Snowy Owl Dream

I dream I’m lying outside in a sleeping bag. I’m holding a piece of dark bread in my left hand which I have been eating. I see an owl flying some distance away to my left toward some trees where it turns toward me. I see the white face and I think “Snowy owl”. It flies toward me, lands behind my head and takes the bread from my hand and flies off. I hold very still so not to frighten it. I say out loud to a woman near by “Snowy Owl. I held very still so not to frighten it”.

photo by David Hemmings

I wonder about the Owl and the dark bread. I wonder about the gift of stillness and flight. I wonder what shadow stuff I’m eating that this arctic owl of me is taking away? I sense the anxieties that I feed on so easily. Fears of newness, fears of far places, fears of change. Fears of not being able to meet what life offers. Is the dream saying “Hold very still. Practice stillness. Allow the Wild Mystery to eat this food”. hmmmm….

wrensong 1/29/10

The Ancestors

In Britain they treasure their ancient trees. They search them out, measure them, photograph them, keep a record. The oldest living organism in Europe is a yew tree that grows in a church yard in Scotland.

Today I found this lovely old hag of a tree they say is near a thousand years old. She, too, grows in the shadow of a church, this one in Dorsett. I am captured by her girth, the sensuous curve of her trunk, her branches like wild hair. I am touched by the air around her on this winter day as she rests there alone in the field where her roots have held her season in and out this long millennium.  She is known as The Wyndham Oak.

wrensong

To learn more about the search for ancient trees go to The Woodland Trust

Lost In East Berlin

It may be an odd thing to write about on this day of remembering Dr. Martin Luther King. It may seem a long way away from Selma, Alabama or the March on Washington or that terrible day at a small motel in west Memphis. But, like the rest of today’s remembrances around the country, it has something to do with the necessity of not forgetting the things that shape our history as a people. In those early years of the Civil Rights movement in this country, something else was happening in Germany. My reflection today is prompted by both.

LOST IN EAST BERLIN –

This past weekend I saw David Hare’s Berlin Wall, a stunning dramatic reading done by two fine local actors. My friend Bonnie Taylor directed it so I went. I was enthralled. And all thru the meditation on life in Berlin today twenty years since the Wall came down, I was sent back to my own visit there in the early 90s. Images of the place rose in my mind like old dreams. I haven’t thought of that trip in years. Suddenly it returned fresh and vivid.

When we were there the Wall had been open for a few years tho its broken remnants still ran covered in graffiti for miles thru the city. It snaked thru the strasses and platzes suddenly appearing, then disappearing. The ghost of an old regime painted with bright colored figures and phrases as tho the street art could undo the old terrors, express the unfinished outrage. The Wall was an icon, a presence like a scar at the heart of this city.

I got lost one day in East Berlin. I’d gone to the Brandenburg Gate to browse the street vendors where they sold everything from hand bags to blue jeans,  but mostly there were tables of Russian army surplus clothing, spy equipment, night vision scopes and cheap hidden cameras in fountain pens. Vendors also showed up selling those tiny black lacquer boxes from the villages deep inside the old Soviet Republic that were painted in brilliant fairy tale scenes with egg-white paint and brushes with two hairs, ornamented in gold filigree. I’d been collecting these for years, had watched the prices skyrocket and was delighted to find myself in a place closer to the source where the prices were, if not bargains, at least more reasonable.

I had found in some listing the name of a shop that sold Russian boxes deep in East Berlin and was determined to find it tho I felt anxious about getting there on foot. In those days Don and I usually separated in foreign cities, each following our own interests and meeting up again before dinner. That day we’d come to the Gate together.

I don’t know what it looks like now twenty years later, but in those early years at the end of the cold war there was still a sharp contrast between West Berlin and East. The west portion of the city was thriving, lit, full of shops, modern office buildings, boutiques, restaurants, clean, well kept neighborhoods where young people strolled in the evenings in their punk outfits, or gathered to smoke and flirt in the small plazas that seemed to rest at the end of every block. There were up to date cars filling the streets with traffic. It was like other European cities I’d seen, Frankfort or London, or more like Paris, perhaps.

