Glenda Burgess's Blog, page 22

Relativity

WINTER QUIET
Limb to limb, mouth to mouth
with the bleached grass
silver mist lies upon the back yards
among the outhouses.
The dwarf trees
pirouette awkwardly to it -
whirling around on one toe;
the big tree smiles and glances upward!
Tense with suppressed excitement
the fences watch where the ground
has humped an aching shoulder for
the ecstasy.
- William Carlos Williams

The matter of relatives...

Interesting that my recent, rather euphoric posts, on friendships, families and weddings, have once again been diluted by the universe with a salty dose of reality. In the nineteen eighties self-help manuals used the vernacular of pop psychology to identify family drama-divas as "crazy makers." You and I might know these family hot spots as Uncle Ed, or your sibling with the clove cigarettes, Goth piercings and menacing one-liners, the girlfriend gramps brings to family events he is asked not to, the in-law exes that cannot go five minutes before reenacting their divorce. If not family drama, then it's the cold war. The issue is euphemistically what one might call "hoarding of information," an unwillingness to invite intimate family commentary into our lives. We remain mum with one another about everything from job changes to medical procedures. Finding out someone is engaged before knowing they were dating.

The obvious conclusion would be to assume families are comprised of wary, judgmental people taking cover from the bite of familial criticism, but I believe people are instead rather neurotically private, and in most situations completely unable to distinguish helpful bonding behavior from exclusion. One can probably lay part of the blame on the perpetuation in early childhood of old generational conflicts and habits, but relevant or not, there seems to be a stubborn pattern of defensive coil-and-sting behaviors wherever relatives gather. And for some of us, no matter how often the zingers occur, we never see them coming. The immediate sequel to the experience of emotional evisceration at the hands of a family member is to ask oneself, what is the best response? Both to maintain cordial relations, but also for one's own peace of mind? Do we cut the crazy makers from our "circle of trust" as psychologists frequently advise, or confront and "speak our truth" as others urge us to do? Or in keeping with modern psychoanalysis, feel the real awful, then forgive and grow a callus. Is family forever, or are we all entitled at some point to give up and step away?

Practically speaking, when months of silence settle over a family conflict, the persons involved do not usually come to their senses as one hopes and make an effort to forgive and reconstruct. People tend to dig in and resentment simmers. Get-togethers get more weird and uncomfortable and tense. Communication is reduced to the polite minimum and then you wake up one day to discover paroled Uncle Ed was arrested on gun charges in Scientology rehab with your name as "next of kin" on the back of a bail bondsman's card. A sibling needs a transplant but didn't list you on the possible donor list. Family betrayals, especially the more subtle "dis-inclusions," are ugly and hurtful. Shaming.

Can we change this? We can want to. We can suck it up and try again. As the old saying goes, "hold hands not grudges." But in middle-age, I'm inclined to give more credence to the effects of entropy in family relationships than I used to. Eventually connections just wear down if nothing builds them up. I consider myself to be in the family bridge-building business. Like you, I'm working on the family pothole crew. But what most of us want out of family life is genuine affection: true respect, and an appreciation and gratitude for the beautiful idea of family. In the aftermath of two graduations and three weddings, I can happily toast the amazing, giving, loving family members sharing in these celebrations together. And once again, wonder what any of us can do to improve what isn't so fabulous.

What has worked in your family interactions? Do you have any personal wisdom or insight to share?

A Stitch of Love

A MARRIAGE RING
The ring so worn as you behold,
So thin, so pale, is yet of gold:
The passion such it was to prove;
Worn with life's cares, love yet was love.
- George Crabbe

In the last of three beautiful weddings this year, on Saturday we will join family as my younger brother celebrates the wedding of his oldest, a daughter. My brother is the second among my siblings and I to have a child marry, and the ceremony defines once more the transition of generations. I remember the event of my niece's birth, and the feeling among the four of us (my brother, two sisters and I) that in the birth of our children we were laying a true milestone: that family builds the future. Educations complete - marriages and careers, a home, children. Now that niece with the big smile and infectious giggle is to be a bride, beginning her own adult journey. The foundation of a new generation.

