Deepest infrared image of the Universe yet. Photo: NASA’s Webb Telescope, Creative Commons, some rights reserved
I once read Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time.” Heavy sledding, but there was this one bright moment when it all became perfectly clear. My hair stood on end for about five seconds, and then it all fell apart again. I am a big-time science wienie and was struck by an article in this morning’s EarthSky e-newsletter. My abstract that follows explains how 95% of everything is beyond our ken.
An English Major Explains the Universe
Astrophysicists tell us that everything we perceive, from the end of our noses to the edge of the universe, using all of our senses and all our high technology– that’s five percent of what there is. All the matter and the light by which we see it, is less than the tip of the iceberg. We might have suspected this all along.
Twenty-seven percent they say is made of dark matter, about which we know nothing except that it has mass. And all the rest, sixty-eight percent, that’s dark energy. And we know nothing about that except that it pushes everything apart better than gravity holds it together. If you think about it, we could have suspected that, too.
The astrophysicists think dark energy comes from supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies, is dark light that shines from dark stars, one might say. Easy to believe come nightfall that darkness outweighs the light; it pours out thick and heavy from shadowed woods. But the dawn still comes to chase all the darkness away.
Photo: stuart anthony, Creative Commons, some rights reserved
Being cold a lot is good for the ingenuity. There a lot of ways to get warm, both literally and figuratively. Ignore the folks from more blessed climes who try to tell you that it’s like hitting yourself with a hammer because it feels so good when you stop. So what.
Cold Village
I can’t lie; it’s not paradise. Winter is too long, too cold, with more than our fair share of snow (though not quite so much as in years past). I was reminded of it this week by a little thing.
The thermometer went to 30 below overnight, and didn’t rise above zero all the next day— old-school cold. And there I was again, dressing myself while standing on top of the heat vent.
I worry little about the cold these days, having a reliable furnace and sufficient funds to fuel it. It also helps to avoid going outdoors too much between Thanksgiving and Mothers’ Day.
But having enough heat passes for prosperity in a northern winter. Just ask anyone without it. Though a woodstove and woodlot can do in lieu of income. Nothing like cold feet up on a boot rail.
Winter got set into my bones when I was knee high. Out sledding, fingers so froze I cried as they thawed. Hypothermia from biking the paper route. Waking to an icy heat vent when the coal stoker crapped out.
Which it did on a regular basis– mid-century tech welded to a 1920s cellar monster. And walls filled with 1800s insulation, bricks stacked in between studs. You could hang a wind chime in front of the window draft.
These days two-incomes keep us warm and cozy, mostly, though it’s never safe to take that for granted. For instance, when sleet fell for a week straight in 1998 we had no power, no cook stove, no water. And all of the trees were falling.
Everyone poor and cold again–except, of course, the Amish. Luckily we found ourselves rich in friends, who took us in, and warmed by the way folks pitched in and helped out all over the North Country to make it whole once more.
It all comes back to mind, triggered by that moment— bare feet on a warn steel grate, warm air billowing up my bathrobe, looking out into the whiteness through hoar-frosted glass at the creaking tress.
Photo: ChrisGoldNY, Creative Commons, some rights reserved.
While I have sufficient opinions on the management of every aspect of life, I’m afraid I will never get the opportunity to run the world according to my designs because I am always discombobulated by the coming of morning. While I’m still trying to find my glasses and put on my pants, others have already grasped the reins of power.
Light in Other Windows
Sleepless again, I look for light in other windows. Who shares my waking — tapping at a keyboard, reading late on a lonely bed, or pacing a cold floor?
What might another night hold? Each inhabits a different village from each when everyone else lies deep asleep. The grocer remembers a woman’s scent;
a vet wakes up from heavy shelling; a pregnant woman rubs her back. For me, aging, I sleep little and lightly as if saving up for my eternal rest.
They sleep best who lack imagination, rise early, clear-headed, and set to work. Night owls waken one eye at a time, stagger up to brew coffee, then take it back to bed.
