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

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Photo by Molly S./Woodbury, Vermont

 

Onamonapia

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

This afternoon, my 11-year-old daughter walked around the house saying 0namonapia,  over and over, desperately trying to drive her sister nuts, by repeating this beautiful word, richly rolling off her tongue.

Years ago I used to nurse this child at the farmers market where my then-husband and I sold maple syrup. One afternoon, I nursed my baby on the grass behind our tent, leaning up against a pole. A couple sat down somewhat near me, in the shade beneath a poplar tree. Eating, they casually spoke in a slavic language I didn’t recognize. I generally knew they were talking about the day, but I couldn’t really piece together much more than that.

My baby fell sleep, and I pulled a blanket over her soft little limbs, then leaned my head back against the pole and closed my eyes. While the couple kept eating and talking, I listened to their words, this beautiful language I couldn’t precisely understand, but I knew the language tied them together.

Surely, 0namonapia relays much more than cluck or moo. This is a word whose meaning can stretch to entire languages: an audible beauty that makes us human.

 

The Bells

Hear the sledges with the bells—
Silver bells!
What a world of merriment their melody foretells!
How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,
In the icy air of night!

– Edgar Allen Poe

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sweater weather in June 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

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Calais, Vermont

Tools of the Trade

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

I stumble spelling the same handful of words, stupidly over and over. Fuchsia. Schedule. Traveling.  As good, serviceable words, I use them repeatedly, and yet I always catch myself just for an instant. How do those consonants line up in schedule, anyway?

I imagine a surgeon has terminology, methodologies, sterilized silver, to utilize in her trade. Writers weld words with the subtlest shades of meaning: fuchsia in a hanging plant, profusely blossomed; or fuchsia I wrote about this morning, the color of a woman’s silk blouse and hazily diffuse through an unwashed convenience store window, filtered through a storm of twisting snowflakes.

Roseate. Coral. Magenta. Cerise. Bloodshot. Ruby.

Red is the color of blood, and I will seek it:
I have sought it in the grass.
It is the color of steep sun seen through eyelids….

– Conrad Aiken

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Hardwick, Vermont

Imagine Me Gone

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Here’s one reason to read: very late last night, I read through a twistingly wry scene between a sister and a brother. Then, at the very end of the chapter, a few lines tilted the scene into an entirely different perspective. All day, I’ve been thinking over this novel, how those lines are like ones in my own life, rare and yet terribly real. Our everyday realm is bona fide, too, but imagine literature – or life, for that matter – without the raw pulse of emotion, a literal opening of the heart in a world suddenly listening?

He had ceased his fidgeting… The house had gone quiet around us.

“I love you,” he said. “For whatever it’s worth.”

– Adam Haslett, Imagine Me Gone

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Elmore, Vermont

Tuesday: a Few Miles Travelled

/ 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

— Lucille Clifton

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