ANOTHER WET MORNING

“The silence of too much winter,” I once wrote in a poem, and I might add, “the winter of too much wetness,” as I look out at wet leaf piles heaped in the backyard. A prediction of fog and more rain evokes in me a desire to visit a place I love — the desert of southern California. The feeling is further enhanced when I open a folder that contains copies of postcards my mother collected on a trip to California in the 40’s — cards on which paintings of the desert were shown. The paintings appear on linen cloth cards, and, in particular, I was drawn to two: one of smoke trees in a desert wash and another of Joshua trees jutting into a blue sky.

A great classic book about the desert suitable for the kind of droopy weather we’re experiencing was written by John Van Dyke. It’s simply entitled The Desert, and if you read this tome, you might feel like trading locales, swamp country for desert terrain, for at least a week or so. The author spent three years living in and studying the environment of the desert from a naturalist’s point of view, and he paints with elegant prose what is portrayed in the renderings on the postcards I inherited from my mother.

As I finish up a book of poetry I’m writing — some of the poems based on the desert in Khuzestan Province, Iran — I’m reminded of lines in the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: “The worldly hope men set their hearts upon, /turns ashes or prospers, and anon,/like snow upon the desert’s dusty face,/lighting a little hour or two is gone.” Since I’ve memorized many of the quatrains in the Rubaiyat, this verse particularly resonates with me because it reminds me of how our everyday pursuits center on vanity and of how much we avoid the desert places if we can. But it’s there that we encounter the Self and our need for a more spiritually centered life. 

I’ve lived in at least two desert places: El Paso, Texas and Ahwaz, Iran, and from 1983-2007, I made annual treks to southern California where the brilliant light often restored my body and spirit. One summer while we traveled to Palmdale, California from Lake Tahoe, which straddles the line between California and Nevada, I sat in the passenger seat of a rented car during a few hours’ journey and was inspired to write 20 poems about the desert places we passed through, e.g., a brief one entitled “Sage Advisory” and another “Near Cartago, California.”

The long green fingers of sage

reach, open-handed, upward,

unafraid of the brilliant sun,

but they are closed,

will store their brilliance

and open their fingers

 only in darkness

when the desert has cooled,

when the universe becomes a plant.

and “Near Cartago, California: Population 75”

Salt flats, fields of uncommon snow

blush at the edges,

brine shrimp wriggling pink.

Not a mile away

from the turn-off to Death Valley 

Joshua trees suddenly jut up,

old men with arms linked,

standing too close to each other,

grousing in the sunlight.

And as I write this, the sky refuses to clear, so I continue going through my mother’s postcards, envisioning her delight… and loving that she, an intrepid adventurer, taught me to appreciate desert life.

LOSING LEAVES

Years ago when I lived in Limestone, Maine during a bleak winter, I spent many icy days indoors, watching snow fall and huddling near an old oil stove that valiantly tried to heat one room of a drafty farmhouse apartment. To amuse myself, I listened to 45 rpm records of Tchaikovsky's works on a small record player and memorized quatrains of the Rubaiyat of Omar Kayaam, a book to which my father introduced me at an early age. It was a comforting exercise, and today I'm surprised how many of the quatrains I recall, especially at odd times; e.g., at breakfast on a winter morning a few days ago .

I suppose the sight of a backyard covered with brown leaves incited the memory. A live oak in the yard seems to shed year 'round, and the leaf-strewn yard brought up the lines: "Whether at Naishapur or Babylon, /whether the cup with sweet or bitter run,/The wine of life is oozing drop by drop,/the leaves of life are falling one by one." The Rubaiyat is filled with nostalgic, philosophical quatrains that cause me to wonder, now, why on earth a 19-year old girl would memorize lines that could be associated with aging? I also think that some strange prophetic wavelength from the universe urged me to memorize almost an entire book devoted to the literature of a mideastern country that I'd one day live in for two years.

