Strawberry Moon

Apparently the full moon in June was called the Strawberry Moon, named by the Algonquin tribe who knew this moon as a signal of the short harvest of strawberries.  In Europe, where strawberries are not native, it was called the Rose Moon.  

This moon was at perigee, its closest point to earth this year.  They called it the Supermoon - bigger, brighter, more potent.  It's pretty but not noticeably bigger.  Maybe a little brighter.  For me, with a Capricorn moon in my natal chart, it can be a very grounding moon or it can be dark, playing on my fears.  For me, this one is dark, her harvest poor.  Last year she was more steady and sure, the slow, hot burn of new love.  Next year, who knows?  The wheel turns, round and round, down is up and up is down.  The one thing I can count on is that it will be different yet again.  For the first time in many years I am experiencing the vagaries of life personally as opposed to vicariously, through my daughter.  It is not always pretty, but it is living and I want to live.  I decided that after my heart attack, fought for it, for normalcy, for what other people take for granted. The highs and lows are a given.  I can wait for the wheel to turn.  And while I wait, there's this, on of the first moon songs I remember, one of the first I learned, to remind me what I love about the moon and life and living.

Place park, scene dark, silvery moon is shining through the trees;

Cast two, me, you, sound of kisses floating on the breeze.

Act one, begun. Dialogue, "Where would you like to spoon?"

My cue, with you, underneath the silvery moon.

By the light of the silvery moon,

I want to spoon, to my honey I'll croon love's tune,

Honeymoon keep a-shining in June,

Your silvery beams will bring love dreams, we'll be cuddling soon,

By the silvery moon.

Act two, scene new, roses blooming all around the place;

Cast three, you, me, Preacher with a solemn looking face.

Choir sings, bell rings, Preacher: "You are wed for evermore."

Act two, all through, every night the same encore.

By the light, (By the light, By the light),

Of the silvery moon, (The silvery moon).

I want to spoon, (Want to spoon, Want to spoon)

To my honey I'll croon love's tune.

Honeymoon, (Honeymoon, Honeymoon),

Keep a-shining in June. (Keep a-shining in June)

Your silvery beams will bring love dreams,

We'll be cuddling soon,

By the silvery moon.

Your silvery beams will bring love dreams,

We'll be cuddling soon,

By the silvery moon.

Learning a Place

My first months here in Florida were strange and disorienting.   I felt a bit like Alice or Dorothy.  I certainly wasn't in California anymore, that was for sure.  Sometime around February or March, the strangeness began to wear off and I began to pay attention to this place I had come to call home.  I suspect some of this was time here.  I think too, Bryan and I had begun to think we might stay more than a year or two, maybe call this place home.  And so, at the possibility of setting roots, I did what I always did when coming to call a place home, I began to walk it and study it, learn it with my body and my senses.  I read it's history too, but the body has to come to know a place if there's any hope of calling it home.

Bryan's folks came this last week and we took the little boat up the New River.  Bryan sees these canals every time he drives, but I see them less frequently.  In such a temperate place, seasonal changes are small, barely noticeable to someone used to greater variations.  Take the birds, for example.  In the extreme heat of July and August, the birds grow quiet.  Perhaps here it's opposite and instead of migrating in the winter to warmer climes they migrate in the summer to cooler lands.  All I know is that for those few months, the day starts with an odd quiet and ends that way too.  I didn't know last year when we arrived how deliriously the birds sing, how strange the songs are, even the grackle exotically tuneful here as it wasn't in Phoenix.

Apparently in June the Poinciana blooms, glorious and gaudy in her scarlet blossoms.  I didn't know there was a song about them, but Bryan's dad knows tons of songs, many obscure.  He sang this one as we traveled the New River one rather lovely morning.  He didn't know all the words but I searched and found them.  The melody is haunting, fitting the magic of this tree, this place of big dreams, many realized, just as many not.  And I wonder if there is a message for me in this tree, in this song.  I came here for love and sometimes I find it hard to live in that "love, come what may" way I want to.  I don't know but I suspect I will figure it out.  The universe understands I'm a bit dense and gives me plenty of hints, sometimes knocks me over the head with them.  

Here are the lyrics and a link to the Nat King Cole version of the song:

Blow...tropic wind...
Sing a song...through the trees.

Trees...sigh to me...
Soon my love...I will see.


