field notes:

2.29.2004

Three Cala Lilies:

One tightly rolled, points to the sky, mute, poised with beauty's potential--she gives nothing.

One fully unfurled, open like a song, petals velvet soft, seductive, her stigma erect and golden with longing and readiness. She beckons and yearns. Her beauty cannot be taken back.

The third lily is partially open. She waits to emerge, to open herself to the sky. But first needs a look around. She is beautiful, open, but not ripe. She takes her time, minding her inner timeline, not the warmth of false spring, nor the lengthening of days. She hides from the sky's gaze, looking downward, only available to the determined seeker. She tells you her dreams, but doesn't share their meaning.

posted by Lisa on 8:16 AM link |

2.25.2004

Branches of the huge live oak hit the window with a thwack, rain pummels the skylights in Jackson Pollack waves of modernity. Outside the wind swirls around this oaky shallow. I make coffee and toast before the power can go out. It's sure to go with these winds. West Marin is known for our power outages. They are regular as...rain.

I delivered the first draft of my children's book manuscript to my workshop last night--my baby is on its way. I'm sad that I haven't had time to write here as often as I used to, but there is at least a good reason. My writing energies have gone into the book, and into some personal writing that has been necessary and wonderful. That also is leading to something good, something tangible.

A friend of mine is in Florida today and will take a swim in the Atlantic this evening. I'll ask him how that warm water felt as he entered it, how the salt felt drying on his skin. Did the water hold him? Did it claim him? There are only two more months of winter the way I measure it: the six months of the year when it's too cold for me to swim in the bay. That water will revive something in me. It always does. But the thrill of finally moving this story closer to book form has revived something in me too. The way storms send waters running from the tops of mountains to find any passage, any abstract brooks' way down to the sea.

posted by Lisa on 7:20 AM link |

2.20.2004

The Trees Ask Me Home
-Deena Metzger

soon
I'll sleep each night
with the breath of leaves
in the bed, the cough of eucalyptus,
the restless stirring of fig and lime.
There is so much life here,
rooster as alarm, hawk as sentinel,
coyote as guard; there is so much life
and ferment, death is close by.

When the human species deserted him,
tomatoes were what my father planted,
they were his true love.
With their imperative, he spent
weekends in the sun.
So I learned to talk to trees.
I see the song coming, a wing
out of the nest of bitterness,
light and dark. And further on,
those footsteps in the mulch
and that path through the new grove,
must be mine.

It seems
the story of my life
is the story of trees I've loved,
some are standing, some fell down.

posted by Lisa on 7:36 AM link |

2.14.2004

It's this kind of morning. The sound of a tiny Scaup diving 100 yard offshore fills the day. The water is almost calm, just shimmers with tidal yearnings, a charcoal grey mirror that gives the sky back to the world. Today I need the water. A return to state, a simple solution: equilibrium.

One Scaup chases another again and again. The first beats its wings then flies within inches of the water's surface and lands, the second follows that exact path then dives madly at the first, who escapes underwater just in time. It surfaces then beats its wings, rises, again to be followed. Are they mad with the uncontained longings of early spring? Do avian hearts swell with desire; do birds spend fitful nights with lovers' dreams?

I never noticed before that Valentine's day comes just now in the year. Just when the blankets of winter become heavy, when sun-drenched days promise more than the nights can deliver, and fist-tight buds appear--minions of summer.

Today I will dive into the bay. My soul needs drenching, my skin the tiny flagellations of the biting cold. Desire cuts like a knife--the heart's fire is tempered by water; and the waters of imagination are tempered by salt--the grounding of spirit.

posted by Lisa on 8:57 AM link |

2.10.2004

Which is where the catch comes in, the trap of the literary, that final adjustment, meaning filtering chaos, fine-tuning madness, panning the random for value and ends.

Thus ends an essay called 'Out of One's Tree' by Stanley Elkin. It tells the story of his temporary madness and recovery caused by too-high doses of prednisone. For me this line sums up not only the writer's task, but the human as well. What more is life than "panning the random for value and ends"?

To sift through the dirt of each day for the gold flakes of meaning, the signposts that connect one day to the next with some thread that each of us choose.

This, more meaningful than that. A litany of importance that becomes a life.

(Out of One's Tree published in The Best American Essays 1994)

posted by Lisa on 6:53 AM link |

2.08.2004

Mid-winter, I’m poised on the white-hot edge of a new life. Huckleberries have begun to bud, acacia is in full, cold-defying, buttered-popcorn yellow bloom, and the early kind of blackberries are already yielding fruit. But still, it’s cold. Clear, bitter morning cold.

My beach walk this morning fills me with joy, with ecstacy. I want to swallow the earth. I hope to move into the coming days and weeks with all of the energy that my ambition requires. I hope to expand my business; to work hard at completing new and revising old pieces for publication; to pay a little more attention to my blog, and to reading the work of my friends; to read more books; make progress on a books in the prisons project; and expand my social calendar, dating and waiting for a partner to make himself known. It’s a full docket. But I’m hopeful because I have that ecstacy working for me.

I find a small, empty Corona bottle left behind by last night’s tide and carry it to place in our community trash can just up the path. But I decide to walk a bit further, to prolong this Sunday morning reverie. So I lob the bottle towards the grass near the trash can, where it will rest until I walk back this way again. But the bottle doesn’t do as I thought: instead it shatters upon impact and I spend the next 15 minutes picking tiny shards of glass out of the fallen leaves and wet dirt at the base of an oak tree.

I wonder what unexpected accidents will occur and what they will yield. How much time have I spent chagrined or broken, on my hands and knees cleaning up the mistakes of hubris, or carelessness. Some mistakes are simple and easy to rectify. But others throw you off course for years, and maybe even for life.

Which reminds me of a poem:

The Little Ways that Encourage Good Fortune
--Willliam Stafford

Wisdom is having things right in your life
and knowing why.
If you do not have things right in your life
you will be overwhelmed:
you may be heroic, but you will not be wise.
If you have things right in your life
but do not know why,
you are just lucky, and you will not move
in the little ways that encourage good fortune.

The saddest are those not right in their lives
who are acting to make things right for others:
they act only from the self—
and that self will never be right:
no luck, no help, no wisdom.

posted by Lisa on 10:05 AM link |