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October 31, 2002
Hallow It All
Tonight we welcome frightful darkWe relish our own fear
We fear that life is all too drab
So let the dead appear
Yet what are we but dead to be
Will we be braver then
Or hope to hide a quaking heart
Behind a skeleton?
We hallow Halloween with fear
For what we must become
But waking dawn will soon reveal
That trick and treat are one
(Oh, one other thing…)
October 14, 2002
No Vacancy
The Park is a caesura in the city; a pause for breath. A two and a half by one half mile gap, where the grid of Manhattan is not filled in; an aperture in the density of urban intensity.But it is not a vacant lot.
There are vacant lots in the city, and, scale aside, the effect of a gap in the rectilinear mass is similar. Such lots may represent both decay and potential; the razing of the past and the promise of the future. In the meantime, they are dormant, but only in human terms. The emptiness of the Park has been aestheticised, sculpted and subsequently filled with specimens conventionally considered beautiful. Any untended expanse will also fill up, but if we do not love its contents we will continue to consider it essentially empty. The mean grasses and the plants we deign as weeds do not appeal, nor do they offer much resistance to our plans. Regardless, they appear wherever our attention wavers, or our purposes are stymied for a time. Then green things will grow, and animals appear, for Life occupies any place it can.
There is opportunity in vacancy.
Thinking about Columbus Day, I realize that the Europeans treated America as a vacant lot. It was an opportunity, to be cleared and built upon; its plants and animals and even people were merely squatters who should scatter at our coming, or be plowed under. The price of such wantonness is to be alienated from the very Land that sustains us, and therefore to suffer a great nostalgia for what we have lost. I learn this lesson each October as the Wildflower Meadow goes to seed.
The Meadow is a small but significant patch of the Park in which the effect of a vacant lot has been intentionally created, in the interest of encouraging wildlife. A transitional habitat, overgrown and unruly amid the careful landscaping of a lost Victorian America.
Artfully we have planted what once the wind could sew.
But even if we cannot fully recapture our vanished wildness, we may mark in the idea of the Meadow the turning back point of Columbus’ voyage; Santa Maria coming about among the Asters and the Sparrows in a sea of dying grass.
A walk through a vacant lot remains a voyage of discovery.
In truth, the Meadow is as dense as the City, thick with Primrose and Pokeweed, Grape and Pea, Milkweed and Goldenrods and Daises of many kinds. Somewhere in between these I’ve managed to spy, a couple of times, the Yellow-breasted Chat. It’s considered a good bird, for although it’s the largest of our Warblers it’s notoriously secretive, and none too common, either. Seeing one might be the highlight of an intensive day of birding in the Park, so imagine my surprise when one popped up a few feet in front of me, not in the hyper-real habitat of the Meadow, but in a vacant lot in Queens, across the street from the diner where I was having breakfast. The Chat, migrating on a rainy night, needed a place to land and refuel, and that little spot of green was good enough.
There is opportunity in vacancy.
I must confess to my own nostalgic fondness for vacant lots. Indeed, it comes to me that my relationship with Central Park is much the same as I had one childhood Summer when I daily walked the two long blocks to a vacant lot at the end of our street, where I spent hours hunting for butterflies and spiders. That was thirty seven years ago, and I soon moved on, to superheros, to baseball, and then to adolescence, but among all the passing passions of youth I still recall it as one of my favorite Summers. I no longer imprison spiders in jars, or stick pins through butterflies, being (perhaps) a little wiser than a child, but I still find the living things in the corners of our World just as compelling as ever.
I see no vacancy in the empty places.
Vacancy or Plenitude.
It may be a matter of interpretation.
For the Chat, it’s the difference between life and death, but the bird’s interpretation reverses ours. Chats have seen their world diminish. Caught in the vacancy of the City, they must look for those few green gaps that allow at least the possibility of their continued existence. The rest is all necropolis.
For us, everything pivots upon the realization that every vacant lot could be a meadow, and a meadow is something to treasure, to plant if necessary, but not to build over. When we have learned to plant as much as we destroy, and sometimes to merely leave well enough alone, then we will have sent Columbus sailing Home, with a flight of Chats trailing off his windward bow.
