Everything but the Kitchen Sync

Some days,
you forget.
You stand in the hall closet,
trying to candle the eggs
in the only dark spot
and they roll and tip
into a cataclysmic fall
landing as eggshells
and yellow-yolk muck
on the small
hardwood square of floor.

Some days, you try to hang
the clean wet lumps of cloth
up to dry in the freshening wind
But a chicken distracts you
and the sound of a distant dog
and at noon half the laundry
waves at you,
bright cheerful flags on the line,
and half of it peers,
sullen, lumpish, wet
from the basket on the rock.

Some days, you stand
in the garden despairing,
wondering how and when
you will find a source
of more bamboo poles
for the pole beans
and then you notice, forty yards off,
a forest of saplings
tall, straight, and true
waiting patiently
to be thinned.

--copyright Mainecelt 6/30/2010

Snow Soup

A small girl kneels at the hearth, plastic shovel in hand. Between her and the firebox sit two large stockpots. One is full of freshly-gathered, newly-fallen snow. The other is half-full of water, warm from the heat of the stove. With squeals of glee, she scoops up the snow in her shovel and drops it into the second pot. Each time, she pauses, a bit awe-struck, to watch it melt. This is serious silliness. This is elemental play. We are making snow soup.

Ricita is two-and-a-half. It is a long way from her tropical birthplace to this land of wearying winters, but she embraces each extreme as completely as her Northern parents first embraced her. She is a happy traveler.

It is a good thing. Unease would be easy on a day like this, when downed trees and wild winds have hushed the usual household hums. Between last night’s nightfall and this morning’s dawn, sixteen inches of heavy, wet snow blanketed our town. The power went out sometime around one in the morning, reducing all of our neighbors to the same sort of basic frustrations that we have lived with for several weeks. Thousands of other folks find themselves forced to reflect on the sources of light and water, the perilous chain of events set in motion--or not--with the flick of a switch or the push of a toilet’s handle.

At Ricita’s house, her mother has been fussing with iceboxes—the new-fashioned kind—and wringing her hands over the mountain of laundry and dishes she intended to tackle today. She rants for a few minutes, then catches herself—“Sorry, I know you’re USED to all this, at your house, but I’m just a worried mother who’s about to leave her child in a house with no power…” She smiles apologetically, grabs her bags and heads out the door. She is on her way to a town where the lights still blaze, to a class full of bright screens and power-points.

Ricita wakes up from her nap soon after mama leaves, and toddles blithely out towards the warmth and light. We play by the woodstove and watch the wind hurling snow against the trees outside. “It’s windy.” She says. I agree. Bright-eyed, with an elfin smile and a matter-of-fact little voice, she expands on the concept: “It’s windy. We’re warm. Our house is safe.”

Once satisfied with my mollification regarding this bit of wisdom, she is ready to play. We enter the transformative space where a baby doll becomes her grandmother and a stuffed frog becomes her child. She scribbles runes on scraps of paper to make “train tickets.” We ride easy-chair trains to visit our grandmothers several times over, stopping now and then to make more snow soup.

When night falls, though her parents are not yet home, there is no fear. I light a few candles and we continue playing. At supper time, we lift the stockpot down from the woodstove and wash our hands. Ricita is filled with delight at this: that her many little scoops of snow turn into this wonderful pot-full of liquid warmth. Although there is food on the stove as well—reheated and waiting—she shows no hunger. It is enough to marvel at the Snow Soup, to bathe her hands in its soothing warmth, and return to her playing. I tell her we must eat soon, and I set a time limit, but for the next ten minutes we are free to dance in the encroaching darkness and ride our upholstered trains.

Later, I creep down the road in my all-too-real and not-so-plush car, headed back to an even quieter, darker house. We do not mind the darkness. We have our own runes, our own scribbled tickets, our own ways to play at transformation and escape. Some days, we survive on snow soup.

