The Kingdom of Enough

Brigit’s Cross on Saint Patrick’s Day

Clock vines cover the wooden arch my sweetheart built in our garden, and this March, on a sunny Saint Patrick’s Day following storms that flooded rivers and knocked down trees, a few orange blossoms peep bravely from the lush greenery. Back when this jungle was just two small starts from one-gallon pots, back in the early days of the pandemic, a friend sent me a green stone plaque with a golden Brigit’s cross to lift my spirits. We hung it on the arch, and at first, the plaque stood out in the wooden latticework, but within a year vines caressed the edges and leaves curled provocatively around its corners. Then leaf and vine went wild, and now the flamboyant growth almost hides the human-made artifact, but even if unseen, Brigit’s cross hangs there still.

Hallow this arch, ye Irish saints. Make it today a portal, more than a gateway from path to garden. Let it harbor the stone boat that will take me to my great-great-grandmother’s hearth, she who knew what it took to keep the fire stoked during a long winter and how to bake bread in a stone oven, who could milk a cow and churn butter. She knew too the secrets of bog and well, flower and fern. Like her I want to practice lectio divina on what the cedar preaches to the sparrows and transcribe poems the sweet pea bush proclaims to the rock rose.

Come, let us walk through this Brigit-blest arch to the wedding of heaven and earth.

Author standing next to the bare wooden garden arch where the plaque is hung

Clock vine with orange flowers growing up the garden arch, plaque still visible

Written after listening to a passage from Dreamtime by John Moriarty

At the Edge of Spring

All fall and then all winter

I meant to prune

the spent asparagus ferns.

Now, hidden beneath the dry stalks

and lush encroaching oxalis,

Tom and I discover fat spears

pushing up from the earth.

A white tulip peeps from under the hopseed,

and jasmine shares the first fruits

of its fragrance with the bees and me.

Workdays that began and ended

in the dark two months ago

are now bookended by light,

and the slate blues of my winter doldrums

are yielding to pastel hues.

Within me optimism stirs

like a chick inside an egg

who hears her mother’s chirps and coos.

This school year,

my last as a college librarian,

is exactly half over,

and I feel change coming

like the light

slowly swelling the days.

What used to weigh heavy

is starting to slip away.

Already I delete incoming emails

that no longer apply to me.

Soon I will shred papers,

give away office curios,

and on the last day

surrender the keys

that have been for twenty-one years

in my safekeeping.

For now, though, I am waiting

as I started to wait

when I planted bulbs last fall.

What colors will bloom?

Which flowers will flourish?

With gratitude to Lea Haratani for the title

Each Dawn a Surprise

From the dark place despair dropped me

may I rise up like oxalis

after the first autumn rain,

push through

wildfire ashes and

soaked cedar bark mulch

into this enticing

day-following-night world.

Let me sip sunlight

and feast on my own green,

unfold cloverleaves as if

the sun would return

tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

All winter long

buried,

I dream of flowers

so yellow they might be worthy

of this light.

December Drought

In weeks with no rain,

the lime tree and roses sip

rinse water from the shower,

as eloquent in their distraught and drooping silence

as a languishing invalid in a romance novel.

Meanwhile the bougainvillea,

that strapping hero of the garden,

shamelessly flaunts a riot of red bracts,

and the clock vine winks back,

allowing coy orange starbursts

to peep from her curtain of green.

It is December, and we poets must be brave.

Bake cookies and trim the tree,

sip eggnog at the holiday masquerade,

but if you happen to see,

as you sign and stamp

one more Christmas card,

a monarch butterfly go by,

take in the flutter-dance

like Renoir instead of Wordsworth.

Flaunt your own finery

and wink back at this season’s

swaggering would-be suitor.

He doesn’t need to know

what you are saving and savoring,

that you are a succulent

with poems in your cells.

Image created by Jennifer Prince and shared under Creative Commons License BY-NC-ND 4.0

Tug and Sigh

Datura blossoms, also known as angel's trumpet

Like the datura’s yellow trumpets

I am waiting for the breath of angels

to perfume the twilight

of this ordinary day

and play the vigil hymn

reminding me

that heaven and earth

wed long ago.

I too am married

to the unseen

sigh and scent,

filling and returning,

thus never full –

always longing,

often failing,

yet ever blessed

with heaven’s pull.

(Title from “The Silence Now” by May Sarton)

Look As Though with Your Arms Open

I sometimes wonder about Saint Paul’s admonition in his letter to the Thessalonians to pray without ceasing. Did he mean this literally? Surely not. Maybe he thought that by setting a ridiculously high standard, he was giving his readers a worthy if unattainable goal to aspire to, one that in real life only monastics can come close to. Or perhaps those early Christians who believed the end of the world was nigh could detach enough from the cares of daily life to devote every waking moment to prayer, but for me, caught up in all the demands of 21st-century life, it seems impossible. I feel impressed with myself when I find twenty minutes a day to meditate.

One foggy summer morning while on retreat at New Camaldoli in Big Sur, I took a walk as usual on the road that winds steeply down from the mountaintop monastery to Highway 1. This question of how to pray unceasingly lingered in the back of my mind as the mist and morning sun teased and flirted with each other up and down the mountainside. Along the way is a magnificent oak tree bearing a plaque with a verse from Psalm 34:

Here I was startled into stopping. A spider web hung between the oak’s branches, each silk festoon precisely limned with delicate droplets, and sunbeams pouring through the canopy above lit them up like jewels in a tapestry. This same glow highlighted each mote of mist wafting around the tree, and I stood transfixed, watching until the fog completely dissipated. With my mind empty of thought and my heart full of gratitude, an answer to my question came to me.

In her poem “Where Does the Temple Begin, Where Does It End?” Mary Oliver explains how she reaches for things, like the idea of God, that cannot be reached:

I look; morning to night I am never done with looking.

