Blow on the Embers

Fire is sacred. Fire burns. Fire transforms.

The poet, Rumi, says:

            Love is the fire and we are the wood.

Blase, my partner, adds:

            And therein lies our freedom.

On Wednesday our fire blazed. Our household quintet, Blase, my partner, Ariel, my daughter, Ethan, her boyfriend, and Holly our housemate gathered, and burned heaps of apple prunings.

The prunings fall from the orchard trees in February. They’re lopped, snipped, and sawn off the trees over two weeks. We prune to vitalize the trees, direct their shape, remove dead and diseased wood, and most importantly, to let in light. We open up windows for sunlight to penetrate the tree, making sure all branches have a sky view. When one them doesn’t get enough light, they start to shrivel, even more shaded, become smaller, until they die back.

The pruned apple branches winter on the ground under the trees, providing healthy food for voles and mice who chew the bark. Then, when the snow is gone, and the small creatures have plenty of other foodstuff, we collect all the prunings and burn them. Fire blight, a bacterial infection is dormant in winter, and hides in the branches. Burning all the pruned wood help keep fire blight out of the orchard.

Holly and I gathered the tools, throwing them in the back of Blase’s old pickup truck—rakes, a shovel, a box of newspaper, kindling, matches, a portable gas water pump, and long hose. We also grabbed the canister of kerosene. Ariel and Ethan hopped into the bed of the truck. 

Around this mountain of prunings we made small fires with newspaper and kindling. We had a Christmas tree dropped off by a friend. Ariel jammed it into the pile above my small fire. It took. Whoomm! Whoosh!

Ethan and Ariel lighting the fire.

The flames licked through the tree, disappearing the needles and small branches. Then there was quiet. We tried to whisper our small fires into blaze until Blase arrived. He took the container of kerosene and started pouring throughout. With his blazing instincts, the fire caught.

The apple wood is green so you need a hot fire to really get them to take. But they did and the fire burned. More wood caught, whirring and snapping, and the flames grew. Menorahs of little flames on sticks, candles on an altar, a pyre. Fire warming our hearts.

With the forks attached to the bucket of the tractor, I rumbled along the apple rows. Our bonfire contained only a small portion of the orchard prunings. Holly had piled the rest at the end of each row. I teased the forks under a pile at the far end of the orchard, lifted, and scooped, held the massive tangle high up in the air and drove back to the fire. Blase and Ethan were tending with pitchforks. Putting the tractor in low gear, I pulled as close to the flames as I dared. With the bucket held high, Blase signaled, and the bucket dumped. Flames leapt, Blase and Ethan teased out the caught stragglers, and I reversed, to circle back to the next row for another pile pick up.

Meanwhile Holly and Ariel gathered blueberry prunings and white pine branches from across the road in the berry patch. We had little traffic jams on the cart road, but everyone has more patience these days: we’re in no hurry, we’re just here.

In only a few hours, we managed to burn what we needed to. As the fire ebbed, we listened to the last cracklings, and stared into the black sea of charred wood. Some embers transformed into white ash. With the breath of wind, snowflakes rose and fell.

In the final lines in Archibald MacLeish’s play, JB, his retelling of the story of Job, Sarah says to her husband,

Then blow on the coal of the heart, my darling,
It’s all the light now.
Blow on the coal of the heart.
The candles in the churches are out.
The lights have gone out of the sky.
Blow on the coal of the heart
And we’ll see by and by . . .

Strength, even in darkest times, can be found in a whisper. The dark and the light, the suffering and joy, have always been and will always be the human condition. We can choose to kindle the fires, to breathe love through it all. The photo below is from a women’s Full Moon Fire we had on March 7, 2020. It’s hard to believe our world has changed so much in less than a month. When we can be physically close to each other again, we will celebrate with a great bonfire. You are all invited!

Ripples

Sitting at the window in the loft above my studio I look over the pond. The reflections of the trees show only the slightest rippling. As if on cue, two geese quack through the air and splash-land. What are they communicating at this time of world crisis? 

 The poet Rilke wrote:

I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
I may not complete this last one
but I will give myself to it.

Their bobbing beaks pierce the flat surface of the water creating a pattern of two interlocking circles. As these two rings expand outwards, their individual rings dissolve and form one large circle, then another, each one widening into more circles. The geese have become a great concentric ring-making machine, the vibrations extend almost across the pond. Copernicus would have been charmed by this binary sun. I think of all the human beings on the planet, how we haven’t seen the rings of our interconnectivity and interdependence quite this graphically before the pandemic spread. Can we deeply know that everything we do has repercussions that extend far out into the world? Will we remember this lesson?