Our parents are not alive to enjoy or appreciate this moment. This gives each wedding a particular poignancy, the sense of a premature shift in roles. It is up to us, newly middle-aged parents and future grandparents, to stand as unshakable pillars. To brace the uncertainty and evolution of the next generation's first steps into marriage, parenthood�taking on the challenges of life. Will we be good in-laws? Surprised grandparents, self-conscious, perhaps unprepared to be the wise, supportive elders our grandparents were to us? How do we step into such large shoes? Dazzle our grown children's lives with that same bracing unconditional love and faith? Echoes of courage in our hearts, embedded in the memory of our own crossing from "I Will" to "I Do" and "I Shall," we stand proudly at the side of our sons and daughters as they take the hand of the one they promise to love and cherish. We blink back tears, remembering first smiles, tiny arms wrapped tight around our necks.

A wedding celebrates the day we fully let our children go. No longer the smallest or the first stitch in the line, the thread slips forward and loops the future in. Love darns new hearts into the family tapestry. We smile in joy.

Review: Anita Brookner's HOTEL DU LAC

The day seemed interminable, yet neither was in a hurry to have done with it. It seemed to both of them in their separate ways that only the possession of this day held worse days at bay, that, for each of them, the seriousness of their respective predicaments had so far been material for satire or for ridicule or even for amusement. But that the characters who had furnished that satire or that amusement were now taking on a disturbing life of their own, were revealing capacities for command or caprice that threatened, although in a very obscure or oblique way, their own marginal existence. We both came here to get other people out of trouble, thought Edith; no one considered our hopes and wishes. Yet hopes and wishes are what should be proclaimed, most strenuously proclaimed, if anyone is to be jolted into the necessity of taking note of them, let alone the obligation to fulfill them� All I learned I learned from Father. Think again, Edith. You have made a false equation. This is when character tells. Sad precepts of a lost faith.
- from "Hotel du Lac," by Anita Brookner

Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner, published in 1984, won Great Britain's Booker Prize in 1986, nearly twenty years ago. Materialism, Feminism, careerism, explicit film and writing defined the 1980s - a tumultuous time of "-isms" and their vocal, adamant defenders. Yet Hotel du Lac, written in that period, is a novel of another era, a self-contained, wrly observed bridge between the defined roles and mannerisms of Austen's literary women and the depressed self-definition of Doris Lessing's heroines. In this "no woman's land" between independence of means and thinking and social expectation and the demands of good character, Brookner gives us a woman named Edith Hope, whose last name anchors the trenchant theme of the novel. Edith is a successful romance novelist writing under a pen name who is herself awkward and unsuccessful at love. She finds herself caught in a scandal of her own inept making and forced to seek refuge in a grand but out of the way old European hotel. A hotel occupied by those who in eccentric and unpredictable ways are also refugees from their lives. It is here, dwelling on her options, that Edith is forced to confront what she really feels about love.

I found myself drawn in and occasionally at odds with this novel. Brookner's mannered language is what now might be deemed "overwritten." A contemporary critic might declaim such studied writing inserts itself between the reader and the narrative. Brookner's language colors and slows the narrative, deliberatively. Words such as inimical, penumbra, hitherto, veritable, estimable, propensity, etc., put us firmly in the thoughts of a woman of the nineteenth century, yet Edith Hope is very much living the life of an independent woman of the twentieth. Therein lies the root of the "wrong equation" Edith makes of love and what a woman is entitled to want, to hope for; her dawning awareness of the "sad precepts of a lost faith."

This novel is perhaps the perfect ironic anti-romance romantic novel. The observations and humor are fine; cutting, yet objectively drawn as Edith considers her situation and that of the (primarily) women around her, the elegant lost souls of the Hotel du Lac. Each guest in some way has made her or his own bittersweet pact with love - from the material and indulgent to the rebellious or marginalized. The novel's delicately observed truths about human relationships are centuries old. It is Edith who reminds us of this, even as she herself must decide what history she will choose.

Brookner adeptly lures the reader irrevocably into this novel of quiet desperation. A pattern occurs in the narrative, until it becomes obvious what the heroine thinks may not be true (Edith, you have made a wrong equation), or the predicted outcome is not the outcome at all. And so it with complete pleasure that Hotel du Lac ends on a gesture of rebellion. Edith may not know how to find what she seeks, but finally, she knows what is right for her. I found myself wondering at the novel's end how many of us like Edith live a century behind ourselves. Raised in our grandparents's or parents's value systems, influenced by the books and mythologies and manners of earlier times, perhaps like Edith it takes a turning point to force us forward. To leave behind a life inhabiting the expectations of others and define our own lives.