Looking I mean not just standing around, but standing around

As though with your arms open.

In my moment of wordless wonder that foggy summer morning, it was as if I were embracing the scene with open arms, and I realized suddenly, this was prayer. My attention was my praise.

I wish I could say that ever since I’ve been a model of mindfulness, but no, I’m still working on this not-so-secret trick to blessing the Lord at all times, still aspiring to pay constant attention. As always, I’m grateful for Mary Oliver as a role model. Like her, may I morning to night never be done with looking as though with my arms wide open.

Gray-Haired Woman under the Harvest Moon

Sixty summers I’ve seen ease into autumn,

and I recognize this patient tug

of nighttime on the days,

gentle at first like my own hand

easing a ripe tomato from the vine,

then insistent,

darkness yearning

for the tomb of winter.

At sixty a sprain is slow to heal,

and vigor wanes

before day’s work is done.

Tonight, though, last light

like the scent of apples

round the cider press

lingers on summer’s wake

as the orange belly

of this pregnant season

peeps over the horizon.

What will I gather

in the gloaming?

Paint on the cavern wall

the hieroglyph for patience,

And plant me as a seed,

for sixty years have shown me —

winter is a womb.

Feast me now with hazelnuts

and pour a cup of mead

to seal the promise

of a distant spring.

Like crickets and tree roots,

I am beholden to darkness

and care not

what the world in me may see.

Touched by harvest moonlight,

I know my silver beauty,

and novice though I am,

surrender to the night.

Image courtesy of C.E. Price

Hold Us in the Great Hands of Light

Touching the outside,

you make the inside glow.

Drinking my coffee

by halogen light,

I may not see it,

but the fig tree knows.

It all began with you.

Fiat lux,

and so it was

that first day.

This morning

light on leaf

draws my eye

as a chipmunk

nibbles the fig I left

last night on the fence rail,

dainty as a lady at a tea,

all of us beholden

to you,

one of countless,

but in this blue sky

our one, our only.

Title from “Why I Wake Early” by Mary Oliver

The Traveling Reader

One of my favorite things to do when I’m traveling is to find the coffeeshop with the best mocha in town. (Luckily, this is a priority and pleasure that my sweetheart shares.) Even if the mocha disappoints, absorbing the atmosphere of the coffeeshop, observing and eavesdropping on the people who hang out there gives us an entrée to the locale that sightseeing doesn’t. Likewise, the local independent bookstore.

Yes, I am now going to out myself as a promiscuous book nerd. At home, browsing in Bookshop Santa Cruz or Bad Animal Books is a regular delight, but visiting a bookstore in another town offers a particular thrill. The differences are so alluring! Is the shop light and bright? Or dark, wood-paneled, and cozy? Busy or quiet? Are the shelves so high they need library ladders? Do books stacked up on the floor create a kind of biblio-maze? If I’m lucky, I discover a book I’ve never heard of but now can’t live without, or I come across a used copy in fine condition of a title I’ve been dreaming of. Even if this serendipity doesn’t occur, the quirky displays and books of local interest make browsing fun. Whether I’m roaming for hours in the multistory mecca of Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon or breezing through Bookworks just down the road in Pacific Grove, the atmosphere of the local independent bookstore introduces me in a unique way to the place that hosts it.

And if, like Powell’s and Bookworks, it features an espresso bar where I can sip a mocha while reading a new book? Heaven!

Come Back to Still Water

The time has come

To stop allowing the clutter

To clutter my mind

Like dirty snow,

Shove it off and find

Clear time, clear water.

May Sarton in “New Year’s Resolve”

Let me start with a confession: the only way I can sustain a tech sabbath is by cheating.

I should have admitted this up front because I felt terrible when one reader told me she liked the idea of abstaining from technology once a week, but she didn’t want to give up Facetime with her grandchildren. Another admitted she likes to watch television in the evening so she couldn’t do it either. Here’s the deal. When I decided to do a tech sabbath for Lent this year, I allowed myself certain exceptions: I can text, make phone calls, watch TV after dinner with my sweetheart, and attend Zoom meetings with my spiritual community. The practice was meant to disengage me from devices, not from my loved ones. “The solution to mankind’s most vexing problems will not be found in renouncing technical civilization,” Rabbi Heschel writes in The Sabbath, “but in attaining some degree of independence from it.”

If you decide to try a tech sabbath, I invite you make Jesus your role model. One sabbath day He was walking through cornfields with His disciples, who began to pick ears of corn as they went. Judgmental Pharisees jumped all over them for doing forbidden work on the holy day, but Jesus admonished, “The sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath” (Mark 2:27). In other words, don’t let rules get in the way of a meaningful practice.

Here are some ideas for designing your own tech sabbath:

Choose your time. I pick a 24-hour period over the weekend, usually 4 pm Saturday to 4 pm Sunday, but it’s okay to do a shorter amount of time, a different day of the week, or to change the day depending on your schedule.
Set parameters that work for you. Facetime with your loved ones if you want to. Photograph flowers with your phone. You are constructing your own unique palace in time, and it can be as simple or elaborate as you like. What soulful activities are calling you?
Create a ritual. At the beginning of my sabbath I light a candle and make a tiny ceremony of shutting down my laptop and iPad. Then I put them away in the closet. For the next 24 hours I mostly leave my phone out of sight in another room. When the sabbath is over, I again light a candle and smudge all my devices before I turn them back on, praying to use them mindfully in the week to come.
Reflect afterwards. As you dwell in your palace over the next weeks and months, think about what was hard, what surprised you, what you loved. You will notice the aspects of technology that are most deleterious for you — these are the ones to strictly avoid during your sabbath – but you will also become aware of surprising gifts. Keep and celebrate them!