Postcards from Paradise: In the Beginning

 

The Will o the Wisp ©Art Lionse  with kind permission

Sometimes simplicity rises
like a blossom of fire
from the white silk of your own skin.
You were there in the beginning

Galaxy ©Art Lionse with kind permission

you heard the story, you heard the merciless
and tender words telling you where you had to go.
Exile is never easy and the journey
itself leaves a bitter taste. But then,
when you heard that voice, you had to go.
You couldn't sit by the fire, you couldn't live
so close to the live flame of that compassion
you had to go out in the world and make it your own

Elfin©Art Lionse with kind permission

so you could come back with
that flame in your voice, saying listen...
this warmth, this unbearable light, this fearful love...
It is all here, it is all here.
~ David Whyte ~

(Fire in the Earth)

For More Postcards from Paradise Please go to Recuerda mi Corazon and be washed with beauty on your Sunday morning.

About the Photographer: Art Lionse hails from the south of France. He is a researcher who spends every spare moment chasing exquisite light with his camera. He is a lover of nature and enjoys photographing those things that often surprise us while we are walking. He captures ordinary plants and flowers with a fresh eye. For his macro work, as you see here, whether outdoors or in a studio, he uses natural light to make the pictures look more genuine. I am grateful for his generosity in allowing me to use these lovely images. You can find more of his work on 1x.com, fotoblur, http://www.photopoly.net/breathtaking-flower-portraits-by-art-lionse/, and photo.net

Share the Joy Thursday: Reverie ~ a film

It gives me great Joy to find amazing little independent works of art like this created by young artists that hail from Europe. This little gem comes from Belgium. It is a coming of age film that speaks to the heart of inner transformation, taking place in only a moment. It is a beautiful little Indie film that I happened upon last night on Vimeo. I was completely entranced. I hope that you enjoy it. It just came out just this month.

~Noelle Renee

For more Share the Joy posts see Meri’s Musings!

Postcards from Paradise: Briefly it Enters, and Briefly Speaks

 

Briefly It Enters, and Briefly Speaks

by Jane Kenyon

 Octavio Ocampo “Mouth of the Flower”

I am the blossom pressed in a book,
found again after two hundred years. . . .
“Buddha” by Octavio Ocampo

I am the maker, the lover, and the keeper. . . . 
Wakeful Rabbit by Maggie Taylor

When the young girl who starves sits down to a table she will sit beside me. . . . 

 I am food on the prisoner's plate. . .

I am water rushing to the wellhead, filling the pitcher until it spills. . . .

The Patient Gardener by Maggie Taylor

I am the patient gardener of the dry and weedy garden. . . .

I’m Grown Up Now by Maggie Taylor

I am the stone step, the latch, and the working hinge. . . .

David LaChapelle

I am the heart contracted by joy. . .

the longest hair, white before the rest. . . .

Many Pretty Things by Maggie Taylor

 

I am there in the basket of fruit presented to the widow. . . .

 Ecstasy of lilies by Octavio Ocampo

I am the musk rose opening unattended, the fern on the boggy summit. . . .

Kiss of the Sea by Octavio Ocampo

I am the one whose love overcomes you, already with you when you think to call my name. . . .

~Jane Kenyon

(collected Poems 2005)

More about Jane Kenyon’s life here

For more Postcards from Paradise Please go to Recuerda mi Corazon for a heavenly experience!

Dancing Alone

not war, but music Pixdaus.com (Chechnya)

     Daniel was a tall and handsome man with piercing blue eyes, broad shoulders and blond hair. His profile was Grecian, his nose aquiline, and even more beautiful than the fine figure he cut were his exquisite hands, the hands of a musician with long, precise fingers and well-muscled joints from hours of playing. He wanted to be a concert pianist and could play anything after hearing it only once—such was his musical genius. Beethoven, Debussy, Tschaikovsky, Ravel—he could play them all with a grace and ease befitting the concert hall. Although his talent would have pleased the ear of any classical music aficionado, he played only in isolation. You see, he lived in a world where playing such erudite compositions with such ease was looked upon with great suspicion. How was it that he was able to play something after listening to it only once? Was he hearing music in his head when others were hearing nothing and struggling with the more practical matters of life such as earning a living, raising a family or defending their country at war?

     So the young man became a soldier and went off to war in Korea, believing that, there, he could also learn a trade that would make his family proud. He stopped hearing the music in his mind—instead hearing the roar of guns and the deep groans of dying comrades all around him. He felt sure that he was losing his mind. At night, in the commissary with other soldiers, there was a piano and some of the men had heard that he could play a tune or two. So they asked him if he knew any popular songs. He did not. They let him listen to some records—and one or two of the men sang for him until he began to pick up some of the melodies and improvise a baseline. Soon, he was a regular source of entertainment in the evenings when the men were back at camp, and it was the first time that he had ever had the courage to play in front of others without fear. He played each man a memory of his home and family, of holiday celebrations amidst the whitest snow and of evenings dancing cheek-to-cheek with a favorite gal. However, he could not play his own music, or allow them to see how truly skilled a musician he was, for he feared reprisal. He feared that they would recognize that there was something truly different about him, something unexplainable. And Daniel began to lose his own memories—the ones that he had created to replace the pain he felt at thinking about his own family. He began to recall his mother’s hands twisted from disease and his father’s disappointment in his never “amounting to anything.” His father played the organ beautifully, but only for company or when he wasn’t busy with traveling for business—“music was a frivolity, an enjoyment, not a way of life.”