Tree Called Life

[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in]

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing, my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate, my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world, my true)
and it�s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)
- e.e.cummings

This poem by e.e. cummings was part of my own wedding ceremony, shared at sunrise on the crater's edge of Haleakala on Maui. These words capture for me the enduring, burrowing, all encompassing interiority of hearts in love. The supple binding and integration of identities and lives. The way in which love becomes us. Or perhaps it is how we become our love; the way we live in love.

Tomorrow I am leaving for a fabulous wedding in Austin, a gala barn dance. We are celebrating the marriage of the first child of my dearest friend Patricia. Patricia and I met in the basketball stands of our daughters's school, cheering on our girls on the JV team. We hit it off like chocolate and nuts, and hung together as we raised our children through the highs and lows of middle school, high school, the college applications marathon, and on through dating, career starts, and graduations (two college senior sons left to go). And now her amazing eldest, having taken the bar exam, is marrying her true love and fellow lawyer (and operatic baritone) under the old oaks of Austin. I am looking over my favorite vintage wines, thinking of our years as friends, as parents, choosing one to bring down with me for the two of us to share over a private celebratory moment this weekend. This is the first of our children to marry and it is hard to describe the huge feeling in my chest as I think of this.

Love, celebrated in the ceremony of a wedding, marks a transition: hingeing the world of both child and parent.
"the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life"
The families we ourselves began to build so idealistically decades ago divide and double, branch and flower. The child steps away and toward the future, laying the foundation stone of a family of his or her own. Beginning independent life with someone they love. It is a moment of long-anticipated arrival - the threshold of true adulthood - embracing the responsibilities of partnership, parenting, life. And to the parents that have nurtured, guided, suffered, celebrated, and loved their children to this threshold? A sweet, nuanced emotional collision. Swells of accomplishment, great joy, and the twinged melancholy of missing the "days our children were little." Yes. I believe this moment needs a good - no great - old wine. Also something nuanced, complex. Satisfying, but the wish for that half glass more.

I will lift my glass this weekend to you, my friend. To your glowing, gorgeous daughter.
To us. To the glorious years as parents that bond us.
And finally to parents the world over, as they kiss their children and see them through a thousand doors.

Where Are You Leading?

ii.
Old thread, old line
of ink twisting out into the clearness
we call space
where are you leading me this time?
Past the stove, the table,
past the daily horizontal
of the floor, past the cellar,
past the believable,
down into the darkness
where you reverse and shine.
- Margaret Atwood, from Down

At a recent creative writing workshop I held, a gristled middle-aged man wearing a cabled fisherman's sweater, bagged at the elbows, and smudged half-glasses, lifted the nicotine-stained fingers of his right hand and asked with a bit of a hesitancy in his speech, "How do you know you have an idea worth writing about?"

The pat answer, the one you always hear repeated at conference panels, is the question flipped back on itself. "Does it inspire you? Do you feel passionate about your idea? If you do, then dive in and write what only you can." I have no real problem with this response because, in most ways, it is true. Our best ideas are almost always the ones we believe in with all our heart. Only passion will lift an idea from flat ink on the page to construct that three-dimensional vision in your mind, the one you write out fleshed in the senses, in time and drama for your readers. But writers are a hardy lot, self-disciplined; committed to work even when inspiration fails. Driven to drum up enthusiasm when inspiration lags. I knew my gentlemen with the pipe was asking more than what subjects to consider. He tapped his laptop then, asked, "What works?"

In truth, the business of writing occurs one level beyond what is a good passionate story on the page. An acquisitions editor reads for more than the well-executed novel or short story. The editor's interest in a manuscript is often a phenomenon of timeliness, of fresh and unexpected writing, innovative storytelling. Many editors are actively searching for something they can love - that undefinable word magic. That "something extra" that takes a work of private solitary imagination and lifts it into the world of published books. The answer to my gentleman's question, what follows "Are you passionate about your story?" is the simple not-so-easy qualifier, "Can you write this idea so that others will feel about your story as you do?"

At the end of reading a novel submission, the editor has his or her answer in hand. On this basis proposals are judged as well. If you are fortunate to have your "yes," what follows is the amazing, important, book to hand build of industry interest in your fledgling story. Old-fashioned word of mouth enthusiasm is the way your editor wins advance support within the publishing house, amongst book reviewers, bookstore owners, and those whose opinions influence what we read. That your agent loves your work, and your publishing editor loves your work, success still depends on other readers falling in love as well. It's quite the journey your unique story, the idea you were so passionate about, undertakes to arrive in Aunt Edna's hands.

