Subject: moon calendar.
Message: Shall we let it go this year?
Shall we let it go this year?
I like letting things go. I like standing over the trash can and dropping things in, severing earthly ties, relinquishing things to the curb, to the ash pile, to memory's rippled black stream. I am good at it, practiced. In fact, is it the actual letting go or is it the practice that I like, the discipline, the refusal to cling, the soundless thrill of the instant of abstention, of well-rehearsed, well-performed frugality? The solace of diminution, of attenuation. Smallness.
I have always wanted to be small. And am. This, too, a rehearsal of sorts.
I have just come back from walking the dog. Without my glasses, the holiday lights strewn across bushes and porch railings looked just like cake sprinkles - like gold and silver dragees and like the tinier beads of multicolored sugar confetti - and the bushes were little dark cakes, or model train bushes, and the trees and houses like model train trees and houses, and the lawns and streets and shops all the same, so that it was like walking in a model village, everything properly small under the sky. And in the sky, even the moon was to scale, pinched and pale up there in the fibrous, endless, ragged purple landscape: it was a matte white curve, a bitten-off bit of fingernail, it was so little, the moon.
5 comments:
http://www.jta.org/news/article/2011/02/07/2742888/approaching-god-from-the-still-small-self
"In the Valley of the Shadow"
Jame Kugel
I wish I had something wise to say...or even poetic. Big things come from smallness.
One small message, one big change. The moon will always wax and wane. We are all but a piece of dust.
Letting go of things is small. They are there and then gone. Poof! How funny that we thought they mattered when the space they leave behind closes so fast? But letting go of the space people occupy in our life is anything but small. We are small in the great scheme of things, but paradoxically huge in the small circle of our life. The loss of a family member leaves a space that can be soothed, perhaps, but never filled in. Just ask the mother of a boy who lost him after 20 years of mothering. Thirty-seven years later she tells my mother she still feels the empty space in her family constellation acutely even while joyously celebrating her now grown daughters and their families, and being a very positive, alive presence in her world.
calendars
clocks and coffee spoons -
whoa nellie
stop by woods
my precious daughter -
snowy night
time has come
to talk - sealing wax
freezing wane
let us go
then -
you and I
Here is another Biscuit Ryrie.
"Tiger's Eye" by Inga Clendinnen, pages 145 - 146
Clendinnen writes of watching her father scythe the back yard when she was a child.
"...on either side the grass would sigh, and bow, and lie down. And I would follow, not in homage to his expertise, although I was indeed impressed, but because every now and then a soft explosion of withered petels would herald the brief resurection of the dead birds I had ceremoniously interred in the grass. Caught by the tip of the scythe, the small dry corpse would arch into the air, fly again for a breathless moment, then softly decline earthwards. I would mark where it fell, and retrieve it later for further action.
There was nothing morbid about my passion for burying things. It was no obsession with death but a curiosity regarding the efficacy of ritual which gripped me. The head-high grass provided a perfect setting for experiment. Closed to adult eyes, it was open to the construction of all manner of ceremonial ways, altars and shrines. I hung my avian corpses from branches, buried them, dug them up, buried them again,with chants and rituals of my own devising. For a glorious while I lit funeral pyres and launched ashes and marigold petals down the Ganges of the street gutter, until my mother was alerted by the smoke."
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