This Child Who is My Mirror

This child who is my mirror
Reflecting starlight and suns
Brighter than mine
Who am I to comprehend her?

Double helix uncoiled, split
Heart beating in two places
Daughter's shadow has more grace
Than my substance, I fear

To make her laugh
Is grace for a lifetime
See her smiling
Is a thousand suns

Warmth and light, radiance,
In her coltish presence
My heart a sunflower
Ringing like a bell

Clove Heart

chewing, mouth numbing
breath steaming, he dreams her
sweetness, spicy sharp

In the Name of The Father? (Sunday Meditation #30)

I arrived home yesterday evening to be shocked by the sight at the end of my street. A ferocious thunderstorm felled an old tree in my neighbor's yard, two doors up the road. I say "in" the yard but it was really out of the yard and completely into the street. The tree was so tall it actually hit the adjacent house across the pavement. The sight made me blurt out "Wow!" with wide eyes. It really isn't something you see every day.

What it sparked me to thinking was about deep change, about how the confounding circus that is life can uproot your expectations and imaginings before you think to reach for the battens. This is how I felt about this Sunday, Father's Day in June 2013. The notion that I am a dad still knocks me flat now and then. Just like the fallen tree that now occupies a big chunk of my imagination.

I guess I cannot entirely escape that "Imawhat?" feeling, even now when my daughter is on her way to her ninth birthday. If we are trees, she is a sapling, I am mature growth, my own father old growth (and impressive).

A father? Me? It is a miracle and a puzzle. I often wonder what it is I did to deserve such a lovely, good child, and what I can impart to her that someday she will look back and say "He did have wisdom."

Mostly, I worry and pray that I will not totally screw up this fatherhood thing.

I keep that from her. She has no need to know how scared I am, how much I worry that I will fall from grace in her eyes. This seems to be part and parcel of the Fatherhood Gig, to my mind. A constant drumbeat in my heart and soul that is hammered out by this desire for my child to understand the good parts of me, and improve upon them in her own life. I think of her and the life before her, and the specter of failure on my part sends a bolus of ice water through my veins.

It is true, I am my own worst enemy and critic. I judge myself by standards I do not apply to others, because I know how unfair and unforgiving they can be. Thus I generate most of the pressure on myself to get this right, but it puts everything I think and do in a blinding, actinic light shining in my head. Nothing escapes scrutiny, nothing is to small to analyze...or criticize.

Harsh, but true. I am learning to overcome myself. This I believe is necessary if I wish to be the good father I want for her. Others have pointed this out to me, and I know they speak the truth.

Ah, enough self-mortification. It is Father's Day, after all. Looking past the commercialization and cheap sentiment that too often seems to cloy such occasions, I know there is something of note for us to acknowledge. The terrors and ecstasies of being a dad are things I would not willingly trade for anything on this mortal coil.

In the indigo haze of deep twilight, I look down the street at the fallen tree. All things must pass, I reckon, but the tree reminds me that we are all possessed of strengths we may not know we have. I think of my own father, who I am lucky enough to still have on this planet, and the things he taught me. His life was not perfect, we both know this, but through him I learned many things about being a man and father.

Seeing myself through my father's eyes, I know I am blessed by my daughter. She is student, she is teacher. I have much to give and to learn. It is to know and understand, on Father's Day.

Magpie Tales 150: Townhouse

image by Daniel Murtagh, via Magpie Tales

"Colleen, I...I...when can I...?"

Question unanswered, she shuts the door,

While he clutches his Donegal tweed

hair beaded with misty rain,

Going cold there on the doorstep

hands losing sense-memory of her,

Door latches, a metal snick

cutting the strings of his heart

Travelling Riverside (Un)Blues: Meditation

"God expects spiritual fruit, not religious nuts."
-Church sign, Highway 17, somewhere near Tappahannock, Virginia

Heading north on Highway 17, through the Middle Neck region of the state of my birth.  It is a gray day, fog and mist making the world seem like the inside of a back lit oyster shell.  The Wee Lass and I are on our way back to my adopted state of Maryland after a long weekend visiting with her grandparents in the southeast part of Virginia.  She was sleeping when I drove past the sign with that quote on it.  My chuckle didn't wake her up.

