I invite you to come with me through these excerpts from Morning Pages written this past month during my vacation.
June 17: Here — in the house — at the beach — in York, Maine. A foggy day still, at noon, drifts, waiting for the rain that has been threatened from a low pressure system drifting slowly eastward for the last three days. The bed and the room are always the same. Cool wind pushes those drifts of fog by the window. Don't know what I want but am pushing through drifts of fog in my mind — my consciousness. Pushing the pen across this paper in one of my new journal books, which it seems only Bear Pond Books still stocks.
Remembering a delicious day last week with Donna when she plays hooky from the farm for the day and drives us to the camp on Greenwood Lake. We spend the day by the water, on the deck in the shade as long as it lasts and then drop chairs into the water and sit under shady branches with our feet in the warm water's edge.
A giant trout has fanned a circle of bottom pebbles clear of muck and guards it assiduously. Smaller trout have cleared smaller circles. A loon surfaces as soon as we climb onto the deck and then dives under, eventually reappearing far away. Another loon calls from the north end of the lake. One eventually makes its way back past us, heading for the island in the southern end. Several full-throated loon cries echo after the bird was long out of sight.
reflections of trees on the shimmery water
columns of light green
reflecting from the sunlit leaves
columns of dark green
reflecting from the shadows beneath
the ubiquitous red-eyed vireo singing
through the heat
chipping sparrow jingles its single note
all these greens
with blues reflecting from the sky
Late afternoon, we part and, and before I leave East Montpelier, I stop at the trail road leading into the woods. About a hundred yards in, the hermit thrush is singing, singing, as I walk the path through the greenness and freshness of the trees.
June 18: The first Sunday afternoon after arriving in New Hampshire, I climb the hill to the Johnson lot and find a hen turkey on her nest right beside the trail where the fields open to the west. I recognize what she is about when she recognizes me as an intruder. She scrambles off the nest, running behind me to get to the stonewall which parallels the trail. I see little fuzzy turkey chicks in the nest. She runs along in the trees as I walk along the trail until it appears that I have reached her boundary, the stone wall bordering the field of the Johnson lot.
The grasses are knee-high, and it appears that the field hasn't been hayed for a couple of years or so. Goldenrod stalks are beginning to appear. I walk a bit across the field, and it feels like the trees along the perimeter have filled in. It's been ten years since cows grazed here, and I reckon they kept the undergrowth down enough so that there was an airy feeling beneath the trees. Now, they are green walls.
I cross the small orchard of apple trees and blueberry bushes to get to the westerly fields, the Burt piece if I recall correctly, avoiding the turkey's nest. These fields and woods have names from owners of fifty years or more ago. I wade through the tall grasses to get beyond a thin line of trees to see if there is any view, but there are more tree walls bordering the field on the other side. The view of the Partridge Brook valley and the hills on its other side has been completely obscured.
The next morning, under grey skies, I walk over the hayfield next to the house I grew up in and pass a half-dozen bobolinks singing on the top of the hill. The downward-fluttering wings as they come down from the apex of their climb up the sky…a final glide to alight on a grass stem and perch with their creamy backs waving. Magic for someone who hasn't heard bobolinks for years.
In the woods below the fence line, I tread through carpets of ferns, trying to find the old path and eventually succeeding, but there are no red and yellow columbines to light the way. The heifers, perhaps, kept the sapling growth from overtaking the flowers, and now the tree canopy has closed in too much for columbines to grow. The brook feels more shaded, but perhaps the cloudy day affects my perception.
I walk up along the stream, weaving around trees and brush, to the place where there are two choices, either cross the brook or climb up the side hill. A ways above, I can see an edge and, with a bit of sidehill-scrambling, I find the old cowpath that the cows trod to climb from the brook to the field and to the barn. I won't say that it was easier to drive the cows through the woods and across the brook to get from the pasture to the barn than to drive them along the road, but it was less stressful because there were no cars nor impatient drivers to put up with. In the mornings, it was much easier, because once the cows reached the fence line between the hayfield and the woods, they were free to go their own pace wandering up to the pastures.
