Shorter by the Day

THE WINTER SOLSTICE, ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

Whistling Boy ~ Marques E. Reitzel

On the Shortest Days

At almost four in the afternoon, the
wind picks up and sifts through the golden woods.

The tree trunks bronze and redden, branches
on fire in the heavy sky that flickers

with the disappearing sun. I wonder
what I owe the fading day, why I keep

my place at this dark desk by the window
measuring the force of the wind, gauging

how long a certain cloud will hold that pink
edge that even now has slipped into gray?

Quickly the lights are appearing, a lamp
in every window and nests of stars

on the rooftops. Ladders lean against the hills
and people climb, rung by rung, into the night.

by Joyce Sutphen
found in Modern Love & Other Myths
© Red Dragonfly Press, 2015
(see facebook)

[See also "The Shortest Day" by Susan Cooper]

See the mystical oil painting above, as well as this nostalgic pastel,
at the Art Museum of Greater Lafayette (Indiana)

Two Hour Delay by Ron Burgess

The shortest day -- and longest night -- of the year will be here before you know it: on December 21st, one week from today! For the next seven days, we will continue to lose approximately thirty seconds of light per day; and then magically after we round the Winter Solstice, start gaining it back again. So prepare your hearts. As the earth turns towards the solstice, so do we:

December

The white dove of winter
sheds its first
fine feathers;
they melt

as they touch
the warm ground
like notes
of a once familiar

music; the earth
shivers and
turns towards
the solstice.

Linda Pastan, American Poet (b 1932)

SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS ON MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Friday, December 28th

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com

Dogwood, Spring and Fall

THE DOGWOOD TREE, ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

*******************

The dogwood tree next door to us:
above ~ April 2016, looking south;
below ~ October 2017, looking north.

At Auntie Jan's House
in the South of England ~ October 2016

The following autumnal "Elegy" from Linda Pastan
(thanks Katie Field & Writer's Almanac),
echoes a letter we received recently
from Gerry's 86 - year old Auntie Margaret,
over in Reading, England. Bracing for the first
frost, she writes, nearly sonnet - like:

18 October 2017 ~ "The weather is still quite mild
but I get depressed as the days shorten
and one after another I do the jobs
that need doing to get plants through the winter."

Auntie Margaret, the poet feels your pain!

*******************
Elegy

Our final dogwood leans
over the forest floor

offering berries
to the birds, the squirrels.

It’s a relic
of the days when dogwoods

flourished—creamy lace in April,
spilled milk in May—

their beauty delicate
but commonplace.

When I took for granted
that the world would remain

as it was, and I
would remain with it.

by Linda Pastan, American Poet (b 1932)
from Insomnia [see previous posts]

*******************

Gerry, in the Fall with Auntie Margaret (above) ~ October 2016
and in the Spring with Auntie Jan (below) ~ April 2017

*******************

a page from my scrapbook
45 - year - old dogwood leaf

May 1972 ~ Lindenwood College Campus
St. Charles, Missouri
SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS ON MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Tuesday, October 14th

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT ~ More "Spring & Fall"
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com

Look at these beautiful greeting cards
that I just ordered for the holidays!
Dogwood Berries by Sari Sauls

Hopefully

Posting early this week
in honor of Emily Dickinson's Birthday
Born this day in 1830
[died May 15, 1886]

A HOUSE WHERE ALL'S ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

Photo of Dickinson's House by Stan Lichens

"Eden is that old - fashioned House
We dwell in every day
Without suspecting our abode
Until we drive away.
How fair, on looking back, the Day
We sauntered from the door,
Unconscious our returning
Discover it no more."

~ Emily Dickinson ~

[See also: Toni Morrison ~ Paradise]

****************
Does it bring you joy to indulge in an innocent little English usage error every occasionally (like that)? It does me! One of my favorites is the word hopefully. The handbooks will advise you that it means "with hope," as in, "I dropped my bike off hopefully" or "Hopefully, I entered the contest."

It does not mean "I hope," as in, "Hopefully I will win" or "Hopefully my bike can be fixed" (not to mention get rid of that passive verb). Even so, I like using it both ways, either way, ambiguously, whenever I feel like. Hopefully, you will agree with me when I say that we all need all the hope we can get!

What are you hoping for? What are the desires of your heart?

Do you get what you're hoping for
When you look behind you there's no open door
What are you hoping for?
Do you know?
--song by M. Masser / G. Goffin;
--sung by Diana Ross (and a few others)
I once came across a little proverb, so easy to remember, I didn't even have to write it down: "Want something long enough and you don't." It took me awhile to puzzle out the meaning. Once it starts happening, however, you grow to understand. It's not that you actively give up wanting or deliberately relinquish the object of your desire; it's just that one day you realize, hey I don't want that anymore, and in fact haven't wanted it for quite some time.

It's not so bad to stop wanting things you can't have. But it's also good to hope for what you might have. And the wisdom to know the difference. As Emily Dickinson says in one of her best loved poems:

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all . . .
This stanza always reminds me of the Psalm: "Delight yourself in the Goodness of God and you will be given the Desires of Your Heart" (37:4). The trick, of course, is knowing what it is that you desire, what you're hoping for.

