Tag Archives: reflection

Adventure and ibises

At my daughter’s suggestion, we ended up in Mesopotamia: central to eastern Turkey, fertile crescent, Euphrates and Tigris, vaguely following the borders of Syria, Iran, and Armenia up toward the Caucasus to Kars. It was, indeed, quite an adventure. We were booked on a tour following a section of the storied Silk Road through Wild Frontiers, a British company, and spent 11 days in Turkey. It was informative, beautiful, marvelous–a fabulous way to spend over a week with someone I love who lives about 2,000 miles away from me. Our expert tour leader Timuçin Şahin (Tim) is a history enthusiast and sustainable-agriculture proponent who loves his native land and–despite its current repressive government–is not shy about noting its failings, complexities, and fraught past; he says a truthful narrative is the sanest way to accept the past and learn from it rather than repeat it. Though Türkiye doesn’t seem to be heading that way at the moment, and if anything, some of the processes that have led to Erdoğan’s consolidation of governmental power sound frighteningly familiar to this US citizen.

Which brings up another point about our trip: we were the only two Americans. The other ten tour participants were British, mostly pensioners. After a few days, when we felt comfortable with one another, one person admitted that “we were all a bit apprehensive about having Americans on the tour.” Apparently the perception is that more of us in the US support the current administration than is actually the case. So it was up to me and my daughter to correct some stereotypes and present as informed, kind, curious, reasonably well-educated world citizens. I hope we succeeded.

A larger-than-life bald ibis statue and yours truly at the bird sanctuary.

As I’ve no desire to chronologically report the entire trip, and honestly cannot do it justice, I am using my back-at-home time to reflect not on “highlights” (though there definitely were some) or inspiration–though there was that, too–but on some of the quieter surprises that enrich an experience like this one. For example, the Bald Iris enthusiast and savior we met in Birecik along the banks of the Euphrates. This man, whose name I didn’t write down, alas, has been operating a sanctuary for these birds for almost 40 years. The migratory kelaynak was once seen in huge flocks throughout Egypt and much of the Middle East and was considered sacred in some cultures. They went extinct in Egypt quite long ago and have been declining rapidly in the 20th century due to pesticides, climate change, environmental habitat destruction, sport hunting, etc. There are a few non-migrating colonies of Northern bald ibis in Morocco. Yes, it’s a funny-looking bird, but beautiful in its way. The ones we saw in Birecik are theoretically migratory but mostly reside in the colony, because whenever they are let out to migrate, they end up dead (found through tracking devices). The cheerful, enthusiastically hopeful ibis savior who photographs, tags, puts up nest boxes, and corrals the birds so they don’t fly off in winter is a veritable encyclopedia about these avians. He has put together a small museum, informational pamphlets, gift shop, and fund-raising platform in Birecik. There are decent human beings in the world who recognize the value of non-human creatures. This guy is an inspiration.

My readers may wonder whether I found poetry inspiration on this trip; the answer is, dunno yet. Probably, once I settle down and reflect, mull stuff over, consolidate my notes and my photos, and get over my intense jet lag. There was certainly no time for writing during the tour, as the itinerary was packed with cool things to learn, see, do, visit, hike up, float on (there were boat rides), and eat. I’d never been on a tour before. I liked this one, and because I had no knowledge of Turkey’s culture, language, economic situation, transportation options, etc, I was truly grateful for our tour guide’s expertise and enthusiasm.

Not a brisk pace

Recently, a physician I see (for fibromyalgia and related conditions) suggested that I need to walk more often because “walking is the best exercise for you and will give you more energy in the long run.” The advice surprised me a little; I love to walk and, except when the weather is very cold or super wet, I walk most days. It turns out that what she meant is that I should be walking for 40 minutes or so “at a brisk pace.” When I asked her to define what she considered a brisk pace, she said two or three miles an hour.

This poses a slight problem for me because while I am happy to walk around my yard, woods, and neighborhood for 30-40 minutes almost daily, I can’t say I do it at a brisk pace. I get distracted and stop to look at things. Bugs. Worms. Toads. Birds. Flowers. New leaves. Nests. Spiderwebs…I loaf along, as Whitman claimed to do. Some days I start out with good intentions to keep up a lively pace, maybe even to the point where I can feel my heart rate going up. And then–was that a redtail hawk overhead? Did I hear an ovenbird? Oooh, the Solomon’s-seal is in bloom!

