An End and a Beginning

Bees dance when they have something to say. They came to my yard one day to show me how they speak. In this photo, a bee dances in the center of a crowd of listeners. Guided by some sort of spirit, a hive nearby knew it was time to split the community, and the queen took half her servants in search of a new home. They rested for a few hours in one of my rose bushes, and they showed me how the scouts direct the swarm to a suitable new hive, an amazing display of sustainable choices and a great mystery in the natural order of life.

In contrast, we humans tend to be rigid in our beliefs, convinced that our brains know the way of things. We often don't question our knowledge and indoctrinations, mistaking our judgments and opinions for a Universal Truth.

For the past six months I've been on an expedition, like the bees. There have been upheavals and discoveries, sadness and epiphanies. I wondered if my stories here had reached their appointed end. Today, like the bees that paused at my house this past spring, I'm going to dance my story.

What in God’s Name?

You can call God Max if you want to,
says the woman who mentors me
in matters spiritual and guttural
between phone calls to her oncologist
and shopping trips for still more hats
for yet another season of baldness.

I don’t mind being juggled between
the specialists and their repercussions,
a sunny yellow ball shining among
the dry-blood spheres of toxic doctors
and the baby blues of her infant head.
I have her here now, and laughing,
certain she won’t die today, not before
she finishes the job I handed her:
Find a God for me, the newly godless.

On the Fourth of July, she told me
God might dwell in fireworks,
a pyrotechnic atom all crackling red
and shimmering gold. Before that,
she said he dallied in the roses
for my clippers to unleash him,
and before that, she said he bided
at my mother’s, humming in the
sprinkler lines I mended, mourning.

I seek wherever she sends me because
I fired the irascible Judge with a clipboard
the day I found my mother up to her elbows
stirring turds in her toilet with a conviction
only the demented can muster. As I begged
the God of my mother to release his
faithful servant from her shitty life,
the scales fell from my eyes: Suddenly
I knew that old Curmudgeon suffered
psychological disorders, eons untreated,
and I forsook him on the spot. But I
was groomed since birth for God,
the fear of blasphemy embedded deep
in my reptilian brain. To be godless is
to be legless, sightless, hopeless, damned.

As my mentor fights for life, she leads me
through her curious garden, pungent with
the scents of anarchy and heresy, assigning
my tasks: Glean that field of God particles,
rake the fallen leaves under Tolstoy’s vine,
take cuttings from the tree of Martin Luther.
Here she has planted every rotten thing
that ever came to her, and made it bloom:
the young and dead, the broken, unjust,
the bitter losses and the insidious cancer
that tries to claim her every few years.

Here each stone and growing shoot
holds meaning, a miniature magnificence
that speaks of something so immense,
it can’t be grasped. But I reach anyway,
oh puny hand, for some divine, redemptive
purpose in my mother stirring turds
and all the other shocking shit of life.

You can call him Max, my mentor says:
Think about that. So I consider this
ludicrous thought: calling my new God
the name I circled in red ink in a baby book
so long ago, chosen for a son I never had.
Would I be free at last, I ask, of the tyrant
who ordains impossible standards knowing
I will fail, my eternal, horrid, raging father?
Hello, Max, I say, reaching out my hand,
and something brushes against my palm:
a weightless kiss of wings, or lips.

Ripples in the Pond



Fog in the harbor, Morro Bay, California



Ripples in the Pond


Sometimes it hits me upside the head,
how what happened to her
touched him and he touched me
and I told someone and
in the telling she was touched
and the touches keep touching.
One day I want to ask God:
Please show me
the ripples in the pond
where my stone reached.

My Curious Guest, Revealed

It was pure serendipity that I found this creature tucked into the roses Saturday morning. It looked at first like a dry curled leaf, and I'm not sure why I moved in for a closer view. Picking dead leaves wasn't on my agenda; I was picking dahlias. I like to think that God was nudging me so I could enjoy His strange surprise. Last night I queried Google images and learned that my beautiful guest is a sphinx moth that goes by the name Eumorpha achemon.

