Dear Spring Break:
I miss you already. Why did you have to leave so soon?
Sigh.
Fondly,
Me
I often just hold my breath as I read through the posts on Persisting Sighs. They are crisp like the snap of clean sheets and lush like smell of rose petals at sunset.
Today Madelyn quoted Neruda and channeled just how I felt earlier today, when I didn’t have the word to express what I saw:
Naked you are as simple as one of your hands,
smooth, terrestrial, tiny, round, transparent,
you have moon~lines, apple paths.
Naked you are as thin as bare wheat,
Naked you are blue like a Cuban night,
there are vines and stars in your hair,
Naked you are enormous and yellow
like summer in a gilded church.
~Pablo Neruda
Key lime pie=yum
I’ve been busy as a bee the past few days. It’s Spring Break and there is much to do in the garden that can’t wait for a later day!
“That we find a crystal or a poppy beautiful means that we are less alone, that we are more deeply inserted into existence than the course of a single life would lead us to believe.”
~John Berger
The DesNews linking to lil ol’ me. Thanks Emily Jensen–I’m so flattered to be included in your bloggernacle lineup.
So welcome to all you readers of the Mormon Times and the Lord’s Anointed Newspaper. Feel free to sit yourself right down in a cozy chair, kick your shoes off, prop your feet up on the edge of the “Postum table,” and stay awhile.
PS: If you liked “Brilliance,” you might want to take a peek at some more of my blogpics or my flower/garden photos….
Meet Fred, one of the little sapling trees that I planted in the burn area on Saturday. Fred was named in honor of my neighbor Fred Rogers. Next year I can’t wait to see how he’s grown, even though I like him just the way he is.
This tree had the most brilliant pink flowers that I’ve ever seen. I’ve never knowingly eaten quince, but anything this lovely has got to taste good.
Do you remember a few months ago when I gushed about all of the great people I met in Boston? Here’s another reason to love those great folks of MA.
Sara, on sharing the love:
So I’ll bet you didn’t realize this, but the whole argument about socialized medicine? It boils down to love. Do you love America? Great. Now do you love what America is made of, Americans? Do you really? Well, how much?
Do we love this country and each other enough to figure out a way for every single person in America to have what has just been given to me [note: she just received life-saving brain surgery]? Or are we too busy judging and measuring and lying to each other about what things really cost to make this kind of possibility a reality for every single person?
Every single person deserves this level of help and service. Every single one. I only got it because of luck, finding the bad thing at the right time in the right place with an amazing surgeon and his team just happening to be available to me right at this moment, strictly the luck of the draw.
Oh, and because I live in Massachusetts.
In Massachusetts, we are often rude and cold in demeanor, careless of the environment, and even atrocious drivers. You know what else we do, though? Bottom line, we love one another enough individually and conceptually to put our money where our politics, philosophies, and religions are and really take care of each other, or at least to try. Yes, if you live somewhere else in the country, it is very likely that we pay higher taxes than you. Nobody likes paying taxes. But nobody here likes people to die of treatable and preventable medical conditions.
Just having returned from a weekend retreat in Julian, CA, I can say that this turned out to be a happy trip for all of us. Some highlights:
-Everyone recovered enough from the FluB for us to hightail it out of town early Saturday morning. A lovely drive through the California countryside. Driving past blossoming citrus orchards with the windows down and inhaling deeply.
-Flowers. Everywhere! (including huge clumps of daffodils!)
-Discovering that the food at camp was truly worth gushing over. Local, green, fresh, handmade with herbs and ingenuity. Big salads of mixed greens, golden beet soup, chicken (and chick’n) marsala, crepe-pancakes, and the best sugar cookies, ever!
-Julian apples (and apple pie) and finding a local stand selling avocados 25/$5
-3 games of Ticket to Ride IN A ROW with a worthy opponent. Lost two, won one.
-Marveling at the burn damage from last Fall’s fires. Blackened tree stumps everywhere. Joining a work crew on Saturday to plant trees in the burned areas. Digging deep in the ash-laden soil, making new homes for the small saplings.
-Time for quiet worship in the morning. In small groups and in a large circle with Friends. Sharing my thoughts and experiences. Being open to hearing others’ stories. Realizing the joy that comes from striving together.
-Being away from it all: no cellphones, no wifi. Just a lot of wide open spaces and trees and meadows, and deer, and hawks, and frogs singing at night. And sharing it all with the people that I love. :)
Gave John and GameBoy some much-needed haircuts yesterday. Then left clumps of hair on the porch for the little birds who are building their nests in the nearby trees (much to TobyJoy’s delight). Things got a bit silly, but not nearly as hairy as last time.
It’s been far too long since I’ve shared a poem. So here’s this, a poem for Spring and for Easter chocolate bunnies and for hope:
Doubletake
Human beings suffer,
they torture one another,
they get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
can fully right a wrong
inflicted and endured.
The innocent in gaols
beat on their bars together.
A hunger-striker’s father
stands in the graveyard dumb.
The police widow in veils
faints at the funeral home
History says, Don’t hope
on this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
the longed for tidal wave
of justice can rise up,
and hope and history rhyme.
So hope for a great sea-change
on the far side of revenge.
Believe that a further shore
is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
and cures and healing wells.
Call the miracle self-healing:
The utter self-revealing
double-take of feeling.
if there’s fire on the mountain
or lightning and storm
and a god nature speaks from the sky.
That means someone is hearing
the outcry and the birth-cry
of new life at its term.
Seamus Heaney,
The Cure at Troy