January

January 3, 2016January 3, 2016 / 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

Woodbury, Vermont

Girls, Goodbye 2015, Walking

January 1, 2016 / 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

Photo by Molly S./Montpelier, Vermont

What You Need in Your Life….

December 31, 2015 / 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….

River Ice

December 30, 2015 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Late, yesterday, bringing in firewood, I walked up into the woods just before snow descended with all its might and majesty. Dark was coming in, and I hiked to where I could see the blue ridge of Elmore Mountain in the distance across the valley. Standing perfectly still, I heard nothing, not a single sound, until merely the wisp of my own breath pried open that silence.

The river today is filled with flowing chunks of ice, green like water residing deep in a quarry’s bottom. We woke this morning to icy grapple against the bedroom windows, the wind skulking around the house, like a wild animal, eager to enter. All the wildness of winter returns, the icy realm returned in all its mighty fury – and unspeakable, very earthly beauty.

DUST OF SNOW, by Robert Frost

The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.

Traveling

December 28, 2015 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

These past few days I’ve been reading Steinbeck’s The Wayward Bus, traveling through the rain in California, on an old bus named Sweetheart, with the desperate-hearted, the lovely and the profane, the young and the dying. The novel is classic Steinbeck, with an eye for the landscape, and characters so real you could pull up a chair and have a conversation. Near the end, when I began to think this wasn’t my favorite Steinbeck novel, I read a half page of dialogue that made the whole book rise and spin. Then I went with those two characters back to the bus, dug it out of a mud hole, and drove to San Juan.

We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the neverending contest in ourselves of good and evil.

– Steinbeck, East of Eden

Photo by Molly S.

Living Sonnet for this Holiday

December 26, 2015 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

In my daughter’s geometry homework, she’s struggling to take a flat diagram and turn it into a three-dimensional object – harder than might be imagined, even for an art-minded kid. In this holiday break, with a teenager and a savvy ten-year-old, we talked with my brother about who we know and how their lives shape out, and the choices people make in their lives. That clarity of hindsight notion…

Sometimes it appears as though our lives unfold into myriad geometrical shapes, complex beyond any imaging. Walking in the garden this afternoon, around the beds banked over with raked leaves, we saw two fluttering moths, blooming johnny jump-ups, and purple ground ivy flowers in the hoop house. Those petals are a dimension not so long ago I would never have imagined in the month of December. What way will this story bend? All around us appears this mighty world, seemingly all-powerful, greater than any of us: and yet, here we are, a handful of people – my family – walking in our kitchen garden. Who is the folder of this shape?