A few hours after the lines from the Rubaiyat came to my mind, I was dusting bookshelves and came across the diary of my Godmother Dora, who had literary inclinations, like all Greenlaws seem to have (my mother's maiden name). A short notation for Wednesday, April 7, 1943 read: "When we become old, we lose our leaves more freely. A sudden sorrow and we're nearly stripped. The older we are, the greater the toll. But how we do hang on to the leaves—symbols of life, I suppose—and how do we slow down the death of final leaflessness?"

When I left Sewanee a few months ago, the woods and yard in front of our home had begun to fill with leaves—large yellow and rust-colored ones—and we called a few weeks ago to see whether they had been raked and carried away for the winter. Unlike the shedding live oak in our Louisiana backyard that requires constant raking, the trees at Sewanee deposit enough leaves for only one raking. I've written many poems about falling leaves, and most of them seem to echo thoughts that Dora wrote put her pen to, the latest one being in my book of poetry, Everything Is Blue, published in 2012. The poem is entitled "I Saw the Yellow Leaves Fall Down,

the tulip poplar's obeisance to rain gods,

fluttering hope as they perished,

soon, to be a gold carpet

woven of curling deaths,

brown-tipped faces in the garden,

having flown their last flight

in the arch of a summer sky,

having lived through the end of drought,

brought down before their time

by dark rain and changing light,

a shimmering gift to Him

who moves all leaves,

who cradles them to sleep

in the wet grass

glistening in a new wood,

in the innocent air

of a perfect sky."

And on a positive note, Carole Sevilla Brown writes that leaves provide a home for toads, ladybugs, and other creatures that kill off aphids. Beds of leaves also harbor butterflies during the winter, in larva stage or otherwise. They make natural mulch and retain soil moisture and warmth... sufficient facts to inspire me to leave the leaf bed in my backyard awhile longer!

THE NEW YEAR

The last table top Christmas village has been put away, and the Norfolk Island pine has joined a sister Norfolk on the patio, still gleaming with the few silver icicles left on its branches. The New Year has settled in with threat of rain.

This morning, as I was meditating on the New Year, an old quatrain I once memorized during a shut-in winter I spent in Maine, came to mind. It’s from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, an odd rhyme that somehow cleared the heavy humidity in the morning atmosphere:




“Now the New Year reviving old Desires
The thoughtful Soul to Solitude retires,
Where the White Hand of Moses on the Bough
Puts out, and Jesus from the Ground suspires [draws a deep breath]…”

I could almost see Moses’ hand on a bough of the Norfolk pine outside and hear Jesus drawing a deep breath at the condition of the world into which he was born and that hasn’t altered much since his birth.

Sunday, I preached a homily that included the thinking of a man called Rauschenbusch in Saving Paradise who identified six kinds of sin that combined to kill Christ: religious bigotry; graft and political power; a corrupt legal system; mob spirit and mob action; militarism; and class contempt and class divisions [not to mention family divisions necessitated by greed]. Same old, same old, as far as I can observe, but it’s strange that these sins are hardly mentioned as faces on the totem pole of sin nowadays.

However, we draw a deep breath, and the “thoughtful Soul to Solitude” retires to contemplate the mystery of the season and move on, attempting to do those things that would go undone and might be lost if we don’t do them – teach, write, heal, love, forgive, and as I said in the homily, “disseminate the hope that our spiritual journey will end unified with the heart of God.”

And the resolutions? Well, my thoughts support the words of the Archbishop of Canterbury, who in his Advent letter to the Anglican primates, said: “What we aspire to as Anglicans is not to be a federation of loosely connected and rather distant relatives who sometimes send Christmas cards to each, but a true family and fellowship in which we share our hopes and know that we are responsible for each other’s well-being and integrity before God…”

Amen! ‘Seems to me that in this season of “thoughtful solitude,” we’re invited to become more engaged with the people and the life around us…to be useful and to help others get on course in their spiritual lives instead of engaging in the six categories listed above.

Note: The above translation of the Rubaiyat was derived from Fitzgerald’s English version in a beautiful book that includes quatrains translated in English, French, and Farsi, which I brought back from Persia in 1975. The miniature was rendered by Hossein, Behzad Miniatur.