The moth has a fighter jet's lines. I learned that sphinx moths are some of the fastest flying insects, and some can fly over 30 mph. The achemon has a wingspan of about 3.5 inches, about the width of my palm, and it flies at night. One website said it is rarely seen, which reinforced my sense of the serendipity of our meeting. Achemon feeds on nectar, especially petunias, which I don’t have. Maybe that's why it was gone this morning.

In Greek mythology, Achemon and his brother Basalas were a pair of mischief-making ancient spirits, who once stole the weapons of Heracles. He punished them by tying their feet to his club and slinging it over his shoulder, marching off with them hanging upside down, facing backwards. From that perspective, the brothers beheld the sight of Heracles' bare butt and burst into laughter, and when Heracles demanded to know what they were laughing at, he cracked up too and let them go.

I have no idea why the Achemon myth inspired the gentleman who named this moth in the 1700s. But the Poetry Jam requests a humorous poem this week, and the Achemon myth inspired this haiku:

Two mischief makers
spy Hercules’s godly ass:
Divine heroic crack-up.

I like to turn events like this into life lessons, so I remind myself: You never know what might cross your path today. Might be some little miracle tucked in there. Tunnel vision will blind you to it, so be observant!

But Can They Fly?

This winged wonder is the kite I've made to enter in the Mid-State Fair coming to my area this week. It's a triangular box kite variation on a conyne design, using vinyl shelf liner and photos by Ansel Adams from last year's calendar. Will it fly? Hell if I know. The fair's handmade kite competition doesn't require a flight.

The fair always comes up with some theme each year, and in the floral design competitions we'll have to find ways to illustrate the theme in flower arrangements. This year's doozy is "Mountains of Fun" and I nearly scratched from the kite business because of it. Easily overwhelmed, poor me.

But I'm a member in good standing of Alcoholics Anonymous, and the program does NOT advocate giving up when the going gets tough. I did what a good AA ought to do when she has signed up to make a kite and now thinks it will be too hard: call on her sponsor. Sponsors handle all kinds of odd problems.

I was reminded of that ever-so-helpful Chinese proverb: The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. What's the first indicated thing to do? Prayer is usually a smart idea.

Now, God is probably very busy with serious issues. But in AA I'm allowed to access a Higher Power of my own understanding. While the God of my fathers is far too tied up with enormous global and individual crises to care about kite anxiety, my own Higher Power has wiggle room to handle challenges of every sort. So I dialed my spiritual hotline. Next thing I know, that old Ansel Adams calendar comes to mind, with its beatiful black and white photos of mountains. Ha! It happened on the 101 freeway heading for an AA meeting. If anyone tries to argue me out of believing in my Higher Power, I will show them this kite. And I know it will fly even though it doesn't have to.

And here's a photo just for fun of my newest garden acquisition. The 30-inch curving top piece, headed with an iron butterfly on one end and an iron weight on the other, is simply balanced on the stand of stones on a quarter-inch ball welded to the top piece. The large butterfly and a smaller one partway down the backside catch the breeze, and the whole things turns gently on the stand. I wonder what would happen to the betterflies in a gale. Would they fly?

The Dragon Is Full

We call it The Dragon because of its shape. The lake near my town is the Nacimiento, a Spanish name meaning birth or the headwaters. In these shots, we're standing at the Dragon's neck.

Built when I was two years old, the Dragon has this year filled totally up. It's famous for its 165 miles of unspoiled shoreline, its reputation for the greatest water skiing in California, and its white bass fishing. Bald eagles nest here. Joe and I went out there Tuesday, to take pictures of its historic level, more full than at any time since it was built in 1956.

The lake is so full it's pouring over the spillway of the dam, and the water force is a mighty thing.

This is Spanish moss.

Oak branches with lichen.

This is a sample of our stickery dandelion.

Along the hillsides, sage is blooming.

The drive out to the lake is buccolic.

World class horse trainers live out here.

It's a glorious place to live, and in early spring the grass and budding oak trees turn it into paradise.

Today's thought:

You can have anything you want if you will give up the belief that you can't have it.

A Strange Way to Make Peace

It's the Last Bus before Christmas. That has a sad sound to it, but never mind. At the wheel of the Totalfeckineejit's greatest invention, the Poetry Bus is the poet and recent medical-crisis survivor The Weaver of Grass. She told us fellow poets to make something out the word STAR. As there are many kinds of stars. this should get interesting. Follow this link.

