Weaving The Dream

So here I am with my husband at our oldest son’s, Stephen, home in northern Virginia.  He and our daughter-in-law, Mindy, just moved into this house last month and the living room is filled with unpacked boxes.

Yesterday, Bob helped Stephen install three new water-efficient toilets.  Over the years, Bob has shown his sons how to fix, mend, repair and replace what can’t be repaired.  Bob learned much of that from his father.

While Bob and Stephen took care of the toilets, I put on garden gloves, grabbed a rake and a pair of pruners and went outside to make an initial dent in the thick carpet of leaves that lay on all their flower beds and to trim back some of the shrubs.

Glad to be outside in the balmy (40 degree) weather in relative quiet, stretching and working my muscles, I piled up leaves and clipped back magnolia bushes and other shrubs.  As I worked, I was strongly aware not only of the passing of seasons but of the passing down of traditions and skills.

When Stephen was only five, Bob and I moved him and his two brothers to our 1840’s Greek Revival farmhouse in the foothills of the Catskills. Over the next few years, every time my mom and dad came to visit, Dad came prepared to help with the yard work—digging, weeding, planting, mulching.  Many times he brought divisions of his carefully grown daylilies for us to plant. 

Being my father’s daughter, I did for Stephen and Mindy, as my dad has done for Bob and I, raking leaves and pruning back deadwood.

Yesterday, I made sweet rolls for Thanksgiving breakfast, having taken up the tradition from my mother.  This morning, my son and I worked together at the sink to first clean and then prepare the turkey for roasting.  And I remember my mother standing in the kitchen of my childhood home, cleaning the turkey and suddenly lifting it by its wings to pretending this naked turkey was talking and squawking. My siblings and I laughed at her silliness.

While today’s turkey roasted, Mindy and I stood together preparing pies and I showed her how to crimp the crust the way my mother showed me.

Yesterday and today, I am overwhelmed by such a strong sense of the passing of seasons and the ongoing cycle of the generations.

Not everyone gets a chance to experience this.  Not everyone wants to. 

But I do.  So Bob and I are especially grateful this Thanksgiving for the opportunity to do for our son and daughter-in-law what our parents have done for my husband and I—pass on life skills and family traditions, and work to create a sense of home and an appreciation for the legacies and lineage that are our roots.

Even as I clipped the deadwood from an old magnolia at the corner of their house, I also noted the buds of new growth just waiting for Spring’s warmth to blossom forth.

And someday, as they fill this home with the new growth of the next generation, Stephen and Mindy will do for their child what Bob and I now do for them—and give thanks in the doing.

Autumn…makes a double demand.  It asks that we prepare for the future—that we be wise in the ways of garnering and keeping.  But it also asks we learn to let go…” Bonaro W. Overstreet in Meditations for Women.

Living in the northeastern part of our county, I’ve always loved autumn because of the intensity and clarity of color that the season brings.  The air is crisper, less humid, so the sky is a metal-bright bowl of blue arching over me.  Sugar maples are show-offs in their bright shifts of orange and red, especially next to the deeper, quieter black-greens of the pines.  Wild asters and grapes compete to define purple.

While reveling in the elixir of color that autumn brings, I can’t help but hear the footsteps of winter approaching, reminding me that all this piercing bright beauty will not last.

Just as the sugar maples and oaks let go of their leaves to make ready for their deep sleep beneath winter’s blanket, I am challenged to let go as well—of the weeding I didn’t complete, the plants I never planted, the vacation I didn’t take, the creative projects I didn’t finish, some I haven’t even started.

Autumn has also been a time of letting go of those I love.  My mother died 24 years ago this past September.  My paternal grandfather died six weeks after her.

And early yesterday morning, as the day was just being born, as leaves dropped silently and unseen in the night, I lost a sister of my heart—author, writer, and teacher, Liz Aleshire.  Liz was (and how hard to use past tense in this sentence) a woman of great courage and determination, of bright intelligence and wit, of fierce loyalty and friendship.  We’ve only been close friends for about seven years, but we traveled many creative and spiritual roads together.  It is hard to say goodbye.  To release our clasped hands.  To know she is no longer just a phone call away.  That she will never again sit on my patio looking out over our yard, smoking a cigarette while our dog, Duncan, keeps her company.

This is the challenge of autumn.  In the other seasons there is a looking forward to new growth, to warmth, to harvest.  In autumn, we look back, not forward, with the desire to spin out time, to slow the relentless fall of leaves, to push back the dark that arrives earlier and earlier each day.

But we can’t do it.  We can’t stop the trees from letting go of their leaves, we can’t slow the earth in its path around the sun.  We can’t stop Death in her tracks.

