MindSpinner

The MacBook Pro comes equipped with a little camera, enabling video conferencing, and more relevantly, a little program called Photo Booth. You can launch this program, click the camera icon, and see yourself as you appear to the computer’s camera eye. (This can be unnerving. It is certainly revelatory, if you need an update as to how your neck is aging.) You can take a picture of yourself and manipulate it in iPhoto. I experimented with this briefly, sent a picture or two to a friend, and removed the icon from the crowded line-up at the bottom of the screen on my menu bar (or whatever it’s called).

My daughter discovered this tool within days (admittedly, I showed it to her), and one day, while I was out, she took more than 200 self-portraits and made a slideshow to burn to a DVD. At first I was a faintly repulsed by the vanity implied by the enterprise, but when she showed me her shots, I realized that she is an artist at work, both behind the lens and in front of it. Every teenager is in the business of defining a self, in refining persona(s). I was fascinated and impressed.

So this morning, I clicked down into my Applications folder and launched PhotoBooth.

No make-up. No shower and ministrations of hair dryer and curling iron to tame a light case of bed head. Just me up on a Sunday morning, reading the news and writing an email or two, with bright sunlight shot through the window warming one side of my face. If I sat just so, I could capture half my face in light, half in shadow, like the moon was the other day. This time, it was strong light, not deep shadow, that blotted features out, leaving only a lighted eye and a bit of curve around the mouth.

Last night on the phone, a friend asked me what metaphor had been mine that day. I had busily cleaned house and was not thinking then of metaphors. Instead, I was watching Off the Map on the laptop, curled up in bed with the cat at my feet, letting my mind float like a leaf down the darkening stream of evening. But this morning, looking at this image as I did the moon the other day, I know I’m all wrapped up just now in light and shadow. What one makes visible, the other renders invisible. There is a part of myself and a part of being that I can’t apprehend except in darkness where all the edges of things are erased and one slips into all. I have dreamed of flying, on a dappled grey mare with wings, and all on my own, low over fields just where the wind meets the grass, then over water, at the lake at home. I do not dream of flying during the day, but only at night.

In darkness all the words ever printed in black ink on white paper for a time mean nothing at all. I can know the curve of your face only by its touch, your thought only if you speak aloud. I will know the sound of your breathing, and mine. I can meet you - and the sky above, the grass beneath my feet, the night breeze - sans exteriority. I know the cat in the basket by the little sigh he makes in his sleep or the sound of his rough tongue raking his fur. And I am a part of the dark. I know unboundaried belonging to everything that is.

Light on the other hand, defines the otherness and distinctness of all around. The cat is a cat, gray and white, sleeping under the camera tripod at the window, where I took a pre-dawn picture of cresent moon and the morning star. I am the woman sitting cross-legged on the bed in front of the computer, looking through the lower half of her glasses to see the screen. This daylight world is a world full of nouns designating difference, of seeing and being seen, of walking in one’s own shoes one’s own way, of making impressions; even the shoes themselves make impressions. Text reappears on pages, on screens - the drumbeat of messages and ideas intensifies to cacophony.

Daylight is also the time to slip into the garden early; it is all the colors that life is; it is the dappled sea of leaves above on a lazy afternoon in the forest where it is possible to fall asleep midday and dream while a bee gathers pollen from a flower and flies away with golden thighs. Daylight illumines my children’s faces. When they were younger, I thought it beamed right through their faces, as if they were themselves dazzling little suns.

Light grows all things, sustains all things.

The brain takes light for a brush to paint all the beauty that we see - the endless sky, the wave arcing and pouring itself into the shore, the spring duckling cracking through its shell, the crystal under the microscope, the green rock I found 35 years ago in the desert, sitting now here in my garden. Likewise light tells all the horrors, of faces and bodies torn irreparably by wars, of the polar bear drowned. It reveals the concrete hives of our cities, their honeys and their stings, the labyrinths of our perceptions in art. Light tells our justice and our injustice. It supplies metaphors on which we rely for truth. Yet too, too much of it blinds, blots out, just as darkness does.

We are made to partake of the gentle revolutions of light and dark - these are a part of the gift, for we need both ways of knowing.

Gardening is in my genes, and it’s part of my upbringing. When I was very small, I helped my mother and my grandmother plant beans and corn. We planted them together, as the Cherokees do. We’d drop two or three grains of corn, then two or three white half runner beans, then corn again, alternating down the long straight garden rows, covering the seeds lightly with a hoe. The beans grow up the corn, using the corn for a bean pole. My great grandmother was too old to help then, but she sat at a window and watched vigilantly, and told us how we were doing it wrong. Months later, we’d sit on the front porch, catching the breeze off the lake, and string and snap the beans.

In adulthood, I’ve moved again and again, and planted again and again. Everywhere there has been dirt, I’ve left a garden. Here are some of my favorite choices.

For starting seeds in the house (under flourescent shop lights with grow light tubes): Jiffy 7 Pellets, in plastic trays (”greenhouses”). These are quick, easy, and I have an unreasonable affection for them My inner six year old gets a big kick out of pouring water on the pellets and watching them swell up. I’ve had good luck starting seeds with them, and I can readily tell when they’re drying out and need water. Bigger seedlings get tucked into Jiffy Peat Pots when their roots grow out the bottoms of the soil plugs. I found them this year at Lowe’s.