     Daniel felt a kind of split occurring within himself, as though he were living a deeply duplicitous existence. When he was asked by the other men what he planned on doing after he returned to civilian life, he told them he wanted to go to Barber school and planned to open a small shop near his parents home. This was the same story that he told his mother because he saw that it pleased her and gave her some indication that he had a goal and a direction in life. The men joked about letting their hair grow out after the war and being his first customers, but he had no intention of ever following through with these plans. Even when he talked about his goals, he felt as though he were floating in a pool of liquid space, disconnected from them and from the earth by billions of miles. Music filled his senses and he was able to forget, momentarily, the pain of his lost pleasure playing classical masterpieces in isolation. For a time he was able to dull the image of the day that he would sit in a grand concert hall playing before a live audience.

     Daniel returned from Korea a changed man. He had seen other men die—men whom he knew and men whose dreams he had been privy to. He decided to move into a boarding house near the nation’s capital far from where his parents lived. He would go to trade school there—at least that was his plan. At the boarding house, there was an upright piano in the front room where everyone gathered for meals and coffee. Daniel used to go down in the evenings and play Mozart, Bach and Beethoven when others were up in their rooms. It was the only thing that kept him alive, but it no longer connected him to the memories he had once cherished for himself. He felt a sense of calm while he was playing, and it allowed him to turn off some of the noise in his head—new sounds that had not been there before—voices, the roar of guns, the groans of dying men and his own deep, wounded sadness.

     There was a young woman there, Jessie, living at the boarding house, who heard his exquisite piano playing in the evening, and came downstairs to find its astonishing source. She had deep brown eyes and a look of being deeply alone, as did he. She asked him if he would play anything by Bach, for she loved Bach’s music. He smiled, softly and sadly and began to play the lovely melodies he remembered so well. No one had ever asked him to play his own music before. They met, each night at the same time, and he played for her. She was a college girl from a good family near where his own family lived, but she was different somehow, disconnected from her family as he was.

     Daniel became deeply involved with this woman in the only way that he could. He would play Mozart, Beethoven and Bach for her and then go to her room at night and stay until early morning. They would make love and he would tell her stories about his life—events that never happened but that he wished had made up his life’s experience—and she, young and naïve, believed him. Soon the young woman found herself with child and she and Daniel were to be married.

     Daniel’s plans for Barber school dissolved—they were never fully formed to begin with. He began trying to figure out how he would make a living to support a family and he began drinking every night to drown the voices in his head that were growing louder—voices that were telling him to do terrible things to himself or to the woman that he was to marry. He looked to his father for help, but all he received from him were gifts of money, liquor and reproof for not meeting the goals that he had originally set out for himself.

     When he and Jessie were married and living together, he began to stay out every night at local bars in town, playing whatever piano was available to him. Certain establishments began to know him and he gained a kind of local popularity that pleased him, although the music that they asked him to play was not his own. There was one song that had come out during that period of time that he did like, and he played it almost every night. In fact, people would request it because he played it so movingly and so well—Moon River:

Moon River, wider than a mile,
I’m crossing you in style some day.
Oh dream maker, you heart breaker,
Wherever you’re going, I’m going your way.
Two drifters off to see the world,
There’s such a lot of world to see.
We’re after the same rainbow’s end,
Waiting round the bend
My huckleberry friend,
Moon River and me (Mercer, J. 1961).

     When he played this music he felt disconnected from his present life, filled with the presentiment of future possibilities, and dissociated from all memories of the past. He felt rootless, groundless, unanchored, as if he were drifting downstream forever and, if for only that moment, the voices would cease.

     When Daniel’s first daughter was born, he was in a bar playing that song while his wife depended upon a kindly taxi driver to take her to the hospital. He did not want to be a father; he did not want to see his child’s face, nor hear her cries. He was afraid of those cries and what they might make him do.

     The first time Daniel struck his wife in public, he was asked to leave a restaurant where he came to play the piano alone frequently. This was a huge blow to his self-confidence. He didn’t understand what he had done to deserve such rejection. His wife and he began to speak to one another less and less. The first time he heard his daughter cry and his wife did not answer her cries, he struck his baby on the head and the side. According to his wife this happened more than once. And then another child was born to them, a year and four months after the first, but because she had seen what her husband had become, Jessie vowed that no matter what had to be done, this younger child would never be damaged, and she would do whatever she could to make life peaceful again for her first baby, who had endured so much.

     Between bouts of drunkenness and wild piano playing he overheard conversations between his wife and his father, and suddenly his eldest daughter was no longer living in the house. He was glad not to hear the cries at night any longer. He was glad just to sleep. But then his father began to visit and Daniel started to suspect the plans that his wife and father had for him. He would hear his father talking and his wife crying. There were papers they had to sign and important matters to discuss.

     Suddenly, Daniel wasn’t living at home with his wife or his two daughters anymore. He was living in a white room and sleeping in an uncomfortable bed. Nurses would wake him in the morning to give him medication that made him unable to speak well. The voices in his head began to dull a little, but they never really ceased completely. He felt sedated, rootless, and alone, like he was floating in a cold pool of liquid space. There was a piano there, but the medicine that they gave him made it difficult for him to remember any of his music. He lay in bed in a Veterans’ hospital all day, trying to recall the memories that had made him happiest, but he could find none. The music had disappeared. He lay in bed with a cigarette in his hand, his spirit flanked on both sides by the sterile walls of an eastern state sanitarium, and the only song he could remember was Moon River. He played it in his head over and over again until he fell asleep.

