Buddhism

Flux

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

When I was a very young girl – maybe four – and lived in New Mexico, my parents visited friends in Ames, Iowa. In the murky way of memory, mostly what I remember is the house we stayed in had hardwood floors, and Iowa seemed to possess an infinite sprawl of gorgeous lawn. The friends had kids of their own, and their father sprayed us on the lawn one afternoon, raising and lowering the spray while we pretended we were flowers opening our blossoms in the morning light, and folding closed again with twilight. For a desert child, the abundance of water and the sweet scent of cut grass was magical.

Today, our front door will be swapped out with a new, tighter door to keep the cold out, not if but when the bitter cold arrives.

My daughters had lived in our former house all their lives – a combined total of 30 years – but already in these months, this house has changed its shape with us: the scent of freshly coated floors wafted through open windows, paintings of flowers hammered on plaster walls, kittens shedding their fuzzy hair over the kitchen floor.

The house I visited as a little girl held more than its portion of misery, but from a knee-high vantage, there was sunlight and laughter, too.

Your baby grows a tooth, then two,
and four, and five, then she wants some meat
directly from the bone. It’s all

over: she’ll learn some words, she’ll fall
in love with cretins, dolts, a sweet
talker on his way to jail. And you,

your wife, get old, flyblown, and rue
nothing. You did, you loved, your feet
are sore. It’s dusk. Your daughter’s tall.

A Little Tooth by Thomas Lux

IMG_0132

Tiny Treasure

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

A little boy, maybe six, came into the library yesterday with his hand cupped around some precious thing. I had propped the door open to let in the warm September sunlight and a few stray flies. His short hair sweat-soaked, he wore a t-shirt so large it nearly covered his knees.

He laid a crumpled bird shell near my laptop and asked me to keep it safe. I found it, he said by explanation.

The boy was supposed to be somewhere else, and we heard an adult outside calling his name. On his way out, his hand hovered over an apple on my desk, a yellow-skinned fruit with a few dark blemishes I had picked from a wild tree that afternoon, walking to the post office.

I told him it wasn’t sweet, as I lifted the apple and handed it to him.

September’s such a quiet month, with the cricket songs slowly spinning quieter. Wordlessly, he considered, and then he took the apple and disappeared into the sunlight again.

I wondered if the boy would return for his treasure. He did.

Soon the child’s clear eye is clouded over by ideas and opinions, preconceptions, and abstractions…. Not until years later does an instinct come that a vital sense of mystery has been withdrawn. The sun glints through the pines and the heart is pierced in a moment of beauty and strange pain, like a memory of paradise. After that day, we become seekers.

– Peter Matthiessen

IMG_1900.JPG

Nichols Ledge, Woodbury, Vermont

Sunday

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Growing up in southern New Hampshire, the summer sky often skimmed over with smeary white humidity, and I spent a lot of my childhood summers reading library books on the cool front porch behind the trumpet vine. Our box fan in a green metal cage was missing a screw and rattled until my mother jammed it somewhat quiet with a folded-over piece of cardboard.

These days, it’s often just the 12-year-old and me. Yesterday, I found her, hidden on the back porch, reading. While the summer to me seems to be soaring by in a few heartbeats, for a child I often forget a day is yet a day.

Good book? I asked.

Her eyes came to me slowly, returning from this fictional land with people I’ve never met. She nodded. Yeah.

Walked and walked
Here still to go—
Summer fields

– Buson

FullSizeRender.jpg

Hardwick, Vermont, community garden

Melody

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Remember Robert J. Lurtsema and Morning Pro Musica’s sweetly singing birds?

My family had an orange cat named Oliver who would swipe at the window when he heard this opening, searching for birds. We believed that cat brilliant, God rest his feline soul.

Mozart’s music has been gracing our early mornings, these first few days in March. I’ve been skimming through a biography of Wolfgang – until I stopped suddenly at this excerpt from a letter from Mozart himself.

I have now made a habit of being prepared in all affairs of life for the worst. As death, when we come to consider it closely, is the true goal of our existence, I have formed during the last few years such close relations with this best and truest friend of mankind, that his image is not only no longer terrifying to me, but is indeed very soothing and consoling! And I thank God for graciously granting me the opportunity (you know what I mean) of learning that death is the key which unlocks the door to our true happiness. I never lie down at night without reflecting that – young as I am – I may not live to see another day. Yet no one of all my acquaintances could say that in company I am morose or disgruntled. For this blessing I daily thank my Creator.

Enough said.

FullSizeRender.jpg

West Woodbury, Vermont

Travels Around the Globe & Through the Centuries

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Late into last night and early this morning – two periods of darkness – I read Caroline Alexander’s The Bounty, the travels of Captain William Bligh and his misfortunes. She writes of the exquisite natural beauty of Tahiti, and about the chaos of Western men sailing on their rampage for vengeance, men sailing the seven seas, the seven deadly sins rioting through this story.

This evening, walking with my daughter in the early spring evening, the robins singing, I imagined how divine that virgin land must have been, with its contrasts of color and elevation, its welcoming inhabitants, the plethora of food. As a writer, I can’t help but admire the endless metaphorical possibilities….

Reading about the great strife and literal journeys of others deepens the geography of my own domestic Vermont life, reflecting my black sandy beaches. Greater misery of others doesn’t diminish the suffering of those in my world, but widens the landscape, per se, of what it means to be human.

… under cloudless skies and mild breezes…. the lush, dramatic peaks of Tahiti. Closer in, and the mountain cascades, the graceful palms, and the sparkling volcanic black beaches could be seen beyond thundering breakers and surf. The few ships that had anchored here had all attempted to describe the vision like beauty of the first sight of this island rising into view from the blue Pacific. Bligh had called Tahiti “the Paradise of the World.”

– Caroline Alexander, The Bounty: the True Story of the Mutiny on the Bounty

FullSizeRender.jpg

Woodbury, Vermont

 

 

 

Cold – And Warm Communities

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

January’s always cold in Vermont. Sure, we may have a few thaws here and there, but generally, January is dependably cold, in any number of permutations. Today, conserving my less-than-ample woodpile, I opted to work at the public library. While the library’s not heated with wood, the building appeared to be metering its fuel, too; the radiators were stone cold all the hours I was there. The other library-goers and I all wore hats, many of us coats, and by mid-afternoon I had pulled the sleeves of my sweater over my palms.

My fellow Vermonters are hearty and generally good-natured. When I packed up my work, an older woman at the table beside me – wearing a well-knit hat – laughed when I raised my eyebrows. Sunny and clear; 3 degrees above zero; a bit crisp.

Most religions turn their adherents toward the things we are afraid to face: mortality, death, illness, loss, uncertainty, suffering – to the ways that life is always something of a disaster. Thus religion can be regarded as disaster preparedness – equipment not only to survive but to do so with equanimity and respond with calmness and altruism to the disaster of everyday life. Many religious practices also emphasize the importance of recognizing the connectedness of all things and the deep ties we all have to communities…..

– Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell

IMG_0514