Author: Brett Ann Stanciu

Trump in VT!?

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Last night when I came home (late again) from a school board meeting, my older daughter was devouring coverage of Donald Trump in Burlington. She showed me a clip where he claimed it was ten below outside. “It’s twenty-five and practically t-shirt weather!” she laughed.

Even if it was ten below, one thing I’m fairly sure of is that no Trump protestor who lost his coat via Trump’s nefarious thugs would freeze. It’s not the Vermont way.

Our school board meetings aren’t all that different from a Trump protest. Sure, we have laptops and paper rather than markers and signs, but there’s a lot to be said for a democracy of unpaid citizens, united in a common cause. Vermont’s a small enough state for democracy in all its ragged ruggedness to rear its wild head. Plus, we’re good with the cold.

Let us never forget that government is ourselves and not an alien power over us. The ultimate rulers of our democracy are not a President and senators and congressmen and government officials, but the voters of this country.

–– F. D. Roosevelt

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Elmore, Vermont

Imagination

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Yesterday at dusk, while my daughter in her snowsuit gathered icicles and arranged them in an order known only to her, I walked in the cold along our road, the fresh snow recently plowed and sprinkled with brown dirt. How is it the sky can hold that lightest and palest of blues, complementing the frosty earth? Across the valley, Mt. Mansfield’s ridge gleamed with snow and sunlight.

Walking along the road, I imagined myself a wild creature, a woman around a wolf’s rangy body, my pelt matted with balls of ice, my lungs pulling greedily at the air, eyes keen and cunning, utterly watchful, without fear. Imagination is a word used too mundanely, like a child’s activity we toy with and too often cast away. I used the force of imagination today, descending into the bowels of bureaucracy, through windowless rooms with numbered forms and lengthy procedures and strangers weeping; I carried with me the hoary scent of wet fur, the wildness of snow and open skies, the singleminded hunger for survival.

Around our kitchen door, my child’s icicles glowed in the light through the windows tonight, widening the circle of the world she created.

Reading fiction not only develops our imagination and creativity, it gives us the skills to be alone. It gives us the ability to feel empathy for people we’ve never met, living lives we couldn’t possibly experience for ourselves, because the book puts us inside the character’s skin.

– Ann Patchett

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Barre, Vermont

Cold – And Warm Communities

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

January’s always cold in Vermont. Sure, we may have a few thaws here and there, but generally, January is dependably cold, in any number of permutations. Today, conserving my less-than-ample woodpile, I opted to work at the public library. While the library’s not heated with wood, the building appeared to be metering its fuel, too; the radiators were stone cold all the hours I was there. The other library-goers and I all wore hats, many of us coats, and by mid-afternoon I had pulled the sleeves of my sweater over my palms.

My fellow Vermonters are hearty and generally good-natured. When I packed up my work, an older woman at the table beside me – wearing a well-knit hat – laughed when I raised my eyebrows. Sunny and clear; 3 degrees above zero; a bit crisp.

Most religions turn their adherents toward the things we are afraid to face: mortality, death, illness, loss, uncertainty, suffering – to the ways that life is always something of a disaster. Thus religion can be regarded as disaster preparedness – equipment not only to survive but to do so with equanimity and respond with calmness and altruism to the disaster of everyday life. Many religious practices also emphasize the importance of recognizing the connectedness of all things and the deep ties we all have to communities…..

– Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell

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January

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Snow came recently to our small part of the world. As the year turns around again, this quiet time seems right for pausing, for a reckoning up of last year’s affairs, and what might come for the future. Perhaps, most of all, it seems the right time to cup our hands full of prayers, in gratitude – and the desire to keep full of gratitude.

On New Year’s Day

Bless this my house under the pitch pines
where the cardinal flashes and the kestrels hover
crying, where I live and work with my lover
Woody and my cats, where the birds gather
in winter to be fed and the squirrel dines
from the squirrel-proof feeder. Keep our water
bubbling up clear. Protect us from the fire’s
long teeth and the lashing of the hurricanes
and the government. Please, no foreign wars.
Keep this house from termites and the bane
of quarreling past what can be sweetly healed.
Keep our cats from hunters and savage dogs.
Watch with care over Woody splitting logs
and mostly keep us from our sharpening fear
as we skate over the ice of the new year.

Marge Piercy

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Woodbury, Vermont

 

Girls, Goodbye 2015, Walking

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Around six this afternoon, in our Vermont dark, I stood on State Street in Montpelier, waiting outside a movie theatre for my teenage daughter and her friend. The downtown was all lit up with lights, and passersby were merry with the holiday. I was standing with my brother-in-law, and we were laughing about a mechanical music from some source we couldn’t determine, oddly mimicking what might have been the songs of angels. While the girls were at the movies, we had been talking in a crowded coffee shop, and I had seen people come and go that I had known, years ago.

My brother-in-law I’ve known since I was sixteen, before I began driving, before I read Plato, before I married and had two daughters and threw myself into my adult life. Here we stood, in this odd, brightly lit place, on the heartbeat of a new year, in a little bit where time might have simply stood still, for just one moment. We spoke about (what else?) our children. As I laughed about how much his older son ate at my house last summer, my daughter and her friend arrived, in their long lovely hair and earrings, smiling and filled with the happiness of seeing a movie and their own friendship. As we said our goodbyes, we said goodbye to 2015, too; in this evening, the whole unknown expanse of 2016 lies before us.

From behind me, I felt arms suddenly around my waist, and there was a little girl in a familiar iridescent blue jacket – dear companion of my younger daughter – this sweet girl hugging me and saying, Happy New Year! before she disappeared down the street, too.

May Light always surround you;
Hope kindle and rebound you.
May your Hurts turn to Healing;
Your Heart embrace Feeling.
May Wounds become Wisdom;
Every Kindness a Prism.
May Laughter infect you;
Your Passion resurrect you.
May Goodness inspire
your Deepest Desires.
Through all that you Reach For,
May your arms Never Tire.

D. Simone

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Photo by Molly S./Montpelier, Vermont

What You Need in Your Life….

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

… is perhaps something I never thought much about as a teenager. My own teenager this snowy day has a koi she’s intricately drawing in pen and ink, solely for pleasure. As dusk began falling, she started the tractor of her own volition and plowed the driveway, then came in and baked a pan of brownies.

My nephew, age 12, sent me 14 “perfect Japanese words.” I could use a little more of this boy in my life….

komorebi: sunlight filtering through trees

irusu: pretending to be out when someone knocks at your door

shinrin-yoku: literally ‘forest bathing’ – a visit to the forest for relaxation and to improve your health

isundoku: the act of buying a book and leaving it unread, often piled together with other unread books

ukiyo: literally ‘the floating world’ – living in the moment, detached from the bothers of life

majime: an earnest, reliable person who can simply get things done without causing drama

yugen: a profound awareness of the universe that triggers a deep emotional response

yoisho: a word without meaning, said when flopping into a chair after a hard day at work

wasuremono: forgotten or lost things; an item left behind on a train or forgotten at home

hikikomori: when a young person who is obsessed with TV, video games, and the internet, withdraws from society

bimyou: not bad, or ‘meh’

shibui: old school cool

kuidaore: to eat yourself into bankruptcy

and…. what else?… ikigai: a reason for being, the thing that gets you up in the morning…. perhaps the word of greatest importance of all….

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