community

A little Madness in the Spring.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Post-eclipse, rain moves in, balmy tinged with cold. Rain will force spring’s green. Our lives spin on — of course, of course — but the eclipse and all its radiant glory trails us, the collective experience of the cosmos’ unflinching steadiness and how the heavenly bodies align, majestically moving in their infinite complexity. No stasis in this life.

Someone recently asserted to me the caliber of her character — I’m a good person — and the phrase lingers with me, far more a reflection of my wavering self than of the speaker. We’re so unlike the celestial bodies, our mortal bodies driven by gravity and time, but our actions dominated by our uniquely strange brew of our jumbled lives, passions, weaknesses.

The eclipse’s profound beauty for a few moments swept away the pettiness of our thin ideas, our nattering chatter about so much that, in reality, amounts to scant little. Perhaps the eclipse unified us not only by its luminescent beauty, but tugged out the finer strands of us, too.

For a day or two, Vermont was jammed with visitors from so many places. Vermont’s not unique with much that’s happened in recent history — floods and wildfire smoke, the pandemic, and division and division and division. My state also has some of the greatest privileges on the planet: absence of warfare, significant wealth. Let the eclipse bloom last long, carry us through a muddy spring and into summer, keep us questioning what our own goodness might mean, and how goodness transmutes into action.

Last, not least: my giddy joy of gold crocuses. Chionodoxa, AKA glory of the snow, scattered over muddy hillsides, last year’s dull lawns.

A little Madness in the Spring
Is wholesome even for the King,
But God be with the Clown—

Who ponders this tremendous scene—
This whole Experiment of Green—
As if it were his own!

— Emily Dickinson

On Gaslighting.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 11 Comments

Via email, my daughter’s school sends me a survey. The survey poses a question about what I desire for my student. The question is phrased in a way that reminds me of a question I was recently asked, by someone I hardly know. The question was unique; the questioner asked specifically about me and my life, and how I saw my life in the wider context of the town.

I’ve been thinking of that question since that conversation, returning to it in odd moments while opening my post office box or washing the oatmeal pot. It’s a question we might all want to be asking ourselves — not just what would improve our individual lives, but how do we understand ourselves in the landscape of where we live. Or maybe this is simply April musings, cusp of a storm that could go either way, rain or snow or perhaps simply wind, sweetened with the scent of thawing soil.

Here’s a few lines from a New Yorker article that seem contemporarily apt….

Gaslighting essentially turns its targets against themselves, she writes, by harnessing “the very same capacities through which we create lives that have meaning to us as individuals,” such as the capacities to love, to trust, to empathize with others, and to recognize the fallibility of our perceptions and beliefs. This last point has always struck me as one of gaslighting’s keenest betrayals: it takes what is essentially an ethically productive form of humility, the awareness that one might be wrong, and turns it into a liability.

— Leslie Jamison

Kindness of strangers.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 14 Comments

If there’s a sadder building in Vermont than the county courthouse in Barre, I don’t know where that might be. Over the last nine years, I’ve been here again and again and again and again. On Friday, I arrive again, stepping through the metal detectors and removing my knitted hat to show my barrette. My errand is to leave a handful of copies. I wait behind a man in an orange jacket at the counter who cannot understand what the clerk is saying. She repeats her instructions. Another clerk calls to me. I ask my questions, repeat back her answers to confirm. The man beside me weeps.

The last time I was here, I waited in a room of women waiting to be heard by a judge. In those days, I had survived those court appearances and the craziness of my life by imagining myself a mother wolf. I slunk in, took what I needed, and ran. All morning, the room gradually emptied, until only myself and one other woman remained. She was young enough to be my daughter. The bailiff appeared and said it was the judge’s lunchtime, and we could return in two weeks. Wolf, I stood up, all 4’9″ of rage, and said I wasn’t leaving. The bailiff muttered and disappeared behind the wooden door.

The woman’s name was before mine on the court’s list. She offered to let me go before her. You have a child, she said, and I don’t. I didn’t one single strand of this woman’s story. The judge delayed his lunchtime.

On this Friday afternoon, six years later, when I return to this courthouse I had promised myself never to enter again in this lifetime, I carry the memory of this stranger’s kindness.

Outside, at my car, I can’t find my keys, and so I return again, back through security, back to the window where the man is yet weeping, the clerk repeating the same impossible words. Then I realize my keys were in my hand; I hadn’t looked.

Here’s a poem very much in this sentiment, emailed from my father. Listening to the audio is highly recommended.

Are you for real?!

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

The other night, I’m leaving a meeting in the high school library devoted, more or less, to hashing out what community means (nothing to be solved in a few hours). In the parking lot, a woman says Goodbye, Brett — and quicksilver, I shout, Are you for real?!

As the other folks empty out of the school into the spitting snow, she and I talk beneath the ghostly streetlamp. Very quickly, it’s clear to me how utterly wrong I am about this woman. What I believed was true was not. I once ate chocolate covered strawberries in her house with my youngest daughter. The woman packed up a bowl of these delicacies for one sister to give to another.

In ten minutes, we are speaking animatedly of matters of our hearts. We’re both shivering by then in the damp snow. We hug and head to our homes.

I don’t know what’s happening in the rest of the country, and I surely can’t speak for anyone else, but how glad I am that I called out in anger. And how much more grateful I am that she took the time to listen to me, to lend me her shoulder, and I could do the same for her. Indeed: real.

A community… is the knowledge that people have of each other, their concern for each other, their trust in each other, the freedom with which they come and go among themselves.

— Wendell Berry

Music = flowers = courage.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 7 Comments

Nearly a decade ago, my then-husband and I attended an improv poetry reading and concert in a church in Cabot, Vermont — an afternoon I later remembered as the last good thing we did together as a couple. Later that afternoon, news arrived of illness in our family. Although there was no way I could have predicted it at the time, the stress of disease further fractured our fragile marriage.

This weekend, I returned to that church with its high-ceilinged rough beams and unadorned crucifix for a performance with native flutes and storytelling as part of the town’s Twelfth Night celebration. Before the performance, the storyteller remarked about a flute, tens of thousands of years old, made from the rib of a cave bear. Flute music, like the drum which mirrors our mothers’ heartbeats, is bound into our DNA. With a rattle of shells, he began with the Chippewa’s creation story of the flute and expanded into a meditation about music as auditory flowers. Not Hallmark’s pastels: flowers are the rugged beauty that propagate our world. The music poured my heart full with courage.

Outside, a light snow sprinkled. Somewhere in the pandemic, my youngest played spring soccer in this town. In that time, no one was carpooling, and so I always drove. While she played, I walked along the river, early enough in spring that the peepers were singing but the black flies hadn’t hatched.

I had left my hat on the pew. When I walked back in, I met the poet’s wife. The poet, who was once so kind to me, has passed on now. His wife and I spoke for a few minutes, and then I went out, hat in my hand, snowflakes falling into my hair.

“… the need is now for a gentler, a more tolerant people than those who won for us against the ice, the tiger and the bear. The hand that hefted the ax, out of some old blind allegiance to the past fondles the machine gun as lovingly. It is a habit man will have to break to survive, but the roots go very deep.”

— Loren Eiseley

Vermont.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

VTDigger‘s reporting about Burlington, Vermont.

Everything Is Made Of Labor 

The inchworm’s trajectory: 

pulse of impulse. The worm 

is tender. It won’t live 

long. Its green glows. 

It found a place to go. 

Arrange us with meaning,

the words plead. Find the thread 

through the dark.

— Farnaz Fatemi