Soul-stice

         So many words have already been written about 12/21/2012, what can I add? The need to bring light into a dark time - both because this is the season of diminishing light, and because, for our country, it is a dark time. We have been celebrating, fearing, mythologizing the shortest day of the year for who knows how long! Before Christ, before Chanukah. Millennia ago humans believed the light would disappear and the world would end, and that view still prevails among many. How do we hold the light? How to keep it with us?

         And how do we hold the opposites? This season we have experienced a joyful time with family, and terrible diagnoses and physical deterioration among friends. There was the nightly beauty of the Chanukah menorah, the holy meditation on the candles, and the magic of rediscovering cherished ornaments as we decorated the tree.  The beauty of Renaissance concert music, and the echo of guns and grief. Balance. What an effort to keep a balance!
 
       There are still a few days before Christmas, so I can still list my wishes: A ban on assault rifles and an end, or at least a lessening, of the alienation and  rage in our society.

       I wish us all peace, renewed compassion and empathy - the true and necessary qualities of this season. And I offer this poem, and a candle in memory.

Concert After Sandy Hook
    December 14, 2012

Above the dais
snowflakes  fairy lights
illuminated organ pipes
But no digital magic
not even Bach 
or grandkids trilling carols
can ease your anguish

You call up angels 
to enfold these children
Maybe that wingwhir
only occurs
in your oldlady ears
and maybe it's a seraph
Just keep these
wet-winged
fledgelings
safe!

Sing along:
Ten lords a-leaping
eleven pipers piping
twelve drummers drumming
 
Twenty mothers mourning

                                                                                       








                                                                                                            

Grand Kids

       I usually find that between the beginning and the end of what I write, I have learned something that I didn’t know when I started - but this time I learned something before I wrote the first word:  how protective I am of our family. So - no photos, no names - just the understanding that I, who love learning, and seek it in so many ways, have learned as much from these dear ones as I have anywhere else.

      Take the one we worried about throughout high school, sometimes wondering if he would survive his teens -  now in a very creative professional program at the top of his class.  As my grandfather would say, “That such a thing can happen!” That someone can fall in love with their own abilities and find their path. Something inside you shifts with that shift, that change. All the sad experience that age must assimilate moves over and makes room for joy.

     But he is not the only one. There is the one who struggled with being in this world, in this body, the one who presented such difficulties, and received such love. And now? Straight A’s, captain of the football team - and so considerate! And the one who had tutors from an early grade, had problems with subjects and strategies, who is now in his first year at university. Each feels like a victory over those who say that it is all there, all given, all wired - that change is a myth we hold on to.

       Oh, and speaking of change. There is the adult so motivated by the desire, the need for change, who emerged as a loving father and husband. The three brothers, all “singularly skilled” (the new phrase I just learned), all successful by any criteria - and all Fathers. One who helps others become successful parents, one who learned to be a father, and one special individual who learned to father - less.

       And oh those mothers! The one who retained humor and pleasure while struggling with and holding her boys. The one whose daughter wants to grow up to be just like her, and the one who raised her child alone while teaching full time - and could open to the man she created a new family with.
          
        I learn by watching, and the emergence is so powerful. The one who discovered cooking, who spent a month on a farm in Scandinavia, who will major in history - all those dimensions! And the one whose talents and abilities cross the boundaries of arts and ideas, waiting to see what synthesis he will make of it all. And there is the so-very-sweet, lovely-souled and smart boy who excels on  land and snow and water, able-bodied on any surface.  And next year the girl will begin high-school, and the restrictions of middle-school will disappear, and she will be able to thrive in all the ways I know she can. And the one who plays two instruments, is very bright - and knew how to be his own person at a much earlier age than I did.

       I certainly don't want to imply perfection, or ease, or total compatibility, or humans free from issues and problems. I am so aware of what a difficult world the young ones have been born into, and what they will have to face.  
    
      But how fortunate I am to be a part of this ancient process called family  - not through biology or lineage, but through marriage. It has not always been easy. In fact it has often been my biggest challenge. 

I wrote the following poem a year ago - it is the last two lines that retain the most truth:

Grandchildren of my husband
a watch   a book   a custom is what I leave you
I used to hide candied creatures so your visits began with treasure
how well I know some of your worlds   how fidgety I became in others
 
Step   is the word in front of my role
it means one step at a time  it means stop after each step 
and step to the side
 
It’s a dance   like the rumba   
imagine the men in ruffled shirts   the congos  the bembe drum 
imagine the dancer in flounced skirt
She steps forward   stops 
steps to the side
she is what the music makes
as love makes step
                              into stairway
 

What Do Goats & Gratitude Have in Common?

