parenting

Antidote

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

When my teenage daughter recently spied a rattlesnake, we talked about the antidote to snakebite. Antidote: literally, a dose of a substance that’s given against a poison or illness. Antidote is an aggressive word, a noun rearing up on its hind legs and surging forward, or fiercely worming its belly-slinking way beneath razor-sharp lines of barbed wire.

Or perhaps a rose stem slid into a rifle barrel.

A child’s toothy smile after tears.

Or what I suggested to my daughter this rainy Saturday: pick up a brush, raid the paint cans in the basement, and color your walls anew. Step One on your way to solving the rest of your life.

“Warbler”

This year we have two gorgeous
yellow warblers nesting in the honeysuckle bush.
The other day I stuck my head in the bush.
The nestlings weigh one-twentieth of an ounce,
about the size of a honeybee. We stared at
each other, startled by our existence.
In a month or so, when they reach the size
of bumblebees they’ll fly to Costa Rica without a map.

– Jim Harrison

FullSizeRender.jpg

 

Our Garden of Early Delights

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

A week away from the garden yields cherry sun gold tomatoes nearly ripe – these small globes of sunlight sweetly tangible – peppers stretching their leaves to hold hands, and weeds running riot – a metaphor for the human soul.

As a mother, how much of my work attempts to nourish growth? Banishing the ravenous woodchucks, ripping out pernicious prickers, cautioning, please, do not let your thorns gain the upper hand?

Rain falls down on the newly shorn sheep….
The barn cats are sleeping, birds are force-feeding
three clutches of phoebes, two of robins
and I am shelling the first of the season’s
peas as a merciful summer rain
falls down all morning around me in strings.

– Maxine Kumin, “After the Heat Wave”

 

IMG_1712

Woodbury, Vermont

 

Revision: Made by Hand

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

I’m revising both a book and my knitting these days, yanking apart for the fourth time the same skein of yarn. At some not-too-distant unraveling, this lovely yarn may disintegrate. Isn’t revision one of the great beauties of knitting? Unlike in my own life, I can re-do, refashion, re-envision. That’s a gift in writing, too, that the writer cannot use in her own life.

I keep returning to that Aristotelian word teleology from my undergraduate philosophy days. What is the purpose of this ball of yarn? How can I aid that lovely azure linen to achieve its intended purpose? What is the purpose of the book I’m writing, and how do all these pieces within help achieve that end?

Here’s the faith aspect: I’ll find the proper gauge and use for this yarn. The writing will clear. And what cannot be undone in a human life is an intrinsic part of the whole.

The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.

Marge Piercy “To Be of Use”

IMG_1599

Shelburne, Vermont

Know the World Through Wildflowers

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

When I moved to Woodbury, Vermont, in my twenties, walking along our dirt road was a novelty I enjoyed. After I had babies, I spent even more time along the road, walking with a child in a pack to put her to sleep, and then following a little girl as she learned to ride a bicycle with training wheels.

Moving here in the month of July, almost immediately I noticed all kinds of wildflowers whose names I didn’t know: yellow rattle, cinquefoil, speedwell. With a small paperback, I gradually began to learn the wild world around me. One of my younger daughter’s first words was vetch, and she said this word often, with great determination. It’s worth considering – that the naming of our world is how we begin to understand and know our world.

I left you in the morning,
And in the morning glow,
You walked a way beside me
To make me sad to go.
Do you know me in the gloaming,
Gaunt and dusty gray with roaming?…

Robert Frost, “Flower-Gathering”

IMG_1584.JPG

West Woodbury, Vermont

 

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

FullSizeRender.jpg

Photo by Molly S./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

FullSizeRender.jpg

Calais, Vermont