Can Poetry Do What Science Can't?

      At the coast not too long ago, I watched, mesmerized, as waves pounded through a hole in ocean rocks with an irregular, asymmetrical explosion of white spray. What could be throwing those waves? I understand the force of water over a waterfall, but this water was coming from a flat surface. Whither such force? Something was pushing the waves from afar, flinging them with fury and strength – an angry Neptune, maybe, on the other side of the ocean, slinging those waves around. I could even see God doing it, though it's hard to imagine that overworked deity having to stand at the ocean's edge pushing waves one after the other.

      Okay, so, all right. I'm an educated 21st-century woman, and I know that the moon makes tides. But what does that say? The moon? Are you crazy? You're telling me it's the ocean yearning for the moon, leaping towards it again and again, only to fall back each time in frustration and despair, like a dog, enfenced, trying to escape? I could make up a myth to give your explanation understanding, but just to look at the ocean and know the moon is causing that force –? Not really. Your explanation doesn't tell me anything.

      I understand the thinking of pre-Galileo days. Of course the world is flat, not only because we can see its edge but because there has to be a flat box there to hold the water. If the world were round, the water would roll off. That's not hard to see. Do an experiment: Take a ball and try to make water stay on it. If the ball were big enough, a dab of earth would stay there, but no matter how big the ball is, water won't stick. Anyone can see that the world is flat.

     So then you tell me that there's a thing called gravity in the center of the earth that exerts a pull on everything, including water, that makes it stick to the surface. Oh, yeah? What do you mean, "a pull"? Show me.

      And so you take a magnet and iron files, and you tell me that gravity is like a magnet in the center of the earth and everything in the world has something like iron in it that responds to gravity like files to a magnet. So, okay, I can see that, but why, then, don't the stars fall through the sky onto earth?

      I was hiking with a friend once among the golds and scarlets of big-leaf maples and viney maples, the subtle purples of dogwoods and the pale lemon of alders, mesmerized by the colors as much as by the waves at the ocean. My friend, a scientist, marveled equally at cause-and-effect explanations. "It's a gene," he said excitedly, a gene that is responsible for this glorious revolution of color. 

      I tried hard to internalize the information, but it wouldn't stick. After all, what is a gene? It's the thing that gives me a short stature and the viney maple its fiery autumn color, but what does that tell me? I could make a myth about genes as I did about the moon and know no less. If our science explains mysteries, I need the poetry to explore the wonder.

Prayers for Humanity and the Earth

      One of the items for my 75x75 project (75 things of 75 repetitions each for my 75th year; see thingstodoinmy75thyear.blogspot.com) was to make 75 prayers for humanity and the Earth. Today, Thanksgiving Day, 2018, I list some of those prayers:

1. May the children know laughter, love, song, and freedom from fear.
2. May the leaders of the world make decisions based on the rock bed of fact and wound 'round with the glow of truth.
4. May the apple limbs hang low with rosy-cheeked apples.
5. May the snow fly thick.
6. May the geese have joy in the journey and solace at its end.
7. May the gardens flourish all over the world.
8. May the springs flow full.
9. May the earth forgive our trespasses against it, which are legion and severe.
10. May we listen to what the earth is telling us and pay heed.
11. May we never silence another living voice.
12. May we allow the earth time to lick its wounds and recover.
14. May the songbirds fill the woods and meadows as of old.
15. May the owls meet in parliaments outside my bedroom window for years to come.
17. May the voice of reason and the aura of compassion prevail.
18. May all children know the joys of childhood.
19. May the balm of sleep and the calming touch of an adult ease the pains of childhood.
21. May women and men be treated with equal respect all over the world.
22. Nature, my muse: I pledge that I will never ignore you, never neglect you, never take you for granted.
23. Nature, my muse: I pledge to find the words to speak for you to those who speak my language and do not understand yours.
24. Nature, my muse: I pledge to you a voice – a voice of beauty to your beauty, of strength to your power, of tenderness to your fragility.
25. Nature, my muse: I pledge to listen to what the earth is telling me, to hear your voice in the butterflies and frogs, in the clouds and rain, in the fires and in the stones under my feet.
26. Nature, my muse: I pledge to climb the mountains and swim the lakes, hug the trees and hold the flowers in my fingertips, letting their perfume fill my heart.
28. May the ospreys fish with abundance and the fish swim in the shadows.
29. May the streams stay cold.
30. May the rivers run free.
32. May there be increasing pockets of machine noiselessness in the world.
33. May Thomas Berry's dream of the Earth prevail, in economics, in education ,in business, in personal devotion.
34. May the trees grow tall and the flowers spread their colors over the meadows with abundance.
35. May the summers be cooler.
36. May the winters be colder.
37. May the autumns be brighter,
38. May the springs be always the season of joy.
39. May communities thrive with compassion, respect, neighborliness, and conviviality.
40. May those with illness find relief from pain.
41. May we learn to tune our hearts to the aches of others.