September 23, 2002
Rising to the Occasion of Fall
Summer is spent, but what has it left us for Fall?To put a tortured year behind us, in favor of a tortuous future?
Nature’s indifference to our affairs is one of its corrective virtues, but the Land is not unaffected by our actions.
At least we will project our guilt upon its suffering.
The drought persists, infecting Autumn’s prospects. Stressed trees drop early leaves, and promise a scant harvest. Fall is a season of beauty, revealed beneath the Summer’s retreat, but it’s typically a dry time, so we must hope for Winter snows to salve the coming year.
In the meantime, things die, like the grasses; or bloom, like Goldenrods; or go to seed, like Sunflowers; or just go away, like the migrant birds now passing through. Change and repetition, all mixed up in the most multifaceted of seasons.
At twelve hours of day, and twelve of night, the Year is balanced.
Darkness may outpace the day now, but there is much to be seen, while the light lasts. A furtive Cuckoo, or a bold Blackburnian Warbler, flickering through the Meadow; Jewel Weed along the Loch, where the insect thrum mingles with the liquid voice of the stream; butterflies decorating the flowers that decorate the Conservatory Garden.
To know these things seems to me a good harvest.
A harvest of necessity.
I have maintained, on this page, that such engagement is in fact corrective, rather than escapist. We cannot escape our ties to Nature, any more than we can escape ourselves. Sometimes I want to escape from other people, but there is reassurance in finding how many of them are similarly motivated.
A year after last September’s terror and disaster, I met a woman who’d found healing through immersion in birding. We all need healing, if only from the basic trauma of existing. Birds can help, but people need to help each other. I sometimes feel that I should be more helpful and less insular, so it pleased me to be able to point out a few birds for this neophyte, including a rare Connecticut Warbler. Passing along something of what I’ve learned in my own endeavor has a way of validating the effort; laying healing upon healing; a gratification which cannot be had in the solitary precincts of meditation.
Her joy was palpable, and that made me feel good.
So, though Autumn brings decline, the cycle of the Year still offers hope. Healing comes from wholeness, just as our pain comes from separation. Each bird we learn is the answer to a want; each change of season completes the cycle once again; each point of contact holds the World intact.
September 2, 2002
Belabored
On Labor Day we rest.We are told that God rested, in the wake of Creation.
We are made in God’s image, and we too need respite from labors.
But work we must; for us, there is no standing still; no letting the timestream part around us; we have to work; we must exert, merely to exist.
And God?
The Gnostic among us will say that there is something telling in God’s need for rest; something belying the image of effortless omnipotence that attaches to deity.
If God were really God, rest would be unnecessary.
In fact, Creation, which is to say, effort, would be unnecessary.
The only thing God would have to do is to be, and that would be enough; that would be Plenty.
The encompassing, unmediated presence of God is the Plenitude.
We only hear about it as something rumored after death, but I don’t think it would be withheld, had God the power to deliver.
It can’t be granted, by God or to God; it must be worked for, and we are the tools through which the work is done.
Which pretty much means that we are the ones who have to do the work, with no more help from God than the basic grace of our existence.
So we labor.
For today, that we may take a day off, and for a future beyond effort, when the work is accomplished, and there is one eternal Holiday, when everything is right, and nothing more needs to happen.
That's going to take a lot of work.
Better rest up for it.
August 13, 2002
The Evening and the Day
Summer is the Sun.Reveling in it, or avoiding it.
We've had a heat wave, and despite a couple of powerful storms, the effects of the drought are now evident. Curled edges and premature colors advance the argument for Autumn.
Still, the Wildflower Meadow is in good shape, now grown tall. There a daily dance takes place between the sunshine and the twilight. In the hours at the edge of daytime the Evening Primrose holds sway. The pale yellow flowers spread their petals wide for the night, but soon clench up beneath the day's bright eye.