              Have I really never written about being at The Ranch? 
Its real name is Harms Vineyard and Lavender Fields, and its a biodynamic farm where two of our favorite people, Patricia & Donald, live, and where we get to stay when they go away.
      Apart from the healthy abundance of grapes and lavender, plus fruit, olives and vegetables that are grown for their own table, there is also the magic. There is some combination of deep silence and marvelous energy that this land exudes - and the views! The curvaceous hillsides in their evergreen gowns, the far side of the valley with its sunset rose mountains, the steep trail down the hillside with its seasons of mud, weed, dry and leafquilt, the view across the vines,  the vines, and the pillows of lavender.

  
Donald Harms designed the house with its Mediterranean courtyard and Greek columns, built to coincide with the hillsides, size tempered by its soul-satisfying proportions - based on the Golden Mean and ancient ratios.

We feed the goats at night. That is if we can get the herd in the door of the barn and they haven't started a goat rodeo in the corral. It is warm and close and smelly in the small barn as it gets dark. Outside the moon shines, and the llama paces and waits for them to give up their goatly antics so he can be fed without having his feed gulped down by the goat brigade.

Not a Harms ranch machine!

      It is always quiet. The quiet is a presence and an absence. The presence of some magical power that is larger than mere visibility, and the absence of traffic, sirens, air traffic - all the things I usually live with. 

      This is the peace that all Americans outside cities lived in before the 20th century, in what was then a farming and ranching country. It is the machine that brought in noise and distraction, and it is the machine that eased a load of labor that could wear out or break a man or woman.      
        A vacation means a rest from labor, and when I think of machines and labor, I think of the whole history of humankind gnarled with the problem of labor. The daily work of food and water and shelter, the forced labor when hierarchies formed and created grandiose structures, the forced labor of Great Walls and canals and roads and railroads, the slave labor of Greeks and Romans and Hebrews and Arabs and Mayans,  the forced brigades of empire, and the shameful plantations. And there is still the deadly labor of soldiering, where those without a clear future enlist to fight the wars of the Guaranteed.
      I know that Donald spends patient time distilling oil from lavender, and I have accompanied Patricia when she browses the goats, and those are blessed, fortunate tasks, as gardening is for me. These are the labors we choose, they are not foisted on us - not forced. And the labors I choose allow me to once again embrace gratitude, that goatish emotion that gets away from me, and doesn't always appear when I chase it, even when I'm at this beloved place.
     Gratitude, you are not in my control anymore than Lily, Petunia, Boey, and the rest of the Capra clan - you will just keep jumping out of nowhere, startling me with my sweet, relatively easy life.

                                         
                                                          
           

                                                                                                     

                                                  
      
                                                            

The Book of Now and The Shy One

Copywrite Bill Fulton & Fisher King Press

              
      A few days ago I sent the completed manuscript of The Book 
of Now: Poetry for the Rising Tide, to Mel Mathews, my publisher at Fisher King Press. It will be published in the next month.

The Fisher King - how that title resonates: The wounded king who keeps the Grail, and only one person can succeed him, Parsival, whose first sight of the grail castle leaves him at a loss for the words he must have, the question he must ask. It will be a long journey before he learns what he will need to know to complete his task.

Alright Leah, you may say, but what does the fisher king have to do with editing an anthology? It’s like life - you don’t know what you will have to learn, or overcome, in order to complete a task - even if it is a task you have chosen.

I took a long time, or so it seemed, for the book to become what it is supposed to be. It began by Mel asking if I would like to write an anthology. Yes, I said. I imagined a book full of poems by many authors, and my image was a dance hall - a magician’s dance hall, and dance as a metaphor for life. We discussed a web site where poets could submit poems, and maybe a submission fee, and then Mel thought about permissions, and fees, and we both had doubts. Mel said, “The right approach will come to you.” What he always says when I’m stuck. Or when he thinks there is a better title, or approach. So far he’s been right.

Bill & I went to Yucatan & Chiapas, and the great trees of the rain forest, what remained of them, took over my voice when I came back. I began writing poems about extinction, the harm to the earth, a new Noah, poems of praise to What Remains - and the dance hall became the earth, but I still wanted poems that danced, and poems that unified beauty and terror.

I begin to let what I found, what I read, what I saw take over,  let go of having A Theme, A Concept, and what I found! I searched books and websites. My dear friend Naomi Lowinsky’s wonderful poems about the environment fit with my own, but then I saw the video of Crystal Good reading BOOM BOOM in a quantum hip-hop Mountain Mama wild style unlike ours, and thought Yes! Inclusion. 

And I found Dunya Mikhail, an award-winning poet, who wrote remarkable poems about war and exile,  and I cried with relief that those poems had been written. But could I just write her without knowing her and ask to use her poems? The Shy One emerged and suggested we go watch butterflies. But the Book spoke and said Write to her. Write what you feel. She may say no, but you may get the poems!  And I did, and felt such gratitude. 

