Six Billion People

I really enjoyed today's Writer's Almanac poem, and I thought you would, too.

Six Billion People

by Tom Chandler

And all of you so beautiful
I want to bring you home with me
to sit close on the couch.

My invitation inserted in six billion bottles,
corked with bark from the final forest
and dropped in the ocean of my longing.

We would speak the language of no words,
pass the jug of our drunken joy
at being babies growing into death.

Sometimes, I know, life is stupid, pointless,
beside the point, but here's the point —
maybe we would fall

in love, settle down together,
share the wine, the bills,
the last of the oxygen and the remote.

"Six Billion People" by Tom Chandler, from Toy Firing Squad. © Wind Publications, 2008. Reprinted with permission.

Zen in the Morning

I keep a little Pocket Poets book of Zen poems on my desk at the office. Sometimes I read one as I'm starting my day, and I like to think they give me a better perspective on life and work. Here's one of my favorites:

Green Creek
To get right down to Yellow Flower River
I often follow the waters of Green Creek.
They wind around the mountains endlessly--
A path straight there would run a few score miles.

There are sounds of water crashing on tumbled stones;
Scenes of silence deep within the pines.
Water chestnut and water fringe float on the ripples;
Still limpid waters mirror the reeds.

My mind is unencumbered now,
Clear and tranquil, as the river is.
Come, stay a while, rest here upon this stone--
Cast out a fishing line and let things be.

Wang Wei
Trans. Peter Harris

I remember this poem when I am overwhelmed with the petty details of day to day life, and I offer it to others when they seem to be feeling overwhelmed as well. Perhaps when we pause to reflect we ultimately make better decisions and lead happier lives.

"A Faint Tracing on the Surface of Mystery"

I, along with my husband and two cats, live on top of a mountain in one of the most beautiful parts of the country I have ever seen. Our living quarters aren't elegant, but they are set in the midst of exquisite natural beauty. Living in such a place, I feel more connected than ever with the aptly named "Nature Writers;" how could I not, living only a short trip away from John Muir's Woods or the state park named for Robert Louis Stevenson?
Lately I've been reading Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. I suppose I haven't posted about it because I haven't been able to pick out a single passage to post--every word of the first chapter is an integral part of the overall message. To exclude the smallest conjunction would be to risk obfuscating the beauty of Dillard's prose. However, the Heresy of the Ellipsis (close cousin to the Heresy of Paraphrase) will be only one more literary heresy heaped upon my head when the great day of English Major Reckoning comes. So here I go:

I used to have a cat, an old fighting tom, who would jump through the open window by my bed in the middle of the night and land on my chest. I'd half-awaken. He'd stick his skull under my nose and purr, stinking of urine and blood. Some nights he kneaded my bare chest with his front paws, powerfully, arching his back, as if sharpening his claws, or pummeling a mother for milk. And some mornings I'd wake in daylight to find my body covered with paw prints in blood; I looked as though I'd been painted with roses.

It was hot, so how the mirror felt warm. I washed before the mirror in a daze, my twisted summer sleep still hung about me like sea kelp. What blood was this, and what roses? It could have been the rose of union, the blood of murder, or the rose of beauty bare and the blood of some unspeakable sacrifice or birth. The sign on my body could have been an emblem or a stain, the keys to the kingdom or the mark of Cain. I never knew. I never knew as I washed, and the blood streaked, faded, and finally disappeared, whether I'd purified myself or ruined the blood sign of the passover. We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence. . . . "Seem like we're just set down here," a woman said to me recently, "and don't nobody know why."

(These are the opening lines of the book--it just gets better from here!)

[Dillard describes watching a frog be deflated by a giant water bug].

That it's rough out there and chancy is no surprise. Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac. But at the same time we are also created. In the Koran, Allah asks, "The heaven and earth and all in between, thinkest thou I made them in jest?" It's a good question. What do we think of the created universe, spanning an unthinkable void with an unthinkable profusion of forms? Or what do we think of nothingness, those sickening reaches of time in either direction? If the giant water bug was not made in jest, was it then made in earnest? Pascal uses a nice term to describe the notion of the creator's, once having called forth the universe, turning his back to it: Deus Absconditus. Is this what we think happened? Was the sense of it there, and God absconded with it, ate it, like a wolf who disappears round the edge of the house with the Thanksgiving turkey? "God is subtle," Einstein said, "but not malicious." Again, Einstein said that "nature conceals her mystery by means of her essential grandeur, not by her cunning." It could be that God has no absconded but spread, to a fabric of spirit and sense so grand and subtle, so powerful in a new way, that we can only feel blindly of its hem. In making the thick darkness a swaddling band for the sea, God "set bars and doors" and said, "Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further." But have we come even that far? Have we rowed out to the thick darkness, or are we all playing pinochle in the bottom of the boat? (Dillard. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. "Heaven and Earth in Jest." 1985 Perennial Library ed., p.1-2, 6-7.)