14 Cows for America

This Thursday and Friday are conferences here at our school.  The parent’s organization has set up a book fair in the lobby of the school and I got caught by a book as I walked through this morning.  It was a deceptively sweet looking picture book with a slightly kooky title: 15 Cows for America.  I walked past the table and saw that our admissions director was weeping as she read it.  So of course I picked up one of the copies.  It was a straightforward story, told in clear, simple prose.  A young Masi man returns home after studying medicine in the United States.  The events of 9/11 are in recent past and the young man tells the Masi what happened.  They are moved and make a gift to the people of the United States.  The line at the end of the book brought tears to my eyes:

“Because there is no nation so powerful it cannot be wounded.

Nor a people so small they cannot offer mighty comfort.”

-from 14 cows for America by Carmen Agra Deedy and Wilson Kimeli Naiyomh

We are so connected to each other, even without the Internet, here on our violent blue jewel.

Looking through Hubble in 3D

Three Three-line Three-Minute Poems:

Stars

Romantic inspirations twinkling above

Tight Embraces fusing elemental compounds

Weight increasing to an explosive iron nova

Galaxies

Dervish whirlpools in the swift dance of eons

Sucking stars into their crushing chocolate centers

Spread along the bubbled edges of sea foam

Life

Chaos theory miracle of spontaneous appearance, or seeded, or created,

A mystery floating through nets of space and time

Encased in the violent beauty of our blue jewel

A Slice of Mild Insanity

There is something so cozy about being snuggled up in warm blankets and listening to the wind roar and howl around the house corners outside.  I sit in bed; my knees have a pillow underneath and Ziploc bags full of ice on top. As long as I ice the complaining bits right away after a run the muscles maintain only a low level grumpiness.  If I forget, it turns into flaming rebellion and outright refusal. I’m trying to run a marathon before I turn 50.  This is, I fully admit, a mild insanity brought on by a midlife crisis.  With my parents passing last year I was deluged by helpful reading material, dropped off by well meaning friends and hospice volunteers, about the grieving process.  Grief is, to say the least, not pleasant.  Death sucks.  But I was, despite literate preparation, blindsided by the same emotions I had experienced when I left home as a young adult.  As these were slamming away in my brain I started watching, on the Internet, a man my age, who had never run seriously, run 43 marathons in a row around the UK.  I thought, “If he can do that, I can at least run a mile!”  I was staying at my parent’s house, at 9000 feet.  I went outside, ran ten steps and had to spend twenty minutes catching my breath.  Now I’m up to ten miles, as long as I ice my knees.  So here I sit in bed, wind outside, cozily ignoring mortality and denying age.

Take Away

The Denver aquarium was crowded and loud today with families on spring break outings.  But here in Colorado, almost as far away from an ocean as it is possible to get in North America, four students and I sat for half an hour in dim light, knees pressed right up against the glass, and sketched sharks and sea turtles as the glided gracefully past us.  These large ancient creatures, so frightening and fascinating, swam circuits of their tank, oblivious to our existence, as far as I could tell. 

I’ve been hearing a new catch phrase in the air: “Take Away.” 

These kinds of things irritate me and I have heard this one a lot lately.  A docent at the aquarium said that the stocks of large fish in the world’s oceans have gone down to only ten percent of what they were fifty years ago.  It is true.  I just looked it up online.  The study was published in the journal Nature in May of 2003.  Maybe that is why “take away” irritates me so much.  It’s like a naïve punch line for the culture of heedless unsustainable consumption that I swim in, oblivious to the sources that sustain my existence, as far as they can tell.

Ephemeral

A friend of mine collects and sells antique ephemera.  She is from Austria.  I spent today sorting my antique ephemera, oh how it does pile up: my to do list from three years ago, a report card from the kindergarten class of my youngest, who is now eight, notice on an overdue electric bill – I think I paid it.  The lights are still on, at any rate.  My parents both passed away last year and I have boxes and boxes of ephemeral slips of paper they felt moved to keep.  All these little bits of writing: the bill for my father’s violin lessons when he was five, at the height of the depression, a Christmas card I made out of gilt paper when I was six – a nativity on the moon.  

It’s called ephemera I guess since it wasn’t meant to last.  All these little bits of writing; not even slices but glimpses of slices of a day, a time, a childhood that slipped away a moment ago when I was busy and not paying attention.  My Austrian friend grew up speaking a medieval dialect of German – way up in the mountains somewhere.  When she went to university, literature students would ask her to read ancient passages out loud to catch the sound of the past.  The dialect is all but gone now.  Spoken words, shimmering ephemerally, living and dying as they leave the speaker’s lips.  The writing, like an Egyptian sarcophagus, holds bones, shrink-wrapped with leathery skin, in a stab at immortality.

Dark Leprechauns

My first attempt at a book spine poem, this one entitled:

Dark Leprechauns

Just in case the picture is hard to read:

The bad beginning

Outcast

Breathless

Deep survival

Holes

Thinking in pictures

Disposessed

Gnomes

Speak

Where children sleep

Message in a Bottle Loose on the Digital Sea

I have discovered something!  There is a “stats” button on the blog dashboard.  It tells me something almost incomprehensible.  One hundred sixty people have read something I have written in the last eighteen days.  Amazing!  

Here I am, just overjoyed that I have been able to clear the space to write everyday, amazed and blessed to be part of this little community who read each other’s slices and then leave encouraging and thoughtful comments.  Here I am, just toodling along, writing bits of this or that daily snippet that strikes me as funny, interesting or beautiful. And I find I have visitors – from all over the United States! From China! From Mexico, Estonia and South Korea!  From the United Arab Emirates!  Is this possible?  

I thought I was passing notes to friends in class, but no.  I have been rolling up small notepapers and tapping them into bottles, sealing them with a dab of wax from my late night candle and setting them lose to float along in the great digital sea, where other sailors have picked them up and…read them?  Glanced at them?  Worked out the random English grammar?  Or heard a familiar voice with the sound of home?  Perhaps some are just machines looking for an unprotected site to spam, but I am so hopeful.  

Can it really be possible to reach across oceans and continents and converse about ordinary human moments as we hurtle through space together?

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