June 19: Read Tony Hillerman's Sacred Clowns yesterday. Finished Starhawk's The Fifth Sacred Thing (the spirit, after earth, air, fire, and water) the night before. According to the folks who keep time, my light was on after midnight….Now I'm writing here. Halfway down page 2. Now what? I picked up two books at a used bookstore yesterday, one of which was referenced in Natural Capitalism; it's called Biomimicry and the second referenced in the anticareerlist posting, How Much Joy Can You Stand?. "How to push past your fears and create your dreams." It wasn't that I was looking for them, mind you. I was scanning the science bookshelves and Biomimicry stuck out, and then I found the new-agey stuff — quite a few Shirley MacLaine's — and How Much Joy stood out, which was only published two years ago and signed by the author.
Indeed where has the love gone? Where oh where oh where? Do we want anything other than a decent and pleasant place to live? Can we help others acquire them? Can we create a place for people to live in association and yet reasonably? Talking with Donna about Habitat for Humanity and the idea of creating a group of apartments/houses that interlock and creating a kind of intentional community…a community of people who can feed each other creation and good thoughts and assistance – who can do stuff together and apart — who can be inspired by each other — who bring a balance of needs and gifts.
June 20: Pat arrived yesterday and will be going back tomorrow. So this morning, Molly, Pat, and I get up at quarter to 5 and drive to the Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge to hear the hermit thrush. There are none. No hermit thrush music at all. No water-wading birds, either. The usual wood-edge birds and a few warblers, a tufted titmouse boldly sings for us — not for us, really. He sings and we enjoy his rather one-note music. We walk the trail around the Refuge's woods, dutifully following the crushed-rock trail that is so noisy to walk upon, and think that it would be nice if they constructed a boardwalk across the salt marsh to the wooded island.
Then up to Parson's Beach where soft sand drags at our feet as we tread the narrow path that breaks through the dune to the nearly-empty beach. We step over the line of tide-wrack left at high tide and pad on the damp, dense sand to the end of the waves to find the foam brown. Ick! One does not wish to walk in brown foam, considering that its most likely source could be sewage from somewhere. Above tide-line, we sit and munch scones, ignored by the gulls, who seem more interested in the snails that march in curliques across the sand, looking for a good place to dive into the sand. At least, that's what I think, because their loopy trails simply begin and end and are about a couple of feet in length.
June 21: Solstice…New Moon. We experienced a whopping thunderstorm about suppertime yesterday. The power went off early and was off for about three hours. The lightning crackled down in bolts quite near the house and the rain deluged for a bit. Phil went down to the beach after it had cleared out and saw that folks had left towels and toys. I'm not surprised to hear that things got left. People are rather unaware of the sky's changes when they are facing eastward toward the ocean. When we had walked the beach before the storm, a towering cumulonimbus cloud hung above the eastern horizon and it was pink — a pink that shone onto the water and caused an exquisite opalescent color way out to the horizon. I don't think that many people notice that either.
We four sisters played Hearts (card game) the night before, after Pat and I had an argument about hearts as trumps, which Molly finally brought to end with a few critical questions to Pat. Took me back to childhood when I would lose my temper when I lost a card game and Monopoly, a game which I loved to play and which no sibling wanted to play with me because of the temper tantrums I would have when I lost. Temper tantrums — I used to have blazing ones when I was a child.
June 22: Come winds, do blow/from the westerly/and move this low and damp cloudiness off to the northeasterly sea./Surprise us all with sunshine tomorrow/Come wind, do blow/from the plains high pressure weather/Do blow and clear our skies for tomorrow/tomorrow/Let there be surprising sunshine sunshine/Sunshine tomorrow/Come winds and blow away/the clouds of grey.
Now I remember…it seems I am singing all these words as I write them, or rather I sing them, then I write. One page done and fifteen minutes of toning/chanting/vocalizing/humming my cells into harmony. Into harmony into harmony into harmony. This morning with candles burning by the window, when we rise, when we rise, even without the sunshine, ah om ah om.
there is spirit pouring over us
there is spirit swimming around us
there is spirit flowing into us into us into us
filling filling filling the corners of our rounded souls
where is it
it is here…filling our being
here on this earth where we live
…
This is the page, the last page of the morning, and I am writing bits and pieces, responding to the Vein of Gold's exercise about spending twenty minutes writing "I wish's" and thinking that I don't have too many wishes to wish and that is good.
