Skin

 There is a kind of self-awareness that Descartes, the French Enlightenment philosopher expressed as "Cogito Ergo Sum" or "I think, therefore I am." In the philolosophy world, this phrase is called simply the Cogito for short, forms the basis for a whole school of thought called Rationalism, and is one of the few philosophical declarations that persists into common culture.  

It's a springboard for self-examination and self-study wherein one ruminates upon one's own condition and place in the world. Based on a basic understanding each person exists as a discrete human being, separate from all others, it is the beginning of our understanding of what we call personhood now. 

As one adds years, however, the nature of that awareness changes because, well, we change. Life begins by building and growing, but if one lives long enough, eventually evolves into shedding and simplifying.  The skin is perfect mirror for these changes. When we are young, the skin can barely hold all that we are and do. It is fine and smooth and full of young oil. 

Like a balloon, however, we can't possible continue to expand. Long lives accumulate too many experiences, too much knowledge and understanding, for young skin to contain and the strain of it is reflected there. 

Skin

 Satin yields to crepe as taut and plump dissolves into slack folds,

Accomplished adventure looking for release.

What is done is not left behind but carried,

Years less burden than welcome weight.

Gradual deconstruction remarks survival and triumph -

Allows accumulated pressures to fall away,

Disassembling their hidden gathered strength

Rather than preserving dangerous retention in visible beauty

Until skin can no longer contain it

And gives way in frantic cogito,

Imploding like a star. 

Some Raspberries Don't Ripen until after the Frost

 Some raspberries don't ripen until after the frost. It wasn't what they were made to do...raspberries  are meant for hot summer days and long sunshine, when their juice gathers sweet and they turn red day after day in tart waves. Then, it seems like there will always be more. I know better, of course. I know that the days will get short and cold, and that the time for raspberries will pass. But they don't.

Some roses don't bloom until October. When all around them, more predictable buds turn to hips, they refuse to prepare for sleep yet. It doesn't matter that so many around them are ready to store up what energy is left to them and save it for other days. They use everything they have left now to remind the world of beauty. They know it will be a long winter and and they've made their job memory.

Blanketflowers just don't know when to stop. For them, it could still be June, when they first poked strong stems up from sleepy dirt, just then gone warm. All summer, they bloomed thick and sunny and liked it. They must be addicted.

The daisies are probably laughing. In June, they bloomed dense, crowding each other for sunlight in sensational, snowy clumps. Then they stopped, but their leaves stayed green. Now, they give a single gift like a child holding a dandelion to his mother. Here, this is for you. I love you,

I think maple has been listening to them all, having refused to turn proper maple-y red and gold. It concedes only its tips to autumn, telling me that it, like all the others, knows what time it is, but has so loved feeling the sap run and favorable breezes. They are not ready to die.

Me either.

Last Berries

 

My raspberries fruit twice - 

once in July when the sun is high and hot, 

when bees circumnavigate their busy route between blooms, 

leaving me to reach between them for my breakfast -

 and once in September, when dew hangs heavy on their leaves 

and branches don't tolerate bending but, anticipating brittle cold, 

snap when I lift them to peer underneath for the purpling berries hiding there.

My raspberries fruit twice - 

once when still young and supple, 

confident of many more risings and settings, 

when, exposing their heads to the sky, 

look unafraid toward productive tomorrows, 

full of juice and beauty.

My raspberries fruit twice - 

once when nearly done, while leave curl dark at their edges,

and their buds are almost spent, 

nudged into fruit that may not have time to ripen.

These branches bend under accumulated weight,

grown from resisting the storms of a full season and 

the weight of small, green berries that will not have time to redden.

My raspberries fruit twice - 

early and late,

young and old, 

carefree and wise,

innocent and full of days.

One life, one season,

producing what they can until one perfect frost cuts them off.

Taste one. These last berries are the sweetest.

That's how I know they are mine. 

Why We Make Love After a Funeral: What to Do With Who We Are after COVID-19

Image credit: Adobe stock

 We live in times unlike even those of us who wear many years have ever known. These last days, we find, take a grim toll on body and spirit. Many died, and many more walk wounded, broken by illness or dread, as though having abandoned hope of ever again living in peace.

We recognize the worst of sufferers by their resolute faces turned toward chaos because there is nowhere else to go. This chaos, the like of which we have never seen before in either scope or magnitude. This chaos, from which we can see little relief or solution ahead. It's a dismal landscape to wander and we feel every sad step of it. This is our post-pandemic world of shared grief, one which will never brag a declaration of victory. We will not have won, but we can survive. 

We Need a Funeral

Deaths are all like that, of course - endings and darkness, and the pains that come with them. What we need is a funeral. We need to lay these sorrows to rest and raise a headstone over them - "Here lies the COVID-19 pandemic. It killed something carefree in us all, but we survived its deceitful malice. We survived." And then, once we have done thrown exultant handfuls of dirt into the grave, raise a toast.