Moon River, wider than a mile,
I’m crossing you in style some day.
Oh dream maker, you heart breaker,
Wherever you’re going, I’m going your way.
Two drifters off to see the world,
There’s such a lot of world to see.
We’re after the same rainbow’s end,
Waiting round the bend
My huckleberry friend,
Moon River and me (Mercer, J. 1961).

Moon River ~ Sarah Brightman

Note from the Author: I wrote this "Family Myth" as an assignment for a family counseling course at Pacifica. We were asked to write a myth about our families, (based on true feeling) so I decided to write some of the truth and couch it in a more romantic history of the man my father might have been before he experienced a break with reality and just after it occurred. Interestingly, it was healing for me to reinvent my father in this way, and to make some effort to empathize with a man I barely knew barring the nightmarish stories passed down to me by my mother. I share it with you here for anyone who lives with mental illness in their family. There is a great deal of loss suffered both by the person who is ill and by the family who remembers who that son or daughter was or might have been before the break occurred. Many families believe that isolating children from mentally ill parents is the proper resolution. This was the case with my family. I believe that this causes an even greater disconnect that makes wellness, wholeness or any measure of happiness impossible for the person who is ill, and I think that it creates a feeling of permanent shame and emptiness for the children. We live in a culture that sequesters the mentally ill who have money enough for care. They do not walk among us. They are the forgotten, and we fear what we do not know or cannot remember. I write this because I want to remember. I remember you Dad.

~Noelle Renee

Late Autumn in the Forest

Photographer: _Dmitri_

“In the middle of the road of my life I awoke in the dark wood where the true way was wholly lost.”

~Dante Alighieri from La Divina Comedia

in 14th Century Italian:

“Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura.

ché la diritta via era smarrita.”

~Dante Alighieri from La Divina Comedia

 

A Film from the astonishing affirmer of destiny ~ David Whyte

David Whyte On The Preservation of the Soul

hyte

http://www.nvcc.edu/home/vpoulakis/translation/dantetr1.htm

Refuge

“Deep Sleep” by Mustafa Millidere 2010

"You have traveled too fast over false ground;
Now your soul has come to take you back.
Take refuge in your senses, open up
To all the small miracles you rushed through.
Become inclined to watch the way of rain
When it falls slow and free.
Imitate the habit of twilight,
Taking time to open the well of color
That fostered the brightness of day.
Draw alongside the silence of stone
Until its calmness can claim you."
— John O'Donohue

“Dance When You’re Broken Open”

Monika Kaden, Dancer Unique/ Shidoni Bronze Foundry and Gallery Tesuque, N.M./Photo by Noelle Renee 2010

Dance when You’re broken open,

Dance if you’ve torn the bandage off,

Dance in the middle of the fighting,

Dance in your Blood,

Dance when you’re perfectly free.

~Rumi

 

Note From Noelle Renee:

I took this photo when I was in Tesuque, five miles out of Santa Fe at Shidoni Gallery and Bronze Foundry. Just looking at it gave me a feeling of lightness and freedom. As I drew closer, I read the word written above that are inscribed on the shirt of the statue. They are, in fact, the opposite of what one would expect from such a joyful pose. And so it goes. The tension of the opposites prevails and all creativity, all transcendence, all  love and ultimately rebirth of the Self  flows from the holding of that tension. May all of our lives be an amazing, a phenomenal act of balancing. The following is an article by Jacquelyn Small that I found online regarding the Tension of the opposites. I hope you enjoy it.

Namaste.

 

DUALITY
by Jacquelyn Small, Eupsychia Institute

••••••••••

(the following excerpts are from the unpublished, unedited manuscript of, Psyche's Seeds, Tarcher Putnam, April 2001).

To get beyond this duality of the ego and the soul -- to avoid feeling pulled apart by these opposing drives -- we can learn to be in both places at once: unified and unique. (p. 14, Part II)

Certain factors in nature are ordered in ways that remain a mystery to us. But as we move closer to our Source, into the depths of our psyches, we gain a knowing sense that all apparent dualities are really part of a greater whole. And we see that our job, at least right now, is to be a "walker in both worlds" and bridge the gap as much as we can, holding the two together. Then, we'll create that pathway for the Self to enter and take us to a third and higher way. (page 107, Part II)

As hybrid "spirit-matter" beings, we must realize it is appropriate for us to be living in two worlds at once -- the world of the ego and the world of the soul. They do not become one watered-down nondescript composite: they each bring forth their entire way of being -- which is a very rich and inviting way to live. Just as a reminder: we have an antinomous nature - two complementary opposites living together harmoniously, making up the whole. In this manner, neither part gets lost: the ego's passionate response to the physical life lives alongside the soul's spiritual purpose and sacred intent. The individual as well as the collective life is honored and cherished. Or you can think of it as the masculine and feminine principles residing side by side, with no warring nor competition, in deepest respect for each other's differences and opposite function. (p. 106-107, Part II)

In being a walker in two worlds, you do not try to escape into the higher regions of the Self and shirk your responsibilities here. You walk the ways of the ordinary life, doing your daily routines with the people you're in relationship with. Some are karmic duties, such as caring for children you're responsible for, or helping the elderly in your family. And you never avoid serving others in ways that are meaningful to them, when these people come upon your path. You take responsibility in this world for all that you've taken on. And you do it with love and compassion.

