Tonight Grandmother Moon is a little over half full, and waxing. As I walk up my driveway carrying my mail in the warm dark, she shines her light at me. I think, next year I can be walking up this hill holding my almost 6 month old grandchild. We can be looking at the moon together, entranced by the white lit ball in the night sky just as the child's daddy was 30 years ago when he couldn't sleep.
I will be a grandmother, I tell the moon. We will be grandmothers together. You can teach me what you know, and I can show your light to a child who will be in awe of the universe before ever entering a science classroom.
Tuesday, July 16, 2013
Friday, May 24, 2013
Many shades of green, water logged
From my window there is the sky finally open to blue after a deluge of water all day. The various hues of green could function as a color wheel for an art class. Cut green of the lawns, lemon green tops of the laurel bushes, dusty sea green of the wheat field, dots of evergreen, dots of deciduous green and all heavily laden with rain. Heavy is the only word for the sodden red volcanic earth which stretchs out to the east of my visage.
In the distance glows a round rainbow of color, changing shape as I write. Rain, spring, my land in late May with iris blooming in the foreground. I wish you were here to sip wine with me and watch the colors move with the light. Evening comes on, and soon it will be time to eat spaghetti made the old way as I did for my kids years ago. Sauce simmering full of garden thyme, oregano, bay and garlic.
I eat my pasta, heavy with red herb fragrant sauce, and watch the rainbow build itself higher into the air, going from a circle to a rectangle rising up into the sky. There is a title for something, "building a rainbow".
Every day we are building the bridge to the unknown, to our future, to our final transformance. I would like mine to be colored, like this dinner guest in my evening cloud show.
In the distance glows a round rainbow of color, changing shape as I write. Rain, spring, my land in late May with iris blooming in the foreground. I wish you were here to sip wine with me and watch the colors move with the light. Evening comes on, and soon it will be time to eat spaghetti made the old way as I did for my kids years ago. Sauce simmering full of garden thyme, oregano, bay and garlic.
I eat my pasta, heavy with red herb fragrant sauce, and watch the rainbow build itself higher into the air, going from a circle to a rectangle rising up into the sky. There is a title for something, "building a rainbow".
Every day we are building the bridge to the unknown, to our future, to our final transformance. I would like mine to be colored, like this dinner guest in my evening cloud show.
Monday, April 22, 2013
What the Children Know
The squirrelly boy in Art class argues with the teacher, order maker, that his loud talking and laughing with the boys behind him is the most important part of school - socializing. He tells her he is practicing "relating to my peers". She observes him closely, slight and maybe 13. He has his spiel down, that she must allow.
" So, what will you do after school is done? What will your work be in life?' She asks, as she asks many cheeky kids who see no reason to follow the lesson of the day, to focus on the work, to listen.
" I plan to be a minister with the Assembly of God Church. I will bring the message of Jesus to people, and help them be saved."
The teacher is somewhat speechless. Memory flash, the little church across the road from their house next to the Rez, with black letters against white, "Assembly of God". A modest white building in the middle of the farm fields, with a pastor's house next to it. Her son once caught head lice from staying over night with the Pastor's boys. It was a small nightmare to rid the whole family of it once they realized they had lice.
She cannot help herself, pursuing the boy's line of thought.
"Well, it is interesting that Jesus didn't own anything, he went about in sandals, almost like a homeless person now. People in churches seem to have lots of money, which isn't the way Jesus actually lived."
The kid is not phased.
"Well if I had lots of money I would buy a whole bunch of Bibles so I could give poor people a Bible."
"What", she asks carefully, "If the people you want to help are hungry?"
With a surprising amount of bluster from a slightly built 13 year old kid he answers without missing a beat.
"They need to be saved more than eat."
"Have you ever been hungry?"
"Yes."
"I mean really hungry, with nothing in the cupboards. No money to go to the store."
Honest for the first time he answers, "No. But they will be happy if they have a Bible because it is the word of God, and they'll forget about being hungry." He is deadpan serious.
The teacher is rendered speechless. There is no conversation here. This boy will go about being this, and god help us if he does become a minister. The teacher can only think this of course. Teachers have to be very, very circumspect about what they say. It is the challenge to appear not to have an opinion.
