Solar system

Someone's spontaneous subway effort to make sense of senseless war.

Merry Christmas!

A silver tree

Our weekly Lenten "Poetry & Prayer" gatherings wrapped up this morning with Mary Oliver again, having spent time also with Joy Harjo, Rumi and Christina Rossetti. Today's poem, suitable for Holy Week, was entitled "Gethsemane" (2007).

The grass never sleeps.
Or the roses.
Nor does the lily have a secret eye that shuts until morning.

Jesus said, wait with me. But the disciples slept.

The cricket has such splendid fringe on its feet,
and it sings, have you noticed, with its whole body,
and heaven knows if it ever sleeps.

Jesus said, wait with me. And maybe the stars did,
maybe the wind wound itself into a silver tree, and didn’t move, maybe
the lake far away, where once he walked as on a
blue pavement,
lay still and waited, wild awake.

Oh the dear bodies, slumped and eye-shut, that could not
keep that vigil, how they must have wept,
so utterly human, knowing this too
must be a part of the story.

It led to a lovely sharing or reactions, punctuated by sweet silences. We wept with the disciples, and took some wan comfort in the compassion of "dear bodies," "utterly human." Nature doesn't slumber, someone noted, so maybe Jesus wasn't alone in the garden at all. 

I was caught on the three "maybes" of the penultimate stanza, which is more fanciful than declarative and speaks the language not of nature but of miracle (not that those are necessarily opposed). If wind can stand still (in the form of a tree no less!) or a lake be still and solid as a "blue pavement," then is there hope yet for "the dear bodies, slumped and eye-shut"? What hope? Is it in the nature of water or wind sometimes to stop flowing and blowing, "wild awake"? Did we know that? Do we know it now? 

We know how the Holy Week story ends, but those assembled in the garden didn't. And what is the part of slumping, weeping, poetizing humanity in the story exactly?

Isaiah 1:15

No kings III

 

Spent the afternoon with eight million of my closest friends...!

Possibly the biggest protest ever in the US?

 

The joy of the No King protests is in the handmade signs:

this is what democracy looks like!

Dioecious

 

Some red maple antics you won't see in the Lang courtyard

Worth a thousand words

How are things at The New School, folks ask (and we ask ourselves)? We're all trying to understand what's happening, who's deciding or will decide what and when, and how. When everything is being "reorganized" at once, there are no fixed points to hold on to. Administration has announced faculty, staff and space usage must shrink by 20% but it feels like everything and everyone is at risk. 

So I was grateful and proud to find in the spring hard copy issue of the school newspaper, The New School Free Press, not only well-researched and written articles about our predicament but illustrations that perfectly capture how it feels to be caught in it.

Thank you Dove Williams, Jordan Fong and Zora Edelstein for expressing how much our attempts to figure out what's gone wrong and who's behind it are like something from a police procedural. And thank you Cecilia Yang for capturing how existential proposed and feared changes feel!

Curvaceous

First blush

And yet

Ice age

The ice spectacles of the splashing end of winter took my breath away! 

But I swooned when I found lacy contour line-like patterns in the thin sheet atop a marshy pool gently rising and falling in the freezing and thawing. I sent the pic to a friend, querying "Is this map or territory?"

His wise reply: "Both?" These Catskills, I've learned, aren't really mountains fot he usual sort but a "mature dissected plateau" of miles-deep runoff from a vanished mountain range as high as the Himalayas, carved by meandering waterways as it was raised, and much later, as it moved north from below the Equator, scoured by glaciers.

Water ford crystal

It's spring break so we're taking a few days in the mountains (Catskills this time), where winter is still receding. Seasonal chandeliers sparkle.