But that year when you passed out of the lush Tier Garten thru Brandenburg Tor with its famous Quadriga over head the city changed. Suddenly the broad avenue was nearly empty of cars. The sidewalks had few walkers. I don’t remember the famous trees that had lined Unter den Linden for centuries. The place was lined with gray stone buildings grimed with automobile fumes, their faces closed.

Don and I stopped for coffee at a corner shop near the gate and had a fight. I discovered he had no intention of helping me find my little shop, he had his own errands in other parts of the city. I was angry and anxious as he pushed me to go anyway and more out of spite than courage I headed east into the strange city alone armed with a paper map and an address written on a slip of paper.

It was October. If there were trees they were bare. If there was sky it was covered in cloud. My whole impression was of being alone on a broad empty, monochrome boulevard walking east in a city that echoed with old fears and severe punishments, A place forbidden and dangerous. It felt odd after growing up on the far side of the Iron Curtain to find myself behind it. Even knowing the door was open behind me, I kept my passport close.

We had taken the train up form Munich overnight in a sleeping compartment with berths and white sheets. It was a mix of luxury and function. The train was poorly insulated and noisy as it rode over the rough, untended rails thru the old East Germany. I’d woken once as the train slowed and looked out to see dim lights thru the grimy window and a sign over a depot: “Nurnberg”. Chills rose up my arms. I was riding thru the night thru German history, thru World History, across old communist territory, thru a land of war crimes, gestapo. KGB, a land of the Holocaust, of nightmare.

I walked east toward Museum Platz where the already wide avenue of Lindens opens out into a broad circle of grand buildings. There I followed the map and my gut sense north into a residential neighborhood of apartment buildings and small shops. Nothing held the thriving vibrancy of the city’s western half. Shops were dark or empty or faced with window displays full of garish synthetics, boom boxes and antiquated televisions. I began to feel confused and tho I spoke a few words of German in those days I was reluctant to speak to anyone. I saw few people as it was. My legs grew tired. I was hungry but passed no cafes. I felt the afternoon grow chill. I wondered if I would find my way back. Something kept me going forward, following the street signs block after block as tho the mission I was on held some vital importance. Indeed, I think by then my purpose had shifted. It had become, not just a shopping trip, but the difficult adventure of finding my way thru a forbidden city, the danger of being lost in it, this place of old Peter Laurie movies, Greta Garbo, shadowy news reels of stone faced authorities demanding my papers.

I may have begun to learn something that day about the fine art of being lost, the clean wakefulness that comes with not knowing where one is, the craft of tracking an intuitive scent even in strange territory paved with concrete.

The next day I talked to a young blond woman who had grown up in the East behind the Wall. I asked her what it was like when it came down. She said it was like the sun came out for the first time. She saw relatives she had never met. People breathed again. She lives in the west now with a well-paying job. She doesn’t go back very often. She doesn’t think about it.

Whether it was my innate sense of direction or the grace of some angel, I found my way thru the streets of East Berlin that day, found the shop but not the treasure I was after as the place was shut and dark, found the U-Bahn station to catch the train back to West Berlin and the safety of my hotel.

As I sank against the train window in relief and felt it glide over the curves of track winding west, here and there I caught glimpses of the wall like a concrete canvass of cartoons meandering thru the city. We flowed over it without a catch.

Today there are color photos of green trees along the broad boulevards of unified Berlin. The Brandenburg Gate has been restored and traffic flows smoothly from one side to the other. I hear the Wall is gone entirely. I hear tourists ask about it and are disappointed to learn its no longer there. Today you can buy pieces of it on Ebay for about 100.00 dollars guaranteed original and authentic, straight from Berlin. I wonder what we have learned? I wonder what happens when we turn a thing like the Berlin Wall into a souvenir, when we move on and forget to think about it?  I wonder what happens when we travel in the dark thru our own history, or wander its streets with trivial intent? We may get lost.

I hear they are building a wall thru Israel.