As a young reader I was strongly bitten by poems such as “We Are Those People” by Robinson Jeffers, and novels like “The Man in the High Castle” by Phillip Dick. The darkness and chaos of the last few years brings to mind their cautionary prophesies.
The Fortunate Village
All my long years I dwelt in peace. The bombs fell ever elsewhere. No gun pointed at me. My town knew no heaps of rubble and glass. Its siren wailed retail not wholesale disaster — chimney fire or stroke.
Nice to think that war might remain over the horizon: Korea, Vietnam, Panama, Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine — anywhere but home, this bucolic bubble bought by blood and treasure. But elsewhere exists nowhere, in time.
It’s Newton’s third law of motion; only luck defers the equal, opposite reaction to drones, missiles, bombers, napalm, the Trail of Tears, the slavers’ lash. What rough beast awaits — or worse, already tracks our scent?
This dark America, bloated into empire, learns to love its lies, harkens to hate. Its hoarders heap up wealth, heedless of the heated stares of the huddled poor, the vengeful glares of humiliated foes. They wait only for the wheel to turn.
The geese and the leaves, the last few weeks before winter conquers all have always been tinged with melancholy for me. Veterans Day commemorations conflate in my mind with the autumn Moratorium days during the Vietnam War when we marched by the thousands and read the names of the dead all through the night among the fallen leaves. We’ve moved on to other wars since; it seems sometimes we always will.
Armistice Day
All day warbirds prowled the horizon – F-35s from Burlington, Reaper drones from Hancock. A distant rumble, or a shining dot at the head of a streak of vapor. Who’s the target, walking now unknowing underneath the crosshairs?
The winds war too, pushing sun, then cold rain. Squadrons of geese assault cloud battlements rising south of town; their clarion cries carried over miles of forest and river say, “We’re leaving; snow will bury leaves that lie now where the fell.”
All day more rise up; flotillas pack the river: Canada geese, snow geese, quitting cornfields to fill in behind the throngs flown ahead south. Cranes, swans, ducks, heron: all know to be away. A starling murmuration twists over new-baled hay.
At Bayside, at the end of the river trail, little flags fly on veterans’ graves, crops grown up on battlefields of this century and the last. Once World War II vets fired salute, and boys like me crowded in for brass, later I marched instead, naming aloud all of the dead.
The vets who now salute and I share a graying age, done with battles, with labor, autumn cold in bone, lucky really, to be above the stones. The calling geese, the fallen leaves, now we know in keener ways. Once we go beneath the stones, stones alone get final say.
Photo: Jeff Hart, Creative Commons, some rights reserved
Reading Michael Pollan has reoriented my brain a little as regards who’s the boss of me. He reckons a mysterious vegetable intelligence has been breeding us all the while we have been breeding plants. We are symbiotic in ways we hardly recognize. No matter, I have my own reasons to serve.
Laying in the Bulbs
Who profits as we propagate roses, daffodils, apple trees, corn, forsythia, mountain ash – the edible, the inedible? They do – the plants.
That’s why they raise us, seducing us with beauty, alluring aromas and tastes, trippy alkaloids. So we become their legs, spreading them everywhere.
We breed them up, redoubling their hold on us– corn growing ever bigger and sweeter as it migrates from Mexico to Midswest to Northeast.
Apples swell and sweeten from crab to honeycrisp. Cannabis grows danker, stickier, bursting with resins to better discombobulate the hybridizing herbalist.
Daffodil, paperwhite, jonquil–spring heartbreakers– a bag of mixed bulbs and a bag of bone meal cost less than lunch at the diner. Well, not counting the digging.
Who cares what green mind directs me to grow them? Laying in these early bloomers, buttery as April sun, is just the way I spit in the eye of looming winter.
In the last few years, objective circumstances have not been particularly joyful, and yet joy breaks through regardless. That is because joy has nothing to do with circumstance.
Looking at Light
Pain carves deep so the body might survive. Clear cause, clear effect, lesson learned. But not so with joy, which arises when it will, responding to the look in someone’s eye, to late light on the bay, to a far hillside in peak fall color.