Margaret Atwood's imagery of inked lines flying from the table, past the believable to that point words shine, is one I return to frequently when I think how grateful I am to the professionals in publishing. They hear our words. And pass the magic on to readers, everywhere.

By Silence, By Gold

IX
A lingering day was enveloped by water,
by fire, by smoke, by silence, by gold,
by silver, by ashes, by passing and there
it lay scattered, the longest of days:

the tree tumbled whole and calcified,
one century then another hid it away
until a broad slab of stone forever
replaced the rustling of its leaves.
- Pablo Neruda, Stones of the Sky

Dark before the dawn and I am on the road. Making the airport run, nose to tail-light in a stream of red chasing the silver arrows. On my way back home I drive into the mouth of clouds spitting fire. The dawn so huge it swallows the still plateau, the pines dusted in frost, the concrete highways stirring to life. The glow of morning chases the night all the way to my quiet street.

Coming in the door, I hang up my keys and pull on gloves and head back out for my morning walk. I shake the stiffness out of my bones, feeling as rounded and rooted as the thousand year rocks and grandfather trees. After 45 years of running, one knee is bone on bone and today walk is better than run, better than not moving at all. Life reminds us of the non-negotiable passage of time in the most prosaic ways.

Along the bluff fog rises up the valley. Dense, colorless, chill. The breath of earth stills as it turns from the sun. Around me deciduous trees shriek noisily with color, their crimson and persimmon and curry yellows the most festive of chorales to sing the cornucopia, hint the barren that will follow. My breath explodes in small puffs before me as I part the dried grasses, feet crunching stiff wild oat. Bright sun penetrates through the fog here and there, god of somnolent things, warming the stones and snakes awake. It is here, the world cries. The beauty of fullness. The fall. Do you see?

Home, I remove my gloves and embrace the settledness of an empty house. Around me the quiet and still shoulder in, I am wrapped in the waiting. The pure that gestates creative impulse. Today I vow to mute the whispers of the busy world, silence the phone, turn off the devices, cloak the fretful television, the news and melodies and playlists bursting to entertain, saturate. My gift today? Colors of quiet.

In Its Place

The moth and fish eggs are in their place,
The suns I see and the suns I cannot see are in their place,
The palpable is in its place and the impalpable is in its place.
Do you guess I have some intricate purpose? Well I have...
for the April rain has, and the mica on the side of a rock has.
- Walt Whitman

Beyond my study window the wind sighs hard and angry. A storm from over the Pacific has pounded the Cascade Mountains the last few days, hurled across the sage high desert and now catches in the pines and canyons of these inland northwest river valleys. The autumnal equinox of just a week ago felt gentle; a graceful tipping of the scale into another season. This day feels rough and furious, the energy of nature unleashed without temperament or caution. The earth is a monumental force of combative physics, a blue ball hurtling in black space, the whims and fractions of the elements wrecking havoc across the oceans and continents. Whitman's words fill me with a sense of belonging and serenity, even as nature is making it clear everything is for the taking. Stand and I will shred you of your leaves, your shingles, your habitat, your peace.

It is interesting to me the way in which I, as most humans, move in and out of awareness of myself as a precarious biological presence. Rooted lightly in an otherwise inorganic earth. The rock and wind, the heat and cold and pounding rains break down the living, the once living, all that is organic, and incorporate all things over and over again into an ecosystem we usually take for granted, forget, hold in false dominion. I have a healthy respect for wind like this. The long delicate branches of the birch trees snarl and toss as the old soldiers lean in against the gusts. Birds are nowhere to be seen but for the hunting falcons high above on the thermals. The backyard squirrels are snugged deep in the embrace of the boughs of the blue spruce.

Sometimes our lives feel as if they are ravaged by forces such as as this, subject to events and elements beyond our small selves. We bend under the onslaught, scurry for shelter in hopes of riding out the storm. We are shredded by winds of disappointment, of loss, by harm or even danger. When I received news today a dear friend was the targeted victim of a smash and grab robbery while stopped in traffic in a taxi in Paris, I trembled. The wind roars. But she is safe. Her belongings and valuables are certainly gone, but her loved one and her life are intact. Memories remain when things do not. The wind passes, and we gather the downed limbs.