Later in the day the last class is making coil clay pots. She sits with the students at the ceramics table, fashioning a small vase as the others work, and chat. This is a calm class, they are absorbed in creating from the elements. As the boys talk, the girls remain silent and the teacher listens as she works on making her own vase. This vase has curves, curves like a woman she realizes. Most of the students coil pots are straight up and down, awkward lines.
The girl across the table finally looks at her and asks, after half an hour without speaking, "How did you get your pot to curve like that?"
The teacher is ecstatic, that she has taught, in silence and in modeling. She makes an example for the girl of how the coils can be graduated or reduced in their circle. The girl watches carefully, and then tries to make a curve in her own vase.
The school day ends with all the pots on the drying shelf, and the students off onto their yellow buses. The building is a different place, suddenly calm and tranquil. The teacher cleans the room in this quiet atmosphere, taking the opportunity to converse in Spanish with the janitor when he arrives to empty waste baskets and sweep.
The sky opens on the way home, across the fields of the Willamette Valley where thousands of the Mexican peoples have come to work. The day of school is over now. One child off to propagate his dogma, another to think about the curves of life, of women and mothers. The teacher is overcome with the rolling hills of verdant earth which feeds each and everyone.
" So, what will you do after school is done? What will your work be in life?' She asks, as she asks many cheeky kids who see no reason to follow the lesson of the day, to focus on the work, to listen.
" I plan to be a minister with the Assembly of God Church. I will bring the message of Jesus to people, and help them be saved."
The teacher is somewhat speechless. Memory flash, the little church across the road from their house next to the Rez, with black letters against white, "Assembly of God". A modest white building in the middle of the farm fields, with a pastor's house next to it. Her son once caught head lice from staying over night with the Pastor's boys. It was a small nightmare to rid the whole family of it once they realized they had lice.
She cannot help herself, pursuing the boy's line of thought.
"Well, it is interesting that Jesus didn't own anything, he went about in sandals, almost like a homeless person now. People in churches seem to have lots of money, which isn't the way Jesus actually lived."
The kid is not phased.
"Well if I had lots of money I would buy a whole bunch of Bibles so I could give poor people a Bible."
"What", she asks carefully, "If the people you want to help are hungry?"
With a surprising amount of bluster from a slightly built 13 year old kid he answers without missing a beat.
"They need to be saved more than eat."
"Have you ever been hungry?"
"Yes."
"I mean really hungry, with nothing in the cupboards. No money to go to the store."
Honest for the first time he answers, "No. But they will be happy if they have a Bible because it is the word of God, and they'll forget about being hungry." He is deadpan serious.
The teacher is rendered speechless. There is no conversation here. This boy will go about being this, and god help us if he does become a minister. The teacher can only think this of course. Teachers have to be very, very circumspect about what they say. It is the challenge to appear not to have an opinion.
Later in the day the last class is making coil clay pots. She sits with the students at the ceramics table, fashioning a small vase as the others work, and chat. This is a calm class, they are absorbed in creating from the elements. As the boys talk, the girls remain silent and the teacher listens as she works on making her own vase. This vase has curves, curves like a woman she realizes. Most of the students coil pots are straight up and down, awkward lines.
The girl across the table finally looks at her and asks, after half an hour without speaking, "How did you get your pot to curve like that?"
The teacher is ecstatic, that she has taught, in silence and in modeling. She makes an example for the girl of how the coils can be graduated or reduced in their circle. The girl watches carefully, and then tries to make a curve in her own vase.
The school day ends with all the pots on the drying shelf, and the students off onto their yellow buses. The building is a different place, suddenly calm and tranquil. The teacher cleans the room in this quiet atmosphere, taking the opportunity to converse in Spanish with the janitor when he arrives to empty waste baskets and sweep.
The sky opens on the way home, across the fields of the Willamette Valley where thousands of the Mexican peoples have come to work. The day of school is over now. One child off to propagate his dogma, another to think about the curves of life, of women and mothers. The teacher is overcome with the rolling hills of verdant earth which feeds each and everyone.
Sunday, March 17, 2013
Twilight on St. Patrick's Day
The rain has abated, now at dusk. The weekend of green revelry closes to Sunday night thoughts of Monday's reality.
