The loveliness of metamorphosis

The lanes down which I walked all winter when they were wide and bare and starkly beautiful are now close and warm and lush and full. I've been walking and wondering why I've not been so awestruck by the night sky as I was, and then I realized that it's because I'm so distracted by the glistening arms of the trees reaching out into the road and arching up into the sky, and by the flat lawns and bare forest floor that have suddenly grown up into jungles of tall grass and flowers, and by the tree shadows that have transformed from woodcuts into tissue paper collages, making softly variegated asphalt surfaces each evening. And the loveliest thing about spring and early summer is the puddles--the rain-shined roads and the running ditches, swimming lowlands and storm drains filled to flooding. Tonight I passed a gravel driveway that held a large, still pool, wherein were reflected the dark branches of the trees, and the full moon peering through. I thought it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.


David used to tease me a little about having so many favorites and so many superlatives, but appreciated, at least somewhat, that I was (often) serious about them. I was, and I am. I say "most beautiful" so often, and I know it sounds silly. But there are so many different kinds of beauty. The beauty of that puddle--of the night reflected in the water--can't be compared to the beauty of even simply the day reflected in the water, much less to the beauty of a flower or a newly molted cicada or a towering roller coaster, a much-needed scientific breakthrough or sweet nephew climbing a tree. They are each different, each precious, each superlative.






Something I've been meaning to say:
Lately I have been slowly coming to realize the meaning of the phrase "live without regrets," or at least the way it can apply to myself. Maybe it's different for others, but I have never liked this idea. I have always felt that those who claimed to live without regrets were either delusional or disgustingly lucky. As I said, though, lately my perspective has been shifting. The other day I was listening to a friend talk about past time wasted, and it wasn't the first time. I was beginning to notice a pattern of wallowing in past regrets, and it occurred to me that the only reason that the time in question was "wasted," in my opinion, was that we were still talking about it, rather than accepting it, learning from it, and moving forward. It was still pulling my friend's life into revolution around itself. It was creating more waste. So I have decided: missteps and mistakes happen to everyone--but the only time wasted is time from which I do not learn and grow.

May showers

The longer I live here (and I've nearly always lived here) the more I come to understand the comments of some friends who visited from Arizona, years and years ago: "It's like a jungle." I love the cool wet air of springtime in the evenings, and I love the eternally dripping trees during our month of rain. I love the stereophonic chorus of frogs peeping and croaking happily in the wet. I love the green light that fills the space below the trees, and I love the way the branches of some arch up into a glorious and expansive chlorophyll-ceilinged cathedral. I love the evening sun glowing orange-red through the clouds that gather around the Western horizon, and I love its light shining against those in the East. I love the way solid cloud cover seems to pull the world in close--the way, walking in the evening, the soundscape is suddenly so much richer. Sounds that would float up into a clear sky now swirl through the trees. Frogs sing and birds chatter, car doors close and water bubbles down the creek bed, and thunder rumbles in the distance as I leave the house; cracks and splits the sky open as I make my way back home through the thickening rain. As I pass the creek, church bells chime a mile down the road, and the sweet sound wanders down into the valley to meet me.

My mother is a genius.

I have had a cold, and she has been in New York City. When she came back I asked whether she knew of any way to temporarily remove the left side of my head (earlier I had been thinking front left quadrant, but I realized that that was too conservative an estimate), just until the swelling went down in my sinus cavities. She said no, but she asked what I had been eating and informed me that all of my responses were mucus-producing and/or acidic, and when we got home she brought me a little peppermint oil on a tissue and told me to breathe it in and spread a little under my nose. She explained that peppermint is anti-inflammatory. I know this of course, but my brain doesn't connect the "I have a cold" > "my sinus cavities are inflamed" > "I need an anti-inflammatory" > "peppermint is an anti-inflammatory" dots. So anyway, now I feel a little like someone is holding a chunk of dry ice under my nose, but the stabbing sensation inside my sinuses has subsided, so that's nice. On the plus side, I can now move air through the left side of my head. On the downside, it is becoming increasingly difficult to move air through the right side of my head.


On another unrelated note, I bought a new camera for Scotland*. My old one is still functioning, but seems to be on its last legs--and if it died during or just before the Scotland trip, I think I might kill someone. So really this is all** in the interest of homicide prevention.


With my mother in NYC, I had to get up earlyish this morning to help my dad get ready for work. This worked out well, as I began waking up as a side effect of the cold around 7:30. My point though is that I tend to forget how much I love mornings. How gorgeous they are. How delicious they smell, even through my current haze. It was lovely. I also always, always utterly forget how amazing the morning light looks in the fall, when the sun shines in through the trees and fills my bedroom with a deep red light. That was closer to six, when I wasn't quite as conscious as I now wish I had been. It was really beautiful.






















*For my trip to Scotland, I mean. Not "for Scotland," exactly.

**I put hours of research into this decision. Do you see what a good civil servant I am? Completely selfless, even if I do say so myself.

I don't have much thought behind this--was just looking around Google, thinking of poems possibly to replace the DMB lyric in the box beneath my facebook profile picture, and thought to look up a poem about beauty. As though searching "beauty" would turn up anything worthwhile on an internet dominated by pornographers and amateur poets like myself. So I started writing with very little thought and no aim, and then did more immediate editing than I might've liked, and somewhat changed the structure I had started with, and and and whatever. Here.


Beauty stretches,
beauty sighs,
beauty turns and skin
glimmers
in dappled moonlight, and
falls
back
gently
into a cloud pillow.
Sweet air breathes
through the window curtains,
sweeps through the
still room, and wraps the sleeping
in deep
night darkness,
safe and
soft and
sound.



The biggest problem, of course, with immediate editing, more precisely with immediate editing online or on a computer, is that the original draft is immediately and irretrievably lost. I never remember this until after it has happened again.

And I know that every poetry teacher I have ever had, if they had graves, would be rolling over in them at my inexplicable love of ending lines with prepositions and conjunctions and adjectives. I don't know why, okay? I just like to do it. It just feels better. Poetry is, tonight I say, about doing what I want with the words I want. So there.

Starlings

 If you haven't payed attention to flocks of starlings in flight, you have been missing out. I'm not sure there's anything I'd rather watch. When you tally up starlings and leaves fluttering down onto the water and rain blowing through street lights in the wind, and schools of fish and snow sinking from the clouds to the earth, and fields of poppies standing by the roadside, and banks of fog rolling in and whisping past, and families of ducks and geese dabbling, waddling, calling and flying, and trees bending and shaking in a storm, and sunlight trickling and filtering through it all, and water misting and flying and falling and rushing through the air and through our bodies and above and beneath and through and across the earth, and sparks and woodsmoke flying up into the night, and herds of goats wandering down the valley in the distance, and phosphorescence lighting up waves and beaches, and the stars and moon shining from behind strips of cloud, and fireflies dancing above a black lake and lighting up trees like Christmas in the dead of an august night, and bats swirling up into the twilight, I don't even know what you get. Heaven. I know nature and life can be hard and cruel, but it's difficult for me not to believe in grace and goodness in a world filled with so much reckless beauty.