Some poets did not respond. But Anita Endrezze said Yes, she who writes of the wild, and the deep and her people. And I knew that Jane Downs’ The Minotaur, which I had read years ago, had to be in the book. The other poems she sent opened up another perspective.

I asked Frances Hatfield for poems, not knowing how they would fit, but loving her beautifully crafted work. I realized that of course the Underworld, The Soul’s Geometry, had to be in this anthology. The tide is indeed rising!

Each poet would have a portrait, an essay about their work - and I hadn’t written an essay for years. Mel wanted my writing as well as poems, so it would be more than just an anthology. (Just an anthology?!) But I sat with their poems for hours, and their words and worlds told me what to say. I felt the pressure of a deadline,  wrote seven essays in two weeks, then fell asleep in my garden, on the grass with the cat mounted on my chest. Meanwhile Bill, always magically in tune with my work, created the beautiful cover, and Mel approved.
 
Perhaps one of the hardest thing was asking a well-known and highly-respected author, who I at least knew personally, for a cover blurb. It took two months to send the email.  Shy One was about to run out the door before I sent the email, taking me with her. The author said Yes. I was so touched and pleased.
    
The Shy One is still with me. We will probably finish our lives together. A part of her is the humility I was raised in, which I value as an antidote to whatever inflation or arrogance a girl with an almost photographic memory might have had.

      The Book is done, and the last thing I wrote was a back cover description:
       Seven lyrical women poets, each accompanied by a study of their work, navigate our contemporary world. They travel to the depths of the psyche, experience exile, rhapsodize on the beauty 
of our planet, lament loss and celebrate renewal. These poets write courageously on what threatens us: climate change, war, 
mountain-top removal, loss of species, environmental damage, 
the scourge of cancer. They are witnesses, ‘Couriers’, who bring 
us their visions. As the tide rises they reach out to us in deeply personal and clear voices, each providing a unique experience in contemporary poetry.

                                                                    

Pt. Reyes: Sky Trail!

          At Pt. Reyes National Seashore we go up Sky Trail into deep fog, oaks, and Bishop pine covered with moss and lichen,  boughs like some great shaggy beasts. The path turns terra-cotta and winds through the intense alwaysgreen of a temperate rain forest. Then the march of the magnificent Douglas Firs, trunks upright and straight as Bill's Presbyterian ancestors.

     Fog is mystery as sun is clarity? Or so you think. SOMETHING could loom up out of the swirl, couldn’t it?  There are so many gray mornings where I live. An iron lid of cloud clamped down and soundless, not mythfog but overcast, and not a word from the faithful dawn chorus of birds.  And if fog is more menacing, why have I only seen bear and bobcat in bright light, and that bull charged on a sparkling morning.    

      Out here it is always remembrance vs pioneer. Shall we take a new trail or one we know?  I remember when we took the Ostero trail at midnight with Wally & Julie, to see the owls, Bill refusing to hoot at bare pines. And the time we crossed a bridge over a pond filled with croaking, mating frogs. And the time we walked out the Pierce Point trail with Stan & Nancy. Where it narrows Ocean is on one side, Bay on the other, both visible at once  - one wave-strewn, the other wind-whipped to white cap - but the fog was so deep both were hidden. The visitors had to be told - Bay is there, Ocean there, eyes on trail to keep direction - and it wasn't a dream - though if life were a film this is where the director would have done it - elk emerged, crossed the trail, antlers pierced our recognition. When Stan & Nancy returned to their eastern city, would they tell that tale as if Northern California were the Serengeti? Might the elk become rhinos? Or elegant loping giraffes so close you could see the Sally Rand fans of their eyelashes?    

                      

But this is a new trail. Would it ever stop climbing? How high does it go ?Should we take a side path to Mt. Wittenberg? A swath of fogsilk slinks in from deep in the Pacific and where the hell is Mt. Wittenberg? North? South? 

      It's actually dripping, dropping, drizzling, hair wet, then it swiftly lifts - and the green, the intense green. Chartreuse and lime and jade and pine, especially fine because the California hills have turned to summer-drought straw, beige and tan. I am not Rapunzel, and I have given up trying to spin straw into gold; those hills are not golden, just beige and tan. 

      I grew up in the thunderstruck summer-downpour-greenness of the Midwest, and I stand here in sudden sunlight, at home among the ferns, Bishop pines, bay laurel and Douglas fir that once appeared in a child's dreams of an unknown future.

 
                               







 

Called! A Women's Congress for Future Generations

                 A Women’s Congress for Future Generations
            www.wcffg.org    Moab, Utah  September 26th-30th

     When I was still teaching college I was usually unwilling to go to conferences or congresses. I’m rather introverted outside of the classroom and poetry readings, and I am a bit anxious about large groups and runaway egos, but the women on the steering committee of this Congress are such competent, committed, developed souls, that my fears are alleviated by the humanistic rules of conduct they have asked us to agree to.
      