We need do away with dread and panic. Every death leaves survivors wondering how to find a new firm place to stand. It's how surviving is done, and it is always done while grieving. 

Actually, we already know exactly how, having gone to enough funerals during our long years of life to recognize them through song and rhythm, smell and flavor. We know how to preside over the coffin lid's close, over the scattering of ashes. We know how to walk away from the grave and lift faces toward a world still alive.

That's why we make love after a funeral. The love gives loud voice and firm action to the life that remains. It declares that no amount of death can defeat whatever life still holds for the breathing.

And When the Funeral is Over

We will never run out of threatening sorrows. Misfortune constantly lurks, but graveyards do not make nourishing homes. No one residing there thrives. We, the living, bear no fault for turning our backs to the tombs, even as we remember them.

There is no going back. What we've lost is gone forever, but if funerals perform any service at all, they let us leave sorrow and memory where they belong - behind us. They let us remember our living humanity, fully expecting to grin and grow again.

COVID-19 cannot dismantle our humanity unless we let it, unless we make our beds among the dead. If we breathe, we are meant to live, and so rediscover common ground and the joy of rebuilding. Look somebody full in the eye today. They are hurting, too. 

Jackson Harbor, August 26

 

He said last night that every morning, just after dawn, commercial fishermen returned to the harbor here, unloading their catch. Here, where the sun first crests the island’s horizon.

This is Homer’s rose-red dawn whose fingers gather pink ribbons followed by shining gold streaks. These fingers, however, do not caress. They are not gentle. Instead, a chill, stiff breeze blows surrounding trees so that they rush with it. All around, every surface is sodden with dew. Cranes arch graceful necks in the shallows, then gather and fly overhead like black arrows sent to battle. Jets leave distant, silent trails.

One car drives past.

A man walks straight and solitary on the next dock.

The sun has cleared the treetops and casts lines of fire across the water, moving so slowly as to look stationary, but constant enough to leave the horizon increasingly behind.

The earth still turns, this sun declares, full of glory every day, never hiding behind half moons or crescents. This sun has ever been the Lord of Days, but merciful. A gull calls, flies through its halo, and is not burned.

Waves break and froth against a single buoy.

Two fisherman carry coffee and bait in indiscernible white cups, set up chairs next to the dock, and cast hushed lines.

Just down the coast, land narrows to a single rocky point. There is no sand here, only rocks rounded by waves more ambitious than today’s. The lake is loud in this place, wave after wave turning turning themselves over in silver sheen and foam. The bay undulates like a dark serpent playing in new sunshine.

There will be no returning fishing boats today, but rolling waters still rock on the cradle of the earth. The sun still crested the edge of the earth right on time. We are given another day.

Revelation

The world is a whirling place -

Spinning in dizzying, constant motion,

masking with benevolent deceit its gesturing,

attempting to convince with thin perception,

firm feet floating and clear giddy heads.

But it doesn’t always work.

The world cannot help but reveal itself.

It’s the movement, of course.

The coils of a wave,

a dissipation of shadow,

the reeling of stars,

give it away.

Reflection reminds me that 50,000 tides have drawn themselves in and out,

and half as many risings and settings have defined the days of life.

Eight hundred moons have waxed and waned,

and blood flowed through half those to mark the promise of life,

fruit both born and unborn.

Yet, even after all of these,

all the rhythms of this living,

this one heart still fills the world with insistent percussion.

Each day brings its own new-born light,

announcing itself as though the first ever made,

ignoring that millions like it have already gone before

and that I, myself, have witnessed so many of them.

It doesn’t matter, you see.

The turning is relentless.

A million, a thousand, or the first,

they have every one, acknowledged or not,

brought renewed miracle to the world.

Breath, brilliance;

Power, promise;

converge and distill,

unable to deny their source.

They are all the time close,

as a soft breeze stroking with welcome, familiar hands.

This world,

this grace-filled, specific, intentional gift,

opens full-face every new morning,

and all one needs to know it is to raise astonished eyes,

recognizing Joy.

Park Street at Dawn

 

Cool gray.

Clean white.

Muffled, covert blue.

Safe and spare, the house resists heartbreaking human heat, the demands of purple flesh and red blood.

Ice house, clean and clear.

It cannot long hold sway.

Even now, life’s inevitable chaos rises and memories begin to gather in corners.

Flowers poke through between stones.

New books settle on shelves, bringing wild, dangerous thoughts.

Sheets of dancing notes people the piano rack, threatening music.

We all do it.

Hoard the calm, grab up the quiet.

Pull in the drawbridge and pretend that peace is a natural state.

But you see, no saving can come where nothing is out of place.

The narrow way is only a choice when surrounded by unpredictability—orange points of pain—black chasms.

But they have not come yet.

For now, this cool fortress remains, still alive in the slow breaths of hypothermia, holding on, hoping.

We will understand its stranglehold before it’s too late.

God always burns hotter than we bargain.

Even now, the mist evaporates and the drawbridge begins to shudder.

He comes for us.