Then, together with all this, you hold within yourself that "secret place" no one needs to know exists but you. In this numinous inner life of dreams, symbolic images, inner beings, other-dimensional places, and messages of direct knowing, you document your larger life in your spiritual diary or through some artistic expression. You protect this inner chamber with all your spiritual might by surrounding it with a deep sense of silent reverence. You walk in the overlap between these two worlds, drawing first from this one, then from that one. Sometimes you move into just one or the other reality and give it your full intention so you can know it fully. (p. 107, Part II)

Before we can know the light, we must recognize and meet the dark on its own terms. Then, it can all come into the balance of completion in the center. We learn to hold these tensions of the opposites within us as the way all spiritual warriors travel through life. Arriving at this stage of our awakening, we are required to face every dualism we're caught up in ­ every opposition that lives within our psyches. It's a very difficult task. The path gets harder as we come closer to our destination: coming fully into ourselves with absolute authenticity. We must understand that we live as both these sides of ourselves, for this is our nature.

The One Who is Rightfully Yours

 

The TrueLove

by David Whyte

There is a faith in loving fiercely
the one who is rightfully yours,
especially if you have
waited years and especially
if part of you never believed
you could deserve this
loved and beckoning hand
held out to you this way.

I am thinking of faith now
and the testaments of loneliness
and what we feel we are
worthy of in this world.

Years ago in the Hebrides
I remember an old man
who walked every morning
on the grey stones
to the shore of the baying seals,

who would press his hat
to his chest in the blustering
salt wind and say his prayer
to the turbulent Jesus
hidden in the water,

and I think of the story
of the storm and everyone
waking and seeing
the distant
yet familiar figure
far across the water
calling to them,

and how we are all
preparing for that
abrupt waking,
and that calling,
and that moment
we have to say yes,
except it will
not come so grandly,
so Biblically,
but more subtly
and intimately in the face
of the one you know
you have to love,

so that when we finally step out of the boat
toward them, we find
everything holds
us, and confirms
our courage, and if you wanted
to drown you could,
but you don’t

because finally
after all the struggle
and all the years,
you don’t want to any more,
you’ve simply had enough
of drowning

and you want to live and you
want to love and you will
walk across any territory
and any darkness,
however fluid and however
dangerous,

 to take the
one hand you know
belongs in yours.

 

'House of Belonging'
by David Whyte

 

“Love is a sacred reserve of energy; it is like the blood of spiritual evolution”

 Teilhard de Chardin quote

 

 

source for poem: http://www.depression-recovery-life.com/the-truelove.html

pictures 1, 2, and 4 and 5 are from http://3zarr.blogspot.com/

Photos 3 and 6 from Pixdaus. com please click to go to original site

Last photo Free Souls from Flickr creative commons http://www.flickr.com/photos/pinksherbet/315127886/

Discovery of a Father by Sherwood Anderson

“Father & Son”  used here with the kind permission of photographer John Dunne.

Discovery of a Father
Sherwood Anderson

One of the strangest relationships in the world is that between father and son. I know it now from having sons of my own. A boy wants something very special from his father. You hear it said that fathers want their sons to be what they feel they themselves cannot be, but I tell you it also works the other way. I know that as a small boy I wanted my father to be a certain thing he was not. I wanted him to be a proud, silent, dignified father. When I was with the other boys and he passed along the street, I wanted to feel a glow of pride: “There he is. That is my father.” But he wasn’t such a one. he couldn’t be.

It seemed to me then that he was always showing off. Let’s say someone in our town had got up a show. They were always doing it. The druggist would be in it, the shoe-store clerk, the horse doctor, and a lot of women and girls. My father would manage to get the chief comedy part. It was, let’s say, a Civil War play and he was a comic Irish soldier. He had to do the most absurd things. They thought he was funny, but I didn’t.’I thought he was terrible. I didn’t see how Mother could stand it. She even laughed with the others. Maybe I would have laughed if it hadn’t been my father.Or there was a parade, the Fourth of July or Decoration Day. He’d be in that, too, right at the front of it, as Grand Marshal or something, on a white horse hired from a livery stable. He couldn’t ride for shucks. He fell off the horse and everyone hooted with laughter, but he didn’t care. He even seemed to like it. I remember once when he had done something ridiculous, and right out on Main Street, too. I was with some other boys and they were laughing and shouting at him and he was shouting back and having as good a time as they were. I ran down an alley back of some stores and there in the Presbyterian church sheds I had a good long cry.

Or I would be in bed at night and Father would come home and bring some men with him. He was a man who was never alone. Before he went broke, running a harness shop, there were always a lot of men loafing in the shop. He went broke, of course, because he gave too much credit. He couldn’t refuse it, and I thought he was a fool. I had got to hating him. There’d be men I didn’t think would want to be fooling around with him. There might even be the superintendent of our schools and a quiet man who ran the hardware store. Once I remember there was a white-haired man who was a cashier of the bank. It was a wonder to me they’d want to be seen with such a windbag. That’s what I thought he was. I know now what it was that attracted them. It was because life in our town, as in all small towns, was at times pretty dull, and he livened it up. He made them laugh. He could tell stories. He’d even get them to singing. If they didn’t come to our house they’d go off, say at night, to where there was a grassy place by a creek. They’d cook food there and drink beer and sit about listening to his stories. He was always telling stories about himself. He’d say this or that wonderful thing had happened to him. It might be something that made him look like a fool. He didn’t care. If an Irishman came to our house, right away Father would say he was Irish. He’d tell what county in Ireland he was born in. He’d tell things that happened there when he was a boy. He’d make it seem so real that, if I didn’t know he was born in southern Ohio, I’d have believed him myself. If it was a Scotchman the same thing happened. He’d get a burr into his speech. Or he was a German or a Swede. he’d be anything the other man was. I think they all knew he was lying, but they seemed to like him just the same. As a boy, that was what I couldn’t understand.

