The Roses are Remembered: Land Songs

June 25^th marked a year since Douglas and I moved from our house in the woods to High Valley  The last time I posted here, I wrote about feeling overwhelmed with our responsibilities and with other complications regarding this legacy. Many people reached out to me in response to that post, and I have also felt encouraged to ask for help. Thank you, everyone! 

I have also fallen more and more in love with the gardens, and the plants have become my companions and teachers.  This is the first year I have observed closely all the myriad flowerings, beginning in late February with snowdrops and aconites; then came daffodils, tulips, periwinkles, and phlox followed by poppies, allium, and iris, and a yellow flower whose name I still don’t know with small five-pointed cups that bloom all up and down the stalk. (No, it's not mullein). Now is the season of lilies, bee balm, and daisies. 

Most mornings I am outside a little after six. I still go to the far side of the pond (where I have been breakfasting on blackcaps) to do chi gung on the dock. On my way back to the house I visit all the gardens, watering and weeding where necessary, but mostly just greeting everything, praising everything, feeling so grateful for the abundance of life and beauty.  

(Note: High Valley now has a retreat room for guests that includes use of a kitchen and the freedom to enjoy the land, gardens, pond, and trails. Get in touch with me through the website, if you would like to make a retreat.) 

My friend Tom Cowan encouraged me to sing the songs of the land that I hear. Inspired by Tom’s friend the poet JK McDowell who read at High Valley from his collection of ghazal,  Night, Mystery, and Light, I gathered some of these songs and put them in that form.  (12 syllables per line, 3 lines per stanza, 6 stanzas, each one able to stand by itself). I offer the result with gratitude to everyone and to this land. 

…the roses are remembered: land songs

here is the place where human and wild interlace

what is planted, what plants itself, what is tended

what unintended yet more perfect than your plan

the wild wood takes care of its own in its own time

windstorm, wildfire, flood shift its shape, take and give life

what humans make—then abandon—becomes ruin

year by year you grow more deeply rooted, your leaves

may fall or fly, you may wish you could go with them

but you stay here, storm-shaken or still, one more year

in the eyesore, weedy sandbox framed by cement,

you planted ornamental grass and columbine

I gave bladderwort, succulents, German onion

along the pond the frogs sing my song, note by note,

the redwings know their part; robins hear the song of worms

what is silent also sings, listen, your part waits

the one before you planted roses, then forgot

the way she planted everything then turned it loose

now back from near death, the roses are remembered.

PS: All you lovers of Maeve. She is still with me. She is with you. She gets around. From what I hear, the electronic version of the novels will soon be available.

I am in the midst of writing a mystery novel, also historical—set in 1960. Having fun with the characters, trusting the detective dimension will work.  I do like a challenge. Between garden plots and mystery plotting, I may not be posting here very frequently. Maeve and I do post on FaceBook and Twitter more frequently.

Elizabeth: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Elizabeth-Cunningham/137518912968862?ref=ts

Maeve:  http://www.facebook.com/maeve.rhuad?ref=ts

Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/EliznMaeve

Do keep in touch. How your gardens, literal or figurative, growing?

The Wild Edge: Pondering Succession

The sun has moved far enough to the north that early light now finds the far end of the pond. In early Fall, I’d left this spot for warm sunny places closer to the house and gardens. Now the first Spring flowers are gone, and the weeds are asserting themselves, as is the lawn, still mangy-looking from being replanted after the septic system was moved. It is hard not to look at the yard as I imagine guests might see it now that we are entering the busy season. As I do my standing meditation, I keep stopping to pull weeds. And if I manage to keep my body still, my mind is worse, writing do-to lists and shopping lists and wondering if the stink the squirrels left over in the attic over the gathering rooms will ever air out.

I haven’t yet learned how to manage living where I work—a beautiful, overgrown, under-endowed, falling-down place where my tasks include housekeeping, yard work, hospitality, program direction and facilitation in addition to my chosen professions of writing and counseling. At best, I am able to approach High Valley as a Zen Koan. Much better than thinking of it as a business with potential (how I am coming to loathe the word “potential”), a legacy I must save, or a burden I must bear. At worst, I just keep working compulsively till I drop—which I did the other day. I can’t quite bring myself to have a complete nervous breakdown, but my body will periodically arrange for me to be so sick I have to spend a day in bed.

