Brett Ann Stanciu's Blog, page 164

The Rapture of Becoming

A friend from a very long time ago, who now lives 3,000 miles away, took the time to write me an email the other day. It’s quite possible I would now walk past this former lover and not recognize him; the years have been that many.

In this email, he wrote about recreating his house during a tough time of his life. The best damn wood floors you’ve ever seen…. Later, he remarried, sold that house and bought a different one, fathered a daughter, and joined into happier days.

That house he poured his body and soul into, and yet he realized it was not loss; it was one long step of a journey as his life moved on. As my teenage daughter becomes her own young woman, I’m wistful at times for those innocent summers when a kiddie pool brought such pleasure. How good it was to cradle the sweet-smelling heft of a sleeping child in my arms. At yet… how could I not revel in this girl and her friends, bright-eyed and eagerly taking the reins of their lives?

This summer, I’ll heed my friend’s advice well and swim in the cold lakes more with the kids, cook outside over the fire while listening to frogs, worry less about money, and don’t mind so many weeds in the garden.

People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.

– Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

June, Woodbury, Vermont

Child’s Footprint

Stuck in traffic yesterday, overdressed in the afternoon’s high temps as I’d left the house in the dewy cool of morning, I was lost, looking for a meet-up place with my kids. Surrounded by big box stores jam-packed with plastic stuff, that territory is one of my least favorite of Vermont roadsides.

Years ago, I delivered a 5-gallon bucket of our maple syrup every month to a bakery in that area, and afterwards, I let my daughter, who was two, run in the weedy field behind a strip mall, flanked at the far end by condominiums. By chance, I passed that still-undeveloped field and pulled over.

All day, a  white tree fluff had floated around my office windows, a drifting June version of snow. At that field, the white gossamer yet drifted through the air, random bits, here and there. Not that many years ago, this expanse was farm field, with the mountains rising like a blue dream to the east and the Winooski River flowing nearby.

The day was quite hot, and I thought of my own garden’s tomatoes and melons, thirsty on their vine, and I knew I wouldn’t return to water barefoot until twilight.

I had turned back towards the asphalt and the intersections of noisy traffic, when I saw a small footprint in the cracked earth. Crouching, I rubbed my fingers through its chalky dust, wondering what child had run through this field when it was muddy. How I wished that child had found some hidden treasures, secrets just for her.

It is quite possible that an animal has spoken to me and that I didn’t catch the remark because I wasn’t paying attention.

E. B. White, Charlotte’s Web

 

 

 

 

Last night, I heard the poet Sydney Lea read at the Galax...

Last night, I heard the poet Sydney Lea read at the Galaxy Bookshop in Hardwick, and he mentioned being in his seventies is a great time of life. In my forties, myself, I’m in that age justly called rugged – or is it ragged? The age of Dante’s dark woods, I tell myself: a territory to pass through. What’s the best age, anyway? The question begs, perhaps, how rooted we delve into the days we live. Maybe the best answer is Lea’s own, in this love poem.

“My Wife’s Back”

All naked but for a strap, it traps my gaze

As we paddle: the dear familiar nubs

Of spine-bone punctuating that sun-warmed swath…

…Phoebe, osprey, heron, hawk:

Marvels under Black Mountain, but I am fixed

On your back, indifferent to other wonders:

Bright minnows that flared in the shallows,

The gleam off that poor mink’s coat,

Even the fleas in its fur, the various birds

–The lust of creatures just to survive.

But I watch your back. Never have I wished more not to die.

– Sydney Lea

Woodbury, Vermont

 

Dear David Budbill

I laughed out loud and cried at David’s tribute, held by a ring of poets and actors on the stage where his work has been performed so many times. In the front row of the balcony, my friend and I talked about our children, and how our lives had shaken down. Later, driving home in the dark, up familiar route 12 I’ve driven so many times – with children, with friends, with family – now alone, not passing another car all those miles, save for an old Volvo station wagon that followed me out of Montpelier before turning off at a house with two lit windows.

Following the narrow sweep of my headlights, I thought of the final speaker’s words: from human suffering rises song. Thinking of David’s own kindnesses to me, and the great wealth of this man’s work and life, I followed those headlights like a unwinding stream of moonlight all the way home.

My children lay in their beds, sleeping. For the longest while, I stood on the balcony in the dark, listening to the frog’s steady chorus, rain falling lightly on my face, and then I, too, went inside and slept.

…These are not the rare and delicate lemon yellow day lilies

or the other kinds people have around their places. This one

is coarse and ordinary, almost harsh in its weathered beauty…

…A plant gone wild and therefore become

rugged, indestructible, indomitable, in short: tough, resilient,

like anyone or thing has to be in order to survive.

From “The Ubiquitous Day Lily of July” by David Budbill

The Earth Herself

In the garden, on this chilly, almost autumn-esque day, I pulled lettuce from a fattening line, admiring the myriad green. So much of writing is spinning the stuff of language into this three-dimensional world we inhabit. Our world is so amazingly complex, jammed ceaselessly with variations of color and light, that language at times seems a poor descriptor.

I always remind myself, begin at the beginning, with the very first word. Setting aside my basket of lovely leaves, my fingers crumbled dirt into my palm. Dirt? Or the earth itself, but a few grains of this celestial, spinning orb? Or Thomas Wolfe’s “loamy soil”? Or is this broken sod? Tenacious clay?