And there was Mother. How could she stand it? I wanted to ask
but never did. She was not the kind you asked such questions.
I’d be upstairs in my bed, in my room above the porch, and
Father would be telling some of his tales. A lot of Father’s stories
were about the Civil War. To hear him tell it, he’d been in about
every battle. He’d known Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, and I don’t
know how many others. He’d been particularly intimate with
General Grant, so that when Grant went East, to take charge of all
the armies, he took Father along. “I was an orderly at headquarters, and Sam Grant said to me, ‘Irve,’ he said, ‘I’m going to take you along with me.’ ”It seems he and Grant used to slip off sometimes and have a quiet drink together. That’s what my father said. He’d tell about the day Lee surrendered and how, when the great moment came, they couldn’t find Grant. “You know,” my father said, “about General Grant’s book, his memoirs. You’ve read of how he said he had a headache and how, when he got word that Lee was ready to call it quits, he was suddenly and miraculously cured.” “Huh,” said Father. “He was in the woods with me.“I was in there with my back against a tree. I was drinking. I had got hold of a bottle. “They were looking for Grant. He had got off his horse and come into the woods. he found me. He was covered with mud. I had the bottle in my hand. What’d I care? The war was over. I knew we had them licked.” My father said that he was the one who told Grant about Lee. An orderly riding by had told him, because the orderly knew how thick he was with Grant. Grant was embarrassed. “But, Irve, look at me. I’m all covered with mud,” he said to Father. And then, my father said, he and Grant decided to have a drink together. They took a couple of drinks and then, because he didn’t want Grant to show up drunk before the immaculate Lee, he smashed the bottle against the tree.“Sam Grant’s dead now, and I wouldn’t want it to get out on him,” my father said. That’s just one of the kind of things he’d tell. Of course the men knew he was lying, but they seemed to like it just the same.

When we got broke, down and out, do you think he ever brought
anything home? Not he. If there wasn’t anything to eat in the
house, he’d go off visiting around at farmhouses. They all wanted
him. Sometimes he’d stay away for weeks, Mother working to keep
us fed, and then home he’d come bringing, let’s say, a ham. He’d
got it from some farmer friend. He’d slap it on the table in the
kitchen. “You bet I’m going to see that my kids have something to
eat,” he’d say, and Mother would just stand smiling at him. She’d
never say a word about all the weeks and months he’d been away,
not leaving us a cent for food. Once I heard her speaking to a
woman in our street. Maybe the woman had dared to sympathize
with her. “Oh,” she said, “it’s all right. He isn’t ever dull like most
of the men in this street. Life is never dull when my man is about.”
But often I was filled with bitterness, and sometimes I wished he
wasn’t my father. I’d even invent another man as my father. To
protect my mother, I’d make up stories of a secret marriage that for
some strange reason never got known. As though some man, say
the president of a railroad company or maybe a Congressman, had
married my mother, thinking his wife was dead and then it turned
out she wasn’t . So they had to hush it up, but I got born just the same. I wasn’t really the son of my father. Somewhere in the world there was a very dignified, quite wonderful man who was really my father. I even made myself half believe these fancies.

And then there came a certain night. Mother was away from
home. Maybe there was church that night. Father came in. He’d
been off somewhere for two or three weeks. He found me alone in
the house, reading by the kitchen table. It had been raining, and he was very wet. He sat and looked at me for a long time, not saying a word. I was startled, for there was on his face the saddest look I had ever seen. He sat for a time, his clothes dripping. Then he got up.
“Come on with me,” he said. I got up and went with him out of the house. I was filled with wonder, but I wasn’t afraid. We went along a dirt road that led down into a valley, about a mile out of town, where there was a pond. We walked in silence. The man who was always talking had stopped his talking. I didn’t know what was up and had the queer feeling that I was with a stranger. I don’t know whether my father intended it so. I don’t think he did.

The pond was quite large. It was still raining hard, and there were flashes of lightning followed by thunder. We were on a grassy bank
at the pond’s edge when my father spoke, and in the darkness and
rain his voice sounded strange.“Take off your clothes,” he said. Still filled with wonder, I began to undress. There was a flash of lightning, and I saw that he was already naked.

Naked, we went into the pond. Taking my hand, he pulled me in.
It may be that I was too frightened, too full of a feeling of strangeness, to speak. Before that night my father had never seemed
to pay any attention to me.“And what is he up to now?” I kept asking myself. I did not swim very well, but he put my hand on his shoulder and struck out into the darkness. He was a man with big shoulders, a powerful swimmer. In the darkness I could feel the movement of his muscles. We swam to the far edge of the pond and then back to where we had left our clothes. The rain continued and the wind blew. Sometimes my father swam on his back and when he did he took my hand in his large powerful one and moved it over so that it rested always on his shoulder. Sometimes there would be a flash of lightning and I could see his face quite clearly. It was as it was earlier, in the kitchen, a face filled with sadness. There would be the momentary glimpse of his face and then again the darkness, the wind, and the rain. In me there was a feeling I had never known before. It was a feeling of closeness. It was something strange. It was as though there were only we two in the world. It was as though I had
been jerked suddenly out of myself, out of my world of the schoolboy, out of a world in which I was ashamed of my father.He had become blood of my blood; he the strong swimmer and I the boy clinging to him in the darkness. We swam in silence, and in silence we dressed in our wet clothes. and went home.