(See thingstodoinmy75thyear.blogspot.com for the rest of the list.)

A Madcap Summer at Camp Glisson

      When I was having lunch with my siblings in Dahlonega, Georgia, last October (see previous post), I started reminiscing about being a counselor at Camp Glisson, a Methodist Church camp just outside Dahlonega, when I was in high school. I asked our waitress if Camp Glisson still existed.

      "Oh, yes," she said with a bright smile. "It's close by." When I said I had been a counselor there, decades ago, she urged me to go see it. My siblings were willing to indulge my nostalgia, so on our way back to the lake house, we stopped at Camp Glisson.

      I recognized, or thought I recognized, the large log reception building with its porch and pole railings, but I was thrown right back into my Camp Glisson days when we walked to the top of the waterfall. 

Vivid memories returned: swimming in the pool at the bottom of the waterfall, dinners in the rustic dining hall, the campers under my wing, and, most of all, the coterie of young people who worked at Camp Glisson that summer.

      The head counselor, older than the rest of us but probably just a recent college graduate, was one of the most ebullient people I've ever known, with an outsized sense of humor and imaginative ways to use it. He name was Charles, I think. His powerful charisma bonded all the counselors in a summer of madcap fun. Without ever being irresponsible to our campers or disrespectful to God and the church, we centered our summer around adventures, games, and play with each other. 

      I wish I could have walked down to the little stone chapel, nestled in the woods, but I was too cognizant of dragging people around a place that held no memories for them. I had loved that chapel. I used to go there alone, more to sit in its serenity than to worship or pray. I was more romantic than religious in my church days, and the sweet little chapel, with its stained glass windows and large cool stone floor, fit my teen-age romanticsm perfectly.

      If I had walked through the rows of cabins, would I have recognized the corner of the cabin where one of my campers was bitten by a copperhead? I remember the girls crowding around me as I took her to Charles, who put her, me and another camp leader in the car and drove us fast to Dahlonega to find the town doctor. At this point the story has become myth to the extent that I don't know if what I remember really happened or was another exaggeration in that exaggerated, bigger-than-life summer. Was the doctor really drunk? That's what I remember we said when we told the story. Did he really use a rusty razor blade to make the X cut over the fang marks? That's what I remember our saying. I doubt the latter, maybe not so much the former. After all, it was north Georgia in the fifties, deep in the Appalachian Mountains, and it was already after dark. At any rate, my camper survived without ill effects and, if I remember right, returned to finish her stay at the camp.

      One weekend, between camp sessions, Charles had one of his innocent-practical-joke ideas: why didn't we catch lightning bugs, he said, put them in a jar, then go to the movies in Dahlonega and let them loose there? Immediately in the spirit of the game, four or five young people were leaping around the yard in front of the cabins, snatching the blinking lights from the air. Fireflies! Lightning bugs, those most magical of all creatures, not only because they light up the night with their cold yellow blinking lights but because they don't bite or sting; they're easy to catch, and they sit on your palm, blinking a few times before flying into the air again, unperturbed by their brief stay on that warm surface. Who could object to seeing them fly around a movie theater?

