Glenda Burgess's Blog, page 34

Bye My Friend

McDuff was our "wheaten" Scottish Terrier, born eleven years ago on Canfield Mountain. A beautiful cream-color dog with a bearded mailbox head, perky ears, and expressive chocolate eyes - two splashes of cappuccino cream over both shoulders. McDuff lost his battle with cancer Saturday. He leaves behind his adoring family as well as the backyard squirrels, who have for generations taught their young to run fast and jump far over the head of the barking "white terror." He is missed by the quail families he protected from the marauding cats of the "dark side" of the fence and missed by his beloved pet sitter Suzanne, with the home baked treats. Duff leaves behind the dusty winding bluff trails he knew and loved to ramble, his snooze spot by the back door, and nose prints on the car window. We will forever look for his face at the kitchen table window, waiting for us to come home.

Goodbye, my friend. You were there for me after Ken died and the whole world lay on my shoulders. Beside the kids as they clung to you through uncertain nights. At my side as first Kate, and then David, headed out across the continent to school. (You were certain I was losing the herd!) There in the nights, and for shoveling snowy mornings, sunny backyard days lazing by the barbecue, our long daily hikes wherever the whim took us. You were our scout with your amazing nose for hunting huckleberries at the lake, underfoot at Thanksgiving waiting and hoping for a tasty morsel to drop from the carving platter. Just a pup, you decided to "eat" new dental molding into the baseboards around the dining room...bored and awake on your own at night, you raked your teeth down David's bedroom wall like a kid with crayons. How patiently you wore the pumpkin costume at Halloween as the little kids loved on you, and listened to the "little white dog" ditty as you boys shared "last call" in the backyard. You had a tail wag for all the souls that crossed our front door. Duffy, Duffers, Mackleduff, Doofers, Duff. We will miss your snores at the foot of David's bed, from behind the couch and under the coffee table, from wherever you caught a nap. Your presence anchored this house with love and devotion. Your absence has dimmed the light of our every day.

I hope you're romping the fields with crazy Scooter now. Your collar hangs on the hook with his. Best dog, ever.

Beginnings

COFFEE & KEYS
First light
to last star at night
place me in your pocket
toss me with your keys beside
your coffee
drop me on the papers
under crooked glasses.
Use me find me lose me use me again
in the spaces of the days
you live in.
What continents of meaning
sleeps in the naked word
in the crook of your arm
knotted
in the tangle of hair and feet
the heart roots
breathes in and out
of this room
we lie in.
- Glenda Burgess

This entry today might as well be titled "Courage," or perhaps "Second Chances." I settled on "Beginnings" to express the sense that who I am at this moment in time is not just a retread of who I used to be, doing old things in a new way, but someone refreshed from within, rebuilt in cellular layers by life and erosion, growth and design. To tell you I am me, but I am also a me I have not been before, about to embark on a new adventure.

Love in Middle Age! Friends, I am happy to share with you that I am engaged to be married. In love. And that is no small feat given the life journey that has been mine, my love's, or for that matter any old soul among us that has made it thus far by luck or determination. Magic and bravery, kindness and fortune, destiny perhaps, and a dash of boldness... All the spices of life were required for one blind date arranged by mutual friends to become an affair of the heart. Limning the new green, a mid-story beginning for both. My sweetheart's name? Gregory. He is a physician with three grown boys. Added to my grown son and daughter, that gives us five between us. All are in the sciences (medicine or engineering) with the exception of me, lone Defender of Humanities in dinner debates. Vino Scrabble, playing words (real or convincing) fueled by imagination and wine, is hilarious and challenging with this crew.

Gregory and I stir up pretty spicy blends! Our votes cancel. Vegetarian meets carnivore. Twenty year old blood donor t-shirts versus the silk scarf. The pacifist and the hunter. The two of us are Greenacres to the max - cityscape versus country quiet. Chance and destiny. The Discovery Channel flips to Turner Classics. Hockey or MythBusters? Old wine dates the single malt. And it is so fun.

The nearly year and three-quarters it has taken to this moment, formalizing a growing relationship, is in itself an epic story. I promise you tales of the journey as we talk of adventure, reinvention, commitment, fear of loss, courage, independence, blending, solitary work, life lived loving. But for today, the word is beginnings: The instinct to move forward that dwells at the core of us all.

Poem of the Air

SNOW FLAKES (Birds Of Passage. Flight The Second)

Out of the bosom of the Air
Out of the cloud-folds of her garments shaken,
Over the woodlands brown and bare,
Over the harvest-fields forsaken,
Silent, and soft, and slow
Descends the snow.