Today–the walk was very wet, as we’ve just had about 3″ of rain–musing on my not-exactly-exercise ambulations, I thought of this Mary Oliver poem.

Walking to Oak-Head Pond and Thinking of the Ponds I Will Visit in the Next Days and Weeks

by Mary Oliver

What is so utterly invisible
as tomorrow?
Not love,
not the wind,
not the inside of a stone.
Not anything.
And yet, how often I’m fooled–
I’m wading along
in the sunlight–
and I’m sure I can see the fields and the ponds shining
days ahead–
I can see the light spilling
like a shower of meteors
into next week’s trees,
and I plan to be there soon–
and, so far, I am
just that lucky,
my legs splashing
over the edge of darkness,
my heart on fire.
I don’t know where
such certainty comes from–
the brave flesh
or the theater of the mind–
but if I had to guess
I would say that only
what the soul is supposed to be
could send us forth
with such cheer
as even the leaf must wear
as it unfurls
its fragrant body, and shines
against the hard possibility of stoppage–
which, day after day,
before such brisk, corpuscular belief,
shudders, and gives way.

~

At my place, it’s feeder creeks I hear and think I may visit, not ponds, but I identify with the mood of this poem. Walks offer me that joy, that unfurling of leaves, ferns, everything…time to reflect and feel gratitude. If I don’t do quite as well by my heart and muscles as I ought to, maybe my psyche or soul will compensate. If I loaf, it’s a purposeful, sweet loafing, the kind of activity that poets tend to do; it gives me energy of a non-physical sort. (And I think Mr. Whitman would concur.)

Walt Whitman in mid-life, probably a bit younger than I am now.

Curriculum vitae

My year has begun with half a dozen literary journals declining my poems, but it has also begun with a proliferation of new poems–which makes me happy. There are several reasons for a prolific spurt, some of which involve sad events that have turned me toward reflection. While sorrow isn’t a reliable prod for writing in my case, reflection almost always is. Also, attending a workshop is generative for me.

In last week’s session, we read Lisel Mueller’s “Curriculum Vitae,” and Anita asked us to emulate the poem for our own life story. I encourage you to read Mueller’s poem if you are not familiar with it; it’s full of lovely imagery and is so concise and evocative that it stands as autobiography–quite an amazing piece. Also daunting: how to use that poem as a writing prompt? I needed a strategy, so to keep myself as brief and non-narrative as possible, I limited my version to 15 points instead of 20. Then I edited it down several times, taking out as much as possible while leaving things that feel “true.”

What I realized after this practice in form, and after revising it and tightening it up, is that if I were to start again rather than revise–and were to focus on different aspects of my life experience–I could write a completely different, but still true, poem. I could write a dozen completely true and completely different CV poems! I could have used national events that occurred during my life and had greater or lesser impact on me–the Kennedy assassination, the March on Montgomery, Viet Nam War on television, etc. all the way to 9/11 and since then; or I could have focused on friends and family, their appearances and disappearances from my life; or places I lived or traveled…easily a dozen CVs, curated to present a lifetime.

So while the piece I wrote isn’t a “keeper,” not something I would send out to literary journals, the practice of writing and revising it has been remarkably useful (thank you, Anita Skeen!); I’m more aware than ever of how perspective, focus, and image affect narrative. And of how many ways there are to “tell” an experience, which of course is something poets often do: revisit, re-frame, re-imagine an experience, loss/trauma, or relationship using numerous forms, images, perspectives, speakers, and so on.

Which is certainly one reason Anita asked us to try this exercise.

I did not manage to be as lyrical and concise as Mueller, but then I didn’t expect to; she was an amazing poet. From her poem cited above, I especially relate to the line: “At home the bookshelves connected heaven and earth.” It felt like that at my parents’ house, too.

I’ll be brave and post the practice poem, one of many versions of my autobiography.