I was dreaming, too, but wide awake and on matters entirely different from hers.

The gray gauze that wrapped the countryside made it a day fit for dreaming.  The road was sparsely populated, and the car seemed a cocoon and not a machine.  Long stretches of nacreous light with trees fading into view like ents or spirits. The quiet in the car led me to a long meditation on blood ties, family, God and what it means.  We seemed less on the road than in space somewhere between the stars.

The road out there plays a bit of a sine wave with the Rappahannock River.  It veers away, then close, but for a while you can always tell it is there. There are subtle shifts in light and vegetation that let you know the river exists.  There is a presence of this long silver rope that has touched so many, given some a way of life, and many sustenance.  The river exists and we flow along with it.

In my mind the river and my family were merging, becoming blurry, as I glanced in the rear view at my daughter sleeping; this visit was particularly important because my blessed mother has been ailing quite a bit in the past couple of months.  There was scary episode (scary because it was life-threatening) last month, and there are complications because it happened on the heels of another serious condition which is still causing trouble.  It has been the sort of trying times that would make anyone reach out and want to have close as much love as possible, because love is what keeps us afloat, sometimes, on this river we call life.

In that gray blanket of fog and humming tires I recalled the laughter of my daughter and my mother as they played together in the living room of the home of my youth.  That laughter, and the banter, I could hear it as I was in the kitchen on Sunday making dinner for us.  That laughter was a tonic, a salve to make a sore heart a soaring heart.  It pushed back the great gray wall of melancholy that hovered just outside the limits of direct perception.  I could hear the life that was flooding back into my mother's weary voice, see the smile on her face and know that the life I helped bring into this world would not have been possible without the life that brought me into this world.

The tires hummed.  The mist swirled.  My daughter slept, her angel face pressed up against the side of the booster seat. She may not have known, maybe did not understand the vitality she brought to her grandmother.  But I did. I saw my future and my past come together in a brilliant Now, one that made my heart sing and throb to know that my family was blessed to be together, right then.

The gray sky and dripping trees passed by in a dreamy blur.  I swallowed some tears and smiled.  I had looked at my daughter and my mother, seeing joy on the faces of youth and wisdom.  The taste of bittersweet candy rolled around in my mouth. There was a lightening of the sky as I came to understand that stories begin and stories end, but we are blessed to have stories to tell.  This is a story, written in joy with the ink of Love upon our hearts. I looked out the window at the river just through the trees. I was convinced then that the world is not so gray a place as had I let myself believe, by the mighty silver river of love flowing through my heart.

Selene, She Knows

With the shorter days come longer nights, we all know.  There are things we sometimes fail to notice in the nightfall, absorbed in our own thoughts and hurrying inside away from the chill and the polite desolation of winter outside our doors.  In my case, I had failed to see the lights.

She did not.  She always sees such things.  It is not too far off to say that she is an extra pair of younger, sharper eyes to my older, jaded ones.  We left the house, she was cheerfully singing doggerel rhymes and delightful nonsense.  I was trying to recall if I had everything, had left nothing behind.  I was even pondering tomorrow when I had to dive back into the cold, syrupy ocean of job searching and bill-paying angst.  I was not looking at the sky, or even across the street.

In the car.  Her cheerfulness takes the edge off the blade of my mind.  A smile could even be said to grace my visage.  This is good. We drive down the street and turn the corner.  It hasn't sunk in to me yet, but she pipes up with the lilting declaration that "This is my favorite time of year to look at lights!  They are so pretty!"

I finally see them.  All up and down the main street leading out of my neighborhood.  So many houses now adorned with lights of all kinds and colors.  Even plenty of blue, my favorite color.  The light of my life continues her narrative as we continue on.  I hear the delight in her voice and it warms my heart.

I am a fool, sometimes, to fail to notice the beauty around me.  I have often said I need a good editor, and my darling daughter is better than she knows.  The world is fresh before her stained glass eyes, and so it comes to me.  All I need to do is open mine.

