Filter by Category : Tag : Date

Filter by Category : Tag : Date

Filter by Category : Tag : Date

Browsing Tag

Mary Oliver

Not all is doom and gloom.

As an antidote to my habitually bleak news these days, I thought I’d collect and present what brought me fun, knowledge and/or encouragement across the last week.

HOPE:

In Germany literally millions of people marched against the far right now for two consecutive weeks, with demonstrations particularly strong on Holocaust remembrance day. “Germany’s constitutional court stripped a neo-Nazi party of the right to public financing and the tax advantages normally extended to political organizations, a decision that could have implications for countering the Alternative for Germany, a far-right party whose growing popularity has caused concerns among parts of the population.”

Below is what demonstrators got to see on a high-rise in Düsseldorf.

“The difference between 1933 and 2024? You!”

EDUCATION:

And also this…..

I did not know that.

RELIEF:

The International Court of Justice in The Hague walked a fine line in their ruling on the genocide case against Israel brought by South Africa; here is a compilation of short, informative expert opinions on the implications, offered by the Atlantic Council (not exactly a hotbed of progressivism). Here are the take-aways from The Guardian, slightly more to the left. And here the ruling is declared a historic victory for the Palestinians by The Intercept. Then again, Israeli Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir declares it: Hague Shmague. Fact is, the case is taken up, will stretch out for years, but importantly for now, the court ordered Israel to “take all measures” to avoid acts of genocide in Gaza, a ruling that is, however, unenforceable.

FUN:

I discovered a site, Artbutmakeitsports, that manages to combine knowledge of art and sports in ways that had even me, the least sportive person in the world, laugh with delight.

Autumn, by Mikhail Larionov, 1912

The Harvesters, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1565.

Last, but not least,

CONTENTMENT:

I finally managed to bring some of my affairs in order, figuring out what to do in the case of eventual demise. Unlike those whose adherence to religion faiths proscribes what to do, I had to make difficult decisions myself. I’ve never wanted to imagine myself cooped up in a coffin. I did not like the idea of cremation due to its horrid environmental impact. They now offer an alternative, where your remains get literally composted and then, except what urns relatives might claim, gets used to fertilize reforesting projects in the PNW forests. “Mami Mulch!” as my beloved declared. And now I don’t have to think about it ever again…

When I am Among the Trees

 
When I am among the trees,
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
they give off such hints of gladness.
I would almost say that they save me, and daily.
 
I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, and discernment,
and never hurry through the world
but walk slowly, and bow often.
 
Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, “Stay awhile.”
The light flows from their branches.
 
And they call again, “It’s simple,” they say,
“and you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with light, and to shine.”

By Mary Oliver

I might not shine in this world, but I can sure make it grow!

And here is sunlight and a breeze flittering through the tree canopy – Liszt‘s music at its best.


 

2 Comments

Ethereal Blues (and Purples.)

I came across Oliver’s poem yesterday, and it spoke to me.

I was privileged in the sense that I was early on instructed by my mother to attend to the less obvious specimens in the floral world around us – just like the poet points to the weeds or small stones, anything but the showstoppers.

Blue Flax – the plant linen is made from.

So much beauty to be found in the borders of the garden, rather than the central beds. (Well, at least in this magical garden created by a true master gardener who is always willing to experiment. Today’s blog is dedicated to you, R.C.!) So many more opportunities for pollinators, too. And that’s before we even get to the wild flowers…

Baby Blue Eyes

Lobelia

Dame’s Rocket

Even the shade of blues in spring is softer, lighter, and there is purple with a hint of pink at times. Summer, of course, gives way to the heavy saturated blues of delphiniums and salvias, but we’ll get to that in time.

Allium

Scabious (Knautia)

Wild Geranium

I have always thought of prayers that give thanks as psychological tools to focus attention( even before I read the poem,) be it to a situation or a feeling, a means of making aware, reminding oneself of the grace that surrounds us at a particular moment.

Desert Bluebell

Not that I expect (or hope for) another voice to make itself known. Acknowledging the beauty or kindness of the world around me is enough. It restores balance for all the fear I’m usually tuned into. It also points to the importance to help the world stay that way, to protect fragility. Acknowledgement, then, paving the path to action.

Borage

The climbers opt for more substantial flower heads, like the wisteria below, about to unfold,

and the clematis.

These photographs, with one exception, were taken on a single day last week. Wherever you look: reason to give thanks for evolutionary pressures to create what we consider beauty. Awareness that there is not just misery in the world. Reminders that we have to act to keep it that way, before the world becomes a hothouse. You might be partial to orchids. But the delicate, porcelain blues I cherish wouldn’t survive that.

Music today is Mozart’s ode to the violet… (below, strictly, are violas.)

2 Comments

Tides

On a day sunny last week, my son took me to a beach, El Pescador, near Malibu, where he occasionally fishes.

