Snow drifts from the sky whitely combing
the red and golden yellow leaves;
when it melts,
bare limbs climb into the sky.
I want to lie on those whorls of wood,
like mastheads of stately Nordic goddesses
or my tender frozen ancestral grandmothers,
dreaming of Daphne, firey gowns
stripped by solar winds to stark
nude greys of Winter.
Thick ridges of weather
carved rivulets
in the bark.

_____
Visit Riverside Rambles for the 18th edition of the Festival of the Trees, where this little poem is included among many great entries.

A desolation out of which writing comes. An emptiness of words. The streets are dark as I walk. Perhaps love is not fullness but the absence itself.

'Despair....invokes beauty only to pour the void into it. The emptiness of the soul is so vast, its cruel advance so inexorable, that any resistance to it is impossible. What would be left of paradise if it were seen from the viewpoint of despair? A graveyard of happiness.' E.M. Cioran, Tears & Saints.

We cannot merge. Are we are in love with each other's absence? Our holy madness is our love, founded on renunciation.

I am emptied in my love for you. I have no desire to possess you - desire emphasizes lack. Even in this violent wrenching towards each other where we are alienated and jubilatory. When we are empty of ourselves we take joy in the sweetness of the other.

If I could tell you a story, I would. There are no avenues of magnolia trees here, though I wish there were.

'Loneliness means I am at last whole.

Only with him could I be lonely. Open up to him. Completely open, completely for him. Welcome him completely into myself. Surround him with the labyrinth of shared happiness. I know it is you.' Peter Handke, Wings of Desire.

I am alone with he who is alone. Seul á seul.

I'm looking for the essence
that I can drop on my tongue,
until I am suffused with the
scent. Until my kisses are
magnolia,
........soft white petals of perfume.

Imagine the magnolia trees where Venus is born aloft on the shell blown by Zephyr.

Where writing comes to an end and sinks into its
emptiness.

Only then.

A new design. You noticed, thank you, Jean. I resurrected my old Rubies In Crystal banner (of 27 layers, my first real attempt at creating a composite image in Photoshop, it took forever) and decided to make the post titles a deep red, you know, to match - like pillows on the couch with the heavily brocaded curtains of rich rubies and Merlot, the, ahem, 'Tibetan red.' I struggled with the html in the template (which uses 3 numbers for colour, not 6 or the RGB code that I could easily access in Photoshop Elements), a template which I'd already fiddled with quite a bit, and wished I'd taken courses in webdesign, and finally saved the whole mass of computer jargon in a word file just in case, and took the leap into the "new" and easier templates Blogger offers. Along the way I discovered that any photos you post to your blog are automatically saved in a file at Google's photo site, Picasa, which is neat, and where they remain unlisted unless you choose to make them public. Google is creating a marvelously integrated package, with Gmail, Documents, Reader, Calendar, and Groups, plus lots of other stuff - I love Google and its increasing array of offerings.

Rubies In Crystal is a reference not only to mystical caves of jewels that are the colour of the vibrant life force but to wine and the full enjoyment of life as expressed in Sufism, and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, one of my geologist/geochemist/scientist father's favourite books (perhaps I'll try to elaborate in another post sometime). I like the simplified look of the site now, the ease of the addition of the red accents as well as the ability to put the banner in a red background, and the way the font appears. The template still needs tweaking - like why are there question marks before the archived posts (which seem to work nevertheless)?

Forays into html for another day...

:-)

"This composite image combines EIT images from three wavelengths (171Å, 195Å and 284Å) into one that reveals solar features unique to each wavelength. Since the EIT images come to us from the spacecraft in black and white, they are color coded for easy identification. For this image, the nearly simultaneous images from May 1998 were each given a color code (red, yellow and blue) and merged into one." SOHO Gallery: Best of SOHO

The very best image of the sun, and it's nearly a decade old! What was I doing 10 years ago? Oh -?! Gasp. Never mind. SOHO's sun of three-wavelengths was far better.

Without the attraction of this force of 'holding still' we'd fly off
surely.

Natural laws. Diurnal follows nocturnal. Inbreath, outbreath. The world works: in it's clashing, it fits together. It's trustworthy. We rely on it's smooth operation. What rises falls. What is alive dies. Boiling water turns to steam. Nice, this regularity.

Without the natural laws, I couldn't rest.

Have you noticed how clean the microscopic world is? Blood platelets hang together like little solar systems of planets, each with space. Fierce dust mites look tidy.

The four forces, electromagnetic, the atom-binding strong force, the radioactive-controlling weak force, and gravity dependably weave our universe.