The trees alongside the road thin out as we approach the highway.  The sky is filling up with a white gold light.  I see it first, the full moon, Selene in all her aureate glory hovering just above the horizon.  I gasp.  She asks "Daddy, what?"

"It's a full moon, sweet pea.  Look at that!"

"Where?"  I point. She gasps, too, when she sees it.

"Daddy, it is full!  Look! Ooooo, it is so pretty!"

I catch a glimpse of her eyes in the rear view mirror, flashing in the glow of passing headlights.  For an instant, I understand the mystery.  I get her tidal pull, gravity tugging at the rivers of my veins, the ocean of my heart.  This pull will only get stronger as she gets older, and someday I will be the moon to her Sun.

But for now, all I can say is, "Yes, sweetie, it is full.  And so, so pretty."

Sunday Meditation #7: On The Vibrance of Sweet Pea Vines

Saturday morning, September 10th, 2011.  Yard work.

Did not shower this morn before heading out to do yard work.  The promise of a warm day and hard work meant being dirty and sweaty before 10:00, a prophecy that came true.  High grass in the back yard, glazed with dew that turned my boots dark after a few steps.  Little droplets of cool silver fleck my ankles and calves.  The sensation brought back memories of summer mornings long ago, when I was a boy.  Those first few glorious minutes outside when the air was still just cool enough, with a hint of the heat to come.  There were birds, too.

This morning the birds were singing an alternating chorus, the warbles and trills rotating from bush to tree to bush to tree, ringing the backyard with a rotating flight of sound.  Bees among the hibiscus, I heard their low hum as I passed on my way to the shed.  Large bees, ravishing the snowy flowers in pursuit of pollen.  They seemed too large to be average honeybees, their fuzzy bodies dusted with the fruits of their labors.  The activity made me smile.

Toolshed.  Faint aroma of cool, wet wood.  I gathered up the saws and clippers I'd need, and the wheelbarrow.  The little chain saw purchased earlier in the spring rode in the wheelbarrow.  An electric battery-powered model, it isn't big or fierce, but suits my needs for now.  It was on the way back to the house that I saw the sweet pea vines twining in the fences at the corners.  They were bright, deep blue, little pools of indigo splashed on the aged silvery wood, blue eyes peeping from amongst the electric green leaves.  I stopped, and caught my breath.

Flowers graced my fences.  These things happen, and we explain by biology and cellular chemistry, of the cycles of growth and death and growth outlined in textbooks.  Our heads accept that flowers come from plants come from seeds come from soil come from weather and geological processes.  But none of those really matter, not when faced with such beauty and small graces.  This I know.  I went out to work in the sun and shade, and found my favorite color daubed on the fences I had taken for granted.  I was humbled and pleased.  That beauty exists, for us all, is the lesson I learned.

Let Me Call You Sweetheart

I have to write this from the dude POV, because, well...I'm a dude, and that is somewhat critical to the premise of this post.  So there's that.

Anyway...

The TV was on the other morning, because the Wee Lass was here.  I was listening to it while doing a little web-based chore minding, and a commercial came on for a car insurance company.  At the end of the commercial the perky (and if I'm being honest, cute) spokeswoman says to the dancing guy dressed up as dollar signs, "Really, go, honey, it's your break!".

Something about the word "honey" in her mouth made me sit up and take notice.  I felt a twinge of light-headedness and realized that, for all my facades of dude-ness, I like it when a woman calls me "Honey".

Or "Sugar". Or "Sweetie".  (sigh)  I'm such a violin.

I know in the current climate of Political Correctness and Gender Distinction Awareness and Avoidance of (possibly) Patronizing Forms of Address Awareness, it can be a slippery slope to use terms of endearment in a public venue and addressed to someone we barely know or do not know at all.  That's why I don't do it with women I do not know, and rarely if ever in a public setting with women I do not know well or only in a professional* sense.  It's best for everyone, that way.  Especially if you ask the legal folks in human resources.