Always an obedient chickita, I wrote a poem and stuck the word STAR in it. It was fun to write because I decided not to have me the poet/narrator appear in the poem to confess any personal emotions, and furthermore, you couldn't appear in the poem either. It was to be an observation poem without an observer, but it still needed to have an emotive impact on the reader. Does it hit the mark?

The other enjoyable part of this poem is its repetitive references to the principles of fractal geometry, which I taught myself in about two hours this past week. (Ha.) There's some interesting stuff on the Web about fractals, which are beautiful geometric shapes formed by infinite replications of similar units. PBS has a great program about fractals here. They're all around us and in us: branching trees, our lungs, watersheds and river systems. I hope the poem works for you.


A Midnight Course in Fractal Geometry


Sleepless again....a repetition of many nights
Windows in the pentagonal glass room reflect
endless patterns of white Christmas lights
Cheerful chaos erupts
from ordinary roofs and shrubs
Curves and angles and loop de loops
swing in a wind with a storm in its arms
A rope of blue transforms the invisible
fence....Now waves on a blue sea
undulate again and again and again
In the looking glass
infinite points of light
form infinite replicas of stars
repeating themselves until they vanish
into the midnight place....Men know how
to wrest order from chaos
They can turn these patterns into formulas
explaining why the shapes make sense
but they can’t say why
the stars make peace
on a December night

Argument with God

I’ve decided to tackle God, as the Poetry Bus drives around the world picking up passengers this week, steered by Dana at Bug’s Eye View.

The Bug has offered three good prompts for us. The first is based on Isaiah 1, verse 18, in which God says, “Come. Sit down. Let's argue this out.” Dana wants us to tell about the argument we would have with God. The second one involves “The Hunt for Red October” and Sam Neill’s dream of living in Montana. The third prompt deals with the leafless trees of winter. I present a two-fer this week because I have strong feelings about the first and third prompts (sorry, Sam, you're a nice guy, but ... ).

I imagined that I could put God on trial for allowing the deaths of my father, mother, and older brother’s first wife, my dear friend. What came wasn’t a poem. It was a one-sided courtroom dialog between the plaintiff’s attorney and God, whom we can’t hear, who sits in the witness stand.

God on Trial

The plaintiff calls God Almighty to the witness stand.
Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you … God? ––
Please state your full name for the record. ––
Is Jahveh your first name, or your last name? Adonai, Lord, Elohim, I Am … Which of these is your legal last name? How, sir, shall the court address you? ––
Mr. Jehovah, the complaint filed against you by the plaintiff, Chris A., alleges you acted with reckless disregard and in fact caused the premature deaths of her father, Merle W., killed by cancer of the brain at age 53, and her sister-in-law, Jere W., killed by pancreatic cancer at age 46. In addition she alleges you exercised the same reckless disregard in the affliction of Alzheimer’s dementia upon her mother, Frances W., resulting in her death by same. How do you respond to these allegations? ––
You maintain then, Mr. Jehovah, that “reckless disregard” does not apply, because in your omniscience, not even a sparrow falls to the ground without your knowledge. So is it fair to say that you were aware of their impending deaths but still chose to let them die? ––
In what way, in your view, were their premature and tragic deaths a benefit either to themselves or to the plaintiff? ––
All right, then, we will stipulate that the deaths of Jere W. and Merle W. were not premature, because you in fact planned that their lives would conclude in the manner and at the time they did. We return, however, to the question: Would you care to explain in what way were their deaths, the manner of them, and the timing of them, a benefit either to themselves or to their loved ones? ––
If it is always a benefit to believers when they die and, as you say, go to heaven to live in perpetual joy with you, why then do you not simply let all believers die and go straight to heaven? ––
I beg your pardon, Mr. Jehovah. Question withdrawn. Let us rephrase the issue: Did you, with foreknowledge and intent, deprive the plaintiff of the love and companionship of her family members? ––
With respect, Mr. Jehovah, a simple “yes” or “no” is sufficient. ––
Your honor, would you please instruct the witness to respond directly with a yes or no answer to the question: Did you, or did you not, with foreknowledge and intent, deprive the plaintiff of the love and companionship of her family members? ––
Mr. Jehovah, would you please explain for the edification of the jury what you mean by executive privilege and diplomatic immunity?