Poinciana,
Your branches speak to me of love.
Pale moon is casting shadows from above.

Poinciana, 
Somehow I feel the jungle heat
Within me, there grows a rhythmic, savage 
beat.


Love is everywhere, its magic perfume fills the air.
To and fro, you sway, my heart's in time, 
I've learned to care.

Poinciana,
From now until the dawning day,
I'll learn to love forever come what may.

Blow....tropic wind,
Sing a song through the trees.
Trees...sigh to me
Soon my love... I will see.

Poinciana...

Words Belong To Each Other

When I was writing my thesis, one of the books I found that was pure magic was The Poetics of Reverie by Gaston Bachelard.  One of the memorable sections reflected on the amorousness of words, especially in languages which still retain masculine and feminine words.  Bachelard's native language is French and his description of masculine and feminine words in French sentences rolling about and cavorting in the confines of sentences was my first real understanding of the Eros of words and language.

Looking back, I wonder if some of my need to write and the prolific nature of my writing came from my unconscious need for Eros somewhere in my life.  I wanted to be fertile and fecund.  I wanted to love and be loved and if the only way was through stories then so be it.  I wrote of love in all its forms - parent and child, husband and wife, writer and story - but in all of them there was some loss, something incomplete. I had to write that, I think, because I didn't know any other way of being.

But what now, that Eros has entered my life?  I've done some writing this past year, but not anything like I used to.   There is a fear at the core of me that I may not write again, certainly not as I did.  Maybe my life will be my work of art now.  I'm not sure one necessarily prohibits the other, but it may for me.  I guess time will tell.  Maybe my words will find their own ways to come together again, not so much be design but by their own hunger for one another.  If so my writing will be different, or at least the process different, more collaborative, more wonder-filled.  It's past better or worse; it's just the writing and the words and feeling again the sparks between them.

Virginia Woolf wrote an essay on the craft of writing.  She captures it best, I think, the way words belong together, drawn by their own desires beyond our willful insistence that one follow the other.  "It is only a question of finding the right words and putting them in the right order. But we cannot do it because they do not live in dictionaries; they live in the mind. And how do they live in the mind? Variously and strangely, much as human beings live, by ranging hither and thither, by falling in love, and mating together. It is true that they are much less bound by ceremony and convention than we are. Royal words mate with commoners. English words marry French words, German words, Indian words, Negro words, if they have a fancy. Indeed, the less we enquire into the past of our dear Mother English the better it will be for that lady’s reputation. For she has gone a-roving, a-roving fair maid."  It's time to go back to words and trust in their hungers.  It's time to write again.  

Good days vs. Good Life

On the heels of my last blog, comes another voice weighing in on the debate.  From Annie Dillard, and The Writing Life:

"There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by. A life of good days lived in the senses is not enough. The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage sweet. Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading — that is a good life. A day that closely resembles every other day of the past ten or twenty years does not suggest itself as a good one. But who would not call Pasteur’s life a good one, or Thomas Mann’s?"








http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/04/29/craftsmanship-virginia-woolf-speaks-1937/

LIving as Art

"Living has yet to be generally recognized as one of the arts. Being born and growing up are such common experiences that people seldom consider what they involve. As most readers of books pass from cover to cover, realizing not at all that the letters which form the words are the product of painstaking craftsmanship and that the imposition of the type upon the page, the composition of the title-piece, the binding of the volume, are the result of centuries of study and design, so also we take as a matter of course the miracle of being alive, and the comings and goings of the men and women about us."

"For man is not born into a world made to fit him like a custom tailored suit of clothes, or a house built to order. He enters a universe that was eons old before his appearance, and that in all likelihood will continue for eons after his departure an infinitely complex, eternally changing universe that evolves its processes unmindful of his presence. It sets the conditions. It is man who must do the fitting."

Karl De Schweinitz

I'm a writer and I've toyed a bit with thinking of myself as a collage artist.  At a recent exhibit at the Jaffe Center for Book Arts I saw an artist who, with collage and pop-ups, created unique art books for each of her artist residencies.  And then I came across these quotes and the connection was made.  Our lives are our art and our art is filled with our lives, whether we know it or not.  

So how does one make their life a true work of art?  I suppose it could be argued that our lives are art whether we live them well and fully or not.  Still, if our lives are our magnum opus, then what does that look like?  Or, perhaps more accurately, how do I want my life to look?