Even as our cloudy fancies take
Suddenly shape in some divine expression,
Even as the troubled heart doth make
In the white countenance confession
The troubled sky reveals
The grief it feels.

This is the poem of the air,
Slowly in silent syllables recorded;
This is the secret of despair,
Long in its cloudy bosom hoarded,
Now whispered and revealed
To wood and field.
- by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

There is something about Christmastime, and winter's long blue nights, that sing the lament of the year's end. Especially here in the north and in the mountains, where seasons are as distinct as spices. Nature is now absent in her abundance: what remains is the skeletal architecture of what has been, and what might be, once the seasons turn. The landscape stands in the hollow grief of what is not. The benevolence of life has fled with the geese on wing, and we feel the hard and frozen earth turn within and away from us. The melancholy note in so many Christmas melodies, the lone light that shines in a pool of yellow from a dark house, the snow quiet and undisturbed in the fields...these are the bookends of our rush through the year. The frenzy of growing, constructing, creating and promoting the things we do in the cities we live in comes to a kind of stand-still. We tally the year, reflect on the days past, plan those to come. Outside the winds blow, the snow falls. We build a fire, our instincts guiding us to stay in, to stay together and warm, to wait out the inhospitable winter for the warming sun rays of spring.

I am drawn to the powerful wisdom in winter's instinct to draw within. To accept and embrace the quiet solitude of winter's dove gray skies, the pink brush of sunset that has walked the horizon without warmth or luminescence. In the quiet are thoughts we are otherwise too full of noise to hear. In the darkness we rest. With one another we realize the joy and warmth of family. In winter we release what has been, release and grieve our misfortunes and losses, we burnish and repair the good for the work to come. In winter, as the poet pens, "the troubled heart doth make in the white countenance confession." Absolution. Comfort.

Deep Writing

All the deep writer can do is honestly chew on something. All she can ask of herself is honest effort and right intention. Deep writing arises from this effort to really wrestle with something, to honorably and truthfully make sense of something, making use of the known and acknowledging, as best as one's defenses permit, all that is not known. If a writer does that, sometimes miracles will happen.
- excerpt from "Deep Writing," Eric Maisel

Occasionally sprinkled in this blog, like cranberries in a salad a bit of tart and unexpected flavor, will be the occasional essay on writing. Many writers have a "writing tips" page on their web sites, but in my experience the material sits, grows stale. But if it lands in the blog from time to time, it may interest both writers and readers in matters of the literary craft.

Eric Maisel's comments on deep writing pivot on the idea that some writing is intended to mean something, not just to entertain. He speaks of Hiroshima, 1964, On the Beach, Crime and Punishment, The Death of the Heart, The Stranger, Giovanni's Room - all books he read in his youth that he felt were written to convey a dream, solve a problem, had a truth to tell, a moral imperative, a holy quest, all mixed up together. Maisel prompted me to think about the books of my life that speak to me: how, as he quotes Freud speaking of Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, such writers may achieve a "perfectly motivated" novel, or a brilliant, beautiful, truthful book of nonfiction.

I think much of what is missing in modern literature, and no doubt what has prompted critics to "hang the crepe" on the future of the literary novel, is precisely a lack of genuine meaning and depth of thinking, truthfully, on the part of the writer. One can not easily shoehorn a life's work of art into the flash commercial model of something written for inexpensive entertainment, adaptation to a film, or a book du jour on a topic soon to fade from interest. In a sound bite culture, the book that delves deeply into a topic, that requires the reader follow a complex story, think through meaning, and spend more than a train ride or two reading, well, publishers are convinced that is the book that gets dropped. If publishers can't make money in quantity, the quality is of little value, and we are left with books that evaporate from our minds and hearts like powdered sugar on the tongue.

I've spent time recently thinking about books that have meant something to me in my reading life, and why. I'm sure we would all have differing lists; books we deem important, that speak to our innermost thoughts. Such a list reveals much about our own intellectual and emotional history. So let me say that the most recent good book that I've read (in my humble opinion), was the nonfiction study by Jane Horowitz, Inside of A Dog. Horowitz's research revealed to me why my dog seems to live in a different world than mine, and why the bond I share with my dog means so much to me. Good stuff. It doesn't have to be Shakespeare to be meaningful.