And I am called to A Women’s Congress for Future Generations

      What is the Congress about? “At the Moab Congress, we will map possibilities and pathways toward achieving whole health and justice in this generation to come. Inspired by our environmental foremothers, our hope is to craft a dynamic articulation of the pressing rights future generations have to a livable world and the responsibilities of present generations to uphold those rights. Our labors will yield a living affirmation of these rights and responsibilities in word, art, music and story." (from website)                                             
And I am called to this action, this involvement, these tasks.
        
      I have written poems, letters, essays to our grandchildren bemoaning the fact that my possibility-filled world may not be theirs - and I have lamented that my generation has failed in providing them a safe, sane, sustainable future. 

I am called to A Women’s Congress for Future Generations on behalf of our own lovelies, and the children yet unborn.
      
       Among other things, I taught environmental ethics for years. 
I have been an activist  most of my life. My solace and pleasure comes from what Gaia provides me in my garden and in the wild. 
I have spoken to trees on four continents. I have cried for the elephants, visited the tigers, and laughed with giraffes. I cannot bear it that future generations may only know these magnificent creatures from books and photos - and I have dreamed that I must name all the animals of the sixth extinction.
                   
And the animals, the trees, the mountains and the seas 
call me to A Women’s Congress for Future Generations.

      I am a poet, and I am working on The Book of Now, an anthology of seven women poets who write for the time of rising waters. On her website, the poet Annie Finch writes:
   “The poetess uses poetry to do the work of a witch, calling up 
  and shaping energies to heal and transform society. The poetess,
 in other words, is a witch and a poet in one.”
              
I am called as a poet and a witch, willing to shape energies and heal and transform society, to A Women’s Congress for Future Generations.

Here is a poem written for The Book of Now, after I was invited to the Congress. Perhaps I will share it there also.

               Praise Song

I want to sing the life of the earth
an egg    a nest   a hive   the herd
uncountable wings in the wet forest  
microbes thriving in the heat of a geyser
the unknown swimming the canyons of the sea
what the cat scans as she stalks the savannah 
what the hunter sees as he moves through the veldt 
the invisible in a bead of water

I want to sing the profusion of peoples
Camel-riding desert Tuareg draped in blue  
Balinese balancing edible towers
The last Hadza drilling fire
Inuit curving snow blocks into dome
     the stunning variety of indigenous homes
         the bo-sa  a house of bamboo    adobe   hogan   igloo
I want to sing the children on their way to the temple
          mosque    pagoda    kiva   jinja 

          I want tribes to sing
              before they’re unspoken
                    I want us to sing for the sake of sound
                          birdsong  croak and cricket-creak 
                 Praise  all I have named 
                       this  relic 
                                                 residue 
                                              remnant
                                           remainder
                                         
I am called to A Woman’s Congress for Future Generations to speak for the relic, the residue, the remnant, the remainder


              
         

Hungry!

          I am hungry today. Every few years I have a medical procedure that means clear liquids for a couple of days in preparation, and today is one of those days. I am so aware of how rarely I am truly hungry - the cupboard and the fridge are filled with things I like to eat. Since it is summer there are bowls of plums and cherries and peaches and apricots. A small watermelon sits on the counter, and its rippled rind reminds me of fabrics I’ve seen in Africa. If I leave the house I have a protein bar or two in my purse, and unless we are hiking The Mountain or the paths of Pt. Reyes there is always food nearby - or a couple of backpacks filled with trail faves. 


       Michelle Obama has rightly focused on child obesity, with its attendant danger of type 2 diabetes, plus heart disease likely in the future. When Bill & I travel through the West we leave the farm-to-kitchen food culture of the Bay Area, and we have to rely on what we bring and whatever restaurants we find - and we are always astonished by the proportions people are served.

      But is anyone besides a few large organizations still concerned about hunger in America? The War on Poverty is simply a lost phrase from the Sixties. What summer means in some communities in this country is not bowls of ripe fruit and fresh vegetables from farmer’s markets, but no school lunches. 22 million children are estimated to be in “food insecure” households in the United States. 
       When climate change results in freakish weather in many parts of the country - abnormally high winds, flooding, hurricanes, wildfire - there is a sudden desperate need for food and shelter, and Food Banks provide it.  There is no problem obtaining it - there’s 200 billion pounds of food that go to waste every year in America! We have all the food necessary to feed our hungry, it is just a matter of access, equity, and distribution.  Equity? Ha! A House Agricultural Committee just came up with a Farm Bill that would cut 16 billion dollars from Food Stamp allocations over the next decade, which impacts 43 million people. 

This is a recent photo though it looks like a Dorothea Lange portrait from the 1930s

 Just think. We’ve gone from a War on Poverty to a war on the poor - and I thought it was just women who were being targeted!