A Daisy then must take the lead; the family has many branches, but great among them are the Sunflowers. In the Park, the biggest of these is the Jerusalem Artichoke. While the Primrose nods, the Sunflower aspires skyward, a namesake chasing its name. But it goes awry when darkness comes, lost among alien insects while Primrose pollen hangs invisible upon the air.
The eye that looks into the Sun is blinded by the night.
The Earth turns, and day returns, and Summer cycles on.
Summer is the Sun, but Sunflowers must go to seed, and even the Primrose cannot tell whether it's the days that are getting shorter, or the nights getting longer.
Even so, while Summer lasts,
they dance.
July 31, 2002
In And Out Of Place
In Montana, along the Smith River, you could look up (and I mean straight up) to the top of the Morrison Formation, where the eroding limestone supports a picturesque line of conifers. Perched among them could be seen, not a bird, but a work of human kind, familiar, yet appearing strangely out of place in that context: a television antenna.There's something jarring about the sight, offensive even, to a sensibility that seeks a seamless view of nature, but it should really come as no surprise; hardly a view can be found, even in the rugged west, that does not betray the presence of our species. Antennas, transmitters, and power lines are widespread signs, but even in the most pristine, protected wilderness, the practiced eye is likely to descry at least the fading contrail of a passing jet. Fly where you will, you just can't get away from us.
Central Park is a get-away within the city. As such, it's hardly seamless, or rather the seam is its main feature. The contrast between the foliage, all soft green billows, and the hard, sharp planes of metal, glass, and stone in the surrounding buildings comprises the signature aesthetic of the place, though such a scene was unimagined in the pre-skyscraper days of the Park's conception. Now it's the perimeter that is central, and the view of the midtown skyline, rising out of the trees, has become the quintessential Central Park view. It is the city that makes the Park unique, and the city will not be ignored.
Not without some effort, anyway.
Those of us who turn away from the towers and the thoroughfares, screening the city with a scrim of briars, are not really aberrant, just a bit extreme. Everybody wants to get away at some point. New York itself is an exotic locale, attracting escapees from other quarters. Amid its grid of indiscriminate stimulation, you don't have to be a tourist to catch yourself staring. But live here long enough, and some sort of respite will become a necessity.
There's getting out of town, and then there's getting into it, but turn far enough inward and the city diminishes. At the center of Manhattan is this heart of green. Turn your back to the skyline and you might soon forget the world of right angles and crooked deals.
Except that,
peeking through the briar laces, or bordering an open field, vibrating on the periphery of vision, or pieced together by the eye's mind from behind a filigree of leaves,
that other world always shows through.
The Park is built upon the City, which is built upon the Land, and neither sits easily upon the other. You might think the Park is a hole, an absence of the City, but of course it's thoroughly landscaped, with slopes that are always in need of shoring up, and underlain with drainage systems forever under reconstruction. Belabored by heavy use, without continual maintenance the Park would deteriorate into a rather less artful (though perhaps more "natural") condition.
Just so, the City never quite subdues its situs, and is ever in danger of falling to pieces, like a crackled scab falling from the living flesh of an Earth that seeks to heal itself, no matter the depth of the wound.
So the City and the Park try to slide off of one another, but have long since slid into each other, and are inextricably linked, or one and the same, altogether. But it still comes as a shock, and a disjuncture, when you see through one and into the other.
There's a phenomenon I call a flit slit.
If you're looking for birds among the woods and meadows, then you're looking for a certain sort of motion: on a small scale, but across a wide field; maybe just a glimpse; a flit... You become sensitized, learn to discriminate among things half-seen, but even then, your eye is tied to expectations. Looking into the withy-web of Willows in the Loch, I often (if the time of year is right) see the tell-tale flits of Warblers, but also something else, that I can hardly tell from birds. It seems a flit, but proves to be a movement on another plane, as through a slit in the greenery I catch a glimpse of the hillside beyond, where a paved road runs, the main Park Drive. I can't really see the Drive, but now and again some vehicle, a runner's lifted heel, or a wheeling bicycle is caught for a split second in one of these slits, collapsing distance, producing an uncanny semblance of flitting in the forward plane, leading me to raise the binocular to my excited eyes, only to see all my illusions of a seamless natural scene dissolved and disabused, scattered before the ongoing civic parade.