      When we had a jar full of lightning bugs, we hid it in a bag and took off for town. We filed into the theater quietly, respectfully, but secretly gleeful. I don't remember what movie we saw, but I do remember when Charles opened the jar and let out the lightning bugs. They flew off in all directions, flashing their lantern lights everywhere in the dark theater. I don't know whether the other patrons were annoyed or amused, but the counselors from Camp Glisson were suffused with glee at our harmless and maybe even charming stunt. 

       I was a bit in love with Charles, in my teen-age way. I was mad about him, but not seriously. That a future with him wasn't contemplatable was a good thing in more ways than one. Once, when I served him his dinner, he looked at his plate in dismay and said, "But the peas should be on the other side of the potatoes!" When I told my mother that story, she shook her head and said he would be no man to marry! 

      I could see her point, even then. Nonetheless, he was one of the most brilliant personalities I have known, and he made that summer at Camp Glisson a bright star in my galaxy.

Siblings' Reunion 2018

      After our parents' deaths in 2005 and 2006, my siblings and I promised we would try to get together every year. This year the opportunity came in September, after my cousin-once-removed's wedding in Birmingham. The four of us would spend a few days together – no in-laws, children, or grandchildren – at my sister Laura's house on Lake Lanier, in north Georgia.

      As soon as we arrived, late afternoon, we walked down to the lake and dove in. Sharon and I took a swim while Laura was putting the two paddle boards in the water. Then, while Lee did some quite passably good swan dives off the top of the boathouse, Laura, Sharon, and I did some sometimes passably good paddle-board yoga. The sister without a board would call out poses – "Down dog" "Arta chandrasana" – and the two on the boards would do the pose. Yoga is a skill of balance to begin with. To do poses on a slim piece of hard foam wobbling on a moving surface takes the utmost concentration. The first person to fall in gave the board to the sister waiting her turn.

      As the sun was going down, we pulled the paddle boards off the water and sat on the dock drinking wine as the setting sun sent a flashing brilliance of golds and pinks across the lake. We toasted each other and our reunion. With a glance towards the heavens, we toasted our older sister, who died exactly a year before. We basked in the beauty of the sunset and of each other's company. We laughed a lot.

     That evening Lee showed me pictures of his raft trip down the Colorado River. After dinner on the screened-in porch, he gave each of us an "early Christmas present" – a digitized copy of the home movies from the family trip to Alaska in 1959. We reminisced about that trip, talked about family, our favorite books. We moved inside and worked a jigsaw puzzle to completion.

      The next day we took a hike on the Appalachian Trail at Neel's Gap, just strenuous enough, just long enough, beautiful in the Appalachian woods. 

We had a late lunch at the Bourbon Street restaurant in Dahlonega, where I temporarily forgot where I was and ordered jambalaya because I thought I should have local fare. Back at the lake house, we had time for another swim and more fun with the paddle boards before dinner.

      Then there was more good talk. Laura brought out another puzzle. We worked together on it for a while. Then Laura said good night and went to bed. Shortly thereafter, Lee did the same. Sharon and I worked steadily on. We didn't say much, only the occasional mumbled exclamation of success when a piece slipped into place, or a description of a piece we were looking for, in case the other person spotted it. The silence and the concentration made a cocoon of camaraderie around us. At 1:00 a.m. we put in the last piece we had. Two pieces were missing. We went to bed having done all we could

     The next morning someone found one piece under the table. Sharon found the other one on the kitchen floor. It must have stuck to the sleeve of my sweater when I leaned over the puzzle, then dropped off when I walked to the kitchen. We put the final two pieces in place with a satisfying sense of completion.

      We had breakfast, then tore the puzzles apart and put the pieces back in the boxes. We cleaned the kitchen and remade the beds with clean sheets. We loaded Sharon's paddle board on top of her car, closed up the house, and drove back to Atlanta.

