Brett Ann Stanciu's Blog, page 143

Robert Pirsig

Robert Pirsig, dead at 88, I hear this morning, driving along a rutted back road.

I pilfered Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance from my dad’s bookshelf when I was a teenager, intrigued by its title, lured by the lush fatness of reading material. Not that many years later, my dad showed me an article (in the Times Book Review section, maybe?) Pirsig had written about his son’s murder.

What I’ll always remember about that book is the high school teacher who told me the book saved his life. What higher complement to give a writer? And yet every time I think of Pirsig, I think of that essay, too…..

Sometimes I like to think about truth in the image of an old and wrathful Buddhist master who grabs us, shakes us, and shouts, ‘Drop it now!’ Truth can be wrathful.

– Anam Thubten, No Self, No Problem: Awakening to Our True Nature

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Bluer Than Blue

Last evening, as dusk threaded in slowly, the 11-year-old and I played leisurely games of croquet, stepping around the blooming Siberian quills we planted late last fall. They flower in profusion over the lower leach field, whereas the other bulbs, in higher ground, are merely slender green leaves, with no apparent sign of flowering. Fitting?

That mimics a line I read early this morning from Katie Kitamura’s Separation.

Imagination, after all, costs nothing, it’s the living that is the harder part.

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Working

When my girls were little, we played Signs of Spring for weeks, enthusiastically spying the first unfolding daffodil bloom, robins’ beaks clamped around strands of nesting material, tiny dresses flapping on clotheslines.

On the evening shift now, my 18-year-old came home last night and said a goose wandered into the nursing home. With another woman, they lured the wild, spitting creature through the open door with bread.

Spring tidings in Greensboro, Vermont?

Laughing, my daughter digs into her salad, a pile of fresh greens piled high with salty feta and kalamata olives, already thinking of other things. She’s sparkling, this young woman.

spring begins

as it has deigned to do

for a thousand ages

– Issa

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Montpelier, Vermont

Spring Notes

Emptying boxes of recycling at the transfer station, I found a drawing of my daughter’s making, from a few years ago. In a shallow sea of mud, surrounded by the mighty clangor of trash-moving activity, seagulls pinwheeling overhead, I studied her bright creation, laid it carefully on the passenger seat, and returned it to our living room wall.

Flowers? More, please.

Nothing is so beautiful as spring –

When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush….

What is all this juice and all this joy?

– Gerard Manley Hopkins

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Soaked

We’re in a holding place, these days of rain and returned cold, the earth sucking up the steady, daily downfall, gradually greening. I tell my daughters the line my mother used when I was a girl, April showers bring May flowers. They appear as unimpressed as I must have seemed, in my own long-ago girlhood.

This school break, after dinner dishes and reading, the 11-year-old is determined to watch all The Lord of the Rings movies again, while eating watermelon. The older sister’s working evenings now, so to keep her company, I sit beside her, finishing up a little more of each day’s work, ridiculously over-occupied in my own adult world.

Last night, my daughter asked me what the heck was happening with Gollum. I glanced at my marked-over pages I had tossed on the rug, where I had written about Buddhism’s Three Poisons. I said simply, He’s gone mad.

Ever pragmatic, this girl studied me. I like the Shire, she said.

Yeah.

This must be every parent’s perfect moment: watching a child asleep and safe from all the storms of the world outside…. I’ve been through enough to know this kind of peace is rare and fleeting. This is all I’ve ever asked of life: just to be here, to achieve this humble goal of harmony… to smell lilacs and the coming rain, to move beyond economics and consumption into dream work, to live as if this life is an open window in spring.

Stephen J. Lyons, Landscape of the Heart

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Photo by Gabriela

Leaf by Petal

Bit by bit, color rubs into our muddy world. My younger daughter remembers bulbs we planted, late last fall, and runs with her friend to find them: snow glories, grape hyacinths, the deep blue Siberian squills. Tiny clusters of emerging mysteries. Where, again, did we bury those knobby roots, and what will appear?

Out of school this week, my daughter and her friend switch back and forth between houses and parents, sometimes complaining there’s nothing to do, and almost immediately wandering away into one of their myriad projects.

Easter night, the peepers sang in profusion as the four girls and I walked down the dirt road in the dusk and then stood at the crossroads near a stand of old maples. In summer, tiny sparkles of birds often burst from their leafy branches in a radiance of soaring yellow. Rain began falling.