-wrensong 1/18/10

The First Days

Snow

and  cold chimes

in a singing wind;

Clear dawn,

hungry birds,

All the hemlock boughs

heavy white with

snow.

wrensong, the first week of January 2010

I am enthralled listening to Antony singing Leonard Cohen’s If It Be Your Will. Please gift yourself with a moment of this prayer.

Blue Moon on The Last Day

Snow melt and the blue moon,
The last hours of the year.
These days flow out like
an old tide. The stones shift
in their sleep. Do the trees in
their winter roots take note?
The cold wolves with ice on
their breath? The cranes
rising from the Bosque
on one broad will? Eagles
circling over this River?
Children at midnight
run into the streets
banging pots in their
pajamas, laughing.

We are blessed with time,
with the turning seasons,
with voice, skin, hope,
we humans who ride the arc
of a wave where time curls
under out feet pouring us onto
the shore, with a crystal stillness
before dawn, before the first sun
spills over the rim of the new year.
Amen.

Thank You.

wrensong 12/31/2009

Wind

Today the wind is fierce out of the west. The blizzard that has unloaded feet of snow up north brought only rain and now the wind. The trees are wild, the leaves pulled by the sky flying east. I’m thinking about the birds. Hard to fly in wind like this. I haven’t heard the hawk in days. The nameless urban raptor who has taken up residence in the back yards of this neighborhood in recent months, keening from the bare oaks before the stoop over a hapless titmouse or morning dove. Still, I love the wild sound of the call, as tho something mythic and dangerous has come close.

Yesterday I received the following poem from Panhala, a wonderful poetry resource that delivers great stuff to my mail box a few times a week.

Hawks

Surely, you too have longed for this –
to pour yourself out
on the rising circles of the air
to ride, unthinking,
on the flesh of emptiness.

Can you claim, in your civilized life,
that you have never leaned toward
the headlong dive, the snap of bones,
the chance to be so terrible,
so free from evil, beyond choice?

The air that they are riding
is the same breath as your own.
How could you not remember?
That same swift stillness binds
your cells in balance, rushes
through the pulsing circles of your blood.

Each breath proclaims it –
the flash of feathers, the chance to rest
on such a muscled quietness,
to be in that fierce presence,
wholly wind, wholly wild.

~ Lynn Ungar ~

(Blessing the Bread)

wrensong, 12/9

December Moon

So, go and buy yourself a purple cloak

in shades of evening as the moon

rises fat and full up the quiet sky

into December – elegant, slow

along the tidal paths older than

time – we move into the dark

canyons of winter whispering

dreams behind our icy hands.

Sisters, sisters, dress your selves

in Evening. Sing your feathered

hearts to roost in the barren trees.

We carry the hope of the year

toward unseen fire.

wrensong, 12/1/09

*photo by Tom Schmitt

One November Sunrise

This last weekend I gathered with a group of women for retreat in an old convent amid the stubbled cornfields of southern Illinois. These days in the week before Thanksgiving we came to celebrate a Gifting Universe. Saturday morning I woke up early as usual and sat sipping my coffee looking out the window at the misty dawn as I wrote in my journal. Suddenly the ball of sun appeared at the edge of earth and set the gray trees on fire! As I watched it slip skyward all at once the deer appeared and gifted me with their morning play.  And so the poem.

Now the November sun comes

pungent red behind the misted

trees, bare and dark against

the blush of sky, fire rising

spare and quiet over a gray earth.

Suddenly there are shadows

of deer running thru the veil

of dawn leaping in long-legged

delight, circling thru cut corn,

over fences, behind low scrub

Around again, and again, running in

the pure, wild play of morning.

And then, as suddenly, they are gone,

vanished into mist. Breathless,

my heart falls open laughing.

Thank you! Oh, Yes!

Thank you!

Wrensong, 11/ 24/09

photo by Karen Rexrode

“The Long Hard Labors of Prose and Enduring Love”

(Two weeks ago I assigned my writing group the task of using a phrase from this poem as an entrance into their writing piece. What follows is my contribution.)

