrive like secret women in the spring.
 
We carefully cross the “busy” road (cars can come every couple of minutes, and they go fast – 35 miles an hour) and walk a stretch of woods to the old Whippoorwill Farm.  Its imposing dark brown face does not acknowledge the smaller, newer houses, scattered here and there on what were once its own fields and orchards and woods.   
 
An overgrown meadow gives us a view of the mountain.  We live too close to see it from our houses, but from here we can see how powerfully it raises the horizon.  This mountain creates microclimates that can change even a half-mile towards town; sometimes we have our own private snowstorms.  It’s like living in a paperweight.
 
Now, the mountain is acting as a fog machine:  warmer air is sifting down from above to hit that enormous cold bulk, and curls of fog are lifting off its black sides like an endless supply of pencil shavings.  At this sunset hour, the vapor curling off the mountainside is pink.  I have never seen pink fog before.  Neither has Mrs. K., and she has lived here longer than I have been alive.  “I wish I had my camera,” I say.    
 
I have clearly pushed one of Mrs. K.’s buttons.  “Don’t wish for your camera!” she scolds.  “Be in the moment.  There are beautiful sunsets up at the school; people are always running for their cameras and they miss the moment.  Just enjoy it now.”
 
So we watch the rosy fog waft down the sides of the dark mountain.  We notice a puddle that creates a large pink mirror, pierced by the wavery daggers of tree branches.  We watch the snow in the surrounding fields take on a pink cast.  “It’s like a Monet!” I exclaim. 
 
Mrs. K. looks at me severely.  “His paintings of pink snow at sunset,” I quickly explain. I feel like an adolescent under her evaluating eyes.  She decides to let my not-quite-in-the-moment remark go, and I content myself with silently observing my familiar world turn exotic and subtle shades of pink.
 
As the color drains from the sky, we walk back to our houses.  “Well!” Mrs. K. says brightly when we reach her driveway.  “If you hadn’t come along, I wouldn’t have had this walk.  I would have just stood in the driveway and gone back in!”
 
My little dog and I head back to our house. Overhead, the white moon slightly overfills its halfway mark, like a pregnant woman who is just beginning to show.   
 
The journey of the magi might have been like this:  an unplanned walk with friends, a taking of time, a willingness to notice an extra-ordinary light.