A beautiful spot, with the tide still out, allowing me to explore the rocks and tide pools and all that they house. Every new bird set off a quick heartbeat, from cormorants, to king fisher to whimbrels.

A beach where benevolent pirates decided to make it easy for you to find treasure… DIG HERE!

I was particularly taken by the range of colors, not those of the sea as in Mary Oliver’s poem, but those of the rocks, fauna and flora surrounding me.

Reds, greens, yellows, ochres, turquoise, purple, oranges, grey and blues filled the eyes if you looked closely. Lots of pictures, then, and few words – treading with light feet and a full heart in view of nature, once again.

Tides

Every day the sea

blue gray green lavender
pulls away leaving the harbor’s
dark-cobbled undercoat



slick and rutted and worm-riddled, the gulls
walk there among old whalebones, the white
spines of fish blink from the strandy stew
as the hours tick over; and then



far out the faint, sheer
line turns, rustling over the slack,
the outer bars, over the green-furred flats, over
the clam beds, slippery logs,



barnacle-studded stones, dragging
the shining sheets forward, deepening,
pushing, wreathing together
wave and seaweed, their piled curvatures



spilling over themselves, lapping
blue gray green lavender, never
resting, not ever but fashioning shore,
continent, everything.



And here you may find me
on almost any morning
walking along the shore so
light-footed so casual.

By Mary Oliver,

From A Thousand Mornings, 2012

The stone formations and differing colors never cease to amaze.

Here is a musical offering to the oceans from around the world.

It was a good day.

1 Comments

Curious Companions.

Pull up a chair. We are not walking today but looking out of my window, something I was forced to do most of last week since I had to navigate the consequences of a fall. (All good now, no worries.)

I resumed photographing the squirrels on my balcony. When you stare out of the windows for hours at a time you can eventually identify a cast of characters by their distinct markings. By now we are on a first name basis.

Meet Fire Ear, my favorite, since s/he’s fearless, happy to look me straight in the eye and defiantly pees into my flowerpot during visits. Every single time.

Then there’s Mohawk, whose tail is either fashionably barbered or the proud emblem of victory in a previous fight.

Nipped Ear has obviously been victorious as well, and is aggressively defending his position at the peanuts when other squirrels arrive.

Red dot is the leanest of them all and shy,

Butterball only appears when the big guys have had their share,

and occasionally there’s an enterprising Baby.

The word squirrel is Greek in origin: it comes from skiouros, from skia, meaning “shadow,” and oura, meaning “tail.” When they sit up and move their tail straight one could think of it as a bit of an umbrella, I guess.

There are a whopping 200 species across the world, all born altricial, or completely dependent on their mothers for the first three months of their lives. They hoard food in caches for lean times, able to dig up stuff even under a foot of snow. Some 25% of those stores are lost to raiders, some are never dug up, which in turn helps to grow new trees, in theory. Not in my flowerpots, where nuts disappear en masse.

They are crepuscular, that is most active at dusk and dawn, so they can hang out when it gets hot during the middle of the day. They also sport hyper mobility (they can rotate their ankles by 180 degrees,) which allows them to climb in amazing ways, with forearms stretching, while the backless are anchored to the tree limbs. Oh, and their teeth never stop growing. Good thing, too when your perennially wear them down on hard nuts.

It brings me such joy to watch them, prohibitions to feed them close to the house (they might start nesting in the rafters) be d-mned. The poem below could not be more apt.

Checking out what’s inside the house!

Here is a field recording of Squirrel Flower – longtime readers might remember the location, deCordova sculpture park in MA, I wrote about it here.

3 Comments

Hoping for Grace

In Praise of Craziness, of a Certain Kind

On cold evenings
my grandmother,
with ownership of half her mind-
the other half having flown back to Bohemia-

spread newspapers over the porch floor
so, she said, the garden ants could crawl beneath,
as under a blanket, and keep warm,

and what shall I wish for, for myself,
but, being so struck by the lightning of years,
to be like her with what is left, that loving.

by Mary Oliver

from New and Selected Poems: Volume Two

This is probably one of the poems I love most, for so many reasons. The way it shifts between description and evaluation, the former showing an outsider’s perspective, the latter a relationship to another human being as well as a yearning for some form of grace. The tenderness with which a seemingly “crazy” act is put into perspective, disambiguated as a form of loving, is striking. We so often, scared to death by the perceived reality of losing our minds, rather distance ourselves from crazy behavior, instead of finding some remaining value in it. Oliver also acknowledges that we cannot count on (or control) a particular way of aging, but might be blessed – either avoiding dementia or finding a light within. A frightful admission and her unswerving insistence on finding hope, as in so much of her work.

