Wild Apples

Knowing Is Not Perception

Knowing Is Not Perception

I’ve known her - like forever,
But knowing is not perception.
Watching, as in a far-off place,
tears spilling from her eyes,
I wondered if I had ever
even tried to be so close.
I wondered,
Can we stand such familiarity in our
Narrow, self-centered world?

“Mother was alcoholic, and…
and…I didn’t really know what that meant
to me. Until just recently.”
This said at 56 years old.
“It changed us all, my brother, my sister
And me.
And when I saw her, down in Arizona
As she lay dieing – caught in the consequence
of her illness,
I couldn’t believe the pain I felt.”
Years later, here and now,
the tears still flow. Sadly,
A permanent part of her everything.
A permanent unknowing.

She wiped them away and I listened.
Bless my heart, I listened! I didn’t offer solutions,
I didn’t offer advice – for once in my selfish life,
I just listened.
Can we stand familiarity in our
Narrow, self-centered world?
Can we ‘just listen’?
Can we bear to hear the ‘unknowing’ of our friends?

Spring Wonder

Totally amazing!
Unbelivingly awesome!
Almost too small to be called a tree
the April buds winking at me
as childlike eyes,
wrinkling their noses
under the slight skiff
of Spring Snow.

Each pale green bud
covered with cotton white.
Hundreds and hundreds;
touched by some hidden hand
with a brush filled with
snowy flakes.
Viewed by one whose breathe is caught
in a moment of disbelief.

As sand, or seashells, or flakes of white
we inhabit the buds
on which we are placed;
winking and loving and
Emblazing
our corner of this earthly
twig.
Take a deep breath and wrinkle your nose!

Sue

A Few Favorite Things

A Few Favorite Things

Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens
Bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens
Brown paper packages tied up with string,
These are a few of my favorite things.
“A Few of My Favorite Things,” from
Sound of Music
The Easter Season is a time for me to remember some of my favorite things; raindrops on roses and sitting close to my parents on Easter Sunday in our old “upper room” church in Freeport, Illinois, seeing everyone wreathed in smiles and shaking hands as we left the church to go home to a delicious Easter meal.
This time of year is so special to so many different cultural groups – it is New Years for my Persian friends and Passover for my Jewish friends. In all cultures the signature of God’s forgiveness and benevolence in the promise that Spring brings. Aren’t we lucky to once again see the robins return and hear the woodpecker beating out his rat-a-tat-tat love call on our metal stove pipe. I look out my door and just feel the spark in the air – the spark of life as all dormant things begin to thrust their way through the damp earth.
Puppies are born and nuzzle the mother, anxious to be out and about in the greening of nature. Mothers wrap their newest babes in warm sweaters and hats and walk with purpose and vitality; thump, thump thumping along and making a song of their own. Young boys with kites and girls without mittens. Fathers with new cars and a house full of kittens, small tiny flowers push through the earth, new clothes, new day, new start, new world. Ah, Spring. An everlovin’ Wild Apple for those who see.

Love

Love. What other day would be more fitting on which to discuss love? Valentine's Day - Named after a Roman Catholic saint whose life's work remains almost unknown. But don't tell that to the wives of America! Mr. Man better come home this day with flowers, candy, a beautiful trinket, or at least dinner out on the town! Ah love - it has a price,it seems!

Made important by chocolatiers and greeting card manufacturers, Valentine's Day has become one of our favorite holidays. Why - because of love, love, pure love. Who can argue with a day set aside for lovers to play nice with one another. A day to remember, if one has moved beyond chocolate and flowers, that the most important part of a human life is in the love and friendships we hold dear.

This is a day for elderly lovers, like my husband and me to remember why we married in the first place, and to be happy that our love has survived years and years of trials, tears and happy times. What more can we ask? It is the day for young lovers to go to the door with pounding heart to meet that someone who stands there with one red rose. Ah me! Love!

Henry Thoreau, a confirmed bachelor and things philosophic has few words about love and those I found are hard to interpret. Was he shy? Was he stilted by a New England stiff Christian upbringing? Did he fear that such entanglements would cause him to have less time for his Higher Laws, or did he avoid love because he knew he had tuberculosis.? We’ll never know for sure, but I think he might say yes to all of the above. Why? That is the question and the answer may be in his view love was worth more than just chocolate and flowers. Read on:

"Love is a thirst that is never slaked. Under the coursest rind, the sweetest meat. If you would read a friend aright, you must be able to read through something thicker and opaquer than horn. If you can read a friend, all languages will be easy to you. Enemies publish themselves. The friend never declares his love." Mar. 28 1856.

On Nov. 22, 1858, now 41 years old he says, "Here is an author who contrasts love for "the beauties of the person" and that for "excellences of the mind as if these were the alternatives. I must say that it is for neither of these that I should feel the strongest attraction. I love that one with whom I sympathize, be she "beautiful" or otherwise, of excellent mind or not." I wonder if he is not thinking of his friendship with Lydian Emerson.

