Author: Brett Ann Stanciu

Inner Life

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

A number of years ago, visiting an elementary school with my daughter, I asked the teacher about the school’s philosophy. He told me every child has been brought into the world for some particular, unknown destiny, and so the whole child needs to be educated to fulfill that destiny.

Destiny and children? When my first daughter was a baby, even then I believed a rich inner life was invaluable. I’m not the kind of mother who bought stocks or purchased a life insurance policy.

Today, I drove through New Hampshire. In the backseat, my younger child worked mightily at her inner life by reading Harry Potter. My nephew, at 11, leaned forward between the front seats, and we passed the time by talking about being present. We are here, he said, and even when we’re up there, ahead, we’re still here. If you think about it, we’re always only here. Only my father enjoys this trend of conversation, so we talked about him, too.

In the mirror, I looked at my daughter with her sun-streaked hair, her tiny blue earrings, so immersed in this book, the first book she’s carried all day, the first I’ve seen her enraptured in pages, deep in the world of imagination.

That’s something, my nephew said, this always hereness. I like it.

A summer river being crossed
how pleasing
with sandals in my hands!

– Buson

Bee on elecampane by Molly S.

Bee pursing its destiny on elecampane by Molly S.

The Present Moment

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Note: guest blogger Yasuhiro Nikolai Shinozaki wrote this entry. He is an eleven-year-old novelist, and a Vermonter currently growing up in Charlottesville, VA.

When I first got this assignment, I wasn’t sure what to write about. So I sat looking out the window at the white blanket of clouds hanging above the green trees. It was 7:47 in the morning.

That’s when I got my idea I would write about just this morning. Nothing much big. Just the present moment.

I always liked mornings. There is always a new day ahead and nothing yet to regret. Everything seems new and bright: the sunlight marching through the window and the silence yet to be broken.

Other than nights it’s always been mornings and evenings people have time to sit around. Most time is consumed by actually doing stuff. So here I am waiting for the rest of my family to get up at now 8:05 in the morning.

Photo by Molly S.

Photo by Molly S.

Garlic

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

A neighbor stopped by for mint. In the gloaming, we walked through my garden and I offered what I had for her to begin her own garden. Dig this up anytime, take some of this. Then I bent down and pulled some garlic, the new skins white as the moon where my fingers rubbed the dirt loose. A half dozen heads I handed her, this good crop, my soil sprinkling over our fingers.

I remembered the death of a man. He was a gardener, and he was speaking on his deathbed: “You know, I used to sweat sometimes when I was digging. My rheumatism would pull at my leg, and I would damn myself for a slave. And now, do you know, I’d like to spade and spade. It’s beautiful work. A man is free when he is using a spade. And besides, who is going to prune my trees when I am gone?”

– Saint-Exupéry

Photo by Molly S.

Photo by Molly S.

Eyes

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My dear daughters sometimes  look at the books I’m reading and moan, How can you read that? My Struggle? Come on, mom…..

I read on, I read on. In this cool and rainy Vermont July, my nephew and daughter picked wild raspberries this evening, while the clouds darkened ominously and the wind stirred up, and I bolstered my fence against the woodchuck. As a child, summer days wound out into a sheer infinity, but now it seems perhaps tomorrow the children will be back at school and I’ll be stepping into my boots to carry in another armload of wood. Tomorrow seems tucked into today, the years interlaced like a pair of folded hands.

In the light the moon
sends back, I can see in your eyes

the hand that waved once
in my father’s eyes, a tiny kite
wobbling far up in the twilight of his last look:

and the angel
of all mortal things lets go the string.

–– Galway Kinnell

Yasuhiro

Yasuhiro

A Small Handful of Soil

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

Last fall, I dug potatoes in the school’s garden with the kids on one of those crystalline autumn days rampart with sun and the darkening emerald of summer’s end. One boy reached down and scooped up a handful of soil. With his finger, he stirred through, unearthing a centipede, glacial pebbles, a shard of white quartz. Around us lay the garden opened up for harvest, the stalks torn free from the rows of potatoes, the tomato and cucumber beds emptied of their frost-killed vines. In this sizable sprawl of black earth, this child stared intently into a single handful of dirt.

Today, weeding, I thought of this child again. With what joy he would see what lay in this garden. When I finished what I could do, I stood back and looked over my small measure of order, the vegetable rows surrounded by tiny tiaras of crown vetch. I thought again of this child-sized handful of soil, the dirt now masked under July layers of stalk and vine and straw and leaf. And yet, it’s the soil we always return to, the mother of our sustenance, the ever-changing constant.

But cultivation’s hold is always tenuous. The sense of order and safety it imparts will change if you turn your back on it: the brush grows in, the night comes on, old fears crowd you. It’s a skittering truth….

– Jane Brox

Photo by Molly S.

Photo by Molly S.