As you can see, I didn’t get very far in putting God on trial. Maybe I need to change attorneys … Anyway, here’s a poem about leafless trees, sort of, and God too, since I’m still a little ticked off about his claiming executive privilege in my last outing with him. The funny thing is, I like God a lot and thank him pretty often for being very, very good to me. I guess I’ve had to wrestle with him a bit, and that’s what these two items today are about.

Eye in the Sky

All milk and smoke, the winter sky arcs overhead
rimmed by bare branches of trees

Lie down beneath it
like a hard brown chrysalis
on the dry ground

and look up
Stare at the pearly white eyeball staring back at you
with its branching network of nerves
through which the vision of yourself travels
to the unfathomable resting mind behind the eye

Marvel that you ever bother to cry out
to the God who turns this eye on his creation
and feel the chill of it all
in the tiny chrysalis that is you

(Photo from Wikipedia Commons, God bless 'em.)

Resurrection

No matter what dramas play out in the human arena, in the spring I can find rejuvenation in the natural world around me.

We left the city of concrete and asphalt 12 years ago and moved to our modest town in the country, where nature hasn't disappointed us. We have seasons here.

This past month the oaks have fully leafed out with fresh green leaves. The hills are undulating fields of green. The vineyards are busy churning out new shoots. Wildflowers are brushstrokes of purple and orange and yellow.

A pair of blue jays have set up housekeeping somewhere nearby. I saw a robin yesterday. The woodpeckers are busy in the oaks outside my glass writing room. The air is alive with the movement of doves, hawks, crows, mockingbirds, and finches.

I love this cycle of nature. It's bursting with fresh life, life running rampant all around, life you can hear, and see, and touch. When the world is too much with me, I can focus on the resurrection of life all around me, and it builds my faith that all is as it should be in God's world.

Dead Wood Resurrected

Blue jay restless
as a cat in heat
hopping from foot to foot
in the dead pyracantha
with its black trunk
and fire-scorched leaves
sheared off shoulder high

That blue jay bird
breaks off brittle twigs
and spits them out
one twig, two twig, three twigs down
the fourth twig suits

And off jay flies
to build a nest
one damn twig
at a time.

Aha! It’s back.
And so’s its spouse
who alights in a nearby cherry tree
to observe this twig connoisseur
at work
Blue jay hops from twig to twig
in the dead pyracantha
picking only one

And off they fly
to build a nest
one dumb twig
at a time.

At day’s end
I check the bush
still black and scorched
killed this winter
by fireblight
(damn it all to hell)

I find it stripped
of all its twigs
by blue jay birds
who’ve built a nest
one dumb twig
at a time.

P.S. The photo is not mine; it's from an educational site.

You Are Who You Are

Me in a marble

“The easiest thing in the world to be is you. The most difficult thing to be is what other people want you to be. Don't let them put you in that position.”

Leo Buscaglia

I don’t know what a co-dependent is exactly, but I have a feeling that’s because I wasn’t one. I just didn’t like myself.
Having a relationship with my Creator changed all that in a miraculous way.

When I was young, I was bad. That was my role in the family, and that was how I stood vis-à-vis the God I was raised with. Can anybody relate?

Then I had a deep spiritual experience and was reborn. But I still fell terribly short of the requirements my faith dictated. Now God loved me, but I was supposed to live a very spiritual life, and I didn’t do that, so again, I was bad. This went on for decades.

Then I found the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous. I did the 12 Steps with a sponsor and discovered forgiveness. I discovered my God not only forgave but loved me exactly as I am, imperfect and also very wonderful.

Part of my imperfection is that I really need the affirmation of others to believe that I am okay as I am. I can accept it today, since most other people feel the same way. Acceptance of my humanity makes it possible for me to be me and to let you be you.

Today my intuition is better than it once was, thanks to the Steps. I can feel when I’m not being authentic, when I’m searching more for affirmation than I should. I’ve also been blessed because the people I’m close to also accept me as I am, and they don’t require me to be other than that.