I am taking a breather. I enjoy this opportunity to focus my attention on the geese, and not on the airspace around us. I have only been watching for a few minutes; they will glide and bob hour after hour, day after day, week after week, month after month. I don’t live within this kind of repetition; I seek what’s new. Something to assert, or is it insert my presence into the world? I always have plans, projects, things to do.

The geese begin swimming towards shore. One goose approaches and looks back, its mate is not following, so it turns back. I lose track of them and then espy them floating in the reeds along the edge of the pond. They occupy their own world in the cold water, churning out circles as they bob down and up with precision.

I consider how the geese are oblivious to the virus. They don’t know that my daughter and her boyfriend have moved in with us or that we are isolating ourselves physically from the rest of the world. They don’t know the longer I watch them, the closer I feel towards them. 

Two Geese on the Pond

I’ve lost track of the geese, where did they go? Meanwhile, raindrops fall from overhanging branches into the pond making their own gentle circles. 

Then I see one goose chase its mate out to the center of the pond, its neck hammering forward with surprising violence. Is it propelling its mate to swim faster or propelling itself with this motion? The geese are responding to a competitor who has entered their airspace. The intruder kept flying, and my two friends are quiet again, tucked near shore, bobbing for food. A green noodle of pond weed hangs from one of their beaks. The other has its back to me and I watch its webbed feet vigorously paddling to keep its backside lifted with its head and neck submerged. Is it seeking something more delicious, or more difficult to pull up, or something deeper? The tipping point is so hard to maintain. 

Even in the midst of social distancing, let’s keep our circles widening. There are so many people who will need help financially, emotionally, spiritually, and physically. Toss pebbles into the pond, send prayers, call your friends, let love ripple the world.

I watch a little longer. I begin to feel like I know which is male and which is female. It’s quite silly, why would I even think that? One goose seems quieter, more delicate, and maybe a little smaller. But, of course, that’s all wrong, my personal bias. There are many species where the female is larger than the male. 

Compassion increases the more attention we give something. Isn’t that the way the world works?  In this time of social isolation, we need to be in touch, send out our love, and share what others are experiencing.

I have recommitted to posting a blog on Sundays as a way for us to stay connected. It may not be polished prose, but I will try to offer some small distraction from the numbers and charts. I send my love to all of you, each of you facing your own challenges, each of you dear to me.

The second and last stanza of Rilke’s poem is :

I circle around God, around the primordial tower.
I’ve been circling for thousands of years
and I still don’t know: am I a falcon,
a storm, or a great song?

A storm is raging, let’s be the great song, bow our heads, and let the ripples echo across the planet. 

We Are Connected, LH, 2020, wax.

Tibet Impressions

Our three-generational quartet, aged twenty-nine to ninety-two, received four visas for Tibet at our airport Beijing hotel less than twenty-four hours before our scheduled flight to Lhasa. We could hardly believe it, we were going to Tibet after so many hurdles.

In front of the Potala Palace, built in the 7th century and then rebuilt in the 17th century, this masterpiece of Tibetan architecture, was home to the Dalai Lamas and Tibetan government from the 17th century until 1959 when the present Dalai Lama escaped to India.

Bill, my stepfather, and my daughter, Ariel, walking down the wet and slippery slope on the backside of the Potala Palace.

Our travels through Tibet climbed up and down—stairs and mountains, from thrilling sights to chilling realities. The first three shocks upon arrival:

1. Three fighter jets sat near the terminal at the Lhasa airport. Military presence we would learn is everywhere.

2. Our guide pointed to the two recording devices on the dashboard of the vehicle we would be traveling in for the next ten days. We needed to always be aware that what we were saying, not only in the car, but anywhere, might be overheard and reported.

3. Tibetans cannot have passports. No Tibetan person can leave the country.

Blase, my partner, and I send prayers by way of the smoke from burning juniper at a high pass above Lhasa.

Lhasa is seemingly undergoing more construction than any other city in the world. In downtown Lhasa, the snowcapped mountains are partially obscured by high-rise apartment buildings. The construction is primarily for the Chinese who are moving into Tibet. The population is changing. Tibet now has an estimated population of about 6 million Tibetans and 7.5 million Chinese settlers. The apartments are affordable only if you have a government job.

For five days, we stayed in the old part of Lhasa from where we could walk to monasteries, temples, nunneries, noodle shops, teahouses, and explore the narrow streets of old Tibet. We joined the devoted pilgrims walking clockwise around the Barkhor Circuit, Lhasa’s most important pilgrimage Kora.

The Barkhor Kora, an everyday happening.

