The Comfort Jar

Mary Oliver and her lovely swoons to the trees. I too feel saved daily by glimpses or encounters with trees – like sets of grandparents lining the streets, always waving.

Recently, I found myself waiting a long wait in the parking lot of an industrial warehouse. A miserable spot, as you can imagine. The dogs needed air, so we left the car for a bit of a stroll. And came upon a spindly grove of Cyprus and two or three grande dame Scots pines that all hinted at what might have once covered the place before it became a Tile Mart. The dogs tugged me into bits of places I hadn’t thought accessible. Mr. Bojangles (the border collie) kicked up tufts and stirred old pine needles. My mask was off. So the crisp, menthol clean scent of those pines just filled me up. And as we are all so conscious of every breath, I found myself stopping and really breathing and even whispering a little thank you to them. 

I’ll leave you with the rest of Mary Oliver’s exquisite poem as I can’t hold a candle to it:

I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, and discernment,
and never hurry through the world
but walk slowly, and bow often.

Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, “Stay awhile.”
The light flows from their branches.

And they call again, “It’s simple,” they say,
“and you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with light, and to shine.”

Tomorrow is the last day of the Bangkok Biennale (of which this series of posts is a link) so just another quick thank you for reading. 

xxB

Another quote about releasing regrets. Lincoln with his life of tragedies, before the ultimate one. Still thinking of presidents this week it seems. And the one whose memory feels like a porch light left on in a very dark night. As we know, Lincoln knew he could please some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time but not all of them all the time.

I’m a fast walker. An impatient-with-tourists type of walker. But these Covid days and their walks for walks sake and their life-or-death vigilance has slowed paces. Zen master and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh says, ‘Walk as if  you are kissing the Earth with your feet.’ Which makes me picture toes in moss with eyes fixed ahead.

A vaccine is coming. A president who might just leave the light on is on his way.

xxB

“Drink your tea slowly and reverently, as if it is the axis on which the earth revolves – slowly, evenly, without rushing toward the future.”

– Thich Nhat Hanh

“When danger approaches, sing to it.” – Arabic Proverb

I came across this quote a year ago when I met the author Amy Hempel – she had the text tattooed on her leg. Next to a vicious scar. She said she got it tattooed there, beside the scar from a motorcycle accident, to remind herself.

She also said, “Regret is one of those words of high danger. It’s a terrible feeling, because what can you do about it? Nothing.” So instead of regret, sing to the thing that might’ve borne the scar. And by sing to it, my understanding is, turn to that regret and soothe it.

It’s a year since I attended her workshop. And in that time, her words have come back to me a thousand times. One of the ideas for good writing (and fulfilling living) which she came back to again and again was to ask questions. ‘Take any day’, she said, ‘and ask twenty questions of the day. Big or small.’ To get us started she shared the one question she asks herself every day, ‘What do I have that’s already enough?’ 

xxB

‘What makes night within us might leave stars’. – Victor Hugo

I love this twist on the idea that what makes a shadow within might leave something bright – stars rather than scars. Cracks to let the light in and all that. My 11-year-old son, Arran,  took this photograph on our walk tonight in a dark park. So dark, our dogs were invisible. There was soft rain and a scattering of voices attached to cigarette-spots-of-light . We met a teenager with a bouncing, young dog ‘who can’t walk on without saying hello.’ We saw a glowing haze from nearby stadium lights. ‘It looks like God’s house,’ said Arran.

This current run of posts will come to an end on Saturday when the Bangkok Biennale wraps up (in case you missed the start of these – the posts from November 1-21st are my offering to an invitation to participate in the Cloud 9 Pavilion of the Biennale: ‘a utopic vision for the future and a critical eye to the present.’)