I type as quickly as I can while savouring my recollections. (This laptop battery won’t last long, and the wait for restored power could last days.) I bank up the fire in our own woodstove and bask in the glow of the little one’s words. May we all be so blessed, to gaze out at the tempest and say, with such certainty, “It’s windy. We’re warm. Our house is safe.”

Into the Gap...

The Bluebirds of Gappiness showed up again on Saturday. This time, it was a mated pair, flitting between milkweed stalks and fenceposts by sudden, urgent turns. I wonder how much longer these messengers will remain before they start their annual migration, leaving Wise Old Raven behind as official mystic courier of the Frozen North. Perhaps they'll make the switch at Samhainn, (pronounced "sow-when"), which literally means, "Summer's end."

It's almost time... which, as a person with so-called A.D.D., is a state of being with which I'm most familiar. (I prefer to think of myself as "multifocal," since it's not a lack of attention, but non-singular attention, that best describes my style of engagement.) One book about A.D.D. describes the afflicted as "hunters in a farmer's world." While it's true that hunters spend a lot of time scanning their horizons, I don't buy this idea either. I've never met a farmer who DIDN'T have to keep their minds on a hundred things at once.

The more I study my Celtic roots, the less my so-called disability distresses me. Celts, it seems, have always understood the complex and flexible nature of time. Celtic philosophers and theologians have long recognized time as an embroidered tapestry, a mesh of the interwoven, the knotted, and the wrapped. An old Gaelic hymn to the Christ Child includes the declaration that, "although You are not yet born, people are praising the great things you've already done." The Divine Child is both "already" and "not yet." This speaks deeply to me. It describes my state of being, much of the time. It also reminds me that, as a Chronos-bound creature, I have my work cut out for me. I know, full well, that I can't afford to stop TRYING to do things "on time." I will never stop struggling to do business promptly and show up prior to the official start-time of shifts, classes, and meetings. This may never be an arena of particular personal grace.

Yet Grace does come--and it comes, most often, when it's "About Time." It is when I am most awkward, most unsure, and most open that the Holy Spirit shimmers and flutters and blazes into view. Poet Ted Loder calls this, "teetering on the edge of a maybe." I perch on the edge of self-doubt, which strangely doubles as the edge of cosmic acceptance. Grace unfolds in those awkward spaces between naughts and oughts. I am challenged, continually, to live more fully and step more willingly into the gaps.

And now it is Almost Time for one of my favorite Gaps of all: Samhainn, the Celtic New Year. Like Christmas and Fat Tuesday, this has long been celebrated as a "time beyond time" when the shackles of society are shaken off in favor of wildness. Yes, there's a sinister side--tricks can be cruel and damage may be done--but the essence of this time is a holy one. Where and when else, in our fast-paced, artificially brightened lives, are we given permission to see and acknowledge the dark?

Like the Jewish people and many other ancient agricultural societies, the Celts recognized darkness as the necessary time/place for all beginnings. Each new day begins at sundown. The year starts when the cold creeps in, the light wanes and the hard labours of harvest come to an end. It's a welcome respite, a seasonal sabbath. Seeds rest in the soil, new life sleeps in the dark womb, and all wise people take time to laugh and rest, doing the crucial work of re-creation, singing and sharing tales among deep shadows and flickering light.

Among the shadows: not an easy place to be. Yet our shadows demand attention, as our brightness continually invents them. Samhainn may wear the disguise of No-Man's Land, but what it really offers is Common Ground, a place for honest hopes and unreasonable fears to meet. Here is one meeting I will not miss. Here is one lesson for which I dare not show up late. (Hurry! Finish the wiring in our new house, so we can turn off all the lights!) Now is the time to step into the darkness, dance and wrestle with the darkness, shake the grief loose from my bones, mourn for all things returned to earth, and dream of new life that shall spring.

Happy New Year! May this "Almost Time" become a celebration. May we dance and weep around the bonfires of loss, feast on the richness of our memories, and--in dreams--step into the future's blessed embrace.