#amwriting

Yin Yang, or Giving Rise To Complements

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Here’s a simple thing which took me a ridiculously long time to learn: that famous yin yang symbol isn’t particularly about a dot of white in a tear of black or vice versa. Instead, the black and white are all smeared together.

As an American woman, for years I perceived the world as opposites: you’re in the house or out, it’s light or dark, we’re dead or alive. Through gardening, I began to perceive growth demands decay, and then I carried that notion to writing: creation depends on destruction. The universe is intricately braided with myriad shades of being, color, sound….. There is no one single thing separate and opposed to the whole other rest of the world.

So when my daughter comes with me on a drizzly and rainy afternoon in the woods behind our house, I’m grateful this the childhood world she knows, the place she is rightfully at home in.

….These two emerge together but differ in name
The unity is said to be the mystery
Mystery of mysteries, the door to all wonders….

– Tao Te Ching

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Photo by Molly S./Woodbury, Vermont

 

Onamonapia

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

This afternoon, my 11-year-old daughter walked around the house saying 0namonapia,  over and over, desperately trying to drive her sister nuts, by repeating this beautiful word, richly rolling off her tongue.

Years ago I used to nurse this child at the farmers market where my then-husband and I sold maple syrup. One afternoon, I nursed my baby on the grass behind our tent, leaning up against a pole. A couple sat down somewhat near me, in the shade beneath a poplar tree. Eating, they casually spoke in a slavic language I didn’t recognize. I generally knew they were talking about the day, but I couldn’t really piece together much more than that.

My baby fell sleep, and I pulled a blanket over her soft little limbs, then leaned my head back against the pole and closed my eyes. While the couple kept eating and talking, I listened to their words, this beautiful language I couldn’t precisely understand, but I knew the language tied them together.

Surely, 0namonapia relays much more than cluck or moo. This is a word whose meaning can stretch to entire languages: an audible beauty that makes us human.

 

The Bells

Hear the sledges with the bells—
Silver bells!
What a world of merriment their melody foretells!
How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,
In the icy air of night!

– Edgar Allen Poe

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sweater weather in June Vermont

 

Butterfly Visitors

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Finally bursting into growth this year, our lilac bush is covered with swallowtail butterflies. All around us, the pollinators steadily work: hummingbird, bee, wasp. The butterflies are uniquely magical, though, wholly silent, almost tame enough to touch my hand near the fragrant blossoms. Then, like a shimmering cloud of colored papers, they lift off one-by-one and disappear, upward, into the apple tree’s canopy.

My daughter’s favorite scene in My Neighbor Totoro is when little Mei lies sleeping on the Totoro in the forest, while butterflies flicker and rise. In that same spirit, the book I’m writing holds spring azures near its end, these exquisitely beautiful creatures who appear mistakenly fragile, yet are graced with flight and fertility, mightily powerful.

….Come often to us (butterflies), fear no wrong;
Sit near us on the bough!
We’ll talk of sunshine and of song,
And summer days, when we were young;
Sweet childish days, that were as long
As twenty days are now.

– William Wordsworth, “To a Butterfly”

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Woodbury, Vermont

 

Alive Within: Generosity

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

A number of years ago, I was leaving a lake after a day of swimming with my daughters, and the gas tank fell out of my ancient Saab. A friend, also leaving the lake with his two young children, stopped to help. We put all the children in his Subaru, including my baby in her carseat, and he drove to a hardware store where we purchased straps, returned to my car, and then he tied up the tank. The gas tank was still secured in that way, when I gave the car to someone else.

The following summer, my baby had an allergic reaction at their pond, necessitating a terrifying ride to the ER. While it seemed my life was always in crisis around these folks, their barn, greenhouses, and farmhouse a few years later were incinerated by a gas explosion. That was in sugaring season, and one of the last things Kate had done in her kitchen was prepare a meal for my family, a gift during our arduous work season. She didn’t keep that meal for themselves; rather, she retained the presence of mind to have a mutual friend drive up the muddy road to our house the next day and deliver that homemade meal.

When I returned her dishes, with a meal I had made for her family, she exclaimed, “These are my things!” In that fire, she had lost nearly everything they owned.

The truth is, I think, that neither my life nor her life was so very far out of the ordinary; there’s undoubtedly differences in degrees and certainly in details, but all our lives are filled with some kind of traumas and miseries we would never willingly accept.

And yet we do.

Today, buying pepper plants at High Ledge Farm, their greenhouses filled with flourishing seedlings, their house beautifully rebuilt, I thought again of the time these folks took to be generous. May their gardens grow well this year.

There… was my answer for why the homeless guy outside Gillette gave me his lunch thirty years ago: just dead inside. It was the one thing that, poor as he was, he absolutely refused to be.

– Sebastian Junger, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging

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Woodbury, Vermont

 

Go For It, Kiddos!

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Not only the season of popsicles and swimming, summer for 11-year-olds is truly Trampoline Season. About a month before my daughter’s birthday, I inquired at a local on-line forum if anyone had a trampoline no longer in use. Almost immediately, a grandfather at my daughter’s school located a trampoline in a nearby town. And then, as back-up, a few more, too.

The gift was an utter surprise to my daughter, and brought her such joy it made me happy, too.

Up above the garden, behind the burgeoning forest of asparagus and weeds, elecampane already massing into its giant summer growth, comes the squeak squeak of trampoline springs, the children launching themselves off our buggy bit of Vermont into their kid version of the wild blue yonder.

There is a place where the sidewalk ends
and before the street begins,
and there the grass grows soft and white,
and there the sun burns crimson bright…

… the children, they mark, and the children, they know,
the place where the sidewalk ends.

– Shel Silverstein, “Where the Sidewalk Ends”

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West Woodbury, Vermont

Habits of the Heart

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Last night, at a school board retreat, our moderator brought a vase of apple blossoms. How do folks do things in other parts of the world? We sat in our basement school library and ate salad with lettuce from a member’s garden, and fruit and chocolate.

In many ways, I think our local Vermont boards are some of the few remaining hold-outs of democracy in America. We follow Robert’s Rules of Order; the work we do is legally-binding and keeps the school running. Every two weeks, I sign off on every dollar spent. But the work of a school board – like a family – is also dialogue, and sometimes profound dialogue.

So, when we arrived at the place in the evening where we spoke about holding tension and chaos in our lives, I had plenty to draw upon: mothering, writing, being human….

If we fail to hold tension… creatively, the non-stop contradictions of our lives will frighten us, paralyze us and take us out of the action. But when we learn to hold them in a heart-opening way, they may take us toward something new, from greater inner congruence to the expansion of our own understanding. We are imperfect and broken beings who live out our lives in an imperfect and broken world. The genius of the human heart lies in its capacity to hold tension in ways that energize and draw us forward instead of tearing us apart.

– Parker J. Palmer

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Calais, Vermont