Thank you so much for being part of this journey to get through this universally bumpy time.

xxB

 

‘What we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.’ – George Eliot

Despair being  hope with a hunger. I love this idea. And the ways any of us find to feed hope are a source of inspiration. Like those yellow ribbons worried loved ones used to tie around trees, awaiting their servicemen to come back from the Front. I once did a project on lost property departments. I visited lost and founds in about half a dozen countries and interviewed the managers of those places. My mother was terminally ill at the time and I was looking for evidence of how loss is universal and the idea of the managers of those spaces always moved me – how carefully, and often lovingly, they would gather peoples’ lost things, put the details in a log, put a label on them and place them on a categorised shelf. I asked each manager what they got from the job –the Department Manager of  Grand Central Station Lost Property , Mike, said, ‘It’s the meeting of hope that gets me through the days (9/11 was still fresh). You see folks coming in the door and they all have the same expression of worry mixed with hope – hope that you have their missing thing. And what they might not realise is how we have that same feeling, waiting, hoping that they’ll come. My best days are when I get to empty a shelf and fill someone else’s hope again.’

xxB

 

“Rain comes down through the alders, Its low conductive voices Mutter about let-downs and erosions And yet each drop recalls  The diamond absolutes.”  ― Seamus Heaney, North

It’s lashing here in Dublin. The kind of heavy rain that looks like it’s raining back up as it hits the ground. So Heaney with his poem about the wet conjuring disappointments and losses felt like a fit. And trying to take a photograph to suit, I went out to my grubby yard and then the lane, looking for puddles. With his lines in my head, I saw branches and a washing line, strung with ‘diamond absolutes’ – the wide sky reflected in each droplet.

xxB

 

“Should we have stayed at home and thought of here.” – Elizabeth Bishop

A friend in my writing group mentioned this quote today. It made me think of many things including the fact that we are all at home. Tonight’s news showed images of Dublin Airport last Christmas – all those hugging reunions that could make a statue weep.

The line also makes me think of travel and its expectations and the many confusions that usually come in tow when things are unfamiliar. In Bishop’s poem, Questions of Travel, she lists a dozen or so things she would never have encountered without leaving her home – lovely things like monsoon rains ‘that stop … and then a sudden golden silence’. But then she asks, ‘Or could Pascal have been not entirely right about just sitting quietly in one’s room?’ That’s 17th-century Blaise Pascal’s famous line – “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

And lying here in bed, with my dog’s head on my knees and the electric blanket on, I reckon here is where I might well think of, if I was able to fly off someplace else. Pity about the ex-pats and Christmas, though.

xxB

 

‘Put yourself in the way of beauty. There’s always a sunrise and always a sunset…’ – Bobbi Lambrecht 

This is today’s sunrise, which reminded me of this quote. Bobbi Lambrecht was the mother of Wild author Cheryl Strayed. Strayed wrote in her memoir, which recounts her 1000 mile trek from the Mohave Desert near Mexico to a snowy Washington State, that her late mother was her catalyst for her journey. Strayed wrote that she chose the challenges of the PCT Trail as a last ditch attempt to climb from heroin addiction and self-sabotage back to health –  ‘to walk myself back to the woman my mother thought I was.’

If you haven’t read Wild, I can’t recommend it enough. Especially in days like these when resilience is a helpful item in the backpack.

xxB

Whatever you are meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible. Doris Lessing (1919-2013)

I think about this Lessing quote a lot, particularly at this time of year when teaching work gets much busier and whatever I am meant to do (besides teaching) takes a lot more burrowing to find. I have friends who get up at 5am to write their books before their kids get up. Or who start at it after their 9 to 5 job. I can’t do any of those things. I do the things that fill me up in the loose fragments of a day.

Which calls to mind Alice Munro, who wrote her stories in the scraps of time when her children slept or between household chores – I can’t play bridge. I don’t play tennis. All those things that people learn, and I admire, there hasn’t seemed time for. But what there is time for is looking out the window.

I lift my hat to you who have deep diligence, and wish good luck to those of you who are chasing the coattails of your day.

xxB