There was a lamp lighted in the kitchen, and when we came in,
the water dripping from us, there was my mother. She smiled at us.
I remember that she called us “boys.” “What have you boys been
up to?” she asked, but my father did not answer. As he had begun
the evening’s experience with me in silence, so he ended it. He
turned and looked at me. Then he went, I thought, with a new and
strange dignity, out of the room. I climbed the stairs to my own room, undressed in darkness, and got into bed. I couldn’t sleep and did not want to sleep. For the first time, I knew that I was the son of my father. He was a storyteller as I was to be. It may be that I even laughed a little softly there in the darkness. If I did, I laughed knowing that I would never again be wanting another father.

http://www.mvrhs.org/english/shark/Headbar/Discovery%20of%20a%20Father.pdf

Note: I saw this photo in Google images and asked the photographer if I might use it on my blog. I love that it only includes hands and feet but you know that it is a father and son. I was looking for a photograph to accompany Sherwood Anderson's "coming of age" story--one of my favorites to this day. I used to teach it, and students started out being mildly interested but were always very moved by the end. Like a few other stories in my life, it has always remained with me. I hope you enjoy it.
Noelle

Information on the Author

 

June 17, 2008

Sherwood Anderson: All for Art

The portrait of Sherwood Anderson on view in NPG’s Edward Steichen exhibition was taken for Vanity Fair by Steichen in 1925; Anderson biographer Kim Townsend records that as a great moment for Anderson, he was recognized by the magazine as “America’s most distinctive novelist.”

Born in Camden, Ohio, on September 13, 1876, Anderson was the third of seven children. His father, Irwin McLain Anderson, was a Civil War veteran and a poor businessman, whose efforts to provide for his family led them to Clyde, Ohio. Anderson would always associate the town with his father’s inability to secure a steady means; later, in his writing, Anderson would replace Clyde with the fictional town of Winesburg.

Despite faulting his father for the family’s struggles, Anderson would carry a few faults of his own into four marriages. His first marriage, to Cornelia Platt Lane in 1904, provided Anderson some small happinesses—and three children—but he suppressed his desire to write while working as a copy writer and an executive in a series of businesses. Shortly after the birth of his daughter, Marion, Anderson experienced a breakdown of sorts. The following account is from Irving Howe’s biography, published in 1951:

On November 27, 1912, Anderson told his secretary, “My feet are cold and wet. I have been walking too long on the bed of a river.” A few minutes later he left the factory. He walked out of the town, and for four days he aimlessly wandered about until, on December 1, he was found in Cleveland by a pharmacist.

Although his marriage to Cornelia would survive almost another four years, it would do so only by the most sparse definition of survival. Anderson immersed himself in his writing, and he found much success. Also, his influence on the next generation of writers was great; Anderson boosted the careers of both Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. Kim Townsend writes:

From Hemingway’s perspective, Anderson was a man who could help him get there. Anderson did not help him much with his writing. In a few years Anderson would tell his other great protégé—William Faulkner— that he would gladly help him find a publisher for his book as long as he didn’t have to read it. Though he read more of what Hemingway wrote, Anderson helped him, as he would help Faulkner, mostly by his example. He represented professional success, he could say how you achieved it, he could say what you did to maintain it.

Anderson’s stories were well received into the 1920s, and to this day, his novel Winesburg, Ohio is a staple of the American literature classroom. Sherwood Anderson died in March of 1941 in Panama, just as he was beginning research for a work on South America. He is buried in Marion, Virginia, near his home, Ripshin.

References:
Irving Howe, Sherwood Anderson (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1951).
Kim Townsend, Sherwood Anderson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987).

Sherwood Anderson, 1926/Edward Steichen/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; acquired in memory of Agnes and Eugene Meyer through the generosity of Katharine Graham and the New York Community Trust, The Island Fund

Posted at 04:20 PM in Biography | Permalink

The Scarlet Ibis

Scarlet Ibis posted by JChip on Pixdaus.com

The Scarlet Ibis

by James Hurst

Summer was dead, but autumn had not yet been born when the ibis came to the bleeding tree. It's strange that all this is so clear to me, now that time has had its way. But sometimes (like right now) I sit in the cool green parlor, and I remember Doodle.

Doodle was about the craziest brother a boy ever had. Doodle was born when I was seven and was, from the start, a disappointment. He seemed all head, with a tiny body that was red and shriveled like an old man's. Everybody thought he was going to die.

Daddy had the carpenter build a little coffin, and when he was three months old, Mama and Daddy named him William Armstrong. Such a name sounds good only on a tombstone.

When he crawled on the rug, he crawled backward, as if he were in reverse and couldn't change gears. This made him look like a doodlebug, so I began calling him 'Doodle.' Renaming my brother was probably the kindest thing I ever did for him, because nobody expects much from someone called Doodle.

Daddy built him a cart and I had to pull him around. If I so much as picked up my hat, he'd start crying to go with me; and Mama would call from wherever she was, "Take Doodle with you."

So I dragged him across the cotton field to share the beauty of Old Woman Swamp. I lifted him out and sat him down in the soft grass. He began to cry.

"What's the matter?"

"It's so pretty, Brother, so pretty."

After that, Doodle and I often went down to Old Woman Swamp.