I had a good life, but a small one.  It was filled with the fine details of work and home.  It was like my photographs of roses and flowers, taken on my daily walks, all of them cultivated, small bits of wildness in a world that was mostly man-made.  There was little passion in my life, except my love my love for my daughter, for my dogs.  It reminds me of the lines from the Jean-Pierre Jeunet movie, Le Fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain : “Amelie has no boyfriend. She’s tried once or twice, but the results were a letdown. Instead, she cultivates a taste for small pleasures: dipping her hand into sacks of grain, cracking creme brulee with a teaspoon, and skipping stones at St. Martin’s canal.”  I cultivated small pleasures and I believed for many years, that was enough.  

Of course, it wasn't enough for me.  One day I came to the realization that I wanted something more.  I wanted life, something big and bold, something that would make me know every morning when I woke up and every night when I went to bed, and all the times between, that I was truly living.  I leaped from that life to something I only had a hint might be the more I hungered for.  And for the first time in a long time, I truly, truly lived.

I'm not really sure what making a life a work of art looks like but I do think there are people we can learn from.  For me, Bryan is one of those people.  He is one of the most vibrant, authentic people I know.  He paints his life in broad, bold strokes and small delicate tracings.  It's not always pretty, his life, but you feel it at a deep visceral level.  And it stays with you, long after.  It's not conscious really, his life, but instinctual, from the gut, done without plotting or planning, certainly done without a care of what others may think.  The people who love him, love him fiercely, friends for years.  My art will never be Bryan's but I think it can be grander than I thought possible, more than an exquisite miniature, but something that fills the wall and demands your attention, maybe even a second look, something gloriously me, not just a whisper.  All I have to do, is truly live it.  

The Limits of Your Longing

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.

Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don't let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.

Rilke, Book of Hours, I 59

It's hard to believe such a stretch of wildness exists in a place as built-up as South Florida.  Yet there it is, right along the beach, between Fort Lauderdale and Hollywood - John U. Lloyd State Park.  Back in the days of segregation, this was Florida's Negro Beach.  It wasn't the first one.  That was a stretch north of Sunrise called the Galt Ocean Mile.  There the races inhabited the same stretch but never the same place.  Separate but equal was a pretty accurate description.  And then that mile of beach was bought by a developer and another one had to be found.  What is now known as John U. Lloyd was a barrier island.  It could only be reached by dune buggy or boat.  Families in Pompano or Deerfield had to leave early in the morning to get to the beach by noon.  

It's a beautiful beach.  It's the only one around here that still has trees, part of the natural beachscape in Florida, what this land was before development.  But it's a land filled with longings.  A hard beach to get to, separate and unequal, it spurred 'wade-ins' as protests.  Ultimately the beaches in Fort Lauderdale were integrated.  John U. Lloyd, a local attorney and the man for which the beach was named, was instrumental in getting the beach state park status.  It is, perhaps, one of the loveliest and unsullied stretches of beaches in Broward County.  On the afternoon I found my way there, also by boat, to snap this picture, I could feel it, standing there in wind and waves, the longing that lived here still, and not just for a beach you could drive to.  No, it's hungry this stretch, filled the kind of yearning that the horizon brings and a vast expanse of ocean at your feet.  It tugs at you, fills you with a need to just keep going.  There is also a timelessness here too, a reminder amid all the manmade of the land that was here long before we arrived and will be here long after.  It reminded me so much of the Rilke line, "Nearby is the country they call life. You will know it by its seriousness," and his urging to live life fully, let everything happen to you, beauty and terror.  This I remembered at last.  This is why I leaped.  We are meant to live.  It's why we were born, why we are here.  We forget that sometimes and it weighs on us, breaks our hearts, urges us to reach and grapple, to deeply engage, to love and lose and love still, regardless.

Perhaps every place can illuminate the limits of our longings, but some places possess a special power, a hunger and timelessness that reminds us why we are here and how fully we must engage.  Every reminder is a good one and every reminder is necessary, not for everyone perhaps, but for those of us called by bad hearts and accidents, by close calls and near misses.  For those that have seen our edges and resided there for a span, there's no losing it, unless at our own peril.  I don't think you get another chance if you've gone to the edge and forget what that taught you.  No, you hold on to the hand and let every feeling come, because none are final, and all we can do is go on.  It's what we're called to do, what life demands.