The sound of the refrigerator or the heating system when the wind isn’t speaking. The ice already melting and winter just settling in. The light like thinly settling dust coming through the opaque grey sky.  Clouds would make a difference. 

It’s only temporary. Just like the brown craziness of the branches and brambles.  Everything will get sorted out when the leaves come back ready to sail with the wind. They’ll lift the confusion.  The sky will open to many kinds of blues and close with purple evenings. 

It’s definitely time for a nap.

What does it mean to be a mountain? Is it always about strength or about what remains after the great forces of the ground beneath shifted and shaped the land? The mountain rests on its legs, folded but not crossed, arms forming the strong sides but ready to move or roll or toss a tree down the side or create a river from new rain.

There’s times I’ve seen a mountain in me and times I’ve known that there’s no mountain within at all, just the scree is left or the place where the river washed out a path going down the mountain faster than it came out of the sky.  I don’t know why I don’t just accept these times as easily as I do the others; bow my head and be grateful for being safe and loved. There’s a struggle to feel like a mountain but that is a mythical mountain and not the real ones you see as the land rises toward the sky. Real mountains, no matter how they might be touched and worked by time and hands, have stories of strength; but also stories of enduring, of letting go, of washing out, of being frozen or broken or holy. 

Today, feeling a bit afraid, not at all like I’d expect, I realize that there is comfort, if I let it come, in sitting like a mountain. There are no expectations, there is just the fact of it and that is enough for now.

There was a time when that sort of built-in facility would have been a blessing.  One could add swivel caps for the joints so that some grease and go juice could be added to sore knees until the snake oil kicked in. This notion is even less complex than the idea of painter’s pants personalized for all of our needs, depending upon your sex and life cycle, and of course the electronic accessories of the day which seem to take precedence over even convenient ways to carry feminine hygiene products.

What causes me more wonder than ever are the cormorants on the phone lines. One came in for a landing as I was going over the bridge.  There is no fantasy I can ever imagine where I could fly and land on a phone line. Yet the corms do this and then stay there for hours. They aren’t small and weightless like swallows or sparrows. Even morning doves, normally awkward and precarious in flight or when landing, would seem a better candidate for the phone lines.  Yet the corms defy imagination and find a home there, just above the small river waters, just above the bridge.  

There is a place within that is an island in the stream of things. Imagine it every bit as small as the phone lines for the corms but your ability to rest there every bit as good as theirs. Balance isn’t required.  Webbed feet might be, as well as access to your webbed being and your inner streams. Corms colonize waterways. They aren’t ocean-going birds. The road within might be a river after all. If you find your way there, go with the flow.

I’ve misunderstood hieroglyphics for a long time. Always took them to mean the unknown. In truth it’s about a system of communication through images. Alan Watts talks about ideograms in The Watercourse Way noting that there’s more in an image than a whole slew of words.  Sound familiar?  With all the languages we have in this world there’s never enough to get across our meaning. Always wondered if we lose the world, a little here and there, when we lose languages. And we are, according to some sources, losing languages as fast as we are losing different species. The world is jam packed with life and the life is how we know the world. The familiar is the texture, the background of our world. The matrix. We don’t understand anything without a solid background and I think we need to become more familiar with our world from the ground up.  Crystals, like those in geodes, are beautiful constructions that take millennia to form while the molten lava cools.  Just so with the lives those populate our different environs. When people, language, animals or other life forms disappear, we’ve lost another way of knowing the world.  Hieroglyphics aren’t the unknown. They’re another language that tells a story in images.  The images in hieroglyphics are based upon the life in our worlds. I call the bug writing on branches hieroglyphics. These are the winding trails of beetles that eat the wood. There’s a haunting texture and elegance to this kind of writing.  If the movement of a beetle eating through a piece of wood is a language, imagine the river dolphin in the Yangtze that just went extinct this year. Imagine that dolphin playing in the river, following the bends and turns and living its life in a river.  I never saw a river dolphin swim. Last year I took the Cape May Ferry home and the ferry was escorted part of the way by dolphins.  I will always look for them now when I make this trip. I don’t know how safe they are. They are a part of that body of water and that trip for me. Everything in this world has a hidden meaning. I wanted to tell you about the dolphins so you’ll know.