Is there revenge for such frustrations?
Is that what squeezes its way through sidewalk seams, splitting the pavement, cracking the concrete?
Nature, in its turn, intrudes upon the City, flitting among the sheer facades, forcing slits of its own, where coarse grasses spring up, or Ailanthus grows, in any passing spot where we, sated for a moment, pause in our domination.
And I watch Kestrels nesting in the rotten metal eaves of a church in Queens.
It's not revenge, but reciprocity.
There must be exchange between the City and the World of Green. The terms are hard to fathom, for the City is enriched, while Nature seems to be destroyed, but if the slits are open and free flowing in between, we will learn that there really is no separation, only circulation. And even if "nature" must vanish, we may at least come to live in a park that takes up all the World. We will plant our antennas among the trees, and as long as we can't actually see the broadcast waves of radiation clouding our skies, we will learn to live with such "necessities".
True wilderness is not for us.
This is not much to hope for, but better than most of what I see, squinting at the future through the slits afforded me.
Better than the alternative which would have us peering through another kind of slit, such as is preserved in the old fortification of the Blockhouse: a slit to shoot through, and a wall to cower behind. When the wall crumbles (as it must, being built around an emptiness), there will be free passage in all directions. Until then, contrasts will continue to confound us: the outrage of an aerial among the mountains; the beauty of a city grown taller than the trees.
July 4, 2002
The Fourth of July;
Independence Day;
The American Midsummer
Just back from Montana, into the humid heat of the east, unrelieved even by night. Out west there was a daily swing, temperatures gliding through thin air. Night came cool and cobalt blue, bleeding black into vacuous pockets between innumerable stars.Vega, at the zenith, for all that blue-white fire, cannot heat the night, except the sight of it may warm the heart.
Too warm, I try to sleep.
Too many thoughts infest the heat.
Memories spool through, confused, unsorted; images parade before me: people; places; dogs and mountains; rivers; dinners; wine like fountains. Bluebirds; black birds; gray birds; yellow...
Swept downstream, I beach on shallows;
walk along the river’s shoulder; dance upon the rocky ridges; soar with swallows through the canyon.
I catch myself; was I sleeping?
Awake in the city, I’m aware of America.
Not where I’d been; there the land was just the land, tending to its own business. I heard no news, checked no mail, knew nothing but immediate surroundings. Words from afar now remind me. Montana is surely as fine a place as America may offer, but there is no mountain you can stand on that holds a continent in view.
Only the understanding that we lie beyond the horizon, too.
From sea to sea, we call the countless places one.
Yet our ocean border lies even upon the inland heights where this continent divides; whispering in canyon strata, five hundred million years away.
More recently,
we stake our claim.
June 21, 2002
Summer Vacating
Summer is here.It’s finally starting to feel like it, with a little sun and heat, but it’s an uncertain Summer. A damp drought; war and languor; the confusion of a new millennium in an old season.
Time to get out of town.
So I’m going; first serious vacation I’ve had in a good while.
Going to Montana, on a DMTree chartered tour.
I hear they have mountains and valleys and deserts and prairies, and badlands and good lands, and just a lot of lands in general.
I’ve never been out west, and I’m looking forward to it. Which is not the same thing as wanting to get away from Home, but maybe that too. Habit has its uses, but it’s good to break routine from time to time. Tradition is strong enough to bridge the gaps.
And Summer is the season for vacations.
The Park is a survival strategy of the City, and maybe the big lands out west will make it pale in comparison. But there is no comparison, or rather, there is only comparison, and not competition. Seeing the Wonders of the World makes us appreciate Home all the more. And I don’t think any place anywhere has a view like this one.
But it’ll still be there when I get back.