Jan. 23, 1854. " Love tends to purify and sublime itself. It mortifies and triumphs over the flesh, and the bond of its union is holiness."

I think Henry would agree with Paul and his words on love in I Corinthians 13:4-13 "Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in he truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all thing, endures all things. Love never ends. ... For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part, then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now, faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love."

Or, as Rumi said,

"Inside a lover's heart
there is another world,
and yet another." ...and another. Love is and will be. Happy Valentine’s Day to all.

Headwork

Headwork -
Those times
We muse and moan
Sinking into
Another realm of
Apathy or grace.

Headwork -
That place
Dedicated to thought
But lacking such
When the fleet’s in.

Headwork -
Heartwork.
Soulwork
When does it
All come together?

Headwork - When I
Listen to the cello
Playing in my head,
Sending a message,
a surge of inspiration.

Like walking into
A great cathedral,
Or seeing the hand
Of a newborn child.
We take an unexpected breath...

We are the everyday
And we are the eternal.
Take time for each.
Write the truth
As it seems.

- Sue Petrovski

Dreams

1
A friend sent me a variety of definitions of the word, “liberal” from his1858 American Dictionary of the English Language, by Noah Webster. Springfield, Mass. Perhaps it has greater breadth of meaning than the term as we use it today:

”liberal (noun) one who advocates greater freedom from restraint,
especially in political institutions.

Liberal (adjective)
1. Of a free heart; free to give or bestow -- as a liberal donor.

2. Generous -- a liberal donation.

3. Not selfish, narrow or contracted; embracing other interests than
one's own -- a liberal mind.

4. General; extensive; embracing literature and the sciences generally
-- liberal education.

5. Free; open; candid -- liberal communication

6. Large; profuse -- liberal discharge of matter by secretions or excretions

7. Free; not literal or strict -- liberal construction of law

8. Not mean; not low in birth or mind

9. Licentious; free to excess (Shakespeare)”

When I say that I am proud to be a liberal, I really mean it. It’s meaning, as I see it has become so laden with sneers and challenge that today the word ‘liberal’ is almost like the N word – a word that we each see in different lights.

My light says that to be liberal one sees a man-made civilization that, unlike a God made civilization, is not perfect. We see the flaws and believe enough in the human race to 'dream' that some of these flaws might someday be eliminated. It is a vision of a Utopia, somewhere off in the distance that makes us itchy to get closer. It is Thoreau's dream of men leading more profound lives, and his impatience with hindrances to that goal.

When I look at my conservative friends, and here in my state I have many, I see a fear in their eyes brought on by reluctance to welcome changes. They are fearful of a black president. They fear a woman president. They are afraid of communicating with leaders of countries they see as our enemy. They are afraid that to challenge big business will mean the loss of their own small place on the hierarchy. They accuse liberals of wanting to live in a "Nanny State." They seem to believe that dealing with life is a kind of game and if one knows the rules one can win - win what? Or if I fashion myself and look like someone who has power, then I will have power.

They label, distort and do whatever is possible to maintain life and our society as it is. We are told we should be grateful to live in America. We are! We are told that man needs to stand on his own two feet. Agreed, but put shoes on him first, and respect him/her as an equal thereafter, not as a charity case.

Change may not always be good, and mistakes will be made, but the idea of working toward a goal, like Henry's, of a better life for all, is my motivating dream. On the other hand, perhaps I just don't understand that the conservatives also have a dream. What IS that dream?

A depressed TV commentator said recently that the man of the dream never seems to win - the machine always does. He mentioned those dreamers who like John F Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King were killed and those who were silenced by election –Adlai Stevenson, Eugene McCarthy, etc etc etc.

Did the steam engine thwart Henry Thoreau’s dream? What did Henry see as the impediments to his dream? He mentions the posturing, sterile, phony attitudes that passed as polite society. He questioned the idea that money is any answer to a rich way of life. He cautioned us to look deeply at what we see - noticing the insignificant, the details of our world. And he asked us to look forward, beyond where the truth is, but where it 'comes trickling into this lake..."

His attitude toward the Irish, and other less fortunates, was not scorn, but a frustration that they didn't or couldn't see a better life. He gave the Irish boy a coat. What is wrong with believing that if we give a man a pair of shoes and an education that that, somehow, will build a better civilization? Shoe by shoe, classroom by classroom - As dreams go, it's a decent dream.

However, we need to ask: What is the Conservative's dream? And we need to listen. We're listening........

The Free Market

Tell me about the free market system. Where is it? It surely is not the system we have in the USA. Substities to farmers, small business loans, substities to oil companies, regulation of monopolies, and addressing issues that threaten the market forces - all of which occur frequently and are NOT a part of a free market economy.

Laissez Faire is a dream - not a reality and let's admit it. Anytime things are not running right, who are the first to the trough - businesses that have gotten into messes never refuse a government hand out. It is only when that hand out is given to others that it is heavily criticized. "Our medical system is "good enough". Our schools are "Good enough".