      There we concluded the siblings' reunion with expanded family. The in-laws rejoined us. Laura's daughter and two grandchildren came over, as did my son and granddaughter, who happened to be in Atlanta at the same time as I, though for different reasons. We played croquet in the back yard. (My ten-year-old granddaughter beat the socks off us!) The cousins, close in age, played as though the two years since they had seen each other had left no gap. We had dinner on the patio that night – children, grandchildren, in-laws, siblings.

      The next morning Sharon drove back to north Georgia. Lee flew back to Charlottesville. The children and grandchildren had left for their own places of abode the night before. Laura's husband went to work, leaving her and me alone in the house. Before I left for the airport that evening to return to Oregon, Laura played the piano for me – Schubert, Beethoven, Gershwin.

      Sharing the lake, the meals, the conversation – intimate times with each of my siblings – the easy flow from one to the other: I love my family.

For Those with Colorless Autumns

      When I talk to my East Coast friends, from Boston to Atlanta, they lament the lack of color in their trees this autumn. To boost their spirits, I offer this essay, written one year when the Siskiyous, too, suffered autumn browns.

      What happened to the autumn color? Where are the golden yellows and the flaming oranges, the scarlets and the vermilions? Who dulled the brilliance? Who rubbed the blush from the complexions of the trees? Who sucked the energy away? Who gave us achromatism, pallor, wanness in our autumn this year?

     Brown, brown, brown – everywhere it's brown. On a road I drive frequently, a long row of incense cedars, interspersed tree by tree with broad-leaf maples, is usually an autumn checkerboard of green and yellow. This year the maples between the cedars are lifeless brown. Yellow turned buff, red turned russet scarlet turned chestnut. Far from being vibrant and exciting, the woods have become dull: spiritless, wearisome, prosaic, lackluster, humdrum, drab, and monotonous. The woods this year are brown.

      Is this lack of color a depiction of weather past? Or a prediction of weather to come? Does it mean we had a hot summer? A dry year? A late fall? Or does it mean it will be an early winter? A dry winter? A hard winter? It must mean something. What kind of energy is sucking at the roots of the trees, drawing their color right out of their skins?

      Things are bad if I had rather look at my calendar picture than at the mountains themselves. How can I accept brown? Well, first I should stop pining for gold. Once I stopped looking for Renoir, I found Rembrandt. In a reversal of art history, we have gone from large areas of pulsating color to a soft, retreating chiaroscuro. Brown is not just brown. If it were, the Mona Lisa and The Night Watch would be dull pictures: prosaic, lackluster, humdrum, and monotonous.

      Brown is a vast spectrum of variations. Brown in one tree is Sudan brown, in another Arabian brown, in another Vassar tan, a real term for a real color, a trim derived, in reality, from Vassar College, but my dictionary doesn't say whether it originated from the color of the New England trees around Vassar College or from the tan the girls returned to school with after their Christmas vacations in Florida. Some trees are chestnut brown, some pearl-brown, some sand brown. Some are somber umber; others burnt Sienna, Sienna brown, or Sienna drab. Are the trees this autumn Sienna drab? It's a real color, a "light grayish brown to reddish brown that is duller than sandstone and paler than wood rose." Sandstone? Wood rose? What beautiful colors! Some trees seep with sepia: "a dark grayish yellowish brown that is stronger and slightly yellower than seal and stronger and slightly yellower and lighter than otter." Seal and otter, too? Other trees are only ocher, "a moderate orange that is yellower and deeper than honeydew, yellower and darker than Persian orange, and duller than mikado orange." Honeydew? Persian orange? Midado orange? All that in the autumn woods? Wood rose, seal, otter, honeydew, mikado? How could I ever have thought this a dull autumn?

(This essay is found in my book, Fire from the Dragon's Tongue: Essays about Living with Nature in the Siskiyou Mountains.)