June 16, 2002
One in a Long Line
Yesterday I wrote of my conversation with the Goddess, but today is Father’s Day, and the masculine case cannot be ignored. The Goddess is a corrective in our culture, and if I’ve sought Her out, it may be an index of my alienation. Regardless, the spiritual dialectic of our sexual dimorphism requires of us some relation to the male God; the one that we meet first as the Father.When I recall my late father, he is a reminder that I have less than fulfilled my own relationship to maleness. I cannot see the future, but it seems increasingly unlikely that I will ever be a father, and in me his line is at an end. I cannot see the future, but I can see the past, locked in a photograph from his estate. There he is with his father; one of two grandfathers I never knew. Both died while my parents were yet young. It must be the early 1920’s, while the century was yet young, perhaps on Sugar Island, near Sault Sainte Marie, where he was born in 1919.
They stand on a dock.
All his life, my Father stood on the dock. He was a fisherman, though not a fancy one; maybe a rowboat on occasion, but mostly standing on the dock, casting towards a receding horizon. And he stood on the dock and saw his loved ones off, and for some of us, he was there to pick us up when we got back.
Now there is a horizon between us.
He gazes out into the water, but it is in the nature of a child to be distracted; it is the duty of a man to face the camera, like my grandfather, dapper in his summer whites and straw boater. I look at my father, and imagine that I can see in the child something of the man that I knew. And I look at my grandfather, and I wonder what of him there is in me.
I have loosed myself from the moorings where most of men have docked. Such power to create as I posses passes into words and images, not into flesh.
I do not grudge the choice.
Still, it seems I have unfinished business with the Father; to somehow bring Him forth, whose absence in me mirrors my own father’s death.
If I would not be an empty mirror, I must reflect His image.
For I am a man, if not a father, and that, I think, will make me a better man.
I say this as a servant of the Goddess, nor does She forget, that for every one of Her children, there is also a Father, in a line that has not failed yet.
June 15, 2002
Conversation
Now, in this quickly passing moment; while it’s still Spring, let me tell you about a conversation that I have. Walking across the Meadow swath; cresting the slope of the Ravine; following the course of the Loch, I am not alone in thought.The source of thought I do not know, for things come to my mind that I cannot account for; but if it would be understood, thought must be distilled as Word.
Every word is an answer, and begs another presence; no utterance but assumes an ear attuned to hear it.
The inner ear, the inner voice, converse.
Conversation goes both ways; the ear shall speak, the voice must listen.
Who speaks when we talk to ourselves?
Who speaks for me against resistance?
Who speaks to me through my resistance?
I have heard many voices, and honed my own against them.
I heard the voice of the Friend, loved and admired. Looked for the words that win approval; what would they say to what I think? Can I cause myself to think in such a way as I imagine they would wish?
Influence is a form of reply.
Peer review can be cruel, and our friends often prove as callow as we; yet some few achieve the estate of teacher.
And I have heard the voice of the Teacher, and measured all my learning by it. Tried to imagine the reply of one more knowledgeable than I.
Imagining what we do not know is a way of learning, but hard in the proving. Teachers don’t know everything, though the right words might make it seem so, leaving us to speak as a child to a parent.
And I have heard the voice of the Parent; that first voice echoes far.
More than we know, we are respondent to the words we heard in youth. We hear them still, across the years, the more so when they echo in the mouths of friends or teachers, or even those dear liars that we know, who lie by saying something true, but meaning something else.
All of these have spoken to me, and I reply as best I can.
But impetus precedes response, so who would I address, if I could choose the ear to receive my inner voice?
I must speak to my Love.
Who She is, I know no more than I know where my thoughts come from.
I know Her nonetheless.
It’s Her that I address, to plead my cause; advance my suit; at best, explain myself.
She answers in the dampness of a cold morning in May; a June that stumbles on towards Summer, leaving me wondering...
And I say, “well, yes, but wouldn’t you like to hear some more about me?”
But She knows me by my deeds, and knows the distance between my deeds and my well intentioned thoughts.
Somewhere between thoughts and deeds are words.
Or, words are a kind of deed, which may or may not be of an easy sort, compared to other actions one may take in the World. For my part, I account them beyond value. If I spend mine on Her, it’s in the faith that our conversation will teach me to please Her. That, I think, will make me a better man.
And I know she will love a better man.