A few years ago in the Notre Dame Magazine, Elizabeth Austin told the story of a young friend who wanted to complete the last leg of an around-the-world journey. Asking his father's advice, he received this ambiguous reply: "I think it's a ridiculous idea . . . If it's just a whim forget about it. The only reason to do something like that is if it's your heart's desire. And if it's your heart's desire, then you have to do it."

The son was baffled: "What's that supposed to mean, my heart's desire?" Austin concludes her narrative with yet another conundrum: Discovering our heart's desire "must be, in the end, our heart's desire" (NDM, Winter 1997 - 98, p 79).

From some angles, Emily Dickinson's sequestered life appears so unruffled, but what about her heart's desire? What message did she discern when listening so carefully to that song without words, the one that never stopped?

Emily Dickinson
"We think of hidden in a white dress
among the folded linens and sachets
of well-kept cupboards, or just out of sight
sending jellies and notes with no address
to all the wondering Amherst neighbors.
Eccentric as New England weather
the stiff wind of her mind, stinging or gentle,
blew two half imagined lovers off.
Yet legend won't explain the sheer sanity
of vision, the serious mischief
of language, the economy of pain."

poem by Linda Pastan, (U.S. Poet, b. 1932)
In her poem, "Lists," Pastan says:

"I made a list of things I have
to remember and a list
of things I want to forget,
but I see they are the same list."
I wonder if it's ever the case that the same is also true of what we're hoping for?

Looking at it a different way, author Susan Jeffers recommends not a "Hoping Life" but a "Wondering Life": " . . . with the magic of wondering, fear of the uncertain is replaced by curiosity . . . pressure about the future is relieved when we live in a wondering world" (Embracing Uncertainty, 20 - 21).

E.g., not I HOPE you are reading my blog,
but I WONDER if you are reading my blog.

For more on Emily Dickinson, see
"Emily From Different Angles
on Kitti's Book List




Young Girl Reading
by French artist
Jean-Honoré Fragonard
1732 - 1806





SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS FOR MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Saturday, December 28th

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com

Lucky Rock

A HOUSE WHERE ALL'S ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

Vernal Haiku:
Equinox wonder
and worry; the Wabash has
overflowed its banks.

*********************

My dad worked at Rocketdyne from 1962 - 1967, writing systems & procedures manuals in the Quality Control department. Neosho is a small town in southwest Missouri, where I went to school K - 4th. This picture was taken when we went back to visit in 2002.

*********************
For me, nothing tops those moments when Life offers its own theme to a strand of apparently accidental events, and everything hangs together for a moment in such an uncanny way that you'd swear it was all planned out somehow!

I can easily spend an entire day sidetracked from my initial focus by a trail of coincidences that I just have to follow. For example, not long ago, I went to facebook where my friend Jan mentioned her extra short story about a tell tale heart. So off I headed (www.jandonley.com) to hear the heart beat (very Wordsworthian!). Then back to facebook to ask some of Jan's friends to be my friend (mission accomplished). Then back to Jan's website to read "Trash Talk" (very reminiscent of my years in Philadelphia); and THAT is when I noticed Jan's link to my blog and for just a moment felt overwhelmed by her great faith in this enterprise.

Next, I had to check out Jan's play, "It's Just the Wind" (very Godot but funnier!) and make a mental note to ask if she had noticed that in Linda Pastan's poem, the father says "don't be afraid / it's just the wind." Then I had to feel guilty that I've loved this little poem for so long yet never taken the time to look up Pastan's reference to Goethe's "Der Erlkoenig" (which I then did, but that's another story):

from "The Months"
by Linda Pastan

March
When the Earl King came
to steal away the child
in Goethe's poem, the father said
don't be afraid,
it's just the wind...
As if it weren't the wind
that blows away the tender
fragments of this world—
leftover leaves in the corners
of the garden, a Lenten Rose
that thought it safe
to bloom so early.

And to top it all off, as I came downstairs this morning, planning in my head a letter for Jan, what were the first words I heard? My son Sam saying: "It's my lucky rock; Mom gave it to me." Turns out, Gerry was asking about the shiny rock that he had just seen Sam pick up from his desk and drop into his pocket. I was touched by Sam's belief in lucky rocks and by his sentiment of hanging on to a talisman from his crazy old mom. It was, however, no more than a fleeting morning moment -- yes, sweeter than most but still fleet -- until it suddenly took on a life of it's own. Why? How? Because, taking another moment to peruse Jan's website, my eyes fell on the title, "Pocket." How had I missed this entry, pocketed as it was, right there in between "Heart" & "Fable," which I had read several days ago? Well, can you imagine my astonishment when just a few lines into the story, I read her words, "Not even a lucky rock"? A lucky rock?

Sometimes, life is so full of coincidences that I think my head will split open trying to take them all in! It's enough to make me believe in the whole Universe at once! Here I was, sitting alone, reading a story about the very object my loved ones had been discussing a mere thirty minutes earlier. And not just any object, but a lucky, magic object, "something to keep forever." And now I know why I overlooked "Pocket," the other day -- the goddess was saving it up for me, a lucky story to read on a lucky Friday! Because we all need stories -- "clear, round, and easy to carry" -- in our hearts.