The New Story of Your Life – by Michael Blumenthal

Say you finally invented a new story

of your life.  It is not the story of your defeat

or of your impotence and powerlessness

before the large forces of wind and accident.

It is not the sad story of your mother’s death

or of your abandoned childhood.  It is not,

even, a story that will win you the deep

initial sympathies of the benevolent goddesses

or the care of the generous, but it is a story

that requires of you a large thrust

into the difficult life, a sense of plenitude

entirely your own.  Whatever the story is,

it goes as it goes, and there are vicissitudes

in it, gardens that need to be planted,

skills sown, the long hard labors

of prose and enduring love.  Deep down

in some long-encumbered self,

it is the story you have been writing

all of your life, where no Calypso holds you

against your own willfulness,

where there are no longer dark caves

for you to be imprisoned in,

where you can rise

from the bleak island of your old story

and tread your way home.

There was a point in my forties when a shift happened in my view of my life. I no longer looked forward to a disappearing horizon toward which my life moved, but began to look back from a finite edge. It was then I began to know that I didn’t have all the time in the world to do what ever it was I imagined I might do with my life. Only later, as I began the long hard labors of learning my own story, looking back and back again and again, turning over the stones of the past, peeling off the dirty bandaids that had concealed old cuts and bruises to see what needed attention, healing, opening doors to shadowy rooms long locked, only then did the whole of my attention look backward in time. When we do this work of excavating our past the work can be consuming, painful, necessary. It is basement work, clearing the depths of ourselves, reading the old letters stuffed in dusty boxes, gazing at black and white snap shots of ourselves in little dresses looking out at our grown up self with hollow or happy eyes. It can be fascinating even as it is painful, this archeology of our lives. And it can take years. I know a woman who was abused multiple times thru her childhood. She has been in therapy for 20 years in order to heal from the woundings. The work still consumes her as she nears 60. It could be that for some people, this is the life work. The healing of a torn soul can take a lifetime.

There have been times in my life that I harbored the belief that if I got “it right”, the big IT, meaning Life or God or Mystery or Myself, then my days would unfold sweetly and easily, moving like clear water over bright stones, or opening like the petals of a scented blossom. If I could just get this piece, or this piece or that in place then it would all flow as tho I held in some secret place the key that would release all the beauty and creativity and peacefulness and holiness and wisdom that would characterize my life. I could stop trudging. I could stop having to go back and deal with old issues from the Old Story, the deeply ingrained habits of thought that keep me in fear or inhibit relationship or block a full, rich sense of this person I’m maybe meant to be. But the poet here speaks of something else required in the “new story”, the new vision of who I am called to be or what the narrative of my lfie will contain. It takes work, he says. The days I write collect meaning, one word at a time. It isn’t always poetry. It isn’t a fluid, metaphoric sweep of life, but a prosaic step by step journey thru time. It is slower, more benedictine, more tree-like. Tree like. . . Once recently I found the phrase “the benedictine trees” after a flash of insight into the vow of stability trees take. How they live in community, rooted, surrendered to the weathers of place and time. How they commit to their community spreading roots out underground thru the seasons of growing, moon by new moon, reaching to entangle themselves with the roots of their fellow trees. How they hold each other in being. The Enduring Love trees practice for each other. The Labor of their Prose, seasons of root and leaf and seed, the long silence of sap flowing, the phloem and xylem moving water up and down the trunk thru the months of sunlight until it all sinks again into the root and rests, enduring the cold of winters.