~

CV, after Lisel Mueller

1.	Three weeks before summer solstice, I enter the world. My father considers me the first perfect thing in his life.
2.	Underfoot, meadow grass and church aisles. 
3.	We move from the manse to the city, where my sister goes twice to the hospital and I walk two blocks to school.
4.	Suburban house, square and white as a die. We learn to ride bicycles in the street.
5.	Bussing and gas shortage, algebra, barefoot girls in summer. My embarrassment at growing too tall, too thin, too bookish, too moody.
6.	Early entry into college. When the only thing I wanted was to get away.
7.	In Michigan, snow like I had never seen before.
8.	Some years of misery, tedious, purposely omitted. But I meet the people who most encourage me to write.
9.	Back to my parents’ kind embrace. Celibacy, recalibration, writing.
10.	We meet one summer. I write you so many letters. It might be love.
11.	Two children 18 months apart, vegetables in the backyard: it is love.
12.	Autodidact in the garden, in the world of literature, in child-rearing. There are cats, chickens, guinea pigs, a beloved dog, but I need to return to study and poems.
13.	Loss and joy keep me writing, teaching keeps me busy, children grow and travel far. My books see print.
14.	Pandemic. 
15.	My father dies, my mother loses her power of speech, friends start failing, there are dark weeks. Many hours in the garden, growing and grieving. We hold on, uncertain, but whole. 

~

Mindlessly

There are some necessary but mindless tasks that I’m good at and don’t mind doing. Weeding, for example (unless it’s raining, or disgustingly hot), or cleaning a bathroom. My morning chore today entailed removing staples that fastened carpet underlayment to the floor. There are dozens of these staples stuck in the subfloor, and most of them have bits of foam-like fabric wedged in them. The edges of the room are studded with tacking strips–annoying to remove when one is not a professional. Best Beloved and I did consider hiring someone to replace the floor, but since it is a job we can do ourselves…well, we have the time and are doing it.

There’s a difference between the mindless and the tedious. I don’t care for tedium; but a task I can mindlessly manage–something physical, but not too demanding, without a lot of surprises I need to problem-solve–those projects can be almost relaxing. When weeding, my thoughts can wander. The job is so familiar and repetitive that there is no need to devote much brainpower to it. Ideas, reflections, observations, images can float aimlessly in my mind. I can think about poems while weeding. Taking a walk in a woods or quiet countryside offers me the same sort of internal/external environment.

Proofreading was like that for me, back when I was a proofreader (when there were such things as proofreaders in every newspaper, type or print shop, publishing house, ad agency, and legal department). Editing takes some thought; but the less engaged a proofreader is with the text, the better. I was employed as a proofreader when I first recognized that I was truly serious about writing poetry, and I found value in the ’empty mind’ that my workaday job fostered. There was a bonus in that sometimes I did glean new information from the materials I read.

~

Composing this post, it strikes me that “mindless” is the wrong word, or not an accurate word to convey what it’s like to feel internally occupied while the physical body’s doing something else. “Reflection” implies more stillness. Something more akin to walking meditation?

At any rate, I can hope that the weeding and staple-removing might eventually get my poetry mojo re-booted. I have to work on my next manuscript and continue to promote my latest book, too. In the meantime at least I’m accomplishing something.

~

Reflective spaces

Many years back, I spent awhile researching and pondering the ways time can play out in a poem. I fully intended to spend another couple of years developing theory on space in poetry, but that essay never came about. Life diverted me from literary scholarship and criticism, and that’s alright. I never was very good at scholarship.

The idea, however, returned to me recently in one of those by-the-by moments; I had been writing to a friend about revisions and was re-reading Plath’s Ariel (the version with the facsimile pages and also drafts of the title poem and of “The Swarm”). I noticed that, from her earliest hand-written drafts, Plath chose to write “Ariel” in three-line stanzas–and that was something she did not revise or alter in any of her subsequent drafts.

Interesting. Stanza length happens to be one of the aspects of a draft I am most likely to change when revising. Stanzas being the little rooms of the poem, it seems the spaces between stanzas play, usually, a more than visual role in the best poems…well, that got me thinking about space in the poem and somehow led to thinking what poems offer. Why we read and write them, even in the 21st century.

Explicitly: The poem is a space for reflection. In the space of the poem, a reader can expand perspective or feel resonance, as in a concert hall; or find a mirroring of the reader’s self (reflection); or, in a critical sense, the reader can reflect upon the poem’s topic, context, argument, content, imagery, craft, language, or beauty. The space of the poem urges response and responsiveness. Poems are not rooms built solely by and for the writer but built of the circumstances and for the reader, too.