St. Patrick, the long dead son of the Roman occupation of Britain, still remains a legend, even though research clearly shows there were no snakes In Ireland. The only snake type thing is a 'slow worm', actually a small reptile which, over time, lost its legs and now resembles a tiny garter snake, hardly in need of the power of a Bishop with his holy miter.
St. Patrick died a little over 1500 years ago today, a period of time long enough to cause his green legend to be left alone. The pictures of him driving snakes into the sea, in our children's book " The Stories of the Saints", stands iconic in artistic depictions even now. Another example of the necessity of Mythology in the course of the mundanity of the human experiment, because a good image is almost impossible to shake.
When I was small, and I drew shamrocks on construction paper, and we had special mass in the morning before school, it was not mentioned that this bishop opposed the Druids. Those Pagan people who did things like build Stonehenge to chart the movement of the stars. The word 'Pagan' was synonymous with ignorance, immorality, and a kind of dirty savageness. When the Catholics went around slandering other civilizations to puff up their own story, it is no wonder why people of other persuasions didn't always like them. Another case of a religion pouting myopic and defensive like an adolescent caught in a love triangle.
I attended the Orchard Society spring grafting fair today, and I really think I must be a Pagan. Being in that fairgrounds building with hundreds of people, all ages, gathering scions to graft to roots, talking to each other about plants and hundreds of different types of apples, or pears, or cherries, or grapes felt like a mass. Holy people who can get excited by what otherwise appear as buckets of twigs gave off a bright spirit, undeniable. This felt like the religion I might belong to.
St. Patrick, what will be left of you? Irish car bomb hangovers and discarded green mardi gras beads.
The house smelling like corned beef and cabbage. The green hurts-the-eyes grass of spring, taunting the lawn mower. The snow over the daffodils, and the luck of the Irish, the ones who escaped the potato famine from which the church did not protect them.
St. Patrick, the long dead son of the Roman occupation of Britain, still remains a legend, even though research clearly shows there were no snakes In Ireland. The only snake type thing is a 'slow worm', actually a small reptile which, over time, lost its legs and now resembles a tiny garter snake, hardly in need of the power of a Bishop with his holy miter.
St. Patrick died a little over 1500 years ago today, a period of time long enough to cause his green legend to be left alone. The pictures of him driving snakes into the sea, in our children's book " The Stories of the Saints", stands iconic in artistic depictions even now. Another example of the necessity of Mythology in the course of the mundanity of the human experiment, because a good image is almost impossible to shake.
When I was small, and I drew shamrocks on construction paper, and we had special mass in the morning before school, it was not mentioned that this bishop opposed the Druids. Those Pagan people who did things like build Stonehenge to chart the movement of the stars. The word 'Pagan' was synonymous with ignorance, immorality, and a kind of dirty savageness. When the Catholics went around slandering other civilizations to puff up their own story, it is no wonder why people of other persuasions didn't always like them. Another case of a religion pouting myopic and defensive like an adolescent caught in a love triangle.
I attended the Orchard Society spring grafting fair today, and I really think I must be a Pagan. Being in that fairgrounds building with hundreds of people, all ages, gathering scions to graft to roots, talking to each other about plants and hundreds of different types of apples, or pears, or cherries, or grapes felt like a mass. Holy people who can get excited by what otherwise appear as buckets of twigs gave off a bright spirit, undeniable. This felt like the religion I might belong to.
St. Patrick, what will be left of you? Irish car bomb hangovers and discarded green mardi gras beads.
The house smelling like corned beef and cabbage. The green hurts-the-eyes grass of spring, taunting the lawn mower. The snow over the daffodils, and the luck of the Irish, the ones who escaped the potato famine from which the church did not protect them.
Tuesday, March 5, 2013
The Heart Consists of Four Chambers
The Heart Consists of Four Chambers:
An atrium and a ventricle on the right
and an atrium and a ventricle on the left.
Blood returning to the heart from
veins all over the body flows
into the right atrium.
From there the blood flows
into the right ventricle.
The right ventricle then pumps it
to the lungs for oxygenation.
The oxygen rich blood returns to
the left atrium,
from there the blood flows into the left ventricle,
which pumps it at high pressure
into the arteries.
This entire process constitutes one
heart beat.
This in not a poem, and it is a poem. I think the body,
This human body is
a poem.