I return to the words of Whitman at the beginning of this essay. I take comfort.

Connection

Only connect.
- E.M. Forster

I think, to a poet, the human community is like the community of birds to a bird, singing to each other. Love is one of the reasons we are singing to one another, love of language itself, love of sound, love of singing itself, and love of other birds.
- Sharon Olds

Hello friends. The autumnal equinox is almost upon us, that great shifting of light across the world that heralds the dip toward winter. The equinox is also my birthday - the beginning of my personal new year. Personal new years are a perfect time to take stock, plan and dream, collect ourselves and celebrate. Along with the farmers working the late harvest, I gather in the apples of hard work and the sheaves of lessons learned. And while I could torture the metaphor further, I'm sure you've taken my point. Whether you're relaxing from a strenuous summer and looking forward to fall or gearing up to take on a personal goal just around the corner, take a beat to celebrate yourself. There's much about life we hurry past and neglect to notice - accomplishments eclipsed by newer goals or growing to-do lists. Acknowledging the work of the year and the fruits of our labors is more than just a pause for applause: giving attention to our efforts consolidates the foundation of goal-setting and confidence. This is life lived. It's good to take a compass reading from time to time.

I wrote in an earlier blog late this summer about reaching the end of a novel manuscript and moving forward toward submission. This novel is a big project, a marriage of research and imagination, and often one side of the work depended heavily on accomplishment in the other. This one novel took the longest to write of any of my books, and I am surprised, pleasantly, by the way that resounds in my soul in a good way, and also by the degree of hope I have for this project. I promised you I would share the journey, and so I will. First step? Take a deep breath and send the manuscript to my agent.

Literary agents work incredibly hard out of deep love for books and the written word. This first professional review of any writer's work is very meaningful. Neither writer nor agent wish to waste one another's time. A writer's creative effort will be leveraged through an agent's market expertise: at it's best, the agent-writer relationship functions as smoothly as a two-man crew, rowing in perfect rhythm, powering forward. I rely on my agent for her market savvy and her guidance, her knowledge of everything that lies outside building a book in my head. The best moment to date? When my agent finished reading the lengthy manuscript and sent me the literary equivalent of a big kiss and a bow.

The manuscript is then readied for submission to publishers, accompanied by a scintillating book synopsis (one hopes), an author bio, a page of sterling past reviews... And the not-so-small matter of sales track. Certainly literature and poetry are the classic face of the book business, but they aren't the bread and butter of publishing. The book market is frequently driven by block-buster sales and a question mark hangs over every experienced author's head. Do sales numbers (collected by Bookscan and available in perpetuity) justify a publisher launching the newest book, or the promotional expenses involved? Modest sales, good reviews? Was the author a victim of a bad economy or a stroke of bad timing? Is the author's work undiscovered or is the writer's artistic run spent? Do good reviews guarantee a loyal reading audience? Is it just about Facebook follows? An expert platform? In the end, I have faith it always comes down to the strength of the writing.

The manuscript stands naked. Success often comes down to one editor, one reader, a stroke of luck - connecting with an editor who falls in love with a book they will fight to bring out even against the competing submissions of their own colleagues. Is it any reason we all drink? But seriously. There is wry truth in what Helen Frankenthaler observed, The price for living the life I have - for any serious, devoted person, is that at times one must live alone, or feel alone. I think loneliness is associated in many people's minds when they think about success.

My birthday wish is probably an easy one to guess. My hopes and plans for this next year are focused on placing this book in your hands. Keep the faith. And send good thoughts!

Getting to Work

Just as appetite comes by eating, so work brings inspiration, if inspiration is not discernible at the beginning.
- Igor Stravinsky

It was Emile Zola who kept a motto in his workroom: Null dies sine linea. "No day without line.' He wrote one thousand to fifteen hundred words a day, until in thirty-one years he finished with businesslike dispatch something like twenty-five novels and twenty-three other books. When you have nothing to say, you write anyway, if only to keep in practice.
- Sophy Burnham

There are many divergent arguments for how and when to write best. There are "sit down and do it anyway" disciplinarians who manage to scratch out something even in the grip of a creative block to make their page a day; those who, as Sophy Burnham points out, find putting pen on paper (fingers on keyboard) is plain good practice. Stravinsky points out quite accurately that simply beginning may be the best catalyst - inspiration may arrive in the middle of what was just until then, aimlessness on the page.