History, especially a family’s, is elusive, and memory is, as it is often said, a poor guide…. History is made in what appears to be at first glance mundane and ordinary ways. It’s written at kitchen tables and printed in the small boxes of calendar days… Sometimes in life it may seem as if nothing of consequence happens except the small acts of routine that occupy countless hours and ultimately frame our short lives. But I want you to know: Everything counts.

– Stephen L. Lyon, Landscape of the Heart: Writing on Daughters and Journeys, whom I discovered through his essay in Full Grown People

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Hardwick, Vermont

And Grace….

When I attended Sunday School briefly as a child, I remember reading about the Resurrection in a paper booklet and studying an illustration of Christ standing in a white robe beside a boulder, his clean hands outstretched to a gape-mouthed Mary, his hair neatly brushed. What the heck was that about?

The presentation was like reading Macbeth on Disney character flash cards. How would this be possible? Why would it even be desirable?

Hallmark’s proliferation of bunnies and tulips to the contrary, this holiday is a mystery, bloody and ethereal within a span of days, a profoundly condensed version of human life.

More than anything else what I resent about that sanitized illustration is the belying that the crucifixion is also the story of nearly unbelievable persistence, of a man who endured physical torture, an extreme crisis of faith, and phenomenal resilience against the human tendency to flee when the going gets tough. Over and over, I’ve met that Joseph Campbell line “you must be wiling to give up the life you’ve planned in order to have the life that is waiting for you.” On this Easter morning, I’m reminded again that the price of grace is fiercely earned, and, yet, eternally possible.

…modern people have seen too many chemicals and are ready to go back to eating dirt.

– Mark Kurlansky, Salt: A World History

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library book reading…

Oh, Joy!

Coltsfoot sighting today: a whole wide hillside of the gorgeous tiny blossoms. This Good Friday emanates the radiance of these persistent blossoms. In Montpelier, everyone is smiling. I buy too much Easter candy, chatting with the proprietor at Delish about taxes.

On the street, I see young mothers everywhere, babes cradled in arms, or kicking their tiny heels in strollers. A young man intently mows the State House lawn. I stand on the wide porch of The Pavilion, a warm wind tugging hair into my mouth, as I plot changes in my life.

An old woman walks down the street with two shirtless teenage boys. All three lick ice cream cones.

Collective good will. Collective promise of spring in all her tender green beauty.

The old man

cutting barley–

bent like a sickle.

– Yosa Buson

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Little Bits

A child gave me a tiny quartz pebble.

Thinking the pebble must have caused some injury to the child’s bare foot, I asked why I had been given the small thing.

The child said one sentence: I found it, and apparently believed that was enough, as she walked away.

I’ve put the pebble on my library desk, along with pipe cleaner creations, a crocheted pumpkin, broken pens – springs, bodies, screw-on caps – the children intend to repair.

Our upstate April

is cold and gray.

Nevertheless

yesterday I found

up in our old

woods on the littered

ground dogtooth violets

standing around

and blooming

wisely….

Hayden Carruth, from “Springtime, 1998”

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Frivolity

My friend of mine mentioned his young baby had begun crying more. Hey, I casually mentioned, babies change. 

Isn’t Robert Frost’s line the one real piece of family advice – Life goes on – both through sorrow but also embracing sheer curiosity and joy? For a few years, we held Easter egg hunts at our house, usually pulled together at the last moment, in the sleep-deprived somewhere of sugaring season. This year, the younger daughter decided to flip the hunt around and have the grownups search for treasure, instead.

The kids are taking mastery of the terrain.

Spring fever imbues all of us. Children after school at my library yesterday were giddy and light-hearted. Round, mellifluous Lady Moon rose over the peaked roof of our house last night, shining over the diminishing snowbanks and running streams, the leaf-covered garden beds pushing up through the tenacious crust of what snow remains. The girls and I stood on the balcony in the balmy night breeze. Peepers are not long off.

Plenty of damp and drear will fill April Vermont days; it always does. But the mystery and miracle of spring has arrived. Our landscape changes.

How long does it take to see something, to know someone? If you put in years, you realize how little you grasped at the start, even when you thought you knew. We move through life mostly not seeing what is around us, not knowing who is around us, not understanding the forces at play, not understanding ourselves.

Rebeca Solnit, The Mother of All Questions [image error]