But when I hear it applied to me in a more informal setting (the office is not such a place) like a restaurant or in a store...I usually get that puppy-dog sensation in my gut and I immediately relax a little.  I think its because I grew up in a different climate of male-female relations, one that was further along than most of the neanderthal-ish antics I remember hearing about from my elders (and which have not completely disappeared today), but certainly a little more traditional than today.  That was a time when it was much more common in my experience to hear those terms bandied back and forth and no one, male or female, thought much of it.

As I have evolved, and as things have changed, I realize that we all have to be much more careful about how casual we treat others, especially when affection can too easily be misconstrued for disrespect.  I certainly don't advocate calling colleagues "darlin'" or "honey" (male or female) in business meetings or in places where focus and respect are key to getting things done.

But sometimes?  I don't mind being called "Hon" or "Sugar", especially when I can tell someone is being nice because nice is the normal way to be.

And when it comes from the lips of someone you love?  Well, that's just the cat's meow.

---

*Note:  By 'professional' I mean in a career or workplace-based setting, not in the informal slang of a (ahem) prostitute.  Get your heads out of the gutter.

Song 1

Aureate bars on the walls
Sol peeking in to rouse,
to stir the blood
that filters through
the wetlands of my soul
wild places, and green
reached by invisible paths
known only to myself
and then only sometimes,
because they shift, no warning,
I relearn the quivering map
to find those growing things
under a sky of azure
in an atrial silence, silver water
where the ripples of you
break the surface

The Tearing Of The Bagels

Friday morning is bagel time with my daughter.  The ritual began soon after she was big enough to toddle.  She was once enthusiastic, even demanding, when it was still fresh and new to her.  Lately, she likes to go, but she often seems noncommittal.

Me, I don't want to give it up yet.  The capstone to my week, and my girl she is growing swiftly.

One aspect that took root early on was that the plain bagel she always requested had to be rendered into smaller bits, to fit her wee mouth.  It was done out of necessity when she was much smaller.  At first I had to cut the bagel into pieces, she insisted, and they had to be wedge shaped.  She would use them as tiny shovels to scoop cream cheese out of the container and into her mouth.  Later, I convinced her that tearing the bagel into bite-sized pieces was better (have you ever tried to saw apart a chewy bagel with a bendy plastic knife? Tedious and tiresome), and much to my delight she agreed.  So for the longest time I would tear the bagel into bites, and she would eat.

As with many of these things we do for our children because they can't do for themselves, there comes a time when we grow tired of performing these tasks.  That time usually occurs about the time the kids can manage these things for themselves.  Seat belt fastening and bagel tearing, yeah, I've hit limit.

So it was last Friday at the bagel shop.  Bagels arrived at the table and as usual before I could sink teeth into my hot, crispy, fresh bagel, Her Royal Cuteness asked me to tear up the bagel.  I was annoyed, more so than the situation warranted.  But I complied as I always do.  I did wonder when she was going to start doing this for herself.

I watched her as she ate.  She seemed content, scooping cream cheese like a boss, and pushing the fragments of the now sundered bagel around the napkin on the table.  She didn't eat that much.  I polished off my bagel and wondered at this progeny of mine, and why it has to be my hands that tear the bagel.

It became clear to me, when she looked up at me with those stained glass eyes of hers and a small grin on her face.  This thing we have, the trip we take every Friday morning for the ritual "Tearing Of The Bagel"...maybe it matters to her.  Maybe it isn't so much that she doesn't want to do it herself.  Maybe she thinks this time we share together is incomplete if Daddy doesn't make the big things small.  Because that's what daddies do.  They help make the big things small for their precious ones, and that is as it should be.  I look on that angel face and believe it to be true.

I wish I could tell her, explain so that she may understand, that I may make the big things small for her...but by her presence sharing this ritual, I am a bigger man.

Fearless Leader

Last Saturday, the Wee Lass and I were enjoying a stroll through a favorite park, down by the Patapsco River.  We had reversed course, as Her Royal Cuteness had declared, loudly, that she needed to void the royal bladder.  Well, what she said was "I gotta go potty, Daddy!", but you get the idea.