This walk takes you around the Jokhang, one of Tibet’s oldest temples. Pilgrims make the circuit multiple times, some walk, some do full body bows. Others stop at the plaza in front of the Jokhang, roll out their prostration mat, and do a hundred, or a thousand full prostrations, sliding out on their gloved hands or using wooden blocks strapped to their hands, to extend their arms fully out beyond their head, belly flat on the ground.

Before sunrise prostrations.

Inside the darkness of the old Jokhang pilgrims are moving always in a clockwise direction, making offerings to colorful thangkas and sculptures of Buddhas, deities, demons, and kings. Butter lamps burn, silver bowls of water glisten, cans of beer (some protectors favor beer) along with fruit, money, and yak butter decorations are packed into every nook and cranny. Gongs and drums, wood and cloth, bright colors, meditation cushions piled with burgundy meditation robes, people jostling, hurrying, determined to complete their rounds, Tibetan Buddhism is practiced here by Tibetans everyday.

We arrived at Sera monastery during celebrations for their six-hundred year anniversary. The road was closed. The Police were limiting the number of people. Following our guide, we started walking to see if there was another way to enter and saw people slipping through a hole in a fence and running across a yak field. We followed at the fastest clip we could manage on day one at 12,000 feet, avoiding the entrance road and entering further up towards the monastery. Our timing worked. Another ten minutes and this alternate route would have been closed. The monastery was filled with pilgrims from all over Tibet in colorful traditional clothing, mala beads in hand, making offerings and chanting, We followed a group of people to see the Thangka unveiled for the occasion, about three hundred feet in length and hanging over a slap of flat rock, covered in plastic because of the rain.

Monasteries are traditionally built into the hillsides, and above many of them are rocky paths leading to caves where monks, and Dalai Lamas, and yogis like Milarepa and Guru Rinpoche once meditated for years at a time.

During the cultural revolution ninety-five percent of the monasteries were destroyed, but now the Central Government is rebuilding them, though limiting the number of monks who can live at each one. Tibetan families historically sent at least one son to become a monk, but today, you need to be approved by the Central Government. Monasteries were the principal sites of resistance—the government wants to make sure that this doesn’t happen again. The Police have a convincing presence at the large monasteries, the head Abbot is appointed by the Central Government. I imagine even in a monastery one must be careful with one’s opinions.

After visiting Gangden Monastery, a complex with some fifty buildings that was first destroyed during the 1959 Tibetan Uprising and then reduced to rubble during the 1966-67 Cultural Revolution, the brutality of the deaths kept me awake all night weeping. Throughout the trip I worried that we could be arrested for our sympathy for the Tibetans or that we would put our guide at risk.

Nuns at morning service in the main assembly hall at the Nunnery in Chimpuk.

In spite of decades of persecution, the Tibetan people are among the most spiritually devoted people I have encountered. There was never a monastery, nunnery, or temple without pilgrims. In the streets, it seemed like everyone carried their mala beads, even while shopping. I wondered if it was prayer or a devotional peaceful resistance? We visited a small monastery in Lhasa that was completely packed with worshipers. People covered every inch of the courtyard and chapels.

We visited Samye, the first Buddhist monastery in Tibet, climbing the hill nearby to have a view of its mandala pattern and take in the fields and bare mountains.

The hill above Samye Monastery.

We learned the local houses around Samye will soon be razed to the ground to clean up the area around the monastery. These local people will be given housing in several apartment buildings. How will they remain farmers and herders? Where will the cows return to at night?

An ancient world is changing. Roads are being built throughout the country. In the river valleys the Central Government has planted hundreds of thousands of trees. Power comes from gigantic solar arrays and large hydro dams that India and other countries downstream are concerned will affect their water supply. The Chinese say that Tibet has been part of China for centuries—the Tibetans and much of the Western world disagree. Tibet is rich in natural resources and strategically important to China: its square footage is larger than the United States. But our questions of why the Chinese are so determined to control Tibet, what are they really doing there, and what are their intentions for the Tibetan people remained unanswered.

 “Are there Tibetan poets and writers today?” I asked our guide. He didn’t answer.

A visit to a painting workshop.

Monks still yak butter offerings as well as talk on their cell phones.

A view inside the monastery kitchen.

It was a trip that will take more time for me to realize how I have been affected. It was a trip to a third-world country with its close-to-the-earth living, inside a first-world-country with its money and high-rise bureaucracy. A trip made special because I shared it with my daughter, husband, and step-father.

Our wonderful guide with Blase and Ariel.

The memory of family members who died during and after the Chinese invasion is still very much alive for the present generation of Tibetans. They consider Tibet their country, though their language is no longer taught in the public schools. Many Tibetans are concerned about passing their culture onto their children.

The Tibetans we met were honored that Bill would make such an arduous journey at his age.

The trip was an electrical jolt reminding us how fortunate we are to live with so much personal freedom.

How do we offer care to this country whose people have been sending prayers for peace from their once remote kingdom to the entire world for centuries? One thing we can do is learn what is happening today—Free Tibet has up-to-date information.

And send our love to all those in the world who are not free, who are living under totalitarian regimes or imprisoned for their views or choices. Let the prayers fly!

Forest Tales

Our quartet, my stepfather Bill, daughter Ariel, and partner Blase, returned one week ago from our trip to Tibet. However, condensing two intense weeks of pilgrimage into a brief blog, like making a few jugs of sweet juice from bushels of ripe apples, takes time. The apples need to sweat, I need to distill the experience.

Meanwhile the Catalpa tree with its large heart-shaped leaves outside my studio window is no longer green and leafy, but is sending brown flying carpets everywhere. And in the woods, the sight-lines are clear as tree branches lay bare the sky, and the spiced air welcomes the forest walker.

Next Sunday morning, November 17th at 11 am, I invite you to join me for a forest walk in one of Stow, Massachusetts’ conservation areas, The Leggett Woods. Here along a meandering trail, I installed thirteen sculptures, a world of acorn-capped acrobatics, a mother and child, a boy and a turtle, a frog, each one fixed onto a forest stone. The storyteller sits near the beginning reading to three acorn-capped children.

Caps for Sale

The paths are cleared and covered with wood chips so discovering each one is not difficult. The Stow Conservation Trust, the private land preservation organization in Stow, hopes to attract more families to explore their trails by creating special places to visit and enjoy. 

The genesis of this project began along Old Frog Pond Farm’s woods trails where a series of bronze meditating figures are permanently installed. They are small, and you would think go unnoticed, and perhaps do for some people, but most others notice one sculpture, and then another, and another, and are delighted by the shift in scale, the quietness, and simplicity of these bronze figures on rocks.

Vita Matisse sitting with sculptures.

My granddaughter enjoys sitting on the large rock among them. Other children add acorn caps, a perfect fit for the bowed bronze heads. We don’t encourage interaction with the sculpture on exhibit at the farm, but I thought these acorns caps were a charming addition and have since cast a few figures topped with them. The wood burns out in the lost wax process.

When I was considering a possible sculpture for the Leggett Woods, I thought about a village of sculptures that might encourage children to get down on their hands and knees, and play. Perhaps add some more acorn caps, or build a little house of twigs, or add stones and leaves—an artwork to encourage interaction with the forest life.

The Stow Conservation Trust worked hard to find volunteers to help with the land clearing and creation of the trails. I am especially grateful to the committee I worked with directly, Janet Kresi Moffat, Ann Carley, and Carol Gumbart, and to the Alice Eaton Grant Funds for supporting the commission.

Another person I have worked with for many years is poet, Susan Edwards Richmond. In the first issue of Wild Apples, the journal of nature, art, and inquiry we founded and edited with two other friends in 2006, Susan wrote poetry for a series of my bronze boat sculptures. When I told her about this commission, I hesitantly asked if she might like to write a poem—I knew her creative focus was now on children’s books (Bird Count published by Peachtree Publishing Company came out last month!). As the date for installation got closer, Susan wrote, “Where are you installing the sculptures in Stow?  Could you use another hand? I can meet on the 11th as long as it's after 1:45 pm.”

It was a kind offer, but among Susan’s many talents is not operating a hammer drill or epoxy gun. I didn’t reply. She wrote again a few days later, “What time? Would you like some local help? :)”.  This time I answered, “Sure! Maybe around 11? You follow the trail then take the left fork. Can’t miss.”

Susan arrived when John Lowe, my assistant, and I were well into the installation. We’d been there since 9 am. Of course, Susan and I both knew she wasn’t coming to help with the install, but with notebook in hand she immediately knelt down in front of a sculpture.

Susan will be reading the Forest Tales poems at the opening next Sunday. There will be kids’ activities, refreshments, art, nature, and poetry. Hope to see some of you on Sunday, November 17 at 11 am. And I promise a Tibet blog soon!

Directions: Leggett Woods is on Whitman Street just off of Gleasondale Road (Route 62). If you are driving South on Route 62 from the intersection of Route 117 in Stow, go about a mile, turn left at the fork with signs for Honey Pot Orchards , and the Leggett Woods parking area is on your right.

The Storyteller