Do you believe you’re good just as you are? Are you glad you are who you are?

~~~~~~~

Chronology of a Crone

Today has been my special day since I first learned it was my birthday. I thank God for the gifts in my life. I honor myself for the wisdom I have attained, and the growth I have before me. I have gorgeous red and purple-tiger roses blooming for this special day in November. I also had the most monster sycamore leaf drop into the birdbath and I'll treat you to that.
I’ll offer you to a poem about my life.

Chronology of a Crone

The woman—
who hides her gray hair under a blond rinse
—is not aged.

In her lives the young girl laughing in 1963,
when she was all of nine, before the bloody pink suit.
In her is the teen with solemn eyes. Alive and well in her
is the young woman in black robes and mortarboard,
smiling wide with a degree of joy she earned herself,
In her, the bride with wide hopes.
In her too, the mother with child.

A parade of photographs marches around the bed,
telling the story of her long life. This gift
from her mother captures the deep, sweet roots
that ground her in the earth of herself.

The passage of time has smoothed her rough edges,
leaving behind the tracks of the years in her eyes.
You are a crone now, says her masseuse, kneading
the network of aches that lives in her shoulders.
You are the wisewoman who has found the answers
she sought. Lord knows where the diploma is.
The marriage is over, but the hopes remain.

The woman—
who has grown strong, and weathered many storms
—still dances.
She hears the music of the seasons
and she raises her arms high above her golden head.
**************************************
God bless your day, my beautiful people in the blogosphere.

The Great Spirit of God

He said he was like the ocean, a surging white-crested wave
of power sucked from moon and sun, the currents and the undercurrents
all arriving at this place, at this time, by the design of God himself.

I walked the beach shooing away the sandflies and scuffing through
the dried-up seaweed, sending up showers of sandflies that clung
to my lips and my hair. No tide had brought unbroken shells.

He said he thrived on the backs of whales, that he could speak
with the humpback and the sperm, that he knew whalesong
was a way to communicate the great potentiality of God.

Sand dragged at my shoes, not good shoes for walking in sand
and with a terrible foreknowledge I kicked over a mass of kelp
where beneath there lay the bedraggled corpse of a gull

He stripped off his shirt and he looked like a brown crystal vase
from a shop in Beverly Hills. Watch me, he ordered, knowing
his physique was riveting, though expensive, and no one turned away.

I watched as he would have me watch, in semi-sighing awe
as he gathered up his board like a girlfriend and padded to the sea,
that mystery girl I never was nor believed in as I scuffed the beach

But I was turned away when the 20-foot swell took him and his board
that power sucked from moon and sun, the currents and the undercurrents
all arriving at this place, at this time, by the design of God himself.

Chris Alba (c) 2009

Photo courtesyRyan HelmWeslshSurfNRG

Elegy for a Slug, Part 2

I owe Syd for this enchanting discussion of the "WHY?" question I posed in my earlier post. It is magical nature says Syd. An old friend says this current photo of the banana slug is "very yin and yang of them." Whatever. They are fascinating conversation.

In answer to my poem which actually said:

Elegy for a Slug



Why didn't God

throw him a shell?



Syd said...
A shell is actually buried under the slug's mantle. But unlike the familiar spiraling shells of snails, this one is only a thin, fragile membrane of calcium carbonate that is barely noticeable. It hardly deserves to be called a shell.

But the shell leaves a clue that slugs evolved from shell-bearing snails. The slug's shell is a vestige of a distant past. It is a perfect example for Darwin's exquisite logic: "Rudimentary organs may be compared with the letters in a word, still retained in the spelling, but become useless in the pronunciation, but which serve as a clue in seeking for its derivation.

On the view of descent with modification, we may conclude that the existence of organs in a rudimentary, imperfect, and useless condition, or quite aborted, far from presenting a strange difficulty, as they assuredly do on the ordinary doctrine of creation, might even have been anticipated, and can be accounted for by the laws of inheritance."

Most shells are used to keep animals from drying out and not to protect the soft body within. But the slug has a lot of mucus that keeps its body moist. See how magical nature is?