The day I return to the wilder edge for my sunrise practice, I feel a huge sense of release. There is nothing here that needs my attention. There is everything here that rewards my attention. Here I am just another living thing, a transitory living thing. (How I am coming to love the word “transitory.”) Instead of composing to-do lists in my mind, I find myself pondering—an appropriate thing to do next to a pond.

Today I ponder succession, understanding at a new level how obsessed rulers, institutional leaders, family farmers, business tycoons or anyone with a corporate enterprise must be. Who will keep the empire, the church, the farm, the firm going? My husband and I are perhaps not very successful successors to my mother in-law’s small, vast realm. She had her own vision and vocation. But she did not concern herself with succession and left us with some very dicey situations to sort out (not something I can write about). For many years while she was still here, I kept her not-for-profit going with an eclectic Center that evolved its own rituals and culture. But I never made any move to institutionalize what we do here. I never so much as formed a committee. The Center at High Valley, which has hosted many beautiful, meaningful moments and events, is by its nature transitory. I don’t, in any sense, know what (or who) will succeed.

When I am at the wilder edge, I feel more at peace with my lack of success and succession. The natural world has its own succession. As a species, we have interfered with that order yet we are still borne along by forces beyond our control. As a transitory being I find that thought oddly soothing, a bit like a day of enforced bed rest.

Do you see yourself as being and/or having a successor? What is your definition of success? I welcome your ponderings. I also appreciate suggestions of topics for Maeve to address. Her turn next.

Since it is poem-in-a-pocket day, I will close with a couple of tanka (5-7-5-7-7)

buildings falling down
too many people, too few
gardens overgrown
a land vessel going down
us, hapless crew, sinking too

there are these moments
sunlight on worn hardwood floor
they could be enough
bloodroot blooming amidst stone
heron unfolding blue wings

News from the Pond

my news: from the pond
his from the wide world beyond
we meet at breakfast
I report water lilies
he reports London riots

I get up these days around 6:00am and go out to a small dock on the far side of the pond to practice chi gung and tai chi. I have struck a deal with my neighbor across the road, who is not only building a house and a barn but also constantly rearranges the contours of the land with a bulldozer: No earth-moving, nerve shattering, diesel-guzzling machines before 8:00am. It is to his credit and mine that we came to this solution peacefully. Our land situation is complicated and, on a small scale, very similar to the kinds of border/occupancy situations that have resulted in bitter, intractable wars.

This morning was the most beautiful yet, abundant mists after heavy rain, fresh clear sky. I wondered if it was all right to enjoy it so much when there are riots in London, Republican victories in Wisconsin, not to mention war and famine in various parts of the world, and all the personal tragedies the media insists on bringing to our awareness.

Then I remembered how dreams often balance our waking state. If we are unhappy, dreams can bring lightness. If we are flying high, we sometimes have hideous nightmares. As I sat on the dock after practice and noticed spider webs caught in the light, I thought: we are all in this dream; we are all dreamers. I am dreaming the joy right now. It is my job. I am not separate or disconnected from the nightmares. I am not oblivious or impervious. I am just dreaming my part.

My husband walks around in headsets listening to NPR as our larger radio doesn’t get reception. So I no longer hear the news (except from him). Sometimes I feel guilty for not staying tuned to the larger world. But this morning the world of the pond seems huge, as if the whole cosmos had gathered here with the mists that always circle counterclockwise, and the water lilies rising from their dark wet muck, the insects skimming the surface making ripples and the fish swimming up to catch them, and the birds and the frogs calling, and the squirrels upbraiding my cat till he creeps out of the undergrowth and returns to me for comfort. I can never know everything about this world. But I can spend this quiet attentive time in the morning. Now and then I can share some news. Here is some in the form of haiku (5-7-syllables) and tanka (5-7-5-7-7)

Indigo Bunting
can that really be your name?
Iridescent jewel
bringing blue sky, aqua sea
on bright wings to middle earth

the sun calls the mists
turns them back into fire
morning alchemy

Rise, great blue heron
wings green-blue, water and sky
small dinosaur, soar!