I held the handful near my face: black earth, lavish enough to devour.

The voice of forest water in the night, a woman’s laughter in the dark, the clean, hard rattle of raked gravel, the cricketing stitch of midday in hot meadows, the delicate web of children’s voices in bright air–these things will never change.

– Thomas Wolfe, You Can’t Go Home Again

Woodbury, Vermont

Vinegar & the Lupine Metaphor

My teenage daughter asked me if I knew Christ, dying on the cross, had been given vinegar to drink. Why? she asks, mystified.

Why is it that these profound questions so frequently appear when I am about bled out of energy? Could I not write a veritable book on this subject? Our kitchen holds five vinegars – apple cider, balsamic, white, rice wine, an herb infusion – and we use it for preserving, cooking, cleaning. But soak a spongeful and press it your lips? My daughters are horrified at the image.

I offer what my children consider an unsatisfactory answer: the antidote to drinking sour wine is wild lupines. I remind them of the children’s book they both loved so dearly, Miss Rumphius. Could this be the weekend’s challenge, in a realm beyond folding laundry? Amend that: could this be the existential challenge?

You must do something to make the world more beautiful.

– Barbara Cooney, Miss Rumphius

Where You Can Find Us

Late last night, cleaning up my desk for the morning’s work, I found a flip book my daughter had made, with scraps of white paper from my recycling box and stapled together. On its cover, she had written in pencil Where You Might Find Me.

The first page began with a band of rainbows stars drawn in colored pencil – the Milky Way – followed by the classic solar system with orbiting planets, and then the azure and emerald orb of Earth. Her maps decreased to graphite renditions of North American, the United States, New England, Vermont, Washington County, and finally the town of Woodbury.

At the very end, I anticipated her typical drawing of our house, with a second floor balcony and the cupola that yet remains unfinished, the front door flanked by tiger lilies. Instead, she drew the Woodbury Schoolhouse, smoke cheerfully curling from its matching chimneys.

I love Vermont because of her hills and valleys, her scenery and invigorating climate, but most of all because of her indomitable people. They are a race of pioneers who have almost beggared themselves to serve others. If the spirit of liberty should vanish in other parts of the Union, and support of our institutions should languish, it could all be replenished from the generous store held by the people of this brave little state of Vermont.

– Calvin Coolidge

Yin Yang, or Giving Rise To Complements

Here’s a simple thing which took me a ridiculously long time to learn: that famous yin yang symbol isn’t particularly about a dot of white in a tear of black or vice versa. Instead, the black and white are all smeared together.

As an American woman, for years I perceived the world as opposites: you’re in the house or out, it’s light or dark, we’re dead or alive. Through gardening, I began to perceive growth demands decay, and then I carried that notion to writing: creation depends on destruction. The universe is intricately braided with myriad shades of being, color, sound….. There is no one single thing separate and opposed to the whole other rest of the world.

So when my daughter comes with me on a drizzly and rainy afternoon in the woods behind our house, I’m grateful this the childhood world she knows, the place she is rightfully at home in.

….These two emerge together but differ in name

The unity is said to be the mystery

Mystery of mysteries, the door to all wonders….

– Tao Te Ching

Photo by Molly S./Woodbury, Vermont

 

Onamonapia

This afternoon, my 11-year-old daughter walked around the house saying 0namonapia,  over and over, desperately trying to drive her sister nuts, by repeating this beautiful word, richly rolling off her tongue.

Years ago I used to nurse this child at the farmers market where my then-husband and I sold maple syrup. One afternoon, I nursed my baby on the grass behind our tent, leaning up against a pole. A couple sat down somewhat near me, in the shade beneath a poplar tree. Eating, they casually spoke in a slavic language I didn’t recognize. I generally knew they were talking about the day, but I couldn’t really piece together much more than that.

My baby fell sleep, and I pulled a blanket over her soft little limbs, then leaned my head back against the pole and closed my eyes. While the couple kept eating and talking, I listened to their words, this beautiful language I couldn’t precisely understand, but I knew the language tied them together.

Surely, 0namonapia relays much more than cluck or moo. This is a word whose meaning can stretch to entire languages: an audible beauty that makes us human.

 

The Bells

Hear the sledges with the bells—

Silver bells!

What a world of merriment their melody foretells!

How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,

In the icy air of night!

– Edgar Allen Poe

sweater weather in June Vermont

 

Butterfly Visitors

Finally bursting into growth this year, our lilac bush is covered with swallowtail butterflies. All around us, the pollinators steadily work: hummingbird, bee, wasp. The butterflies are uniquely magical, though, wholly silent, almost tame enough to touch my hand near the fragrant blossoms. Then, like a shimmering cloud of colored papers, they lift off one-by-one and disappear, upward, into the apple tree’s canopy.

My daughter’s favorite scene in My Neighbor Totoro is when little Mei lies sleeping on the Totoro in the forest, while butterflies flicker and rise. In that same spirit, the book I’m writing holds spring azures near its end, these exquisitely beautiful creatures who appear mistakenly fragile, yet are graced with flight and fertility, mightily powerful.

….Come often to us (butterflies), fear no wrong;

Sit near us on the bough!

We’ll talk of sunshine and of song,

And summer days, when we were young;

Sweet childish days, that were as long

As twenty days are now.

– William Wordsworth, “To a Butterfly”

Woodbury, Vermont