I am home in California, where big storms have been stampeding through the bishop pine trees up here on the ridges of Point Reyes, knocking them - and the electricity- repeatedly flat. The skies are huge and radiant, even through rain. There are catkins elongating on the hazel trees. The salt waters of Tomales Bay are breathtakingly cold but silky and blessed on the skin (I may have to take myself down for another plunge between storms today). There are no irises yet, but their promise is rising on the green stalks. I will need to go looking for them soon, on the long tip of the peninsula where the tule elk live.
But above all, exactly a week ago today, and only a few days after my return, my paternal grandfather passed away.
So I am very gathered in right now; into my heart; into my family’s heart; holding everyone close, and my grandfather’s memory and soul as he journeys back to the light of God. I find that for once I don’t have a lot of words.
For that reason, I am postponing the first chapter of Mother Animal until next Sunday the 25th of February. It’s a rich-to-the brim gathering of fairytale excerpts and explorations about magical conceptions to start us off (lots of apples!). I hope you will forgive the little extra wait.
For today, I’ve made a small recording dedicated to my grandpa Linsteadt, and to his wife, my grandma Teresa who to me is an embodiment of love and inner strength.
In it are two poems that I often return to when I need words to come wash through my heart like sun, and a third by Hafiz who my grandfather loved. At the end of the recording I’ve also sung a favorite song of mine, for him— Bright Morning Star, a traditional Appalachian Spiritual.
I’ve included the texts of the first two poems below. The Hafiz, and the song, are only on the recording. :)
A note on the first two poems— the e.e. cummings I’ve been reading since I was a teenager, and first in love. Now when I read it, I see it not only as a love poem to a human beloved, but actually even more so, a powerful articulation of what it means to carry God in our hearts, and to therefore at the same time rest in the heart of God. Merwin’s “Rain Light” - well, it needs no introduction or explanation. It’s just perfection, to me, in poem form.
RAIN LIGHT BY W.S. MERWIN
All day the stars watch from long ago my mother said I am going now when you are alone you will be all right whether or not you know you will know look at the old house in the dawn rain all the flowers are forms of water the sun reminds them through a white cloud touches the patchwork spread on the hill the washed colors of the afterlife that lived there long before you were born see how they wake without a question even though the whole world is burning — W.S. Merwin, from his Pulitzer-Prize winning book The Shadow of Sirius (Copper Canyon Press, 2008).
[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in]
BY E. E. CUMMINGS
i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you
here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart
i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)
-from E.E. Cummings Complete Poems: 1904-1962 (Liveright Publishing Corporation, 1991)
So beautiful and moving, thank you for sharing such intimacies. Sending love and strength. Xx
Much love to you and your family during this time - and always.