What poetry means, in terms of reflection, is that the response can be reflective of the reader’s space, as well as the writer’s. I know that I have had different responses/readings of the same poem depending upon the place I was in while reading it (emotional, physical, contextual “place”). Different kinds of mirrors reflect different visual images. The lighting matters. The time of day. The mood. All of those are spaces, metaphorically or actually. Different stanzaic rooms, different poetic rooms–ready for a reader’s exploration.

Photo by Jenna Hamra on Pexels.com

Intermission w/reflection

First, many thanks to Lesley Wheeler for her Virtual Salon series–in this one, she reviews/interviews Elizabeth Savage and Yours Truly: Virtual Salon No. 6

~

Herewith, a different sort of response for National Poetry Month; and I’m not sure I would call it a poem so much as a reflection–indeed, a prayer. It’s too sentimental to work into a finished piece, perhaps. Let’s call it an intermission, as I have at least one more poetry collection to respond to before April closes.

~

Easter Prayer for My Dad

A wedge of mackerel clouds points to the southeast horizon where just beyond
a low hill church bells ring for Easter morning and a woodpecker states
chuck chuck chuck as it makes its straight flight across field from one dead
ash tree to another, blackbirds calling wooker-chee after the bells cease chiming.
I think of Dad, standing at the pulpit, hands raised in grace or supplication, his
voice sonorous in the high-ceilinged church, a man wearing a robe and collar
and white silk embroidered in gold having laid away the purple of sorrow and
preparation. All the church’s raiment white, and we the congregants wearing our
best clothes not to impress our neighbors but to let God know we are grateful and
this is the best we can do. We know it’s not enough, Dad tells us, the huge Bible
open before him, but God will understand our good intentions.

Years later I develop questions such as if no human can understand the mind
of God—thank you, Job—or know His ways, how can a human assure us of such magnanimity on God’s part? To which Dad answers, faith, which has no reason,
ergo the question’s moot. But years-ago Easters I sat on the smooth oak
pew, staring at my best shoes, which always pinched, and pretending that
left foot and right foot were conversing or perhaps arguing until the organ’s
major chords and the words “All rise” brought me back to the community
of believers and Dad’s bass voice led us along the five-barred staffs, stacked verses,
and triumphant alleluias of “Jesus Christ Is Risen Today.” And I knew
I was not good enough but believed that I could be forgiven, and if Dad has
offered me anything I can rely on it has been forgiveness—so today, as the
woods begins to soften into green and the chickadee pronounces its name
incessantly from the beech—Dad, I’ve so much to be grateful for.

                          Amen.

CH Chucrch

Church of my childhood, First Presbyterian Church of Hamptonburgh, New York

Love & reflection

alice-heart1 copy

We express love because the gratification of love is enormous, and we continue to express love and to act protectively because the loss of love is traumatic. If we did not experience pain on the demise of those we love, if we had the pleasure of love but felt nothing when the object of our love is destroyed, we would be considerably less protective than we are.

It may also be that the very structure if consciousness opens the pathway to depression…To give up the essential conflict between what we feel like doing and what we do, to end the dark moods that reflect that conflict and its difficulties–this is to give up what it is to be human, of what is good in being human.

–Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression.

Reflection is a sign of consciousness, the ability to take in information and observe how it feels to be oneself in the face of that information, and to assess the impact of behaviors and actions and catastrophes and deaths. Socrates, the irritating questioner, required of human beings that capacity of reflectiveness. Solomon suggests this reflective ability is natural to people who undergo a depressive episode: “The unexamined life is unavailable to the depressed.” (italics mine)

Yet it is also this reflective consciousness which permits recovery among those who’ve been in the abyss, and sometimes a kind of bounce into remission/relief. Solomon adds that “[p]eople who have been through a depression and stabilized often have a heightened awareness of the joyfulness of everyday existence. They have a capacity for a kind of ready ecstasy and for an intense appreciation of all that is good in their life.”

That sense of “ready ecstasy” often acts as the impetus for poetry, in my experience. I am not sure that joyful awareness was worth the pain and despair–couldn’t I have just achieved heightened awareness through, say, meditation, song, or religion? Nonetheless, if I can craft a relationship with depression that is not a destabilizing battle, that’s enough for me. The recognition of joy and the critical thinking that reflection deepens in my consciousness keep me striving.

Yesterday morning, early, in the long grass, the three-legged doe gave birth to a fawn. I watched as they emerged from the meadow and headed for the woodlot together, mama still licking the little one.

Earth delivers ecstasies readily, if only we will observe.

ann e michael