We have always been a mixed economic system - the government builds roads, maintains an educational system, justice system, military system and intervenes when business in the country needs to be stimulated.

I am happy to be an American. However, I don't think we have a perfect world here, and being the liberal I am proud to be, I am not, like some, satisfied to be happier than the people in Darfur or other places in this world. Count my blessings. Yes, I do. Count other peoples blessings - here is where I foul up. Liberal means in one sense that one believes that certain activities will make things better for all. The Conservative says "they're good enough now. Don't worry about the discrepencies." I guess I'll never learn.

.

From “The Perch”

I climbed up
to the perch, and this time looked
not into the distance but at
the tree itself, its trunk
contorted by the terrible struggle
of that time when it had its hard time.
After the trauma it grows less solid.
It may be some such time now comes upon me.
It would have to do with the unaccomplished,
and with the attempted marriage
of solitude and happiness

from a poem by Galway Kinnell, More Selected Poems, 2000

Galway Kinnell is one of the foremost American poets of the the century. Like only a few rare individuals, his is a hermetic wisdom. It is all encompassing, real unto itself, needing no further explanation. Who of us does not know and weep inside at the truth of our own personal trauma – that time when we know what has not been accomplished with the life we have led.

How can I meld my need for solitude, my fear of loneliness, and my very
American demand that I also be ‘happy’.

Just knowing that we all wrestle therein is to be remembered.

That Breathless Moment

I take a breath
…it is THE moment,
that moment when
unexpectedly,
silently, a tiny brilliance
shines on truth.

Before that moment
Truth is missing the h
It is Trut.
In that moment,
In the blink of an eyelash,
The sense of
Truth
appears.

It
Stays but a flash
Perhaps it was not
At all
Suddenly I know
That that breathless moment
Could have sliced past me
As light chose it’s path,
it’s particle, it’s ray.
But it didn’t.

It is not the beautiful sea,
It is the beautiful
It is not the joy of a child,
It is the joy.
It is not the glory of the sunrise,
It is the glory.

Beautiful, joyful, glorious,
awe-inspiring, unbelievable.
I take a breath. This is the moment.

The Sound of the Chimes at New Year’s

Waggling her finger at my nose she smacked her lips a few times to dislodge the dryness of age and said, “No, and no no! Don’t be afraid to have experiences. Experiences help you solve problems"

Someone - can’t remember who - said this once and it stuck in my brain.”
“I have often wondered if a good problem solver simply hangs her many
experiences, like chimes, in the breeze of the problem at hand and then
listens ever so carefully for a sound...what causes a particular set of
chimes to ring remains a mystery to me."

"Yes, somehow it works," she murmured as she resumed her knitting.

Lost in a reverie of the past, my old friend rocked in place, with me wondering if she was trying to remember who had given her this advice or if she had forgotten that I was sitting there in that single other chair near the fire. I let my glance go to her every now and then wondering if she wanted to add something to her thought and in the silence my own mind wandered. I tried to envision a world in which we could each hang our experiences on the line, let the breezes of our problems flow around them, and then listen for a chime to ring telling us how to solve our problems. How would that work? Does it work?

I’ve always believed that we had an undefined insight and intuition that when we choose to use it can pull us out of the bottom feeding position into a place of brighter light. I liked the picture that played in my mind of my experiences all lined up and waving in the breeze – of whatever problem I had and suddenly a chime of remembrance and solution would sound and show me how to make things pure and simple once more. And don't our problems come like breezes – all is calm and then suddenly the air around us is disturbed and whorling, like the sea when the air becomes heavy and the wind riles the waves.

What experiences should I consider putting on the clothesline of my life? The Alzheimer’s Death of my mother, for one. The courage of my father in his last battle and his words of comfort and love to me my whole life. Oh yes, grab the corner of a hankie here; loss is a terrific teacher. Add to that the experiences of every day of our lives, dealing with the broken bones and dreams of family life and inventing and reinventing ways to make life richer for ourselves and those we love. The experiences of my broken dreams, my failures, my errors of judgment are hung there too – even those I prefer to keep private. The largest experiences that need to be hung high and dry are those options I chose to ignore, those experiences I chose not to experience and those things I neglected to do. Sadly, these are unchangeable. I These are opportunities that are lost and gone forever.

What experiences caused me to turn to writing and reading? I can remember the feeling that I was no longer accomplishing anything with my life – my children were grown, my retirement loomed, my parents were gone and it almost seemed that I was no longer of any importance to the world. Grab a corner of this experience and hang it up good and high for it is perhaps the most profound life-altering experience of my life – I discovered that my worth is found in my self – not in what others think of me. The problem of my later years was solved with this ringing of the chimes of experience, and I began to work to make myself something more than I was. If I was to live, should I not fashion that life to its best and highest meaning? I wanted no life of quiet desperation.

My old friend was right. The experiences of my life had shaped the solution to many of my problems. One can sometimes almost hear the chimes when the light of clarity appears. It is a glorious sound!

May the chimes of clarification and illumination ring for you many times in the new year!

Happy New Year!