So we put mulch in the flowerbeds and stack wood for the woodstove, raising our heads to the sound of honking Canada geese as they wing their way to warmer climes. 

I whisper goodbye to Liz as she heads for her own Summerland of sunlight and flowers, where Nathan, her son, waits to greet her with both arms spread wide, laughter in his eyes and voice.

And my tears fall with the leaves.

It is daylily season.  

I’ve mentioned in previous posts that I have inherited close to fifty   different daylilies from my father as a result of the sale of my childhood home last fall.  He divided all his lilies so I had one of each kind, including and especially the ones he bred himself.

Daylilies are not really lilies.  They are hemerocallis from the Greek hemera (day) and kalos (beautiful).  Now, in mid-July, most of them are in bloom.  And my husband is entertained by my daily walks among these generous blossoms since I talk to them as I walk, complimenting each type on its beauty while I also remove the previous day’s dead blossoms. 

Even though many of the types put out numerous buds so that it seems they are in bloom for weeks, in fact each bloom only lasts one day.  All that effort, all that energy, poured into each bud, only for it to have one glorious day of bloom and color.  One glorious day to attract hummingbird and butterfly and bee for pollination and propagation. 

Last week, my husband, Bob, and I were in Austin, Texas for the wedding of his brother, Ted.  While out with his brother and siblings at a local nursery to buy a palm tree for the bridal couple’s wedding gift, Bob’s brother asked about an agave plant that had died in his front yard.   The nursery man in his sunglasses and cowboy hat nodded and asked, “Did it bloom?”  When the answer was yes, the nursery man told us that agave plants grow slowly, some for 15 years or more, gathering the nutrients they need to put forth blooms.  Then, once they bloom, usually with one blossom, and set seed, they die. Years of growth all to produce one tall bloom.

These plants remind me of the sand paintings done by the Navajo that are painstakingly created for ceremonial purposes and then destroyed at the end of the ceremony.  According to one source, the Navajo word for these sandpaintings means “the place where the gods come and go.”

Where the gods come and go.  Like the daylilies and the agave, the sandpaintings remind us that the Divine often resides in the act of creation as much, if not more so, than in the creation itself.  It is in the secret growth beneath the dark of soil and winter, in the determined reaching for the spring sun, and then the sudden glorious burst into summer bloom, that the mystery and celebration of Life, of creation is found.  The end result – the painting, the bloom, the plant are only temporary and make room for further creation.

We can get so focused on the end result – on the book, the play, the art exhibit, or the performance, that we often forget to give mindfulness, commitment, and value to the act of creating.  And in doing so, we can shut ourselves off from the transcendence of creation, from the experience of the Divine.

So when your published book seems light years away, when your stage performance is over before you know it, when the perfection of your creation is fleeting and then gone – remember the daylily and the agave. Give yourself to the moment of creation, where the gods come and go.

For several years in the spring, an area of unidentified plants sprouted and grew in our back yard.  They didn’t seem to blossom so, having no idea what they were, my husband cut them down with the first mowing of the yard.

But then, a couple of years ago, my husband and I went out to dinner at our small local restaurant.  The menu noted that it was ramps season and then listed several specials for the week featuring ramps.  I decided to give one of the dishes a try.

After the waitress set the artfully prepared plate before me, I looked at the leaves and said, “Bob, look!  Aren’t these the same leaves that are growing in our yard?”

After consuming the dish with its pungent, yet earthy taste, we came home and hurried to the back yard.  Yes, ramps were running riotous in our backyard!  Hurray!

What are ramps?  Wild leeks that grow in places like Quebec and West Virginia and here in New York. Some places hold festivals to celebrate this plant with its unusual flavor combination of onion and garlic. Ramps may be short for rampions, which are native to England and other parts of Europe, (though somewhat different there) and play a central role in the story of Rapunzel.

Remember?  It’s the theft of those rampions from the witch’s garden that forces Rapunzel’s parents to give her up to the witch where she is then imprisoned in a tower with no door.  And even the witch has to use Rapunzel’s long hair to get into the tower. In fact, the name Rapunzel supposedly derives from the Latin name for rampion, Rapunculus.

To me, the ramps definitely have their own kind of magic, growing wild in the spring, sending up those leaves with their red stems for several weeks and then seeming to disappear.  Because they grow wild, you have to look carefully to find them.  And, if you aren’t paying attention, you can miss them altogether and miss an earthily delightful addition to your diet.

Just as we can sometimes miss the seasoning and magic of the wild things that sprout up in our writing or other creative project.  We can be so focused on our vision for that book, or painting—how we imagine it should look—that we enthusiastically weed out and mow down anything that doesn’t seem to belong or, perhaps worse, we fail to recognize the freely offered wild and tasty things that spring up along the way.