Our everyday culture understands complexity and doesn’t get simplicity. We get multi-tasking so much so that we expect it. People rarely get involved in any single activity without another one also being introduced. We’re plugged into music or computers while we’re doing something. The community gardener is rarely without cell phone or headset connecting them to it. Very few people, at least in the suburban lands I travel and dwell in, are unavailable. When someone is there appears to be a sense of alarm or disbelief.  We all know this information now and there are variations and lots of stories about our new state of plugged in busyness.

This afternoon I read a note to myself. I wrote that I felt like an exhausted salmon. How ironic is their lives – only to make it back to their spawning grounds, the waters where they were born, to die reproducing.  How would I know that feeling?  I can’t really imagine it being so unlike a fish. But watching film of salmon coming back to spawn, only to be clawed out of the water by hungry bears leaves me with an enduring picture. There are so many ways to bring the reality of that image to me someone might as well have dropped me into a holographic pool. Every way I turn I see a pattern or struggle that is straightforward and uncompromising.

The salmon that is born in fresh water journeys to the sea. The journey is its life and the completion of its life is to come back to spawn. 

The bears on the rocks wait and burst into the water for their catch.  All that mapping that takes place and directs a salmon’s life, generations through time, and not accounting for the bears? 

Whenever I wrote the note about the salmon’s amazing memory for its journey, I must have been feeling resigned to certain patterns that weave an undesired complexity in my life. It’s difficult to comprehend the salmon’s ability to travel so many thousands of miles and then head back to where they spawned. It is one of the most remarkable events and life cycle on this planet. 

Is there is something that pulls on each of us as we go through the complex and challenging days that we find in this world?  I am pulled toward simplicity, toward decreasing what is complex, in any area of my life, gaining more time in my day for what feels congruous and right.  Could I ever hurl my body up the rocky river paths like these salmon do?  Or could I burst out of the water to rise above white water blockades that add another gauntlet to the salmon’s return?

I know good tired and bad tired. Good tired is when you feel you’ve accomplished something or touched a place within that felt genuine. This could come from spending soul time with the palette or pen.  It could be exercise or cooking – going out to the porch for the basil in the window box and just following an unhurried rhythm as you made the marinara sauce. It could be a chore that you had been putting off and finally got to so that you had a sense of completion.

We often have to work jobs with complexity.  We come home tired but need to do more chores and expect to repeat the cycle five days out of seven. For many of us what pays the bills and puts supper on the table is not our soul’s calling. Our jobs might never even touch what we need to feel whole and complete. But if we’re fortunate, we know what does feed our souls and we find the time to do that. We find the time to do our soul’s work even after a full day of job and a full night of tending toward the business of living and its mundane requirements.

It’s not the same as a salmon going out to the wide sea and finding the mouth of the river it entered from years before.  But we have to overcome our own hurdles and piece together our own migratory paths to reach the place of our natal waters.  There is good tired and bad tired. There’s bears waiting for us some days and some days, after the leaps, the turns, the changes in temperatures, the sun streaming through, the rain dimpling the surface, the rocks narrowing the passage, the openness rushing all around, some days we can reach the place we once knew. We can smell it. We can’t always articulate what it is or what it means to us; but somewhere in the day or night, in the early evening or early morning we have our soul time.  Somewhere among the many days of paid work and time, there and back, you have a chance to be genuine; to feel the morning sun when its still friendly; to find your way back to what feels right and to remember who you are.

The waves have been incredibly beautiful.  There’s this pull back that you feel just before taking off. I heard a man explaining this to his young friend yesterday.  He was teaching her how to catch a wave. The riders were very pretty but  they were large enough that if you took one you’d be at the shallows too soon. It could be dangerous. I stayed out of the wave’s tease until there was a small one, they came every now and then, and I felt sure and safe enough to go along with it.  But I had never articulated that before about the pull back. There is a pull back before you go forward. When it pulls you back, he was explaining, that’s when you know you have it.  It’s like being loaded into the ocean and becoming a part of the wave. It pulls back to get its curl and that motion becomes a sling shot which can carry you to shore.