Then there is the other school - first dream the idea, and write when the spark ignites. Famously championed by Truman Capote, who confessed, "I am a completely horizontal author. I can't think unless I'm lying down, either in bed or stretched on a couch and with a cigarette and coffee hand." Now if that were me, I'd fall asleep. Agatha Christie cleared a space on a kitchen table - any flat stable surface would do. While some writers need a blank wall, a closed door, and zero distraction, others, like Harriet Doerr, begin with visual stimulation - "I have everything I need. A square of sky, a piece of stone, a page, a pen, and memory raining down on me in sleeves."

I think the key to a successful work life in the arts begins with an acknowledgment that creative effort is exactly that: creativity plus effort. For a writer, it may put the cart before the horse to pound out 500 words without a clue as to what you're going to say. Then again, halfway through that paragraph, the theme may announce itself and you're off and running. Musicians often find a composition riff follows routine practice, when fingers and mind are warmed to the music. Painters discover a color palette and stroke that inspires. Dancers choreograph in the process of working out their moves. There is some essential part of art that occurs in execution, some other part that is guiding concept. But idea without effort is just fancy, and effort without direction is aimless.

But back to Capote on his couch and Zola scribbling out his pages. Both writers are maximizing their capabilities. Both understand how they work best. First and foremost, we must look within to understand how we get work done. When desperate for inspiration, how do we encourage flow to occur conceptually, to anchor a viable theme or idea? Is dead time mental gestation, or procrastination, a question of sitting down and doing the work? An artist has to be self-aware, and honest, and willing to own the solution as well as the problem.

It took me a long time to realize I could work continuously - and effectively - balanced between two brackets of writing: practice writing (journaling, idea sketches, bits of essays, drafts of book reviews) and purposeful writing (putting a theme into structure on the page.) Personally, I would shrivel faced with a wall without a window, a bit of nature to gaze on, mementos and iconographic art surrounding me. I've learned I need utter quiet; unless I am editing, in which case, jazz is best. And on days I just don't want to sit down and do any of it, I don't. That's the day for a hike, for reading, for laying on Capote's couch. The big lesson in my writing life has been to TRUST THE FALLOW time. The days of zero output are in fact days of work on the couch. Ideas are gelling, the corner you've back yourself into in chapter 20 is untangling in the back of your brain even as you prune the apple tree. The muse hangs out in your dreams, appears on mile 5 of your morning run.

"Getting to work" balances Creativity + Effort. It truly doesn't matter which side of the equation you solve for first.

Falling up

WILDERNESS

When I lay down, for the night, on the desert,
on my back, and dozed, and my eyes opened,
my gaze rushed up, as if falling up
into the sky,
and I saw the open eye of night, all
guileless, all iris of a starshine grey,
scattered with clusters of brilliant pupils.
I gazed, and dozed, and as my eyelids lifted I would
plummet up out of the atmosphere,
plunging and gasping as if I'd missed
a stair. I would sleep, and come to, and sleep,
and every time that I opened my eyes
I fell up deep into the universe.
It looked crowded, hollow, intricate, elastic,
I did not feel I could really see it
because I did not know what it was
that I was seeing. When my lids parted,
there was the real - absolute,
crisp, impersonal, intimate,
benign without sweetness, I was roaring out, my
speed suddenly increasing in its speed, I was
entering another dimension, and yet
one in which I belong, as if
not only the earth while I am here, but space,
and death, and existence without me, are my home.
- Sharon Olds

This poem of Sharon Olds' never loses its power to transport me into the boundless mystery of the universe. Olds declares, "there was the real - absolute, crisp, impersonal, intimate, benign without sweetness." Describing so aptly the familiar strangeness; the presence of an encompassing unbounded living pulse. There is a greater-than-known truth singing from afar, a song deep in the quiet. It is in nature I encounter moments of intuitive awareness of how much more there is, as Olds herself experiences in "Wilderness." Unaware of the night heron, aware of me. Silent on the lake dock under a tent of a million distant white stars. By the bonfire as sparks pop and pirouette and splinter into the sky into the illumination of the Milky Way. I experience a shift of dimensions diving beneath the surface of the cold clear lake, beckoned by a universe below what I take for granted every day. Truly, we live in one dimension among many. One small part of an integrated endless layering of existences, present and past, known and distant.

Next time you step out into the deep night, look long into the sparkling sky. Do you feel how you belong?