swimming in the mists
to the water lily cove
my cat stands lifeguard
trees singing with cardinals
fish nipping my beauty mark

mists circle moonwise
then rise on a ray of sun
now I know the way

PS: FROM MAEVE

I am enjoying these mornings, too. Eliz did not mention in this post what came to her about a new meaning for Lover of the World (one of my titles). For most of my life and hers, we have thought of the beloved as another human being, a soul mate. But what if your lover is the world, and you love the world back—and what if that love is just as erotic and ecstatic as any other?
Just sayin.’

Tim, please give me a blog post assignment soon.

Your combrogo,
Maeve

Stranger in a Familiar Land

Of course High Valley is familiar. My first stay was a two week stint at High Valley's summer camp at age eleven. I was warned then to “stay away from Olga’s son.” (My future husband) “He snaps people’s butts with towels.” When I was kicked out of school at sixteen, my brother suggested: “Send her to Olga. Olga will find her something to do.” So for two years I served a sort of tweeny maid at High Valley School. Later, married to the son and heir, I worked for a time as a cook and a drama teacher. My kids attended nursery school here. And when the school closed, I started The Center at High Valley, which I ran as a sort of back burner operation, always careful to defer to my mother-in-law’s sovereignty and always able to retreat to our house a mile away on the other side of the hill.

Now, as those of you who follow this blog might know, we have moved to High Valley to an upstairs apartment—which I had painted in many intense colors after years of living with white walls. It is a rabbit warren of an apartment where people get lost and where tall people look too big in the narrow hall. (My husband and I are both short). Our bedroom—two walls raspberry, two a rich green to match an old oriental carpet—is the one my husband’s parents shared. It has a commanding view of all there is to enjoy—and tend!

All my adult life, I have kept to an unvaried schedule: write in the morning, work at whatever the job I had in the afternoons and evenings. I raised kids, kept a comfortable house, without paying much attention to detail or dust, and enjoyed an undemanding yard surrounded by the friendly trees of a deep wood. Now that whole part of our life is past. Though our apartment is small and will be easy to keep, we have many other spaces to maintain for the Center, not to mention lawns and endless overgrown gardens.

And, for the first time in twenty years, I am not working on The Maeve Chronicles. (They are complete. Red-Robed Priestess is coming out in November.)

I have no schedule—at least not yet. I wander here and there, tugged by this or that task. Though I still write and have a counseling practice, I am feeling more and more like an arch-housewife and inept groundskeeper. Sometimes I long to go home to my old house and life, and yes, sometime I weep. More often, I feel tickled. I am enjoying being a stranger to myself, growing willy nilly into a new life. I like that every day is different and that the weather plays such a big role. It’s dry, so today is the day to mow. It’s cool and damp in the morning, time to weed. It’s raining…rest!!!

I will close this post with a recent poem:

Reluctant Gardener

Overwhelmed by weeds
besieged by poison ivy
overrun with grass

I weed-whack away at a bit
of lost garden and give
it a bad haircut.

I must plant something here,
something that will spread
and take care of itself.

Oh the choices! A low yellow bloom
whose name I forget, whose leaves
turn red in the fall.

Butterfly weed, iridescent orange,
and a butterfly bush that promises
to grow and grow, adding butterflies

to its blossoms. How tenderly I mulch them
as instructed: cardboard, dirt, hay,
how anxiously I water them,

how I plan to seek more plants
today, ground cover, dark red daisies,
lavender. Now the garden

is becoming mine, has called me
to itself through my ineptitude
and so we will grow each other.

PS: I don't seem to be able to comment on this blogpost anymore. Maeve has something to say. Here goes:

"I still exist and have a voice, even though my Chronicles are complete. My friend, Tim Dillinger, and I have plans for me to take back this blog at some point soon. Though she is not writing my story, Eliz is still performing portions of it live (and perhaps livestreamed). Her next performance is at the Barn Theatre at High Valley to celebrate my Feast Day Friday, July 22nd. Details on how to tune to livestreaming in will be posted on the blog!"