How you move toward the shore is totally up to you. It’s a rider’s choice. You can put your arms straight out ahead of you as if you were going to fly. You can keep your head down with your arms straight out or you can pull your arms back and along your sides and lift your head up. This sort of makes you look like the figurehead on the bow of a ship. These days, for some, this could mean there’s a thing or two causing drag and slowing you down. But you’ll head towards the shore nonetheless. And, if you don’t get tumbled you’ll have yourself a beautiful ride.

Here’s what happens then, and I can tell you this from experience.  You slide, you glide, and you smile and go with the flow. You head towards the shore and there’s no such thing as time or chores. It’s peace. It’s as if there’s nothing in your head, never was and that’s okay. It brings you out of time and into your element. There’s nothing better. Everything is beautiful in its own wave.

            I was launched on this trip with no idea of what I’d come across.  It seemed like an accident that the need to justify my life came along with me.  It was an unexpected encounter that changed the course of my life.  Quitting smoking was about going back to the source.  And even though I wasn’t intentionally aiming myself towards anything, I found something very significant.  It reminds me of the way some people are talking about creating a more sustainable way to live on Earth.  It’s obvious we’re in all kinds of environmental trouble.  A lot of it could be transformed if we change the way we think about using our resources.  We need to think in terms of the entire cycle of a resource and not just about what we want to consume.  I recently read about the benefits of changing from a consumer society to a sustainable one.  And I realized that all the issues this writer raised were raised in me.  I take the environmental issues of our day very personally.   How we support our economy is how our environment supports us.  It filters down to us in small ways sometimes.  But twenty, maybe thirty years down the road we’ll feel the ill effects of chemicals and pesticides in our food and water.  The same goes for my psychic life.  Twenty years or more of trying to live on the surface doesn’t sustain me.  It’s like losing your topsoil to erosion.  I’ve got to turn the soil.  I’ve got to rotate the crops and create a diversity of nutrients to sustain its quality.  The integrity of the land and the strength of my soul is at stake.  This is why I also came to think of the man of many turns.  Turning keeps things fresh.  Turning my mind and accepting different ways of being keeps me from going stale.  It must be built into our systems.  But if it isn’t it should be.  After all, I can’t depend upon the luck of the draw. 

            Some people might have more ways to be in the world than blackbirds.  I probably have more than I realize now.  I’m sure I do.  I don’t know what the count is up to these days regarding the senses that we have and don’t use but it’s gaining.  There’s a bull market in awareness.  I think they should cover this on the nightly news as well as the stocks.  And if you’re one of those that haven’t heard of anything beyond the five, don’t feel bad.  Most people haven’t.  It’s insider information.  Although the information can be confusing at times, it’s still worth knowing.  It might take a while to sort things out.  But worth the work.  I guess it’s important to realize that you can’t always expect something profound from using parts of yourself that you haven’t used before.  But what I’ve been getting is that it all goes into the mix.  It’s all important.  Don’t give up.  I know about that despair you can feel when you sense that there isn’t a way to find your way in this world.  I know things take a long time, longer than you can sometimes even imagine.  And then, you can come to find out that you’ve missed it.  Whatever it was, was right there in front of you and you missed it.  If lost opportunities were talismans I’d be the luckiest person in the world.

            Even when change is your choice, like when I decided to quit smoking, it feels as if you’re being ripped from your world.  At first it’s horrible.  Eventually something kicks in, maybe it’s getting used to it, maybe it’s a knowing, like an instinct for survival, that becomes a part of our lives.  I can’t deny it.  It is something past innocence.  I can’t say whether it’s for good or ill.  But there it is.  And we are no longer simply, purely, the daughter or son of Demeter.  We are that.  We are something else now too.  Something that our experience of the world has made.

