Kid Zen

January 10, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

My 12-year-old shoveled a path across our sizable lawn, ending at the cemetery’s fence, putting considerable effort into this project.

My teenager, arriving home from work, asked me, in her trademark language, What the hell?

The next morning, I stood on the porch, watching my girl walk through her path, leap the fence with her backpack, and then plunge through the snow on the cemetery side. She lifted her hand once and waved at me.

The girls are both teetering on the precipices of new ages — one into adolescence, the other leaving adolescence for adulthood. I loved that dogged determination of my daughter, shoveling snow through a field in the bitter cold. A few mornings later, doubtlessly wising up to avoid wet jeans all day at school, she opted to head down the road and take the unshoveled path. At the top of Spring Street, she waits for her friend, holding her sister’s insulated mug with hot chocolate.

This girl reminds me that the journey really is the thing, that parenting isn’t ever about a goal or an ending place. Innately, she knows this, while I’m still standing on the porch step, watching.

A scholar tries to learn something everyday; a student of Buddhism tries to unlearn something daily.

— Alan Watts

Continuum

January 8, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

This afternoon, driving home with my friend, our 12-year-olds in the backseat with their skis, sharing crackers, my friend remarked that the days were longer already. A few very cold days into 2018, and already the light — like a long-ago companion — returns. If I have time to reflect on a deathbed, I’m sure the evening’s crepuscular light is something I’ll miss when I pass out of this life.

This weekend had a suicide in town, a grief-soaked death, a death I can’t yet write about.

This weekend also had my library filled with new babies and mamas — one infant so little she was yet womb-sleepy. These mothers braved subzero temperatures, with their determination to meet, their pleasure in their new motherhood, the shared exchange of company and steaming tea.

These two pendulum swings of the human condition. How much grief, and how much milk-laced joy.

We’re one week into this new year. My daughters and I sat in our kitchen this morning, eating sausage, drinking coffee, talking and talking and talking… Savoring Sunday.

Perhaps there is after all nothing mysterious in Zen. Everything is open to your full view. If you eat your food and keep yourself cleanly dressed and work on the farm to raise your rice or vegetables, you are doing all that is required of you on this earth, and the infinite is realized in you.

— D. T. Suzuki

And A High Today of -10º

January 6, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

We’re surrounded by cold. Two days of school this week. The air cuts.

The cats have wholly given themselves over to this season, indolently lying on blankets, nestled in cardboard boxes and the laundry basket, wrapped in each other, luxurious in their fur and the warm house.

At ease. Peaceful. Marvelously content, sweet little beings.

Meanwhile, I read Rebecca Solnit’s The Mother of All Questions.

We need to stop telling the story about the woman who stayed home, passive and dependent, waiting for her man. She wasn’t sitting around waiting. She was busy. She still is.

Winter’s Wow Factor

January 4, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

Checking to see a child arrived home last night, I drive around a hillside — the cemetery hillside — and my daughter says, Whoa, under her breath, with not a tinge of 12-year-old sarcasm. Just wonder.

Feral, the ebbing, ravenous wolf moon. A profusion of moonlight in an unending night, and all that cold. 6º and expected to get much, much colder.

We feed our own hunger — for warmth, for color, for stories spoken and read.

All night long, while we’re sleeping, meshed in cats and blankets, that pristine moon sails silently over our rooftops, more luminescently magical even than St. Nick.

Endless bare fields
not even a bush
nowhere to abandon a child

— Buson

21º Below Zero

January 2, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

January.

I’m naturally a sweater knitter — not a sock creator like my sister. Likewise, I’m inclined to the lengthiness of novels, but more and more I admire the uses of brevity. Such as…

January 2.

Kittens, yarn. Piles of work. Stacks of library books. Friends on the calendar. Winter, Vermont-wise, has barely commenced.

When the winter chrysanthemums go,
there’s nothing to write about
but radishes.

— Matsuo Bashō

Gliding

December 31, 2017December 31, 2017 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

10º below zero this eve of 2018. Like an oddly magical gift, I woke from a dream of visiting a woman with whom I’d had conflict, conflict, and I lay as the day’s light slowly trickled into the room, rubbing a happy cat and thinking I could release that piece of worrying.

One more year slipped by, my younger daughter officially leaving the terrain of babydolls for the mountainous terrain of adolescence. Here’s a good thing I fostered: ice skating.

If it is written and read with serious attention, a novel, like a myth or any great work of art, can become an initiation that helps us to make a painful rite of passage from one phase of life, one state of mind, to another. A novel, like a myth, teaches us to see the world differently; it shows us how to look into our own hearts and to see the world from a perspective that goes beyond our own self-interest.

— Karen Armstrong, A Short History of Myth

Stony Soil Vermont

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