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.

Democratic backpushing

M. Gessen warned us of this. As we get distracted by never-ending scandals and outrages and take comfort in isolated victories against the storm, the juggernaut of what Gothenberg University's Varieties of Democracy Institute calls "autocratisation" continues. 

Gessen has also suggested that they may be taking it too fast, dispensing with the step of manufacturing consent from the public (indeed, squandering the little support they came in with). Let's hope the upcoming third No Kings March - next Saturday! - proves the charm.

Poetry and prayer everywhere

One fruit of our congregation's CCD team discussions is a series of online "Poetry and Prayer" gatherings. We met during Advent, 8:30-9:00 on four Monday mornings, and have resumed it for the Mondays of Lent. The organizer chooses a poem for each session, which, after a little silence, is read by two different people, one or both of whom then offer reflections. Other participants then share thoughts and reactions, before we close. Usually with about a dozen people, it's a lovely space, surprisingly profound for its small size.  

Today's was a short poem by Mary Oliver, suitably entitled "Praying."   

It doesn’t have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don’t try
to make them elaborate, this isn’t
a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.

The first reader/commenter pronounced this was the "New York City poem" she'd been looking for! She'd thought she was the only person who paid attention to vacant lots. Others appreciated "just / pay attention" and "this isn't a contest" and "a doorway / into thanks" and the quiet miracle of "another voice." I reflected on how "a few / small stones" prefigure the push to "patch // a few words together." (I tend to be the animist in this group, seeing our human feelings and noticings and doings anticipated in the more-than-human world.) But all of us found ourselves thinking about the poetry of overlooked, perhaps unbeautiful city scenes as "silence[s] in which / another voice may speak."

What about those ugly piles of dirty snow, someone mentioned, and I had to share that I find them beautiful, have a phoneful of images of them - and shared two you've seen (the second and third from here). The unexpected multimedia turn was warmly appreciated. "One of those could be something a gallery in Chelsea," the organizer enthused. As I tried to articulate how hard it was not to sense design and intention in the way seeds and twigs and grit were lined up as the snow melted, the initial reader/commenter had an epiphany: all the things that wind up in the snow are distributed on the ground in a new way as it melts.    

patch // a few stones together and don't try / to make them elaborate !