I just read her piece on patience and, in reading that, I think I will extract some pertinent sentences and make a big font printout and give to several folks. Sara needs to do art, also. DO ART — the Vermont number plate that I followed down Main Street in Montpelier the year before I moved to Colorado, along with the one "DREAM" which I followed down State Street at about the same time. Then there is "ASUWISH" – a Colorado number plate that I was behind while driving to an art group meeting within the last couple of months. As You Wish — I wish for beauty and truth to always be a part of my life and always to be a part of the lives of the people closest to me…and for all the peoples of the world. I wish to be able to fill Kaitlynn with the desire for and the capability to always be in truth and in beauty.
June 23: I managed to find the parts of the meditation sculpture that I want to give to David…the statue of Kuan Yin, a large ceramic watering tray, a wrought iron curved plant hanger, a small wind chime, rocks and sand (from the beach), a clam shell for a water pond, a candle, and a method for sticking the plant hanger to the ceramic dish (2-sided sticky foam squares). Earth, air, fire, and water, and Kuan Yin for spirit, it looks pretty neat.
I realize that I have done two creative things this week — the meditation sculpture and the colored pencil abstract that I've been working on, plus writing in this journal book and making up morning chants.
Come winds/do blow and sweep this wet away
Clear the skies to bright sunlight before the end of day
That's a workable rhyme. We're expecting company to celebrate David's graduation from college, four and a half years of hard work and the fun of meeting a young woman with whom to share life together. Denise and Mike, David's dad, Katy and Kaitlynn, David's grandparents. It would be nice if the rain stopped.
Cameron's chapter on patience — simply do it — do the art — slogging along, if that is the only way — because the plateaus that one crosses will eventually lead to a higher peak of activity. So the slogging which I've put off doing — like going through my photos and discarding the junk and keeping the really, really good ones, then scanning them in and creating a data library of the best photos — I need to do.
June 24: The party was great! I got a good photo of great-grandmother Elaine with great-granddaughter Kaitlynn. We all congregated on the sunporch after a while. It's a pleasant memory for everyone to file away. After the visitors left, we went down on the beach to comb the low tide for sand dollars, which have been plentiful this year. It was a comfortable day, and, the best yet, we had no rain except in the early morning and a brief shower as we were getting ready to walk to the beach. While the sky wasn't bright blue, the sun glimmered through a lot, and the fog eventually cleared the bay in the mid-afternoon.
June 25: How the month doth fly away. Reading in Vein of Gold and came to an exercise that I want to do:
If I let myself admit it, I feel:
Creatively blocked
Artistically inept
Frustrated at no output
Loving the world outdoors
Frustrated at not getting outdoors
Helpless at times about actually doing things
Angry about my own ineptitude
Angry about my own stupidity – cupidity
Angry about my laziness
Frustrated that I'm not pushing myself to take a walk every day…every day!
Angry that there aren't more people in the world seeing that we are destroying the world
Joy in being alive
Angry that I don't handle money well
If I let myself admit it, I think:
That going to the artists' group is not relevant
That working at TWS is not relevant to the activities I feel most strongly about
That it's important to feel strongly about the relevance of what you do in a job
That I am not an 'artist'
That I am lazy in many ways
That singing could be more than just a hobby
That happiness is a state of mind, not a place of being
That I'm missing the folks at my office after two weeks of not seeing them
That I'm missing singing and voice lessons
That my creative level is low
That skill is in the landscape surrounding us.
(I don't know what I mean in that last one).
And now a page of morning — it has cleared…the sky, that is. Cooler, sun is blooming. A chickadee is singing, the purple finch's melody ripples up and down, and some squeaky little birdling is trying to get its parents' attention. It is a strange little call.
I am missing the mountain-scapes. I am concerned that I will exist in two places and not be quite happy in either, because of missing the other. I do feel passionate about things; but then I forget the cause for the passion before I remember to act upon it.
Table of Contents
Letter to the Author: