Glenda Burgess

"On roadsides,
in fall fields,
in rumpy bunches,
saffron and orange and pale gold..."
-"Goldenrod," Mary Oliver, Blue Iris, 2004

Yesterday afternoon McDuff and I headed out to the bluff, lulled outdoors by a late afternoon warmth, pools of mellow light that fell through the trees. As we walked through the wild oat and dried thistle, the hillside around us caught the angle of light in a palette of caramels, dusty tans and white yellows. The sweetness of summer at its fullest. Surely fall hovers at the edge of the valley in the crisp mornings and cool nights, but here on the bluff summer holds court.

As I walked, a wordless song played through my thoughts. Duff fell behind, his nose in dusty rabbit holes. I stopped and just stood in the champagne light, looking across the valley. A raven cry drifted up from somewhere near the creek. I was filled with inexplicable happiness. As if everything had its moment and this moment had now. Floating, ebullient joy. My thoughts touched on my son and daughter, far away, their lives anchoring down for the new school term at university. I felt the erasure of geography, the delicate knots and stitches that bind us, one to another.

I offer the final stanzas of Mary Oliver's "Goldenrod" here -

"I was just minding my own business
when I found myself on their straw hillsides,
citron and butter-colored,

and was happy, and why not?
Are not the difficult labors of our lives
full of dark hours?
And what has consciousness come to anyway, so far,

that is better than these light-filled bodies?
All day
on their airy backbones
they toss in the wind,

they bend as though it was natural and godly to bend,
they rise in a stiff sweetness,
in the pure peace of giving
one's gold away."

May all of you find delight in summer's last song.

“To will what God wills is the only Science that gives us rest.”
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I am one who believes in the dance between science and chaos. In that dance exists the spark of magic. Uncertain, I look for the handprint of destiny in life. And while patterns can be seen in retrospect, forks in the road loom clear only once we’ve taken new direction. It doesn’t always appear to be a preordained plan we are following. Rather, it feels more as though we uncover the path; building a stairway across space even as we take the next step into an empty dark we are not certain we trust.

There is a simple truth in Longfellow’s words – inner peace is essentially found within surrender to an ultimate power we cannot define nor commune well with, let alone identify or prove. While we seek to master the laws of science and take security in the material laws of the universe, life in its entirety is mystery undefined. Whatever creation is, creation wills. Is this destiny? I don’t know. Free will? That would account for our choices and refusals. Perhaps chaos and a corner pocket shot of stardust. I do sense that the science that we speak of, Longfellow and I, is big enough to define itself as it sees fit. While I may need to discover magic and serendipity, another person might need the rule of reason, or perhaps a sense of preordained fate, the mystery of surrender. We are all quite possibly right.

As I stand in the doorway between who I have been for most of my adult life - woman, partner, mother, writer – I look to the stars. There is a star out there for each of us. A point of light that reminds us the distance we’ve come, and how limitless our possibilities might be. In tonight's cloudless sky, a cerulean midnight fluted with deep purple, a white crescent moon hangs above the birch trees. A moon as improbable as a prop, a Matisse cutout pinned above a dark and curtained theatre. The moon...a planet captive in our orbit, catalogued by our most knowledgeable sciences. Humans have reached the gray rock on rocket ships. But to me that luminescent crescent is a symbol of the improbable, the mystery that makes every moment of life a question mark. The moon and I have so much in common - we exist, we have no idea why.

“She was all around me
like a rainy day,
and though I walked bareheaded
I was not wet.”
- “The Blue Wing,” Donald Hall, A Blue Wing Tilts at the Edge of the Sea,
1975

Moths seeking light, albeit with a bump or two along the way...

You might describe my life’s work as a writer as a study of moths. The mixed up and confused human kind. When I sit down to write on the project I call FINDING JOY, it is with an image in mind I am on an excavation. Joy has to be out there, somewhere. Deep in the hills perhaps - next to the mastodon bones? All I have to do is search out the right conditions, bisect through layers of detritus and stone, and there I will uncover joy, cached with the broken pots of some ancient dweller's fire pit.