Saturday it snowed in the Tetons. It began with rain on Friday afternoon and it rained all night. Then in the morning the soft hail, the ice, the snow. It snowed cold and wet all day in and out of sun. There could have been rainbows against the white peaks as the wind blew the snow across the watery sunlight. Sometime in the afternoon I sat for a long time under a massive Douglass Fir with boughs that curved down at the base forming a sheltering room. There I created a small ceremony of gratitude for the Enduring Love of this old forest, this place that again and again has brought me to tears for the shear beauty, the dense, tumbled stillness, the faithfulness. The trees of this forest are fir and spruce, pine, aspen and hawthorn. I sense in my own heart a tenderness for the risk of our forests. So conscious of the damage we humans do in our taking and taking of the earth’s resources. And How faithful the trees are as they continue in their work in spite of us. They don’t give up making trees because of human violence to them. They simply continue their own labors of prose and enduring love. This tumbled forest is full of fallen trees and small pines and firs and spruce growing up amid the decomposing bodies of their ancestors. I spoke to the trees in such small words, such fleeting human sensibilities, in tears wondering again at the depth of emotion that gets stirred in me there. Once I looked up thru the branches that disappeared hundred or more feet above me into the blue, snow dusted sky and I saw tears. Oozing from the bark of the huge trunk were small glistening drops like tears. Sap dripping, frozen. I reached up and picked a piece that immediately softened in my fingers, became sticky. I picked another and put it on my tongue. I could taste the sharp, pine flavor as it melted in my mouth. I pulled a strand of my own hair and wedged it into the plates of bark, an exchange that felt like communion.

I read there is a spruce in the mountains of Sweden known as Old Tjikko that is 9550 years old. The root is 9550 years old. For thousands of years it was a dwarfed, gnarl of a tree, barely a stunted shrub. The visible trunk only a few hundred years old. Then in the last century, with global warming it has begun to grow and leaf and make cones and take on the recognizable shape of a tree again. Imagine the vow this tree took. Imagine the labors of enduring prose in a life this long. Imagine the sap held with such love in that ancient root.

On Sunday the Wyoming forest was utterly still. It is always a silent place but it seemed especially quiet that day. Not a whisper of traffic sound from the highway. No wind. Not a bird or bugling elk. No wandering herds under the trees. No bear shuffling thru the fallen aspen leaves nibbling the hawthorn berries. Everything held in bright, cold silence. Winter coming on.  Not far off the sound of the Snake River flowing over the stones. It won’t be long before even that is stilled in ice.

Home again my life is caught up in the rush of days and work and people. I come home with a promise to slow down, to listen more, to be more still. The trees teach such slowing, such stilling that the traffic of urban life can quickly shatter. The new story of my life must be about an acceptance of the labor of prose, word by word the days are imagined and told. The new story must be about the labor of enduring love, the benedictine vow to cherish the community of souls life has given me. This is a large work demanding the most open heart. Presence, where the old story and the future story come into meaning in the work of the moment. No promise that all will flow easy and golden when I get it right. It is the labor itself that makes the love and makes the endurance possible. To labor out of love for the sake of Love, this is the prose. This is the poem.

wrensong, 10/28/09

Old Tjikko

Dreaming Among the Trees

In the deep heart of an old-growth pine forest in Northern Ontario known as Temagame I slept at the base of an old Red Pine who dreamed herself into me and called me to my depths. I saw in the night a portal in the roots leading down, inviting me to travel deep. The dream said “The way forward in your life is thru your own depths”.

Years passed, and one August day I wandered in the tangled forest of northern Wyoming at the foot of the Teton Range. Again Tree came to me in a dream showing me the great roots, enormous roots of a primeval Tree. The dream said: This is the Tree where all the Apples grew. From this enigmatic pronouncement I felt a knowing that here was the One Tree, the World Tree, the Tree from the beginning of time. The Roots of this tree are dense and dark as stone, ancient. They hold the source of everything in their web.

This week I travel again to that forest of Douglas fir, Engleman spruce and aspen and river willow where the Snake River braids itself south from Yellowstone thru the Gros Ventre valley. I go wandering in the dream world of tree-life along the trails with migrating elk, watching for mule deer, moose and the late bear. One day there will be my birthday. When I was there two years ago the full moon rose on the night of my birthday and the coyotes came in a pack howling around my cabin in a great, happy rucous before dashing off into the dark forest. The trees there are dense and patient, close. A cloak of something long and old wraps around me when I move among them. There are bones hidden at the roots. There are a million stones along the river. At dawn the peaks glow pink to the west. I return with offerings. I go listening for dreams.

wrensong