Wedding Bells: Chop Wood, Carry Water.

August 24, 2026 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 20 Comments

Van Morrison’s Enlightenment begins with a riff on the Buddha’s Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. Didn’t I first stumble into that koan in Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, that little white paperback my sister and I checked out of the public library and handed back and forth between us? Those were the adolescent years when I devoured literature — Dostoyevsky, James Joyce, Sylvia Plath — so hungry, those years of amazement, at how literature could sing. So hungry I was in those years that merged into that Vermont mountainside college where I often stayed up most of the night, talking, drinking, often sleeping under the dazzling constellations. In the mornings, we trekked to seminars in the former cow barn and debated Plato and Kant.

Those years, I believed I could wrap my mind around life, that understanding was possible in more than ragged snippets. All my adult life I’ve leaned into a daily version of chop wood, carry water, that three-legged stool of raising children, writing books, earning a livelihood to keep shelter and home whole for my tiny family. An insanely complex equation.

With great merriment, my oldest daughter marries, we host a party, folks arrive, cake is eaten. The night before, we stay up late, the girls decorating the cake, my brother on a kitchen stool, shaking out the stories of our memories together. Such happiness to have a full house of youth and laughter. Monday morning, awake long before dawn, I labor at my version of carrying wood, those Van Morrison lines humming through my mind. Illusion? Nonattachment? Perhaps all my life I’ve thought about this koan in the wrong Western way, an either/or. Cold dew washes my bare feet.

As for the cake…. I’m still handing around leftovers, sweet luck.

the leaves believe
such letting go is love
such love is faith
such faith is grace
such grace is god
i agree with the leaves
― Lucille Clifton

Female House

June 17, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

The summer my second daughter was an infant, the season was particularly hot and sticky — at least in my memory it was. That summer I just didn’t do certain things — I washed clothes and probably even folded them, but I rarely put them away.

Domestic chaos? Maybe. But I knew I would never have another baby, the irreplaceable sweetness of a nursing infant in arms.

We were at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center that summer with our 6-year-old for a very minor procedure, and my then-husband and I took turns walking up and down the hospital hallways with an infant. At one point, I stood swaying with my sleeping baby from foot to foot, reading the posters on the wall.

One watercolor was a purple hyacinth blossom with the words beneath: Choose joy.

When I drove away from the hospital, with all four of us, and crossed the river back into Vermont, I was so light-hearted, so happy. It was such a minor thing that had occurred, and we were all together and well.

Now that infant daughter is a teenager, the oldest daughter a young woman. Like all families, we’ve lived through the gamut of happiness and grief and rage. Every now and then, I remind myself, slow down, breathe deep, and finger the strand of life that’s joy.

You might as well answer the door, my child,
the truth is furiously knocking.

— Lucille Clifton, Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969-1980

Before the Birth

May 30, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

13 years and a day ago, I walked down to our sugarhouse and closed the double front doors. Rain had fallen every day in that May, but that morning promised to be sunny.

After prolonged medical discussions, I had agreed to a caesarian for this second child. That morning, I leaned against the rough boards of our sugarhouse, with my enormous belly, looking at the wild red trilliums.

My six-year-old was eating breakfast with her father in the kitchen. I knew we would leave soon, that my two friends would be meeting us. But I kept leaning against the door, in one of those moments where time drifts away. I was so ready to meet this little child, to know who this new person in the world might be — and far above all — to know this baby was born well and whole.

I didn’t know then the natural sweetness of this child. I didn’t know, either, that her easygoing temperament would evolve as she grew into a wordless strength, that by the time this child was ten, her family would had shrunk to just a few of us. But I did know what an incredible piece of good fortune I had to be a mother to a second child. If anything, I know this more deeply now.

When she was born, this tiny girl could lie in my left arm, her head in my elbow, her miniature toes in my palm. She would lie there, blinking her little eyes, as though wondering, What now?

….may you kiss
the wind then turn from it
certain that it will
love your back…

— Lucille Clifton

G.

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

After my second daughter was born via caesarian, I lay numb from my shoulders down while the surgeon stitched me up. I was beyond ebullient, full of joy but also a steady kind of peace. She had crossed over into us, into our living, chattering, very full world.

The surgeon and his assistant, working, talked about their long Memorial Day weekend, most of it apparently spent in the garden. Grass grows crazy everywhere in Vermont, except sometimes where you want it most. The sheer normalcy of talking about tomato varieties was enormously reassuring. l felt suspended, finished with a hard pregnancy, not quite yet in the realm of mothering an infant, poised between no longer pregnant and not yet nursing this little one. A rare, unique moment.

Later, looking at photos, I was amazed by the sheer mechanics strapped and needled into me for that surgery. My memories are only of gossamer wellness, rays of rainbow radiance with the very heart this tiny six-pound being. Such incredible, utterly amazing good fortune.

Happy birthday, daughter.

may the tide
that is entering even now
the lip of our understanding
carry you out
beyond the face of fear
may you kiss
the wind then turn from it
certain that it will
love your back    may you
open your eyes to water
water waving forever
and may you in your innocence
sail through this to that

– Lucille Clifton, “Blessing the Boats

FullSizeRender

The Day Before The Birth Day

May 30, 2017 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Exactly 12 years ago on May 30, I was standing very pregnant at the bottom of our driveway, and about a dozen ATVs roared by, excessively fast and noisy. Within me, my baby abruptly flipped, and I pressed my hands over this baby I had yet to meet, face-to-face. The next morning, we saw each other, tiny girl infant and me.

I always think of that moment as the first time I held and comforted this daughter, wrapped my hands around her, loving her, the first time I began to know this child was mine, small being who would spend her first years in our arms.

…the poem at the end of the world
is the poem the little girl breathes
into her pillow
…this poem
is a political poem is a war poem is a
universal poem but is not about
these things this poem
is about one human heart this poem
is the poem at the end of the world

– Lucille Clifton

Tuesday: a Few Miles Travelled

May 31, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Eleven years ago, I drove away from Copley Hospital in Morrisville, sitting in the backseat of a car – a place I never sit. My six-year-old daughter was in the backseat, too, her infant sister between us, just days old. Although it had rained every single day in May – either a drizzle or deluge – the beginning days of June were sunny and hot. Leaving the hospital, we passed enormous corn fields where emerald shoots of corn had emerged from the dark soil in those few days I had been cloistered.

Sick through almost the entire pregnancy, by the end I was less alive, submerged in that pregnancy’s difficulty. But all that passed immediately with the birth of my second daughter. Within minutes of her birth, I felt myself returning to life.

In all the marvelous experiences of my life, those minutes driving by those June corn fields rank very near the apex: the two children I was meant to have, beside me birthed and healthy, the gloomy raininess of a long hard season dispersed, and all around us, radiant in sunlight, those fertile fields rich with life pushing upward, in those long sweeping rows of gems.

blessing the boats
(at saint mary’s)

may the tide
that is entering even now
the lip of our understanding
carry you out
beyond the face of fear
may you kiss
the wind then turn from it
certain that it will
love your back
may you
open your eyes to water
water waving forever
and may you in your innocence
sail through this to that