            Even when change is your choice, like when I decided to quit smoking, it feels as if you’re being ripped from your world.  At first it’s horrible.  Eventually something kicks in, maybe it’s getting used to it, maybe it’s a knowing, like an instinct for survival, that becomes a part of our lives.  I can’t deny it.  It is something past innocence.  I can’t say whether it’s for good or ill.  But there it is.  And we are no longer simply, purely, the daughter or son of Demeter.  We are that.  We are something else now too.  Something that our experience of the world has made.

             I wonder whether I received a primal push the way someone launches a boat into the water.  Or if this natal catalyst is something that has influenced the direction I’ve been going in ever since I got started.  I mean from way back when.  Wouldn’t that be something?  Whether the catalyst turns out to be the winds, Psyche or of unknown origin I am moved into a pattern of existence that seems to bring me round home time and again.  But I guess there’s times when I’m traveling between the distant places in my home turf.  It’s all connected.  And there’s layers of connections of course.  There’s the ride we take, as if on a current in the ocean, within the larger pattern of the culture we live in.  We pick up souvenirs as we go along.  And some of these turn out to be memories from what are the far corners of our lives and the dark corners of our heart.  I heard Louise Bourgeous say, “I need my memories.  They are my documents.”  And now I think of mine, culled from all the places where my memories have grown, as my passport past the land of withdrawal.

            I was launched on this trip with no idea of what I’d come across.  It seemed like an accident that the need to justify my life came along with me.  It was an unexpected encounter that changed the course of my life.  Quitting smoking was about going back to the source.  And even though I wasn’t intentionally aiming myself towards anything, I found something very significant.  It reminds me of the way some people are talking about creating a more sustainable way to live on Earth.  It’s obvious we’re in all kinds of environmental trouble.  A lot of it could be transformed if we change the way we think about using our resources.  We need to think in terms of the entire cycle of a resource and not just about what we want to consume.  I recently read about the benefits of changing from a consumer society to a sustainable one.  And I realized that all the issues this writer raised were raised in me.  I take the environmental issues of our day very personally.   How we support our economy is how our environment supports us.  It filters down to us in small ways sometimes.  But twenty, maybe thirty years down the road we’ll feel the ill effects of chemicals and pesticides in our food and water.  The same goes for my psychic life.  Twenty years or more of trying to live on the surface doesn’t sustain me.  It’s like losing your topsoil to erosion.  I’ve got to turn the soil.  I’ve got to rotate the crops and create a diversity of nutrients to sustain its quality.  The integrity of the land and the strength of my soul is at stake.  This is why I also came to think of the man of many turns.  Turning keeps things fresh.  Turning my mind and accepting different ways of being keeps me from going stale.  It must be built into our systems.  But if it isn’t it should be.  After all, I can’t depend upon the luck of the draw. 

            Some people might have more ways to be in the world than blackbirds.  I probably have more than I realize now.  I’m sure I do.  I don’t know what the count is up to these days regarding the senses that we have and don’t use but it’s gaining.  There’s a bull market in awareness.  I think they should cover this on the nightly news as well as the stocks.  And if you’re one of those that haven’t heard of anything beyond the five, don’t feel bad.  Most people haven’t.  It’s insider information.  Although the information can be confusing at times, it’s still worth knowing.  It might take a while to sort things out.  But worth the work.  I guess it’s important to realize that you can’t always expect something profound from using parts of yourself that you haven’t used before.  But what I’ve been getting is that it all goes into the mix.  It’s all important.  Don’t give up.  I know about that despair you can feel when you sense that there isn’t a way to find your way in this world.  I know things take a long time, longer than you can sometimes even imagine.  And then, you can come to find out that you’ve missed it.  Whatever it was, was right there in front of you and you missed it.  If lost opportunities were talismans I’d be the luckiest person in the world.

by freda karpf

from Conversations with Nic

Or it could be as Yeats said, that the argument with yourself is poetry and the one with others is rhetoric. Let’s leave rhetoric to the dailies, the nine to fives and fill in the dreamtime with the soulful work of finding what it is that pulls at you.  And then follow it.  If only, right?  But sometimes you are captured by a tide, as I was, and you move with it as it remembers for you until you catch on.

