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Summer Evening

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

One simple and incredibly marvelous piece of our summer so far has been making a ring of rocks into a fire pit. The small daughter has naturally seized on this as a daily s’more opportunity. With the fairly regular rain, we’ve put up my old farmers market tent, and now we seem to be moving more and more outside. Dinner? I stir fried peas and garlic scapes and carried the skillet outside, while the girls roasted sausages. Sadly, our chocolate s’more supplies are depleted. The other morning I twisted my ankle leaping off the porch and spent the bulk of the day with my laptop outside. Since I couldn’t walk, that pretty much eliminated chores, which – while as a long-term scenario is hugely unappealing – for a July day really was an odd kind of opportunity. In summer, I’d rather live outside than in, and the smoke dispels some of the opulent bug life….

Whereas he baled hay. I baled sentences into paragraphs of prose. The meadows revealed themselves as pages, and the barn itself became the equivalent of the book where it all goes, to feed the mind and soul.

– Julia Shipley

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Flux

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

My daughter, picking peas in the garden, reached down and plucked a pod chewed ragged by tiny snails, the little creatures with their whorled homes still climbing on the green. Next bed over, a black swallowtail caterpillar munched the parsley. Early this morning, not long after dawn, as my daughters and I drove across Vermont, we saw a fawn sprawled over the pavement, two porcupines, a raccoon. Weeds, breeze, pollinators: the ten thousand things wildly grasp these long July days. Nothing still, nothing static. Even the children, asleep at last, lie breathing softly with dreams murmuring through their minds.

… the ten thousand things (are) in constant transformation, appearing and disappearing perennially through one another as cycles of birth and death unfurl their generations: inside becoming outside, outside inside. This is the deepest form of belonging, and it extends to consciousness, that mirrored opening in which a heron’s flight can become everything I am for a moment…

– David Hinton

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Flowers and Sustenance

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

In my first gardening days, I planted few flowers, hoarding what little space I had in those days for vegetables – work to eat, work to eat.  How years unravel and unwind.  Today, the garden is lush with vegetables, but my beloveds are the blossoms.  This morning, the reseeded calendula is nearly open.  My earlier days, with nursing babies and accumulating bills, were a scramble to plant and weed and harvest.  These days, I pause and watch the traveling pollinators at their work.  Sustenance.

Your peonies burst out, white as snow squalls,
with red flecks at their shaggy centers
in your border of prodigies by the porch.
I carry one magnanimous blossom indoors
and float it in a glass bowl, as you used to do.

– Donald Hall

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Blue delphinium by Gabriela J. Stanciu

Heaven Under Our Feet

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Here’s a bit of my Thoreau paper on sense of place – with snow. Then back to weeding the garden.

Imagine Walden a sphere, where all elements within are constantly in motion and inherently connected, from the most minute level – for example, the weight of perch – to the cosmological. Within this Walden sphere, all aspects knit into the natural world…  Standing on the snow-covered plain, as if in a pasture amid the hills, I cut my way first through a foot of snow, and then a foot of ice, and open a window under my feet, where, kneeling to drink, I look down into the quiet parlor of the fishes… Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.

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Floor, Concord, MA, Masonic Lodge.

Writing and Sowing

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

I found that plowing land, traversing rows of vegetables, mowing, traveling back and forth from barn to house – this shuttling is akin to writing, the body a pen, the land an endless tablet. I learned that the words within us, under our gambrel skulls, are waiting to be let out to pasture.

– Julia Shipley, Adam’s Mark

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Lemonade

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

We’re thick into the summer now, with a smear of humidity, and the breeze this evening through the open window and balcony door rich with the sweet scent of freshly mown grass, the nocturnal animals calling and chirruping.

I have this vision of summertime involving sweating glasses of refreshing lemonade, and every year about this time, I realize there’s lemonade, but the sweat drips from my hand. More likely these days, there’s a cup of coffee beside my laptop, my toes grimy already from an early morning weed in the garden.

July is the month of verdant growth – not a month to miss in Vermont.  But while the garden is growing, and the jewelweed and ferns and raspberries march in, the human realm doesn’t seem to pause, either.  Some of this is just fantastic – the radiant happiness of a ten-year-old at art camp (oh joy!) this week – but our lives have no pause, no genuine respite from the undercurrents of our inner lives.  Perhaps this is simply the nature of being human, and the lushness of summer echoes our own midsummer madness.

In the Thoreau paper I’m writing, I propose Walden is a spherical whole, where all aspects of the natural and human worlds are intertwined.  Joy knots around a kernel of sadness, and grief holds a gleaming ribbon of happiness.

Here’s Paul Gruchow again:

But the fact is that the same dramas and miracles of life occur in Windom (Minnesota) as in Tokyo. People are born, they struggle to live worthy and productive lives, they are challenged by fate, buffeted by setbacks and disappointments, heartened in unexpected hours, visited by evil and grace alike, and come to sudden and premature or to lingering and overdue deaths everywhere in the world.

Go for a swim in a cold, deep lake, with its illusive bottom.  Eat cherries with kids and spit the stones, laughing.  Lie awake at night listening to the breeze dappling the maple leaves.

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