How wrong I turned out to be! Joy is not lost, and it isn’t to be found, not really. We connect or disconnect with spontaneous happiness all the time, sometimes without awareness. Joy is as simple to embrace as taking a breath. We close our eyes and breathe in what is around us, what is in our memories, what is in our heart. There is joy to be found in dreams, among friends, running a wooded trail.

I think we are all hardwired to be joyful, in the way the nocturnal moth is drawn to light. We seek because we are meant to, because there is meaning in what we find. What is more than true is that it’s a rough ride. Crashes, bumps, walls and invisible barriers. We batter against screens, unable to cease sometimes and rethink the plan. We drop, rest in place, and try again with greater purpose. And with this quixotic relentless valor, eventual success. We bump into happiness.

Donald Hall’s poem, although ostensibly about love, seems true of joy. It is all around, and although it is raining, we are not wet. We float in the happiness we seek.

“It is the night of the ocean, the third solitude,
a quivering which opens doors and wings.”
- “Serenade,” Pablo Neruda, Fully Empowered, 1967.

Pablo Neruda is one of my most cherished poets. His language is shift in definition for me. Pure catalyst. A new understanding limned to a familiar object, a brash surprise. His words name the mystery, the unspoken ache. The poem “Serenade” is on one level about the wide deep night, the pulse of quintessence, the place where sea and sea life meet in the whisper of moonlight. On another level, it is about intimacy, the elemental purity of what breathes in darkness. Just the words “the third solitude” stop me in my tracks. Does this third solitude the poet speaks of in “the night of the ocean” describe a deep undercurrent in what never sleeps, life itself? What are the other two solitudes? Those of earth and sky, perhaps the soul? The word in Spanish that Neruda chose is "soledad," which means solitude. Or does the word more delicately infer aloneness. The alone. I wonder. The subtleties of word meanings give rich and secret freight to poems, private readings.

The purpose of poetry for me is to disengage the reasoning mind. Word mandalas that rearrange the furniture of ordinary thinking - push the chairs to the wall, roll up the rug, let’s dance! - and in so doing, invite in a conscious, unchained meditation. The poets allow me to step out of the borders of the habitual and contemplate the wonders of the everyday. Apple, star, stubbed toe, love. So go on, today write a poem.

“A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval.”
- Mark Twain

My son has returned east for his second year at the Naval Academy, my daughter has returned to Yale for her senior year. What is left in their wake are the sandals and dog-eared books and rumpled leftovers of these few rushed, splendid weeks of summer. The last few “summers at home”… Today the empty rooms are chock full of ghosts and I close bedroom doors with a tightening heart: I leave untouched on his desk his scribbled notations on a song he was writing, her gym bag perfume remains tossed in a ratty running shoe. The dog eyes me with soulful sadness. Where has the pack gone?

Add to the unsettled feelings that out there in the big world it has been “that kind of day.” Crazy in spades. A day thrown in the spin cycle. Our digital world means not only do events happen in a split second, but so do their consequences. A banker pushes a wrong button and economies collapse. A clerk forgets an input function and someone on the cross-town bus loses an interview. Today’s energy is all about these human vortexes - action and reaction, cause and effect - and I am struck by the enormous amount of bureaucratic puppeteering it takes to resolve the most practical issue. Emails wing across the prairies.

As I stand in the midst of the wreck of my day, holding pieces of fallen plaster from what normally passes for a sane and practiced routine, I accept the chaos. I accept my inability to do much about it. I accept my family world is transitioning to one of individual independences. And with that thought comes a deep breath. Mark Twain is my inspiration. I can be comfortable with this chaos if I have my own permission. I imagine Twain’s remark refers to a more profound, inward approval - that of the conscience, the wrestling match between morality and an uneasy heart – not my struggle to find balance in upheaval. But for today, it is enough to just throw up my hands, yield to the crazy and be okay with it. I don’t have to fix the world. I can just be…comfortable with the crazy.