There is inside me (and with sadness I have seen it in others) a knot of cruelty borne by the stream of love. And at times I was mean to Doodle. One time I showed him his casket, telling him how we all believed he would die. When I made him touch the casket, he screamed. And even when we were outside in the bright sunshine he clung to me, crying, "Don't leave me, Brother! Don't leave me!"

Doodle was five years old when I turned 13. I was embarrassed at having a brother of that age who couldn't walk, so I set out to teach him. We were down in Old Woman Swamp. "I'm going to teach you to walk, Doodle," I said.

"Why?"

"So I won't have to haul you around all the time."

"I can't walk, Brother."

"Who says so?"

"Mama, the doctor–everybody."

"Oh, you can walk." I took him by the arms and stood him up. He collapsed on to the grass like a half-empty flour sack. It was as if his little legs had no bones.

"Don't hurt me, Brother."

"Shut up. I'm not going to hurt you. I'm going to teach you to walk." I heaved him up again, and he collapsed.

"I just can't do it."

"Oh, yes, you can, Doodle. All you got to do is try. Now come on," and I hauled him up once more.

It seemed so hopeless that it's a miracle I didn't give up. But all of us must have something to be proud of, and Doodle had become my something.

Finally one day he stood alone for a few seconds. When he fell, I grabbed him in my arms and hugged him, our laughter ringing through the swamp like a bell. Now we knew it could be done.

We decided not to tell anyone until he was actually walking. At breakfast on our chosen day I brought Doodle to the door in the cart. I helped Doodle up; and when he was standing alone, I let them look. There wasn't a sound as Doodle walked slowly across the room and sat down at the table. Then Mama began to cry and ran over to him, hugging him and kissing him. Daddy hugged him, too. Doodle told them it was I who had taught him to walk, so they wanted to hug me, and I began to cry.

"What are you crying for?" asked Daddy, but I couldn't answer. They didn't know that I did it just for myself, that Doodle walked only because I was ashamed of having a crippled brother.

Within a few months, Doodle had learned to walk well. Since I had succeeded in teaching Doodle to walk, I began to believe in my own infallibility. I decided to teach him to run, to row, to swim, to climb trees, and to fight. Now he, too, believed in me; so, we set a deadline when Doodle could start school.

But Doodle couldn't keep up with the plan. Once, he collapsed on the ground and began to cry.

"Aw, come on, Doodle. You can do it. Do you want to be different from everybody else when you start school?"

"Does that make any difference?"

"It certainly does. Now, come on."

And so we came to those days when summer was dead but autumn had not yet been born. It was Saturday noon, just a few days before the start of school. Daddy, Mama, Doodle, and I were seated at the dining room table, having lunch. Suddenly from out in the yard came a strange croaking noise. Doodle stopped eating. "What's that?" He slipped out into the yard, and looked up into the bleeding tree. "It's a big red bird!"

Mama and Daddy came out. On the topmost branch perched a bird the size of a chicken, with scarlet feathers and long legs.

At that moment, the bird began to flutter. It tumbled down through the bleeding tree and landed at our feet with a thud. Its graceful neck jerked twice and then straightened out, and the bird was still. It lay on the earth like a broken vase of red flowers, and even death could not mar its beauty.

"What is it?" Doodle asked.

"It's a scarlet ibis," Daddy said.

Sadly, we all looked at the bird. How many miles had it traveled to die like this, in our yard, beneath the bleeding tree?

Doodle knelt beside the ibis. "I'm going to bury him."

As soon as I had finished eating, Doodle and I hurried off to Horsehead Landing. It was time for a swimming lesson, but Doodle said he was too tired. When we reached Horsehead landing, lightning was flashing across half the sky, and thunder was drowning out the sound of the sea.

Doodle was both tired and frightened. He slipped on the mud and fell. I helped him up, and he smiled at me ashamedly. He had failed and we both knew it. He would never be like the other boys at school.

We started home, trying to beat the storm. The lightning was near now. The faster I walked, the faster he walked, so I began to run.

The rain came, roaring through the pines. And then, like a bursting Roman candle, a gum tree ahead of us was shattered by a bolt of lightning. When the deafening thunder had died, I heard Doodle cry out, "Brother, Brother, don't leave me! Don't leave me!"

The knowledge that our plans had come to nothing was bitter, and that streak of cruelty within me awakened. I ran as fast as I could, leaving him far behind with a wall of rain dividing us. Soon I could hear his voice no more.

I stopped and waited for Doodle. The sound of rain was everywhere, but the wind had died and it fell straight down like ropes hanging from the sky.

I peered through the downpour, but no one came. Finally I went back and found him huddled beneath a red nightshade bush beside the road. He was sitting on the ground, his face buried in his arms, which were resting on drawn-up knees. "Let's go, Doodle."

He didn't answer so I gently lifted his head. He toppled backward onto the earth. He had been bleeding from the mouth, and his neck and the front of his shirt were stained a brilliant red.

"Doodle, Doodle." There was no answer but the ropy rain. I began to weep, and the tear-blurred vision in red before me looked very familiar. "Doodle!" I screamed above the pounding storm and threw my body to the earth above his. For a long time, it seemed forever, I lay there crying, sheltering my fallen scarlet ibis.

--James Hurst

 

I read this story when I was in the ninth grade. I found it one of the saddest and yet most incredible stories of  brotherly selfishness and betrayal , family love and ,ultimately, profound brotherly fidelity that I had ever read and it has always remained in my memory. I found this photo of a real scarlet Ibis tonight and looked for the story online to share it. I am sorry if it is too sad, but sometimes life is that way as I have come to discover recently. I realize also that we can learn something  about ourselves from sadness.