A better man may recognize Her in the words of women of this world, and even some men. Knowing that they share Her voice, and learning to hear it, serves reply to my meditations, and corrects me with the force of Life as it is truly lived. And that’s really the better part of what I mean when I talk about worshipping the Goddess; a conversation of the heart, or head, or with a friend.
So if I talk to myself, or if you hear voices, it’s not to be thought strange.
Because we must have something to talk about.
And someone to talk to.
Beyond the conversation is silence: Mystery awaits your voice.
May 27, 2002
A Memorial Day Triad
Three Things to Remember:There is No Holiday of War
Properly construed, there are no Holidays, certainly no holy days, associated with war and its victims. Such memorials are commemorations rather than observations. I am an observer, and will honor what I can see: the presence of the Goddess, manifest upon the face of the Land. Ignorant of our endless battles, Her seasons reiterate a lesson taught across time. In Her, experience and memory are one. But we are forgetful, and if we really remembered our war dead we would honor them by living in peace.
There is No Holiday of Peace
Well worthy of a holiday, but we regard peace as our native state, and war an aberration. Peace is the presupposition of all the Holidays; the soil our way of life is nurtured in. Peace is transparent as water, and as vital; the medium in which we launch our celebrations. A season only appreciated upon leaving.
Today’s Holiday is the Gateway of Summer
So another Spring passes from actuality to memory. It’s been a strange one. Inside out, you could say: hot and dry in April; cold and wet in May. Reservoir levels are creeping up, and it certainly doesn’t feel like we’re in a drought, but there are still water supply concerns to trouble the prospects of Summer.
A fitful Spring, dimmed by the shadow of war. Sporadic and erratic. Frost at the beginning of the season retarded the momentum of the warm Winter; then the heat wave fooled many plants into panic-blooming; coming and going in a hurry, but it was only an advertisement for a Summer yet held in abeyance. Since then we’ve been below average in temperature, and above in precipitation. “We need the rain” is the oft repeated truism, but the weather patterns have not favored my schedule, and I haven’t coincided with the best waves of migrating birds, slipping through when they can. Still, there have been some nice ones, including the Little Blue Heron, a very rare sight in the Park, and the Kentucky Warbler; my thirty-fourth warbler species, leaving only the Golden-winged yet to be found, among those typically expected in our area. And there was the pleasure of sharing a few of these things with friends; the pleasure of sharing Life.
So I’m not complaining, though the Spring is waning, and early morning rambles must give way to the multitudes and their barbecues. The Holiday requires no less. I will remember this Spring, and hope to celebrate another. I will honor the dead, but not their deaths. I will seek to live in peace.
I will step into a further season.
I will remember
three things:
remember War,
remember Peace,
and in between,
the Dead.
In Memoriam;
in Spring,
Immemorial.
May 12, 2002
Mother’s Day
An empty egg, found upon the forest floor.From one of the many Robin’s nests, no doubt. Tossed out after the emergence of the chick, one hopes, though predation is just as likely. Was that the hole where the baby first broke through at birth, or where some rapacious Jay or Grackle broke in to consume it? Motherhood is not without its risks, but every empty egg must fill a heart, and she would lose her own life to save her offspring.
We need ask of ourselves no more than what our Mother has already given.
And still would give again.
Again and again.
Generative of generations, Motherhood is the original repetition, the chorus of the song of Life.
In Spring, Hers is the only aim, no matter that a foolish male gamete may so suppose as to proclaim dominion over land and labors. His mark is but affixed to his subservience. His space; Her place to choose. She may grace him or be gone.
And yet she ever makes the choice and takes the chance, and those of us who have been born are glad.
The Robins are already hatching. They will go on to a second brood; even a third. The egg shards of the past do not concern them. For us, it’s different. We cannot wander far from the womb without a backward, longing look. It’s not so much return we seek, (for that we’ll have to hope ahead,) but the means to repay the debt of birth. This we can hardly do, except to live our lives with Her approval.
Accept Her guidance.
Wonder at Her surprises.
Surely Mother is the wisest.
Or only such a fool
as made a place here in the World
for You.