“and the body wouldn’t send out light from every edge
as a star does…for there is no place at all
that isn’t looking at you. You must change your life.”
-Rainer Maria Rilke, “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” Selected Poems, 1957

The imprint of poetry is visceral, assimilated by both the body and the brain. Just as the beat that moves our limbs in dance is also music in poetic syntax and meter. What causes our tongues and imaginations to fire like torches in the dark? Poetry. Strings of galaxies, pearls that spiral through our brains. The double helix, the Milky Way, inchoate dustings of fractured light. A poem is a doorway through. To where? You alone decide. Imagine the power in the pen of a poet!

This morning I gave to reading poetry, breathing air into my lungs. I have doubted all I know about myself as a writer this week. The drive and faith that pushes me through the unknown, across the dark crevasse, has abandoned me this day. And so, I read poetry. I allow the moment to find bottom.

Standing in my office, my hands take a book from the shelf and open randomly to an essay by Mary Oliver in “Blue Pastures,” a writing on the essence of the poet’s voice. Not limited to a discussion of the unique, the poetic vision or timbre of thought, Oliver writes of "one voice, above all others," that has the power to reach into our chest and pound us back to life. The poet’s handful of lines, formed long ago and for what cause, find purchase in darkness. Without awareness, or permission even, a spark is coaxed back, ever so gently. And we know it was that voice.

For Oliver, and for me, that voice is expressed in Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem, “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” a strange meditation upon a timeless marble statute. This is a poem that explores beauty; the holistic truth, thoughtful and unpremeditated - our transformation in the presence of utter beauty. Rilke writes in simple observations, identifying what is and isn’t revealed within the fluid shape of the sculpture; a tracery of close observation that rises like an incantation, intensifying like light itself. Truth from living stone. We anchor deep in the world, pinned to the stars.

When I finish Rilke's last stanza, quoted at the beginning of this essay, I surface - sucking huge gulps of language, raw but alive. The very best art has this effect on us. A spark revived, a truth that speaks our name.

"Hush, beloved. It doesn't matter to me
how many summers I live to return:
this one summer we have entered eternity.
I felt your two hands
bury me to release its splendor."
- "The White Lillies," Louise Gluck

I am deep in the quiet hours. The summer heat of August has abated behind the low clouds off the distant ocean. Almost an act of grace, my mind is tranquil, moving in loops down river banks of slow-moving thought. I have been thinking about the connections, the bonds of love. I began thinking about truthfulness between couples, saddened by the infidelity and break-up of the long marriage of a friend of mine. At the heart of their parting, a painful truth that neither wished exposed, but when brought to light, erased even the pretense of a loyal foundation between them. He played roulette and lost; she wished she'd never known. What was their truth?

The fundamental song in dramatic love is the aria. A melody and a response. A call and an answer. A cry and a caress. Two voices that sing their passion and expose the story of the human heart. In the intertwining melodies of song, in the weaving of dreams lie secrets, a wordless language. The call and answer determines the fate of the lovers. What we ask for and what we are given. What we offer and what is taken. Recently I saw a French film, "Coco & Igor," the story of the relationship - complicated and inspirational, secret and harsh - between Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky. A story of two muses, lives sacrificed to art. Who called out first, who answered? So much of their exchange remained wordless, physical, understood. Watching the interplay of their passion and the ways in which its fires fueled their individual commitment to art, I sensed the secret nature of this one kind of love. The affair was not important, what mattered was the bonfire of inspiration. There are so many arias, so many whispers we do not hear.

What does seem true is that even for the most ordinary of us, love is what we make of it. Are we lovers for the small, sacred moments of living, or lovers running from life's dangerous territories? Do we build or destroy? Love is only as permeable, as pure an elemental essence, as what we give of ourselves. What is demanded of us, how we value one another. Some of us love in sorrow or separation, others hold the hand of someone to comfort, others fall into that certain slant of light that becomes the gilded heart. Love unfurls. Place a rose on your kitchen table and watch the bloom drench the moment in grace. While most of us, unlike Coco & Igor, love for what love itself is, an act of the soul as transformative for the lover as the beloved, there is no denying elemental spark. Love is catalyst.

“That butterfly in physics
moves its wings
and something happens
across worlds.”
- “Arlene,” Sheryl Noethe, The Ghost Openings, 2000

There is mystery in the relationship of cause and effect. It is not, as science would convince us, a given. Sometimes there is an effect, with no discernible cause; a cause that boomerangs away without effect.