It transforms the everyday, awaiting only one’s awakening. It comes not from outside, rather from within, arising from attention, from opening to the moment. Look at that light where tiny motes of dust are dancing. Just beautiful.
Photo: Jack Bones, Creative Commons, some rights reserved
My night vision is getting too poor to enjoy this form of meditation from the driver’s seat, but there is a special form of peace to be had running down a smooth empty highway in the middle of the night. It is one of those times that rhymes with every other time you’ve looked out into the night from a moving vehicle, from childhhod ‘til today.
Driving at Night
Driving at night is the American form of meditation. While a far-off station plays music low on the radio the mind freewheels, sorting out the day then putting it away.
Conversation in the car at night is like Quaker meeting, where long spells of silence create space for one thing that really needs to be said, then after miles of reflection comes the response.
The car at night is asylum, personal space, intimate. The hectic routine melts away, making a way straight and smooth as this four-lane highway through the heartland.
“Each year the students come and go like geese, pilgrims passing…” Photo: Bill Gracey, Creative Commons, some rights reserved.
Somehow I never managed to share this poem from “Light Year” on Facebook or in this blog. I come back to it now because it is central to the themes of my work-in-progress, “The Other Village,” a volume of poetry focused on the village and town where I have lived since 1957. It is more personal than my more descriptive pictures of life in the village over the decades, taking a look inside my family life. There are a few other previously published poems that fit into “The Other Village” as well. I guess it will need to be titled “The Other Village: New and Selected Poems.”
Elders on Sunday
When the elders come forward to lay hands upon their newest sister, the pews are left near empty. The congregants, grey and white as seagulls, lean in to hear the vows spoken, just as they have been spoken these past two hundred and some years.
After service, coffee hour and cleaning up, we come home to our empty nest in four acres of second-growth. The archaeology of a working farm is broken up by beech and pine, buried under sumac and vine, the dug well plugged with stone and rusted roof tin.
We settle on couch and chair with silver laptops open, me to edit an article, and you to post our little news to the feeds of friends. “Coffee?” I take your nod to the kitchen, fill the filter with local roast and lean against the sink to wait for water to whistle.
Watching our neighbor wrestle his pick-up, upsized for the life he used to lead, onto the road to town, I re-litigate this choice to stay put, rooted at the edge of rootless America. Here in this house a little too big for us, outside this village a little too small for us.
In the ’70s, we were ready to go. You proposed, “Cid and I could go Army on the buddy plan; you and Allen could live on base,” or, I countered, “We could move the whole shebang to Montana while Allen does his MFA and I set up a little press.”
We once thought a commune might raise a batch of kids all together, but then we bought this place instead — and baby made three. The collective scattered, the whole world moving off it seemed, while we stayed put to settle this nest.
You worked OB-GYN and I ran press on campus; you nursed on campus and I worked freelance, changing jobs instead of place until the girl grew, went off to sink her own roots into city streets. Natural for her to go; just as natural for us to stay.
Each year the students come and go like geese, pilgrims passing while we keep faith, keep house from falling into the cellar hole, keep going to high school musicals, gallery shows, meetings, church suppers, the movie house, the co-op.
“I have no thought of leaving. I do not count the time,” as Sandy Denny sang, except now and then, while waiting for the whistle, waiting for the brew to trickle through, before returning to place this mug of coffee by your side.
Bonus track: Sandy Denny singing “Who Knows Where the Time Goes?”
Note: published in “Light Year” 2019 Liberty Street Books
Detail: Cumulus clouds. Photo: Huha, Creative Commons, some rights reserved
During this time of seemingly non-stop bummers, of disease and unease, dreary with fear, a little drop of joy can feel like a revolutionary act.
Into High Country
When I head up into high country my doubts stay back in the valley. For miles around me a green kingdom of corn and clover extends, bounded by barns and sugarbush. Up above another world hangs, continents of cumulus broken by bright blue seas of sky.
The next turn runs up the High Peaks, up into the world of wind where cloud shadows dapple the shoulders of mountains, where bald summits of granite shine. If God so loved this world, why should I not? Having never seen God, only creation, it’s all I know of sweet shalom.