Working Hands

IN PRAISE OF IRONING
Poetry is pure white.
It emerges from water covered with drops,
is wrinkled, all in a heap.
It has to be spread out, the skin of this planet,
has to be ironed out, the sea's whiteness;
and the hands keep moving, moving,
the holy surfaces are smoothed out,
and that is how things are accomplished.
Every day, hands are creating the world,
fire is married to steel,
and canvas, linen, and cotton come back
from the skirmishings of the laundries,
and out of light a dove is born -
pure innocence returns out of the swirl.
- Pablo Neruda

In praise of simple work. Intention and creation. These are the elements that human nature brings to bear on the living world, and they are not to be underestimated. In the ability we have to help and heal, to create from imagination, to form from clay, to fail and begin again, we are stewards of the living planet. We are learning as we nurture the living biosphere, even as we are learning as we see ourselves evolve in this work, deepening our understanding of the importance of what we do as people going about our daily lives. We can be a contributor toward the betterment of all, or part of the senseless erosion of finite resources.

Neruda's poem is both about the caldron of work and its power to transform things, the nature around us, and about poetry and its ability to transform our thinking. I'd like to throw this idea out today - think about the work you do. What your hands do in a given day as you shape the hours and bring personal intention into the world. Is work simple? Or is it much more, part of a complex kinetic fire that strikes the elements of the physical world into the forms of imagination. I am honestly in awe as I type these words on a laptop someone has invented, at our human ability to shape existence. I feel as Neruda that honest work releases light back into the world. That creation furthers creation, and primal innocence is continuously reborn in the value of what is good.

Eyes On the Horizon

And the longer he thought
the more plain to him how much
still remained to be experienced,
and written down, a material world heretofore
hardly dignified.

And he recognized in exactly this reasoning
the scope and trajectory of his own
watchful nature.
- from "Roman Study," Louise Gluck

Fog has filled the valley and spilled over the rim of the bluffs I live on, threading gray and impenetrable through the bare trees. In this shifting uncertainty of cloud and cold I went for my early run. I ran through the quiet neighborhoods, noting families gathered at breakfast tables in kitchens that spilled yellow light, the harried parents loading preschoolers bundled up against the cold into warming cars. I began thinking about this year, 2011, and how it has been both wonderful for me personally, extremely tough on some of those I love, and difficult overall for our country both economically and for our soldiers overseas. Were all these twists of event luck and suffering on the way to a larger destiny, or simply accidental? Was a greater purpose, a meaningful impetus, behind each of our lives? Or was life merely chance made of fortune both good and bad? What ruled our daily experiences? Was it all a grand roller derby of impersonal collisions circling the risks of existence? I ran the streets thinking, What do we do with that? How in the midst of "the careless random" do we make successful choices, right outcomes, peace with the truly awful?

My late husband, Ken, used to say of his faith, "I work at the art of reasoning away bad luck." He was teasing me to some extent, as I am a tentative proponent of clinging to faith in the shape of greater things to come through both hard times and things I do not understand. Ken pointed out that you can't change what is, but you can deal with it. Your way. I would throw prayers out like a fisherman's net, hunting for the meaning in the misfortune. Both to understand if I could and to learn and possibly avoid future similar pitfalls, and to convince myself that at the end of the bad news would be a happy breakthrough into a better life. Which of us is the more correct? The one who accepts bad luck and rationally chops it into intellectual bite-sized bits better absorbed into the tasks of any given day, or the one who defends hope as the rough edge of a smoother evolution to follow?

I don't honestly know. To me, life is best symbolized by a sail boat tacking across open waters. The seas and winds change, and with shift, the set of sails and tiller change as well. Are we not at our best if the hand is steady, our gaze fixed on the horizon, regardless of the conditions we navigate? Perhaps any kind of philosophy that props us at our post, eyes forward, ensures survival and success. When we look back, some experiences reveal complete and meaningful narratives, while other events register like asteroid hits, shaking our foundations until the dust settles. Either way, life is lived forward. I embrace the spirit of the poem. How much remains to be experienced.

Gratitudes

THE DEPTHS
When the white fog burns off,
the abyss of everlasting light
is revealed. The last cobwebs
of fog in the
black firtrees are flakes
of white ash in the world's hearth.

Cold of the sea is counterpart
to this great fire. Plunging
out of the burning cold of ocean
we enter an ocean of intense
noon. Sacred salt
sparkles on our bodies.

After mist has wrapped us again
in fine wool, may the taste of salt
recall to us the great depths about us.
- Denise Levertov

Raise a glass to friendship. Gratitude is the heart of the season. Gratitude for the year's harvest, for good fortune. Earth's breath cold and strong across our hearths. Welcome the coming season's wintry respite, the chance to lean back into the cold and silent nights.