Or the four humors before them, but never mind.

It's a relief. The regularity of process. Eating chocolate, as I am, produces sweet heaven on my tongue. It always does. Chocolate can be trusted.

Perhaps you are like creativity,
dangerous.

I don't think about anyone else.

I'd better come back in,
where stars sparkle behind my eyelids.

At the deepest level, there is no chaos. It's troubling. An insane waring bloodbath is a neat and tidy microscopic world of platelets suspended in solution. Or the decay. Molecule by molecule. Lovely chemistry, that's all. Electron microscopes are revealers of the secrets of matter, I tell you.

Love wherever it happens is the most extraordinary of all.

We are moved by our stories, their involving narratives with plots, characters, themes, structures mimicking us in our real lives but grander than us, more dangerous, the stakes higher, but I, oh, what can I say, and ought I to apologize, I find this image of the dark side of the earth taken by a passing spacecraft with our cities shining like stars more moving than I can find words for. All of the stories are here. I ache for this world; my heart beats for this sun-rimmed beauty - I am thick with love for this world of ours. Doesn't everything in you reach for what is within this image - us, in our nighttimes, on our rolling planet.

_______________
"On Nov. 13th, Europe's Rosetta spacecraft flew past Earth, swooping a mere 5300 km above the southern hemisphere....Rosetta also took some spectacular pictures of Earth's nightside, capturing city lights and possibly some auroras, too: annotated image. Inside one of those dots of light, a team of Italian astronomers (Giovanni Sostero, Ernesto Guido, Luca Donato and Virgilio Gonano) were looking back at Rosetta. Here is the view through their 18-inch telescope; Rosetta is the dim streak of light cutting through the starry background. Bon Voyage, Rosetta!" SpaceWeather.com

If we try to exceed ourselves too much we injure ourselves. It's important to excel beyond oneself, to lose one'self' in the ecstasy of the dance, but safely. There is a hubris to an injury - an overdoing. If the ego tries to stretch with the expanding/dissolving self it's called ego-inflation and perhaps the emotional corollary of physical injury. The muscles stretch but at a point they have to 'let go,' 'relax,' even in intense, highly aerobic movement, otherwise there'll be damage: a pulled or stretched or torn muscle or tendon, a broken bone, a dislocation; harmony is lost. I find most of my injuries occur when I am working in an area of unacknowledged emotional tumult. Then I push myself and overdo it when perhaps I should be tenderly reaching in with self-compassion and loving-kindness. I forget limits, my fragility. And remembering to be humble towards what I can and cannot do.

Self-care, how important this is.

Most of my thankfully minor injuries take about six months to heal fully. Often I overdo and re-injure. In the high octane of the dance it is easy to forget that a part of your body needs constant TLC.

TLC, for myself.

Ah, should we not all do that more often, and not just when we're injured?

________________
An expansion on something I'd written in the feedback for the 5Rhythms dance workshop I attended last August.

On the edge of a great cloud bank
wet, each pore
fire suffused, open,
bones like wind
sunlight of the Summer, free
asking where the words went
when they rained, drenching the heart
the beat of the circle, writing on drums
words flashing in air, lightning.
It's electricity
not gravity
that connects us.
Blue paints the tops of the clouds,
lit.
Waves across the world.


August 26, 2007

_________
Written at the 5Rhythms workshop Taeji and Shara held at Dovercourt House - towards the end of the 2-day event, we were each given paper and pen and asked to write something that would be sent to us a few months later: received in the mail from Taeji today.

leaves, fire colours
reds and oranges
the fallen sun

a street carpet
of fragmented light

sodden endless rain

paper garden bags,
of collected leaves,
raked and packed

my heart, enfolded
withdrawn

an economy of words

no fixing it, either - if it's
not there in the first sweep
it'll never be

I was on a pathway
that disappeared
before I arrived

the large wood-wet oak
a shiny canopy of leaves
held by powerful branches
bright yellow lanterns
slivers of sun

scattering¹


______
On November 8th, browsing radio stations I came across Don Jackson in his nightly spot, "Lovers and Other Strangers," and found him presenting a marvelous Autumn show composed of November-inspired poetry and music, that, hmnn, has obviously been inspiring...

¹While I couldn't work it into the poem, I was also playing with an origin of the universe metaphor with a reference to the point of the "last scattering" when, in the diffuse plasma of ionized atoms, particles and anti-particles annihilated each other for the last time, leaving about a billion photons for every particle of matter, thus making the universe transparent. I wanted this reference to echo the emotional underlayer of the poem where fragmented light leads to a naked transparency of the heart, a clarity.