There is a German saying that age brings out either the cow or the goat in women. The former is supposed to be a hefty, placid, friendly, not particularly flexible form of being. The latter has more the qualities of what English speakers would call “catty” a nervous, snippy, mean and often stubborn crone. Folk wisdom like this is wrong as often as it is right, or contains at least partial kernel of truths, as all stereotypes do. Fact is, despite an explosion of research into aging across the last decades we, as scientists as well, know very few things for sure.

We do know that the brain parts that regulate inhibition of behaviors are affected early on. The subsequent disinhibition might be relevant for becoming “a goat,” bitterness and anger now more expressed.

There seems to be overall agreement, that although personality traits remain relatively stable across the life span (UNLESS dementia occurs, which can completely change your personality without your fault) some traits seem to get a bit stronger age, and others diminish. Of the “Big Five” personality traits, agreeableness, conscientiousness and emotional stability seem to be getting a lift with maturation. Two other traits do decline with age – a general openness to experiences, and both facets of extraversion, social vitality and social dominance. (Ref.) Personality and aging interacts – some of us have an easier go accepting the hardship of aging than others. Personality resources such as self-esteem, perceived control, self-efficacy and resilience shape the person’s response to adversity in later life, not surprisingly.

What else do we know? Some of our long-held beliefs – for example that older people display a positivity bias and are better at emotional regulation compared to younger ones – are now questioned. New insights have found that contemporary old people are cognitively much better off than their peers who were born 20 years earlier, when tested at the same age. This is not because we somehow managed to delay the onset of age-dependent decline or because we decline more slowly across the years. Rather, we have been overall, across our lifespan, cognitively strengthened with better education, technological use, wider access to information, and that overall improved performance is giving us some slack to cover up the early signs of decline with age.

Here is a short list of the questions that are currently asked in the field (NIH/National Institute of Aging.)

  • There is a whole enterprise exploring the biology of aging to help with prevention, progression and prognosis of disease and disability. It is a two way street – aging is a risk factor for developing chronic disease, but diseases also hasten aging.
  • There is a body of work dedicated to better understand the effects of personal, interpersonal, and societal factors on aging, including the mechanisms through which these factors exert their effects. Research is looking into the interaction between behavior (lifestyle)social, psychological and economic factors, as well as the timing of intervention during critical periods in a person’s life span where the course is set, and the effect of place (there are geographic aspects that impact aging.)
  • Researchers are interested in looking a population differences, to see where disparities need to be tackled, and also how we can improve our understanding of the consequences of an aging society to inform intervention development and policy decisions.

They got their work cut out for them. Whether potential answers enable us to improve our empathic responses to people living with dementia, or help us to prepare better for our own decline, I cannot tell.

May what is left be loving.

3 Comments

May Their Memory Be For A Blessing

My mother’s Jahrzeit returns this weekend for the 38. time, she did not even reach 60 years of age. Neither did another, even younger woman, artist Dorothy Goode, who died this week last year. Also a year ago we lost Ruth Bader Ginsburg, going on 90. My mother-in-law died at the beginning of this month, well into her 90s. Two years ago the poet Mary Oliver was taken from us in her 80s, her incomparable sensitivity to and insight about nature now restricted to the work she left behind. Uncountable numbers of souls departed as a result of a pandemic that could have been stemmed during the last two years. Uncounted humans were erased by climate catastrophes, poverty and violence, children among them. May they all rest in power.

Jewish custom has us say “May their memory be for a blessing” after someone’s passing, often expressed as (z”l) or in Hebrew (ז”ל) after their name, which stands for zikhronah livrakha, blessed memory, in the shorthand form. The phrase refers to the blessing a person leaves behind, from a life lived in ways that reverberate, an impact that continues to flow. Whether goodness, creativity, love, justice or any other positive mark they left on the world, the point is that something lives on, blessing future generations.

In this regard, it does not matter how many years you are granted. The issue is what you make of them, or as someone said “your legacy of righteousness,” a term deeply settled in my soul, cliché be damned.

The poet Mary Oliver resonates for me over and over again by her ability to reconstruct the familiar, give it a twist or open it to questions that reveal reversed perspectives. Couldn’t think of a better legacy. The poem I chose for today, in memory of my mother who loved all things owl, helps us to move from visions of death as something dark and frightful to the opposite:

but so much light wrapping itself around us — as soft as feathers —

White Owl Flies Into and Out of the Field

by Mary Oliver

Let yourself be carried, is the transcendent metaphor in the poem, without fear.

Until then let us carry others, without hesitation.

It’s the one legacy we all can leave behind.

Photographs today are of some of the postcards sent to me throughout the last 18 months of what turned out to be among the hardest times of our family’s life, by a dear friend who knows what owls stand for in my universe. The constant stream, tucked up on the fridge, has sustained me.

Music also dedicated to my mother, an anxious rebel and a Stevie Wonder fan, who never stopped trying to reach her highest ground.

2 Comments
© 2024