Annual flower seed: Morning Glory Minibar Rose
These are not the rambunctious, freely seeding morning glories my mother tries to keep out of her beans. Their tiny leaves look like variegated ivy, and their 2″ white-fringed pink flowers are vibrant and lovely. They climb the rails of my deck steps and adorn the lattice under the deck.



Fruit: Blueberry Sunshine Blue
Not only can this compact blueberry be grown in a pot, it’s also a good foundation plant, with tiny pink flowers in spring. I had planted three varieties of blueberries at my ex’s house, and Blueberry Sunshine Blue was the only blueberry variety I ordered when I moved here. The berries I managed to save from the birds were among the yummiest I’ve tasted.

Landscape Roses: Knockout Rose
I have never seen any plant grow faster, look healthier, or bloom more prolifically than Knockout Roses. I planted the original Knockout roses as part of the foundation landscaping in front of my house. People stop to complement them and to ask what they are. They bloom from May until hard frost. I like the foliage as well as the flower; new growth is a lovely burgundy; older growth is a healthy dark green. (One doesn’t buy these for a beautifully formed bloom so much as for color.) Mine have grown bigger than the catalogs say they do, though, and I should have given then twice as much growing room as I did based on what I’d read of their eventual size. I have three that are 5.5 feet tall and 4 feet wide. In front of the garage, they do a beautiful job of hiding the fact that the blinds I put on the garage windows came from another house and are a foot too short ;->.

Tree: Appalachian Spring Dogwood
So many wonderful choices, so little time and space. Because I loved the American dogwoods in my grandmother’s yard, I was happy to find the variety Appalachian Spring last year. I grow Chinese dogwoods, too, but it was nostalgia and love for the trees of my childhood that induced me to order this cultivar, developed from a tree resistant to anthracnose.

The moon hangs poised
half in light
half in shadow
just above the apex
of my neighbor’s roof
as if to balance there
in the coming blue of day.
Moon storms whip unseen
along the knife edge
of its stilled Picasso profile,
where light plunges
into shadow
and shadow disappears
half a face.

Comment: If you were to visit and revisit this site in the hours after I post a poem, you’d think you were losing your mind, for every time you look, something is likely to have been changed. I must have altered this poem twenty times today, and I’m not taking bets on whether the tinkering is done. A poem is done when it stops asking for every note to be sounded and heard again and again, until all are tuned true, until nothing could or should be different than it is. The whole business seems to be up to the poem. (I have stopped querying my poems about whether they are good poems or bad poems or mediocre poems or whether they are like anybody else’s poems at all.) Finally a poem will say, “You can go away now and do as you please, for I am what I am to be.” The poem is not thereby agreeing to leave me alone for good, of course. It has signed no contract. It reserves the right to be fickle and to demand my attention all over again at will.

All those who hanker after finality should know that all poems will be certifiably done when I am dead.

Sometimes living is walking at night, in deep fog; sometimes it is crawling, blindfolded, feeling the path, the way forward. Sometimes it is sitting very very still because any movement at all is not yet right. Sometimes it is dancing where you are. And sometimes, light falls on the way ahead so clearly that you can see to run.

As soon as the box office at the Kentucky Center opens this morning, I will have two tickets for the Kentucky Author Forum on April 6. The Forum will present an hour’s dialogue between Sue Monk Kidd and Jean Shinoda Bolen. I’ve had the Secret Life of Bees on my shelf for a couple of years, along with a handful of other novels in waiting. I haven’t yet picked up The Mermaid Chair, but I will today. It was Dance of the Dissident Daughter that leapt off a bookstore shelf into my hands in late January. (How else does one explain such things?)

Sue Monk Kidd’s background is strikingly like mine. There are so many connections at so many levels, so many shared images and arresting moments, that reading her story of awakening in The Dance of the Dissident Daughter at times takes my breath away, at times brings sudden tears. I will meet this woman. It’s not enough to listen on NPR when the forum is broadcast. I must be in the same room with Sue Monk Kidd and Jean Shinoda Bolen on April 6.

I started to write a little about my background this morning, to clarify, but I rather like existing here on this blog sans the context that once threatened to render me invisible and would, even now, define me as I am not. The costs of opting out of that context, though substantial and in part unjust, have been a small price to pay for being able to breathe and to make my way.

The box office is open. I can call for tickets now. The sun’s up. It’s cool out, but not too cool for gardening on this first day of a two-week spring break.

Noon Addendum: I bought the last two tickets available - at first there was only one, but then pleading produced another, and there had to be two. Those were tickets for the forum only, not the more expensive dinner. The dinner cost too much. I didn’t dare the dinner. Until the tickets were ordered and I had hung up. Why wasn’t I opting for the dinner and the option of further conversation. Because I don’t have anything suitable to wear? Because I don’t need to spend the money? Because I haven’t been out from under my rock in a very long time? Because I find the notion intimidating? Of course. All of the above. Not good enough reasons, dammit. If, once upon a time, I mustered the gumption to debate with Stanley Fish over his reading of a line of Milton, winning my point, then I can go to dinner with Sue Monk Kidd and Jean Bolen. I called back. I have dinner tickets.

The barn photographed
last month standing
at sunset stands now
smaller by half.
The western half lies
fallen, its rusted roof
covering its ruin
like a sheet drawn
over one dead.