Tag: time

remembering our ancestors

“Haunted Farmyard” by Debbie Wetzel

Here’s the puzzle I did during the day on Halloween. This is the third stop on my journey around the Wheel of the Year by myself. I don’t have any pictures from past celebrations because in the past I spent this holiday with my ancestors, as it is a time when the veil between the living and the dead thins and they are remembered. I visited cemeteries and did research. They feel closer to me this time of year.

Today, on All Souls’ Day, I am going to share a poem that resonates with me. My daughter found it posted on Facebook and shared it with me. It perfectly expresses my feelings about missing Tim these days.

Your heartbeat was my metronome
My compass
The rhythm I kept
The north I followed

Your arms were my home
My safety
My belonging
The one place I fit

Now I’m alone
I can’t keep time
I can’t find north
And there’s no way home

~ Racheal Bashaw
(No Way Home)

I live too far away from where our ancestors lie buried so I didn’t visit a cemetery. But I did something for Tim and created a memorial page for him on the Find a Grave website. Before he died we had discussed how we wanted to make sure we were buried near where we and our ancestors had lived most of our lives together, and I feel satisfied that I made that happen.

It is the beginning of a new project to add as many of our ancestors’ cemeteries to the database as I can. Since the public can see it without needing an invitation or a password it seems like it will be an excellent way to share the basics. Future descendants might stumble across it and be glad to know where to look for his grave. It won’t replace the pages for the ancestors I’ve posted on this blog; it will be an additional reference. And it’s impossible to know how long my blog will stay online after I’m gone.

And so another year has gone by.

the season of ghosts

“Graveyard in the Tyrol” by John Singer Sargent

Halloween is the border crossing into winter. ….. But winter is a time when death comes closest — when the cold feels as though it might yet snatch us away, despite our modern comforts. We still perceive the presence of those we’ve lost in the silence of those long evenings and in the depths of darkness that they bring. This is the season of ghosts. Their pale forms are invisible in bright sunlight. Winter makes them clear again.
*
Ghosts may be a part of the terror of Halloween, but our love of ghost stories betrays a far more fragile desire: that we do not fade so easily from this life. We spend a lot of time talking about leaving a legacy in this world, grand or small, financial or reputational, so that we won’t be forgotten. But ghost stories show us a different concern, hidden under our bluster: we hope that the dead won’t forget us. We hope that we, the living, will not lose the meanings that seem to evaporate when our loved ones die.
~ Katherine May
(Wintering: The Power of Rest & Retreat in Difficult Times)

when the moon is full

“The Harvest Moon” by Charles Melville Dewey

As well, you saw this morning on the hill
Her horse is in the stable now, the men are at the mill
She thanks you for the apples by her gate
And hopes that when the moon is full you’ll join her once again to celebrate
For she knows that the harvest has begun
The autumn feast rewards our time when
All is well and done
With the blessing of the sun
~ Dar Williams
♫ (All is Come Undone) ♫

a month of fixed facts

“Midsummer, Western Norway” by Hans Dahl

The foliage of to-day will not be denser or of deeper tints to-morrow, and whether in upland or in meadow you will find no new birds. Those that came to stay are now busy with their nests; those that tarried for a while, en route for more northern homes, have long since left us. June is a month of fixed facts, but they are none the less interesting because of this. What transpired a year ago, this day or week or month, or even half a century ago, is now being or will be re-enacted. But all was not reported then, and much has been slighted since, so that the danger is slight indeed that the record of any June day out of doors will be a twice-told tale.
~ Charles Conrad Abbott
(Days Out of Doors)

showing up as a blossom

“Twilight Landscape with Birches” by Anna Billing

When the apple tree blooms
the moon often shows up as a blossom,
paler than any of them,
shining over the tree.

It is the dead summer,
the blossoms’ white sister who returns
to see us
and bless us with her hands
so the burden won’t be too heavy when hard times come.
For the Earth itself is a blossom, she says,
on the star tree,
pale and with luminous
ocean leaves.

~ Rolf Jacobsen
(Night Open: Selected Poems of Rolf Jacobsen)

fleurs de printemps

“Spring Flowers” by Henri Fantin-Latour

What stood will stand, though all be fallen,
The good return that time has stolen.
Though creatures groan in misery,
Their flesh prefigures liberty
To end travail and bring to birth
Their new perfection in new earth.
At word of that enlivening
Let the trees of the woods all sing
And every field rejoice, let praise
Rise up out of the ground like grass.
What stood, whole in every piecemeal
Thing that stood, will stand though all
Fall — field and woods and all in them
Rejoin the primal Sabbath’s hymn.
~ Wendell Berry
(This Day: Collected & New Sabbath Poems)

what bird did you see

My dear sister-in-law, Fran, and I attended a Dar Williams concert on Tuesday, February 10, at the A. J. Fletcher Opera Theater, in Raleigh, with Seth Glier opening. We had such a great time listening to her wonderful story-telling melodies. The little anecdotes she shared between songs were very amusing and heartwarming.

The words to one tune in particular, from her new Hummingbird Highway album, resonated with me deeply, especially at this time in my life:

In the parking lot the dark becomes two panes of light
There’s a charcoal slash of ocean and a smoky plank of sky
Now they’re changing colors
Laurel green with alabaster,
Agate blue with snowy aster.
And as the blues are brightening and the cars are coming in,
You see a seagull weave a path upon the wind,
Like a thread that can begin and then begin
While the world just goes about its day
As the ground beneath you falls away
In this time when there’s no time, there is no place to be,
What bird did you see?

You think a goldfinch is enchanting and you know you told her,
Now a goldfinch lands above you like it’s on your shoulder,
Yesterday you saw a red-tailed hawk
Around a corner proud and still
Out of place, a sentinel.
And at the window when sparrows flew away,
A single cardinal seemed to know he had to stay,
He had to be the bright vermillion in the gray,
While the world just goes about its day
As the ground beneath you falls away
In the presence of this absence, was there one bright flash, a simple song, a revery
What bird did you see?

And You will feel the summer sun and autumn rays,
You will return to busy friends and busy days but now,
In this time between the here and the hereafter there’s a feather at your door,
Love will find its way,    
In the very life you have today,
You’ll go back to what you understand,
Maybe unbelieve
But tell me now, what bird did you see?
It’s okay to know it’s me.

~ Dar Williams
♫ (What Bird Did You See) ♫

violete

“Violets” by Ştefan Luchian

Within my reach!
I could have touched!
I might have chanced that way!
Soft sauntered thro’ the village —
Sauntered as soft away!
So unsuspected Violets
Within the meadows go —
Too late for striving fingers
That passed, an hour ago!
~ Emily Dickinson
(The Poems of Emily Dickinson, #69)