From a retreat at Villa Maria del Mar
Fingers poised on keyboard,
curving waves about to crest,
unfurling power.
Sun splits winter clouds.
Wounded cypress at cliff’s edge
flaunts lopped limbs.
Rolling whitecaps roar
and fade, ever freshening
The silent now.
A drizzly morning thirty years ago.
I rush along a path of dripping oaks
from coffeehouse to early morning class.
Across the quad (it seems so far away)
a man much older than I rakes wet leaves.
My coffee steams as I stop now to sip
and in the distance see a girl approach
the gardener, holding out a cup of tea.
He shakes his head, polite but firm, no thanks.
The mist and space between us cloak the two,
a snow globe or a silent movie scene.
Again the girl entreats and lifts the cup.
It’s almost eight, I may be late for class,
but I remain. How will this story go?
At last the man accepts the cup, he nods,
she smiles, nothing left for them to say.
Who gave a gift to whom that winter day?
I light a candle at dawn and invite
my soul to sing with the angels –
which means that I sit my body down
and repeat a mantra in my head to hush
the buzz of plans, desires, and worries.
The soul knows the secret
riffs and melodies
you forgot when you were born
and delights in her play among them
as a dog racing across the sand
to the scent of the sea delights
endlessly in the game of fetch.
The master-tossed ball
arcs across the sky
in a marriage of mass and motion,
and the dog chases and fetches,
chases and fetches.
So, I release my soul
to play on the beach
and beg the Holy One,
open my ears to hear the verses
You are singing to me.
Open my lips to join the chorus.
When children go hungry and migrants have no refuge, when flooding kills thousands in Libya while smoke from Canadian wildfires makes it hard for people in Florida to breathe, when one friend is diagnosed with Parkinson’s and another with cancer, what entitles me to sit in my garden and write a poem? Why make art of any kind when the world is falling apart?
The refugee crisis and world hunger and climate change sometimes paralyze me. What can one ordinary person do after installing solar panels and donating to the food bank? I bake banana bread, read Keats’ “Ode to Autumn,” and drink coffee with my girlfriends— anything to drown out the creeping dread I’m often not even consciously aware of. It eventually finds me in my dreams though: the bus to nowhere, the oncoming wave the size of a mountain, no place to hide from whatever sinister figure is stalking me that night.
When it’s impossible to forget and hard to hope, what can one ordinary person do?
Be curious.
Pay attention.
Resist numbness.
Writing a poem helps me do all three. Close observation and a spirit of exploration are solar power for art-making, and on the occasions when they float me into the zone where I lose all sense of time and place, when it’s just my pen and notebook and me, I get fired up with the exhilaration of the creative process as well as pride in making something. “Do poems make a difference?” poet Jane Hirshfield was asked after a reading at Bookshop Santa Cruz recently. The woman who wrote a book about how great poems transform the world answered, “Any action is an escape from paralysis.” Like signing a petition or composting my food scraps, writing a poem gives me a sense of agency.
But it’s not just about me. The poet lights a candle in the dark, both illumination and prayer. Whether I am reading a poem or writing one, it reminds me, in a world that wants saving, I am not alone.
Seductive valerian and maidenly chamomile,
same herbs my great
great grandmother snipped and brewed,
summer garden wrapped in tissue,
insomniac’s aphrodisiac,
you promise I’ll wake in the morning
like wood sorrel opening
its neon yellow flowers
to the first
touch of the sun.
Come, blessed leaves,
soak in this boiling bath;
release slithers of scent
into steam if you must,
but save every single soporific cell
of sleep-inducing power
for me.
O liquid lullaby,
soother of worry
and dream enticer,
drift away with me
into a nightlong
river of rest.
The same breeze that sifts
through the redwood boughs
and flutters the aspen leaves
also lifts a strand of hair from my face,
brushes my cheek and wrist.
What arboreal aerosols
has it lifted on its way
to trace on my skin?
We can’t see what happens underground,
roots and beetles, tinge and seep of water,
the faint white mycorrhizal threads
doing work beyond human imagining.
The power of the barely there
becomes visible in trunk and leaf,
honeysuckle nectar for the bumblebee.
Like the magnetic pulse that tells
wild geese where to fly,
something is calling you
to the place
where your joy meets
your neighbor’s need.
At this crossroads
in the kingdom of enough,
listen to the gull’s cry,
the squawking of crows,
the warbling coo of mourning doves.
Here is the delight of the realm
singing your name.
With gratitude to Frederick Buechner, who wrote, “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”
During the pandemic I was one of the privileged who could work from home, but for many years I commuted 38 miles from Santa Cruz to Foothill College in the heart of Silicon Valley, a drive that took me across the Santa Cruz Mountains on the toboggan run known as Highway 17. The summer before I started that job, I was helping another woman from Holy Cross Church organize the parish library when our pastor emeritus Father Mike Marini stopped in, and she told him that I would soon be working “over the hill.” With a sympathetic smile he gave me a blessing – which was comforting but at the same time added to my trepidation about the commute I was about to undertake. Although I’d always considered Catholics who kept a St. Christopher’s medal in their car sort of superstitious and old-fashioned, after Father Mike’s blessing I bought one for my Mazda Miata.
Generally, my drive over the hill and back took two hours of my day. During a storm, or if there was an accident or some other incident like a downed power line across the highway or an armed bank robber at large in the area, it could take twice as long. Near the summit of Highway 17, you lose the signal from whatever radio station you’re listening to when you started, and I soon set up my radio with separate pre-sets for the Santa Cruz side and the Silicon Valley side, so I could shift from KAZU to KQED or vice versa without missing a moment of my NPR show.
