Glenda Burgess Books

WINTER TREES
by William Carlos Williams

All the complicated details
of the attiring and
the disattiring are completed!
A liquid moon
moves gently among
the long branches.
Thus having prepared their buds
against a sure winter
the wise trees
stand sleeping in the cold.

'Tis is the season of quiet. We slip deep into the heart of who and why and where we happen to be. This lovely small poem, like so much of Williams's work, frames nature in mideas res. In the midst of narrative, without preamble. In "Winter Trees," Williams sketches an orchard, emptied of fruit. Nature at her turning point in the cycle of do and done.

Activity and rest. We enter the deep cold months of waiting in stillness. The silver season of the "liquid moon."

I invite you into winter. Into the space between moments and years. The break among days, marked by small distances between stars. I invite you to the quiet and the stillness, to stand comfortably with me in this fallow space; in the geography that is love, both present and gone. As many of you know, the place others hold in our lives and the space our feelings occupy is important to me. I believe we find ourselves and welcome truth into consciousness in the pause between event and stillness. All life requires space to rest and regroup. People in particular need a pause to gather and consider, and most of all, breathe beauty. Breathe in the essence of the present.

Bone-white moments of clarity, fragile barrenness, lush extravagant joy, tenuous fulfillment. We take our experiences up even as plants absorb oxygen, slowly. We absorb living on the broad leaves of our soul. And with growth, even as the wise trees, we collect ourselves in stillness. An expanse of stillness.

Do we know where we stand as this year "disattires" of its days? I am not sure that I do, not yet anyway. The time is now, to stop and abide the hours. In the quiet comes the story of what has been, and what we hope will be. Barren branches fill with winter moon as we celebrate or lay to rest what has come before. Tomorrow seeps into awareness. Now, in the time to dream.

To all my readers - dear friends one and all - thank you for a rich and meaningful year. I am grateful we travel the stars together. See you in the new year.

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I don't think I am old yet, or done with growing. But my perspective has altered - I am less hungry for the busyness of the body, more interested in the tricks of the mind. I am gaining, also, a new affection for wood that is useless, that has been tossed out, that merely exists, quietly, wherever it has ended up. Planks on the beach rippled and salt-soaked. Pieces of piling, full of the tunnels of shipworm. In the woods, fallen branches of oak, of maple, of the dear, wind-worn pines. They lie on the ground and do nothing. They are travelers on the way to oblivion... Call it Rest. I sit on one of the branches. My idleness suits me. I am content. I have built my house. The blue butterflies, called azures, twinkle up from the secret place where they have been waiting. In their small blue dresses they float among the branches, they come close to me, one rests for a moment on my wrist. They do not recognize me as anything very different from this enfoldment of leaves, this wind-roarer, this wooden palace lying down, now, upon the earth, like anything heavy, and happy, and full of sunlight, and half-asleep.

- WINTER HOURS by Mary Oliver

Mary Oliver's essays in "Winter Hours" contain thoughtful observations, detached and yet deeply intimate, marked by crisp, curious writings of what it means to grasp one's life whole. An organic, evolving theme. Oliver explores the ways human endeavor is a construct. A shelter for creative thought and action.

This idea of settling into one's life. Oliver stands before a cabin in the woods she has hand built. A private retreat she intends for writing but which over time has devolved into a little-used potting shed. She realizes she built the cabin not for work, for poetry, but for the sake of building. To construct something with her hands. The task completed, she lies in its humble shade among the blue butterflies, free to make use of it or not. It matters not at all. Her presence simply is, she tells us. A part of nature. Neither something proven or disproven in construct.

Oliver points out it is instinctive to examine life. To ponder what makes things work, what influences one thing to nurture another. The linking of ideas and experiences creates the future out of the past, and while we understand ourselves as part of the vast natural interchange of what lives and dies, we are still stricken by the secret wish to be beyond all that. Thus, we build, Oliver concludes. She adds wryly, "You can fool a lot of yourself but you can't fool the soul. That worrier."

To have built the house.

We voyage through our days lost in the work of working at life. As another year comes to its close, we take stock of our "constructs." Family, work, home, friendships. These complex symbols of the living we have done. Have we lived up to the soul's expectations? Have we lived strong and true, within the essential principles as nature would have them? Are there places we have followed the blueprints of a construct, not life?

Within ourselves is a potting shed in the woods. There we may rest "upon the earth like anything heavy, and happy, full of sunlight, and half asleep."

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