I am grateful in this month that marks the end of autumn and tips to the end of the year. Grateful for so many experiences and gifts, but especially for the steady compass, the lighthouse shining, of friendship. I count myself fortunate to have original and authentic, deeply creative people - my "diamonds in the rough" - as intimate friends. What they possess as souls of intellect and compassion is given freely to those they love. They are funny, wise, steadfast, resilient. Like cedars they stand tall in the storms, and like willows bend but do not break beneath the fiercest wind. The roots cling, collective strength an expression of humble grace and hardiness. The shelter of friendship, my joy among these fabulous characters, offers me a tender place to reflect, recoup from losses, share the hilarious, celebrate the rare.

So my friends - and you know who you are - this Thanksgiving I am profoundly thankful for you. You are the rare find, the nonpareil without equal. Life in your company is full of wonder. Thank you for your presence in my life. Salut.

Poised In An Awareness of Mortality

The problem is that we think we exist. We think our words are permanent and solid and stamp us forever. That's not true. We write in the moment. Sometimes when I read poems at a reading to strangers, I realize they think those poems are me. They are not me, even if I speak in the "I" person. They were my thoughts and my hand and the space and the emotions at that time of writing. Watch yourself. Every minute we change. It is a great opportunity. At any point, we can step out of our frozen selves and our ideas and begin fresh. That is how writing is. Instead of freezing us, it frees us.
- excerpted from "Writing Down the Bone," Natalie Goldberg

Tragedy, from my own experience, does seem to strike in pairs. I recently finished reading Joan Didion's sequel memoir, "Blue Nights," reflections on herself as a mother and the complex relationship she shared with her daughter, Quintana Roo. In 2003, Quintana fell ill with pneumonia shortly before the tragic, sudden death from cardiac arrest of Didion's husband, John Gregory Dunne. Quintana passed away of septic shock complicated by bleeding in the brain days after Dunne. Didion's first memoir, "The Year of Magical Thinking," was published in late 2005: a bare bones coming to terms with loss of so much at one time, but especially her life partner, her defining other. Didion has now turned to the painful emotions of her daughter's loss, writing a memoir imbued, for the reader, with the sense Didion is for the first time deciphering the intimacies of her daughter and their relationship even as she writes. To paraphrase Natalie Goldberg's words, this is writing that unfreezes the soul, freeing the author to define what very personal truths mean.

The title, "Blue Nights," comes from the twilight hours of long evening light that signal the summer solstice: "the opposite of the dying of the brightness, but also its warning." Which is to say, this is writing poised in an awareness of mortality. Echoed within each memory even as she shares with us, "Like when someone dies, don't dwell on it. "Blue Nights," is a spare read. Poetic, unintentionally raw. Didion's observations jab, pull back, wipe away what is sentimental. Yet, there is a yearning in her thinking. An exposed awareness of age and frailty and loss; a sense of the shortness of time that drives the writing. In sometimes painful reflection, Didion parses away the mystery of her daughter. As if she seeks a concrete understanding of the true shape of their connection, a sense of what balance holds together the intimacy/dissonance of a difficult relationship. Didion needs to perceive her daughter clearly in order to hold on to her; combing through the turning points of their connection to find an anchor, a sense of their relationship pulled from a well of murky, half-dismantled memories even as her own life enters a blue period of increased clarity and diminishing opportunity to make more (or less) of what is left, of what is.

Didion writes with great lucidity, poised on the tipping edge of her own mortality. A sole survivor, striving to understand the relationships that she now understands have defined her. A quest to find something in those relationships to accompany her as she travels alone through her own blue nights of uncertain faith. She leaves us with the question, Is there is anything more than memory itself at the end of life? And is that not an answer in and of itself?


Reader Blog Note: Blog comments gone missing? A reader fortunately has recently let me know the "post a comment" function on my blog was not forwarding your comments through to me. (And here I thought you were all just exceptionally quiet!) Thankfully, everything is back in order - so write in and find your comments here.

Holiday, Packaged

A CONTEMPT LAMENT
Everything costs too much
so is on sale. However
the miracle of walking upon a parking lot
must not be discounted. There were
boys in a car with a
wrecking ball taking on
their speakers. A girl
talked in a window to them and
just where was her skirt?
I'm getting old. So old I read
obituaries for
hints on the personal narrative. I'd gone
to the mall in search of
a solid sweater and was
met by headless mannequins
dressed I guess
for the season's decapitation parties.
Surely somewhere
John the Revelator points to the practice of
taking an additional half off the sale price at the register
and says See?
- John Marshall

Hang on, Citizens of Cable TV...we are entering the holiday season. Last night, I kid you not, the countdown to Christmas was featuring "made for television" mini-dramas one after the other with holiday magic as the theme. (Did we miss Thanksgiving?) I noticed, perusing the program descriptions, that these were misty-eyed dramas built on themes of the dysfunctional modern life. Mom and dad, more in step with their careers and smart phones than their lonely children; single women abandoned by their men, raising children alone in quaint towns hoping to win the Holiday Lottery; Mrs. Claus, on a reconnaissance mission to save a family from divorce, trying to prove to her tired old stalwart of good cheer, Mr. Claus, that Christmas still matters; bitter singletons hoping for a little Hanukkah lantern magic on the night bus. Over and over, themes of urban loneliness and relationship estrangement. Families are not families anymore, they are battlegrounds for attention deficit.

