Last week I bought yellow tulips as a beckoning to spring. They were buds that opened, and now today their petals are soft, transparent and falling so I offer them to the yard.
I’m with these words of Toni Packer:
The immense challenge to each one of us is this: Can we live our daily lives, at least for moments at a time, in the wonder of presence that is the creative source of everything?
Again, it’s dark and gray with rain. This January offers stillness and reflective time.
I’ve been immersed in Tracy K. Smith’s memoir Ordinary Light. The book ends with the passing/passage of her mother.
Lately I’ve felt my mother close though she passed 15 years ago. Perhaps it’s the birth of my grandchild, her great grandchild that connects the cords.
Tracy ends the book with a poem by Seamus Heaney from his book, The Haw Lantern. The sonnet sequence called “Clearances” is an elegy for his mother. It closes with this.
I thought of walking round and round a space
Utterly empty, utterly a source
Where the decked chestnut tree had lost its place
In our front hedge above the wallflowers.
The white chips jumped and jumped and skited high.
I heard the hatchet’s differentiated
Accurate cut, the crack, the sigh
And collapse of what luxuriated
Through the shocked tips and wreckage of it all.
Deep-planted and long gone, my coeval
Chestnut from a jam jar in a hole,
Its heft and hush become a bright nowhere,
A soul ramifying and forever
Silent, beyond silence listened for
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