Summer jumped in on the day and got into my skin.  That must have been what propelled me through another ring of time into the past when it wasn’t only a good idea to start dinner with dessert but something you did without any inner hassling. Just when it dawned on me to go for a swim past five, my brain noodled some more time. Didn’t have me catch a catfish but caught the cool breeze and decided to have a sundae on Saturday instead of a swim.  The drive to DQ brought all the sights and sounds of summer folks on the beach and those moving between the boards and Ocean Avenue. It is the air, it is the haze, the dampness, the smells, but it’s also all that movement that tells you summer is happening now. 

After dessert, it seemed only natural to check on the eagles and see if there were any babies.  It’s the first time I brought the spotting scope by myself.  I also took the new camera, which weighed less, then a roll of film.  It was starting to feel like an adventure. I had to struggle with the call to chores and projects.  Time off is the catch basin where I hope to get a huge jump on my own work.  Fortunately, I couldn’t ignore what was calling me. All the while this felt like being in the flow there was the awareness that this feeling was something that I rarely followed.

Now that the current is known the way there should be easier to travel. It bends to the right and right again until you’re at the wetlands. I went alone but it didn’t feel that way when I got there. Never saw the eagles. The red wings were calling back and forth. The tide was out. The mud flats were wide and marked with new reed plugs – it looked like the business side of a needlepoint. The sun was going down.  Every moment the colors were sweeter, the blues deeper. The spaces between the reeds and cattails grew darker.

I know the way now. 

by freda

and a Monarch butterfly

enter every piece of blue sky

I find in this city.

Thinking of you through the spin

of days and wings

I’ll allow myself these thoughts,

cut my hair,

and remember how I wanted you

while touching you.

There really aren’t any bees

just the thought that they are somewhere

creating a world out of pollen

fussing gold from the hair on their legs

musing in sweetness

tasting the work of the thoughtless moment

while I enter a New Year

thinking of my days that were

dipped in honey.

 by freda karpf

Many people take solace from nature but don’t always seek nature when they need solace. Someone has to say to them, “Go by the ocean.”  Or, “Why not take a walk in the woods?”   There have been times when I felt the deep pain of loneliness. Now it seems that the feeling of loneliness and even the feelings associated with being displaced from your home are central and pivotal feelings that should be a part of anyone’s picture of what well-being means.  It is something we probably all have known but may not have articulated.

Feeling out of sorts, not feeling like yourself, feeling as if you got hijacked by some place, time or times, or someone else’s agenda – or even, more innocently, someone else’s energy can cause the kind of havoc in your soul that has no name. But there it is just the same. Real and touching you in places that have not been given names that suit you. Or maybe they have. Just as native names for places are taken over by the powers that be, perhaps the names for these feelings are there, have been there all along. Place names for loneliness that describe it just right and aren’t covered by any gloss or pathological expression.  Some kind of blues. 

John Muir wrote that  “As age comes on, one source of enjoyment after another is closed, but Nature’s sources never fail.”  I read that line yesterday and this morning it merged with the en masse return of the butler birds. Some call them robins but I think they’re picking up spring here and there the way a butler might go after lint or cigarette butts in an ashtray. What do I know of butlers? All my butler knowledge comes from movies. But all my butler bird knowledge comes from living here and taking note of the robins’ staccato movements and stillness. Robins are still like no other bird.

Loneliness is also still like no other feeling. It is not about quiet or being alone. It can be a yearning for someone or something that you can’t even know because you haven’t met up with it or that person yet. The whole idea of time and relativity plays on this theme. If I had known then what I know now is part of that. Then there’s the mystery of receiving what you can only know at the time you were open to it. Sometimes sources of deep connection seem remote or too difficult to reach. Sometimes the butler birds introduce a whole season and you know that a warmer world is approaching. It feels like the times you lift the sheets and quilt aloft to smooth out the night’s wrinkles. Your cat might scoot under while the sheets and covers are billowing. Joy is always near. Spring is around the next bend.  It’s good to be home.