As we hoofed down the path on the way to the loo,  she announced that she was the leader, and that she should be in front.  So she increased her pace.  She looked over her shoulder to see how close I was getting.  When she saw me gaining on her, she knitted her brow, looked at me and quipped:

"I should be the leader, 'cause I'm a girl!"

She then turned her head forward and took off down the path, leaving me with jaw agape.

I had no ready reply or refutation.  Her logic was inescapable, and my only response was to grin and try to keep up with Fearless Leader.

Bell

Blood heat of the day
Iron bell pealing, he sees her
Heart blossoms anew

Laughter of the Sun

Spun silk and sunbeams,
her hair a long bead curtain,
Behind, diamonds smile.

Tiny Revelations

I found myself walking along the railroad tracks down by the river, Sunday evening.  How I arrived there was a bit of a mystery, because I couldn't pinpoint when it was I told myself to go there instead of going home.  Was it a conscious decision?  Not sure.  More likely it was some directive from the recesses of my mind, emerging from the deep dark like a whale surfacing in a channel between the floes.  Me, in my kayak, paddling fast to stay ahead of the bow shock and to stay upright.

So there I was walking and sweating in the heat, puzzling over what I do when I do stuff I don't quite fathom.  there were birds calling.  The river flowed liked a quiet conversation three stacks over in the library.  The gravel crunched satisfyingly under my shoes as I trudged down towards the river and then up the hill to my car.

Flash.  A moment of slow time when all was quiet.  The birds and the trees held their breath, as I held mine, and was flooded with the thought that I would rather know love for a lifetime than be a hero for a day.

Silence.  Heartbeats.  A letting go of ego...if I know love, then I will know life.  This is what was revealed to me.

Small Bang Theory of Love

Desire, suns at dusk
swirl around the galaxies
of our hungry hearts

It Was A Simply A Walk In The Park

We strode the path
treading leaves and roots
two shadows pursuing our bodies
where the air was thick and languid
along the river, keeping company
on a day meant to assure
me that the word father actually
had a definition, but this,
this I already knew, truth
known to me, there in the park
the instant she took my hand
and said I love you, daddy.

The Not-So-Unbearable Lightness of Being

So anyway its Tuesday or should that be tuesday, because really is it that important, that much of a standout that it deserves its own capital letter?  Seriously, man, it's freakin' tuesday and I'm not feeling the love, you know?  Sorry I know I'm being difficult, my bad. It's just that I was expecting so much more by this time in the week.  Too many weeks of the grind and the yawn...

Wait, hold that.  Yeah, yeah, the obligation of what needs to be done to earn the Daily Bread, that can be a royal drag, the ol' millstone and albatross many of us carry around and can I say, as as sidebar a digression even, perhaps said sotto voce ('cause you should know by now I can't resist those little sidesteps into Theater and Art and Screenplay language, yeah boy because (as the kids say) that's how I rolls.  or roll.  Or something like that.) that the Millstone & Albatross would be a great name for a pub, or perhaps a law firm.  Has a nice ring, don't you think?  Yeah, me too.

What's that? Oh, damn. Right, right, now where was I?  I was speaking of grinds and yawns and royal drags...but what I meant to say is that it isn't all gloomish and Sturm und Drang (there I go again off into Art), no no by any means no, there are good things too, my lovelies, yes there are and the trick the real trick, the meat of the matter as it were is that you need to know where to look for the good stuff...

...Because sometimes the good stuff, my friends, the good stuff can sometimes be right there under your nose or hanging out just behind your back, like when you try and turn around really fast to see if the good stuff is trying to sneak up on you, or maybe trying to keep the bad stuff from sneaking up on you.  Which I have to say is damn near impossible because joy and misery will find you no matter how  hard you try to catch them or avoid them, and they will do it most often when you least expect it.