Courage!

Noelle Renee

 

http://209.184.141.5/westwood/academ/depts/dpteng/l-coker/virtualenglish/Englsih%20I/English%20Ia/scarlet_ibis.htm

When the Blue Hour Comes

The good times are all gone
The night keeps coming on so strong
You can’t hold on, no matter what you do
Will there be someone who cares for you
When the blue hour comes?
When the blue hour comes?

And when your restless heart
Tears your world apart
And everywhere you turn
It’s falling down on you
Will there be a light that shines for you?

When the blue hour comes for you
If there’s anything that you would have me do
Just call on me and I’ll be coming through
I will always be there for you
When the blue hour comes
When the blue hour comes…

excerpted lyrics by Orbison and Crowell

*Dedicated to my friend Jim.

“Love alone is capable of uniting living beings in such a way as to complete and fulfill them, for it alone takes them and joins them by what is deepest in themselves”

Teilhard de Chardin quote

Photos taken in Santa Fe, New Mexico

Joan Osborne “When the Blue Hour Comes”

Alone With You

 Alone With You- Oguzceng  Digital Art of New Zealand

Getting There

You take a final step and, look, suddenly
You're there. You've arrived
At the one place all your drudgery was aimed for:
This common ground
Where you stretch out, pressing your cheek to sandstone.

What did you want
To be? You'll remember soon. You feel like tinder
Under a burning glass,
A luminous point of change. The sky is pulsing
Against the cracked horizon,
Holding it firm till the arrival of stars
In time with your heartbeats.
Like wind etching rock, you've made a lasting impression
On the self you were
By having come all this way through all this welter
Under your own power,
Though your traces on a map would make an unpromising
Meandering lifeline.

What have you learned so far? You'll find out later,
Telling it haltingly
Like a dream, that lost traveler's dream
Under the last hill
Where through the night you'll take your time out of mind
To unburden yourself
Of elements along elementary paths
By the break of morning.

You've earned this worn-down, hard, incredible sight
Called Here and Now.
Now, what you make of it means everything,
Means starting over:
The life in your hands is neither here nor there
But getting there,
So you're standing again and breathing, beginning another
Journey without regret
Forever, being your own unpeaceable kingdom,
The end of endings.

~ David Wagoner ~

(In Broken Country)

Sarah McLachlan—Answer (Live)

Daniel Duvall Mayers: Moon River Memories

When I was nine years old I remember my father coming to visit us one day, quite unexpectedly.  I knew my father for only one complete year of my life, and this was one of the four times within that year’s span that I can recall seeing him. I remember him walking up, tentatively, to the open front door of our small apartment and embracing the curly-headed little blonde girl, who stood boldly in the doorway and called him “Daddy.”

Not long after he had arrived, he sat down at the small, mahogany veneer piano, on which my sister practiced religiously, and he began to play a soft, melancholy tune that hangs in my memory still. Moon River.  As his fingers traveled in a trance over the familiar black and white keys to his childhood, I realized that this man, my father, drank tears as other men drink their coffee of a morning.

There was a sweet sadness in his playing that I have not heard since.  My mother told me later--rather mockingly I thought--that my father had the ability to play almost anything he had heard once, provided he could transpose it into the key of ‘C’.  It was as if he must bring all musical expression, I supposed, to that central place on the keyboard where sharps and flats are tonically subdued—such was the pain that made up his life.

When I turned twenty-three, nine years after my father’s early and rather senseless death, I watched the film Breakfast at Tiffany’s for the first time.  It is one of my favorite films to this day.  The image of Audrey Hepburn singing the words to Moon River accompanied by the soft strains of an acoustic guitar, made me see my father’s peaceful face and graceful hands once again.  As I watched Hepburn’s character “Holly Golightly” gaze longingly beyond the window of her tiny flat, set in a building flanked on either side by the high brick walls of New York City, I identified her sadness with mine.  She too had run away from home a long time ago and had no real place in the world to call her own.

I thought of my father as he must have been before he died, lying in his bed, looking out the window—with only a burning cigarette in his hand for company—his spirit flanked on either side by the sterile walls of an eastern state sanitarium.

 He was a long way from home, even when he returned for a visit.  And the dramatic emptiness that made up his life is the space that I’ve been left to fill.  I still cry when I see the film Breakfast at Tiffany’s. And I realize that Life is a long song that swells and ebbs on waves of yearning and discord, and though it rarely reaches resolution, its music must always be heard.
--Noelle Clearwater (all rights reserved by the author).

Moon River

Moon river, wider than a mile

I'm crossing you in style some day

Oh, dream maker, you heart breaker

Wherever you're goin', I'm goin' your way

Two drifters, off to see the world

There's such a lot of world to see

We're after the same rainbow's end, waitin' 'round the bend

My huckleberry friend, moon river, and me

(moon river, wider than a mile

(I'm crossin' you in style some day

Oh, dream maker, you heart breaker

Wherever you're goin', I'm goin' your way

Two drifters, off to see the world

There's such a lot of world to see

We're after that same rainbow's end, waitin' 'round the bend

My huckleberry friend, moon river, and me

--Johnny Mercer/Henry Mancini 1961

Breakfast at Tiffany's "Moon River" (Window Scene) Audrey Hepburn and George Peppard

Nota Bene: Pictures above are not my father or me.