Not to go overly sentimental here, but has the world really changed this much? Are cable television "holiday specials" a true mirror of today and the chaotic desperation of modern family life? The classic "It's a Wonderful Life," for all its small town smaltz, nonetheless was a reflection of its times: George Bailey dealt with real world problems and people with humble expectations. But there was an inherent (and perceived) dignity to life. In contrast, the film dramas of today seem to have a kind of self-mockery and toss-off ennui. The jokes are on us, and they're not kind. The old twentieth century animated specials made us laugh, merry stories familiar to the season. They were sweet, and entertaining. It wasn't all so depressing.

At the risk of sounding much like John Marshall assessing the headless mannequins on his search for a sweater, feeling like life has become a kind of "decapitation party," I'll go out on a limb here and say - "So What?" So we are that broken, occasionally skirt-less and shallow, on sale, overpriced and miraculous. We sit with our cell phones at the table and our kids can't hear their teachers over their earbuds. All generations look on the problems of today and think of the simpler answers that seemed to work yesterday. Wisdom, like politics and history, is mostly rearview mirror revelation. I agree with the poet. I am getting old. Old enough to miss the days when the enemy was not us but practical misfortune...the broken axle on a road trip. If television is any judge, our kids are going to have trouble simply remembering what holidays are for.

Curmudgeon signing off. (Have to meet the headless mannequin.)

World of Another

The scientific study of animals was changed by a German biologist of the early twentieth century named Jakob von Uxekull. What he proposed was revolutionary: anyone who wants to understand the life of an animal must begin by considering what he called their umwelt: their subjective or "self-world." Umwelt captures what life is like as the animal. Thus two components - perception and action - largely define and circumscribe the world for every living thing. All animals have their own umwelten - their own subjective realities, what Uxekull thought of as "soap bubbles" with them forever caught in the middle. We humans are enclosed in our own soap bubbles, too. In each of our self-worlds, for instance, we are very attentive to where other people are and what they are doing or saying. On top of that each individual creates his own personal umwelt. full of objects with special meaning to him... We are bombarded by stimuli, but only a very few are meaningful to us.
- excerpted from "Inside of a Dog," Alexandra Horowitz

My dog is dying. He is under attack by an aggressive and relentless mouth cancer that each day steals a little more well-being and life from him. It's been a balance the last few weeks to provide pain relief and nutrition - and in the process, joy in the form of his favorite home-cooked meals. He comes to the bowl and waits, disoriented on medications to the degree he often forgets he has just eaten. There he stands, large chocolate eyes luminous in his dignified Scottie head, the bones of his skull prominent now, framed by white whiskers and silky brows. His expectation of food is his whole world just now, the instinctive fight to life, a break in the numb ache. And so, too, are our long rambles through the last warm November sun rays that slant against the wild bluff. These are the trails he loves to explore, nose deep in the grasses, the flag of his tail high as he trots ahead of me. It astonishes me how on these paths today, his body a war zone of illness and medication, he forgets his limitations and opens fully to the umwelt of a dog - the fresh scents, the freedom to run, explorations that expand each moment and carry the day into true happiness.

Late last night McDuff had another of the seizures that have wracked him more increasingly as the cancer deepens into his brain. And as I held him and comforted him and wept, soothing the trembles and the fear of his pure and dependent confusion, I became aware of the naked power of touch. The comfort of a known voice, the gentle support in a loving stroke, the truth of what a friend of mine had just said to me, regarding the often crushing challenges faced by our children as they move out into the world alone - "We want to protect them, but all we can do is walk beside them through their difficulties." All I could do was hold my dog as he fought for consciousness, orientation; breathing along beside his own unsteady heart. All I could do was be there.

Being there. This is something I understand; taught by love how to tend the suffering of others, to deepen my own reserves, how to become the sustaining energy in a crisis. Pumping all that you have into the moment to glue life together from one moment to the next. My dog is important to me, he is part of my umwelt. My circle of life. And somewhere deep in his own sense of the world, I am part of his. For now, as long as joy illuminates the suffering more than suffering takes away, McDuff and I will walk beside each other. At some point, we surrender to the losses and let go. But that should be on the last beautiful note of the symphony, don't you think?