On the bluff today, McDuff and I encountered a solitary coyote slipping down to the stream for a drink. The thin body, fur color of driftwood, leaned into the shadows as we neared. I felt its eyes on us before we actually saw him. Duff smelled the coyote before that. After a moment observing us coming along the trail, the animal slipped down the bank. With the slightest rustle of grass it was abruptly gone, invisible amongst the tall canes in the marshy creek bottom. This encounter was unusual. The coyote is an animal accustomed to solitude, yet never alone. A call flung to the sky and another voice answers.

Solitude and aloneness are not the same state of being. I think of relationships in which the partners are not alone but their hearts are. A long distance sailor who though often in solitude on the world’s great oceans and seas, yet rarely alone. His days full of adventure and dreams and his mind filled with the voices of those he loves. The coyote challenges me. Dig my hands into the earth, define my own life. I am searching for the elusive. The single beat of a butterfly wing that might, as the poet says, move worlds.

McDuff stares into the reeds ferociously. The coyote is gone even as he hopes it is not. As the dog and I head away from the river, his ears perk for another exciting encounter. I think what the dog does is worth imitating. He does not stamp the present moment on the next. The coyote has come and gone and there may be nothing but bees in the larkspur, but tigers might lurk around the bend and wouldn't that be grand?

“We have met the enemy and they is us.”
-Pogo

A week or two ago my phone rang at the crack of dawn. (Children and emergencies have no time zones.) My daughter, fully distraught, had found herself in an academic crisis during an intensive summer science course. Being my daughter, her first response was to emotionally dissolve. I am her “safe place.” I know from experience that within a day, perhaps just hours, she will have vented the bad stuff and settled down into her ever-so-capable cranium and begun to solve her way out of whatever dilemma she has found herself in.

But what greets me on the phone is a serious wobble. The world is out of tilt. Here we go, I think. I can sense the tears trembling within her words. But for the first time I am not whirling around in her tornado as I usually am, but listening, knowing she is far more equipped to handle this than she realizes. That she can, and will, resolve things in a positive way, and soon. In my double-decade span of parenting, I’ve come to call this resting within crisis “the sweet spot” - when the right touch somehow finds the right wisdom and lands perfectly in the heart.

Sure enough, within a few hours she had recouped her composure, contacted the professor, and together they unearthed a massive classroom computer error. I enjoyed the rest of my morning quiet in my office, content to watch the rain, thinking how, as Pogo so cannily observed, we are our own worst enemies. Perhaps this "supportive detachment" is an echo of the universe toward chaos amongst our human souls on earth?

We are more equipped to handle life than we realize.

“The angel, ‘Yes we have met…
My gifts have human faces
hieroglyphs that command
you without yielding what they mean.’”
-“At the Well,” Marge Piercy, The Moon Is Always Female, 1984

Let's talk about bravery in the most ordinary of circumstances. Not heroic courage, but the quiet inner courage that lays the brickwork of character. Courage to do the right thing, tell the truth when it would be far easier not to, face the things that cause trepidation in your heart, keep going when you find yourself discouraged. There comes a point when you’re done being scared, and finally, you decide to “be the buffalo,” as Donna Brazile, a Washington DC political consultant, puts it. She is referring to the words of Wilma Mankiller, a High Chief of the Cherokee Nation, describing the difference between cattle and buffalo in an approaching storm. The cows, it seems, will stampede off ahead of the storm. Run themselves into the ground, exhausted. The buffalo however will turn and face into the storm, plunging straight through it. The point is not lost on me. When all hell breaks loose, better to be the buffalo and break through – there’s daylight on the other side.

The line of poetry that caught my thoughts today is rich in puzzles. I love the idea of human faces as hieroglyphics, the idea of the indecipherable as a gift. Destiny is shaped in the palms of these angels, pounded like clay.

Great determination and vision is required to create anything of ourselves in this world. And then there is the fortitude to see it through. To accept how much is beyond our control. We do all that we can and then release our dreams along with our apprehensions. As fear is released, ideas catch the wind. Be the buffalo.