Except for the occasional jerk, commuters are competent and well mannered. I realized I’d truly become one of them when I drove Highway 17 on the weekend and noticed how erratic and disorganized it seemed. Drivers unaccustomed to the twists and poorly banked curves drove too slowly for my taste, while impatient or overly confident drivers went too fast, zigging and zagging in a way that put everyone in danger. This realization gave me a sense of camaraderie with my fellow commuters and filled me with a perverse pride.
Even in the best of situations, though, I often thought about how many assumptions any of us make when we set out in a car. For everything to go smoothly the way we expect to it – even on a short trip to the grocery store – every driver on the road must know the traffic laws and how to handle their cars; they must be sane and sober, attentive in a world filled with distractions. We hope no one has just had a fight or worse, is in the middle of one. It’s a lot to ask for. On the road, strangers isolated in our separate vehicles become a community utterly dependent on each other’s skill and good will.
I retired at the end of June, filled with profound gratitude for my career as a librarian — and for surviving my commute over the hill for more than twenty years. Thank you to St. Christopher and Father Mike, to my guardian angel, and to everyone who shared the road with me.
Dappled light on a blank page,
breeze sifting through pine boughs
faint as a whispered prayer
invite a spray of words
to fill these vacant lines —
an empty universe waiting
for stars and stones,
crustaceans and curlews,
waiting for the endless
bubbling up to begin
yet already longing
for a still point
within the hurtling.
When the Holy One commands us,
love me with your whole heart,
and with your whole being,
and with your whole strength,
doesn’t She also mean,
adore the pine tree whose shade you sit in
and worship the sun that feeds you?
Praise them worthily, She says,
and you will praise me.
Title from a poem by Rumi
When I was growing up, shaking hands seemed like a formal, old-fashioned custom to me, one I mostly saw in old movies. In real life it was reserved for introductions and making bets, rarely used by children or teenagers – until I moved to Germany during college for a junior year abroad. There a handshake was the customary greeting, and to my surprise I came to embrace it (pun intended).
Does this speak to a prudishness in me that I didn’t realize was there? No, I’m not a prude, but I do appreciate clear rules, and I liked not having to worry about what was appropriate. Are we familiar enough for a hug or a kiss? In Germany you didn’t have to wonder: the handshake was always right. It covered a broad spectrum of relationships from newly introduced strangers to good friends, including the gray area of acquaintances one might not feel comfortable hugging — polite and unobtrusive yet expressing friendly openness.
Several years later I ended up in the Netherlands as an expat. While my knowledge of German helped me pick up Dutch, I had a new greeting etiquette to learn. Here, acquaintances quickly progressed from handshakes to air kisses, which I’d never encountered in real life and associated with superficial city socialites. I mastered the art about as well as I did speaking Dutch, which is to say, with an American accent. At first it felt awkward, but gradually I became comfortable with the three air kisses, left right left, the soft brush of cheeks. It made me feel sophisticated and continental. Even if I sometimes fell prey when kissing someone who was also wearing glasses to the nose-jarring bump of our eyeglass frames, at least I learned the Dutch phrase for this incident which assured me it wasn’t uncommon: brillen kussje, little kiss of the glasses.
I love the complement of ways our different cultures developed to express affection and connect through touch – from embracing to air kissing, from the handshake to its casual, hipper cousins the high five and fist bump. But what do we do now? In the same way that moving overseas dropped me into a dance of unfamiliar customs, Covid landed the whole world in a brand-new culture where none of us know the rules. We can’t learn by watching and doing the way I did in Germany and the Netherlands; we have to make it up as we go along. But just as we learned early in the pandemic to recognize the smile behind a mask from the crinkle in a person’s eyes, we are figuring this out too.
Having grown up in a culture of hugging, I was surprised during my year in Germany by how much warmth and affection a clasping of hands could convey, so I hope Dr. Fauci was wrong when he famously suggested in April 2020 that Americans should never shake hands again. Sure, the way we make eye contact and our tone of voice when we say hello can reveal a lot of emotion, but I don’t think that’s enough for most of us in the long run. Human beings are mammals. We evolved to be in physical contact. As I emerged newly vaccinated from pandemic isolation, I quickly learned to ask friends when we met for the first time, “Are you hugging?” (Mostly the answer was yes.) Maybe our post-Covid etiquette will involve a more complicated ritual of asking How are you? and then waiting for a real answer. As much as I like a clear set of rules I don’t have to think about, sensitivity and mindfulness in the way we say hello is not a bad thing.
Thank you to my friend Kim Woodland for this guest post. I met Kim in Carolyn Flynn’s writing group and have had the pleasure of hearing her work for many years now. A naturalist and retired teacher, Kim shared the experience of outdoor education with kids from preschool to high school, and now I’m delighted to share with you a view of my garden through her poetic eye.
My Friend’s Backyard
the sun
bathes my skin in warmth
like the steam curling up
as I sip my morning chai
on this cool spring day
winter rains have resurrected
last autumn’s chard,
dark green leaves flutter
on four feet of ruby red stems
individual asparagus
stand like sentries
in the oblong wooden rimmed
garden bed
some tipping their heads
like snakes ready to strike
the oak titmouse,
a small gray bird
with a fancy crest,
flies proudly from tree to tree,
a chickadee visits the suet feeder,
turning like an acrobat
to find the choicest bites,
a golden crowned sparrow
flits nervously in a bush
waiting for its turn
while the Bewick’s wren
trills a daring song
and waggles its stiff,
upturned tail feathers
I sit with all my senses alert
as I observe the neon yellow
petals of the oxalis
reflecting the sun’s color
back to the giant star
the smell of jasmine
arrives on a warm breeze,
my feet are solid on earth
as I sit in my friend’s garden
breathing it all in
each atom
vibrating its own story
connects me
to my place
within the infinite
and the microscopic
as they swirl and twirl
into one.
By Kim Woodland
The Kingdom of Enough 