Dribbles of Spring

February 23, 2020 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

Light returns in a rush in these clear sunny days, where the sun has warmth but the shadows are frigid. My daughter abandons her coat.

The days, once so slow with toddlers, spin along, dawn to evening to the night’s constellations, as if the final years of my youngest’s childhood have accelerated. Living on the edge of this small Vermont valley, the sky stretches out as much as it ever does in Vermont, unlike the endless horizons of the west. Come summer, this world will be dense with leaves and gardens, but for now, we’re living in layers of snow and sky, beginning that push-pull of warmth-cold heading toward spring.

What was difficult
was the travel, which,
on arrival, is forgotten.

― Louise Glück

February: Light

February 1, 2020 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

Entirely out of keeping with the season, I’m thinking of spring. Save for houseplants, the Vermont world is entirely without a single leaf of tender green leaf — in utter hibernation — but the days are lengthening.

Groundhog’s Day holds no suspense here — that garden-eater always turns around and burrows back down for more winter. In the meantime, a spring haiku.

The spring breeze.
Being pulled by a cow
To the Zenkoji temple.

— Issa

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Community Bonding

April 26, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Written with a finger on a muddy car door in Montpelier: Spring is here! Hooray!

I mention this to my daughter at dinner, saying, I think a kid wrote this….

Why a kid? she asks. Why not a little old lady?

Why not?

A single day of rain has pushed up green.

As January’s bitter cold links people when strangers comment about the cruel weather, spring does, too. It’s finally here. What a day….

This dewdrop world
Is but a dewdrop world
And yet —

— Issa

Way Past the Ides of March

March 21, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

I read The Long Winter to my six-year-old when I was pregnant with my second daughter, lying down at 4 in the afternoon, too tired for anything else but reading. She was entranced — although not enamored. Twist hay into fuel? Grim.

Like so many kids, I loved those books, with the childhood stories of vanity cakes and rag dolls, the excitement of Christmas ponies and a family who lived in a dugout. I’m reading Caroline Fraser’s Prairie Fires — the adult story around the Wilder family revealed as loss, loss, loss…. How glad I am for our warm house, the morning sunlight in our kitchen with the cats sleeping at my feet. We’re on the far side of winter today.

15 degrees today, with brilliant sunlight: I flung open the doors and windows, whooshing out the winter air in our house, throwing blankets over the porch railings and leaning over the snowbanks, listening to robins.

Here’s illustrator Garth Williams:

(Laura Ingalls Wilder) was never overcome by drabness or squalor. She never glamorized anything; yet she saw the loveliness in everything.

— Prairie Fires, by Caroline Fraser

Robert Pirsig

April 25, 2017 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Robert Pirsig, dead at 88, I hear this morning, driving along a rutted back road.

I pilfered Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance from my dad’s bookshelf when I was a teenager, intrigued by its title, lured by the lush fatness of reading material. Not that many years later, my dad showed me an article (in the Times Book Review section, maybe?) Pirsig had written about his son’s murder.

What I’ll always remember about that book is the high school teacher who told me the book saved his life. What higher complement to give a writer? And yet every time I think of Pirsig, I think of that essay, too…..

Sometimes I like to think about truth in the image of an old and wrathful Buddhist master who grabs us, shakes us, and shouts, ‘Drop it now!’ Truth can be wrathful.

– Anam Thubten, No Self, No Problem: Awakening to Our True Nature

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And Grace….

April 16, 2017April 16, 2017 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

When I attended Sunday School briefly as a child, I remember reading about the Resurrection in a paper booklet and studying an illustration of Christ standing in a white robe beside a boulder, his clean hands outstretched to a gape-mouthed Mary, his hair neatly brushed. What the heck was that about?

The presentation was like reading Macbeth on Disney character flash cards. How would this be possible? Why would it even be desirable?

Hallmark’s proliferation of bunnies and tulips to the contrary, this holiday is a mystery, bloody and ethereal within a span of days, a profoundly condensed version of human life.

More than anything else what I resent about that sanitized illustration is the belying that the crucifixion is also the story of nearly unbelievable persistence, of a man who endured physical torture, an extreme crisis of faith, and phenomenal resilience against the human tendency to flee when the going gets tough. Over and over, I’ve met that Joseph Campbell line “you must be wiling to give up the life you’ve planned in order to have the life that is waiting for you.” On this Easter morning, I’m reminded again that the price of grace is fiercely earned, and, yet, eternally possible.