So stop chasing them.  Misery you don't need and joy?  Well, joy is kind of like that butterfly you ran after when you were a little kid and no matter how fast or agile you were, or thought you were, that butterfly was always one or two moves ahead of you, and you remember what happened? When you stopped running after it? Very often it would stop and alight on a flower or leaf or stalk of grass right in front of you and sit there, wings hinging open and closed slowly as if it were in a dream or it was pondering the dark shadows and lumbering footsteps that rumbled along behind it.

So the point of all this, the kernel, the "crux o' the biscuit" as my brother was fond of saying...is that joy can be ours, if we know where to look, know when to look, and most importantly learn to recognize what we are looking for when we see it.  Because that is how joy rolls.

When you see the butterfly, whisper its name, but let it fly free.

On Seeing Things

Lucky, how lucky I feel sometimes.  Glad to be alive.

Not in the sense I survived a life-threatening event, like crashing a tractor-trailer into a guardrail on a bridge and hanging over the side until rescue came along.  Glad to be alive in that the body and the mind, fatigue combined with stress notwithstanding, feel good about being alive.  This sensation is not unknown to me but I can say it is not like a best friend who comes over to my house everyday.

Yet, it is here.  Has been for some matter of days, now.  How to explain that?

In part, it is a result of my vision returning.  My inner vision, mind you, not my actual eyesight.  (For that matter, there can be a difference between 'vision' and 'eyesight'. But I digress)  This inner vision I fancied to be a set of mental lenses and filters that allow me to shift focus, zoom in and out, try different colors on the fabric of the world, all without leaving the confines of my admittedly big head.  These filters allowed me to see things.  Good things, wonder and beauty.  One day, a few months back, I woke up and I could not see those things.  Or if I could, then not very well.

I would have panicked, if I hadn't been emotionally wrung out and physically exhausted.  So I didn't.  Instead, I simply sat down and reckoned that I wouldn't see those things again.  The creative process began to ebb, and finding those things of beauty increasingly became harder and harder, to the point where I thought I might give up. What vision that was left to me was gradually losing its light.

Yet I didn't give up.  That I kept going, even if the going was glacial, is truly a wonder.

Things have begun to turn themselves to the sun.  I feel the warmth on my face, and color has returned to the landscape. I am seeing rivers as rivers and mountains as mountains, for the first time in months.

To see things for what they are, is to know beauty.

Early Summer Poetry Slam #3: Quiet Aria

She sings, moon listens
straining on tiptoe to hear
music of the heart

A Discourse On DNA

I read somewhere, don't remember where, it was a long time ago, but what I read was that two things that separate us humans from them animals are 1) the ability to curse and B) the ability to write poetry, well, shee-it, brothers and sisters, how about that? Guess that makes me one of the most human-like human beings I know...at least if more weight is given to the cursing rather than the poetry Yeah, yeah, I know, I write stuff that at least resembles poetry, at least in the same sense that a house cat resembles a jaguar, but to my shame I seem to be better at cursing and really, cursing gets so boring after a while its too repetitive Too narrow-minded...although i do allow that sometimes? In the right circumstances? A well-placed curse is the only thing that will serve to make ones true thoughts and feelings known.  Hmm.  Trick, the trick is to know the Right Time and the Right Place, you know?  No sense in dropping an F-bomb in church, you get my drift.  Dig it? I knew that you could.  But hold on, back to that idea of poetry, really, I try and I scrape and I bow before the words and it seems like I never quite get them to say what I really meant, the idea in my Gray Matter seems so grand and powerful, like the sun, but the words hit the page or the screen and its only shadows.  You might ask me "Why do you care so much? What does it really matter?  Its word, only words, and you know a lot of them so if it isn't right one time, you can always write more, try try again, yes?"  Right, yeah, I know I hear what you are saying (at least, I hear what the voice in my mind that I imagine to be you, is saying) and I console myself with the notion of writing something again and again, always trying to find the right way to describe the sun or love or heart or whatever is on the tip of my (mind)tongue...but I confess, my lovelies, I do, even though I am far from a religious creature, I confess to you...

...that if I don't ever get the words right, if I don't ever really write that thing called a Poem...

...I fear I'll not be able to convince myself...

...that I am more than just an animal, who knows how to curse.