Yet, sometimes, it is precisely those magical wild things that can add a flavorful seasoning and significance to our writing or creative project.

True, we don’t want to harvest them all.  If we did that there would be none for the next time.  Nor do we want to add so much of that wild seasoning that we overpower our work.  But a careful selection, a willingness to expand our creative diet and to experiment could result in an expressive dish that is uniquely ours.

Last night, my husband and I had grilled salmon, sweet potato fries, and ramps sautéed in butter.  Yummmm!

Yes, it’s spring.  Are you harvesting your creative rampions?

Just in time for Christmas…a winter wonderland!  The snow fell softly but steadily yesterday from late morning until early evening here in the foothills of New York’s Catskill Mountains—whisper-light snow, perfect for kicking with your feet or for diving into to make snow angels.

The steadily falling snow piled into billowy drifts.  Our six small pine trees that Bob draped with white bee lights two weekends ago, were now also frosted with soft white mounds, turning nature’s beauty into holiday magic.

In the dimly lit darkness, Bob used the snow blower to clear the driveway while our son, Jason, and I shoveled the walkways, the patio, the paths to the bird feeders and up the hill to the woods where the dog has his latrine.

I knew where to shovel because our dog, Duncan, had already plowed through, decking himself with snow on his back and snow balls on his legs in the process.  As I shoveled his path to make it easier for him and us, I thought about how winter forces us to define and recognize the paths we habitually travel—we most often use this door to go out, we walk this direction at this angle uphill, we go to this point and that place.

Winter snows discourage meandering outside—unless you have snowshoes or cross-country skis on.  So, we clear and shovel our habitual paths, and then follow them as long as the snow lasts.

Sort of like what we do with our lives—our creative lives especially.  Which is odd considering that our creative lives are where we should be meandering the most.

But having done the work to clear our creative paths by creating routines, connections, and habits, we can often fail to explore new opportunities, new relationships, new ideas because they require more work—in effect, more shoveling.  And heaven knows our muscles are still aching from the last effort at clearing paths.  And what is wrong with those old paths anyway?  After all, they are usually the shortest, fastest, and easiest ways to where we want to go.

Nothing, of course, is wrong with them, but what happens to some of the critical elements of creativity—discovery, growth and…well, fun—if we stay on the old paths?  We can’t kick up snow or throw ourselves into snow angels by staying on those paths.  Creativity demands exploration.  Life does too.

Maybe that is why Duncan politely sniffed the paths we carved for him and then loped off into the pristine snowscape of uncharted yard.
 

No, this is not the newest and latest excuse for failing to turn in a homework assignment.

Remember those daylilies I mentioned in last week’s post?  Those lovely daylilies, mostly from my father, that line the top of the wall of our front yard, and parallel the road?  Those lovely blooms of yellow, orange, burgundy, pink, and peach?

Well, I went out yesterday evening to walk the dog and almost that entire row of blossoms were gone!  Caput!  Vanished! 

I stood frozen in disbelief.  Wait a minute, I thought, they can’t be done blooming that fast.  I walked over and saw that my lovely legacy of lilies had been nipped in the bud—literally.  In fact, in some cases, the base of the chewed blooms still clung to the stem.

I must have looked like the walking example of stupefaction as I examined stem after stem.  Those darn deer, tired of eating the lush marsh grass and cattails that grow across the road, had decided it was time to sample the delicacies waving at them from our front yard.

I grudgingly coped with their demolition of our hostas in the back yard as the price for living in the country but this was truly an affront.  My lovely lilies!

Oh sure, I know that next year the daylilies will send up new blossoms and I will once again be treated to floral fireworks of color because daylilies are a tenacious and hardy bunch, but I feel ambushed and cheated of at least several more days of glorious color.  The remaining green fronds look as bereft as I feel.

Kind of how we can feel after someone—family member, friend, critic, or editor—has taken a bite out of our creative endeavors with criticism or dismissal.  All our glorious colorful creativity running riot, shouting out joy and life so expressively—a rainbow of color for all to see one minute, nothing but drooping green fronds the next.

And yet, if we can be like the daylilies, persistently sending out more sturdy creative roots into the soil of mind and soul, regardless of the snipping and nipping going on above ground, then, with time and season, our creativity, our creative ideas and expressions can burst colorfully forth again, with even more blossoms than before.

We just have to be as tenacious and determined as the daylilies.  And, as I did with the daylilies, using a little pest spray around us to discourage those deadly snackers wouldn’t hurt either!