An atrium and a ventricle on the right
and an atrium and a ventricle on the left.
Blood returning to the heart from
veins all over the body flows
into the right atrium.
From there the blood flows
into the right ventricle.
The right ventricle then pumps it
to the lungs for oxygenation.
The oxygen rich blood returns to
the left atrium,
from there the blood flows into the left ventricle,
which pumps it at high pressure
into the arteries.
This entire process constitutes one
heart beat.
This in not a poem, and it is a poem. I think the body,
This human body is
a poem.
Wednesday, February 20, 2013
What the Flower?
Ideas for bringing peace into the classroom:
This, quoted from the National Peace Institute course, "Teachers Without Borders":
"What the flower? One teacher spoke of how, in her work with high school students, their use of profanity, (the f-bomb) was getting on her nerves. She asked them if they would substitute the f-bomb with the word flower. Thus, instead of saying "What the f.....?!" They would say "What the flower?
She said that, much to her surprise, they really took to this practice. Not only did it solve the issue of profanity, but it also made them smile every time they said it, and it brought more joy into the classroom."
Small, simple, inexpensive ways to change the paradigm. I think this is flowering cool!
This, quoted from the National Peace Institute course, "Teachers Without Borders":
"What the flower? One teacher spoke of how, in her work with high school students, their use of profanity, (the f-bomb) was getting on her nerves. She asked them if they would substitute the f-bomb with the word flower. Thus, instead of saying "What the f.....?!" They would say "What the flower?
She said that, much to her surprise, they really took to this practice. Not only did it solve the issue of profanity, but it also made them smile every time they said it, and it brought more joy into the classroom."
Small, simple, inexpensive ways to change the paradigm. I think this is flowering cool!
Monday, February 18, 2013
Louis
Louis I Miss You
My grandfather, Louis, he's been gone
38 years ago this month
Tall and quiet, his angular face lined and serious
I still wonder if
he would be less serious
had his life been different.
Last time I saw him he bought me pancakes,
at his regular breakfast place.
"A short stack," always the same order.
Later, saying goodbye
Grama told him,
"Louie, give her some dollars."
(She called him Louie and gave him orders)
He fished in his pockets and
handed me four dollars in earnest
I had to take them, guiltily
Being a grandchild even at 19.
The last gesture I would ever know
from him
it broke my heart
and still does.
His oldest son, my Dad, has survived to live much longer
At the dinner table I say,
"Tell me about Grandad"
"He went around to the bars
In Milwaukie and as far as Sellwood
Selling his father's cheese. Grandpa made
Cheese in his basement."
I wonder what that cheese tasted like,
and what my Grandad looked like in 1910,
A kid of 12
Driving a horse cart around town
They wrapped cheese in cloth then
I wish I could have been there.
What a trick of fate that life does not let
the children know the elders
except in memory and story
Grandad, this is your story,
Us sitting in the pancake house
I'm telling you about college.
You are telling me about the railroad,
The Southern Pacific, because I asked.
What a fine man you are,
able to drive horse carts and fix
trains.
My grandfather, Louis, he's been gone
38 years ago this month
Tall and quiet, his angular face lined and serious
I still wonder if
he would be less serious
had his life been different.
Last time I saw him he bought me pancakes,
at his regular breakfast place.
"A short stack," always the same order.
Later, saying goodbye
Grama told him,
"Louie, give her some dollars."
(She called him Louie and gave him orders)
He fished in his pockets and
handed me four dollars in earnest
I had to take them, guiltily
Being a grandchild even at 19.
The last gesture I would ever know
from him
it broke my heart
and still does.
His oldest son, my Dad, has survived to live much longer
At the dinner table I say,
"Tell me about Grandad"
"He went around to the bars
In Milwaukie and as far as Sellwood
Selling his father's cheese. Grandpa made
Cheese in his basement."
I wonder what that cheese tasted like,
and what my Grandad looked like in 1910,
A kid of 12
Driving a horse cart around town
They wrapped cheese in cloth then
I wish I could have been there.
What a trick of fate that life does not let
the children know the elders
except in memory and story
Grandad, this is your story,
Us sitting in the pancake house
I'm telling you about college.
You are telling me about the railroad,
The Southern Pacific, because I asked.
What a fine man you are,
able to drive horse carts and fix
trains.
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