Worth Saving?

I had a chance to sit down with Edward for a pint this evening, and he got to telling me about some troubling thoughts he's had lately. He's beginning to feel like mankind is not worth saving. For a long time he's been unhappy about the state of things - the wars, the way governments manipulate us, the way global warming is overtaking us but no one seems to be willing to do anything about it. But he's always thought, "Well, that's the politicians who are thinking that way (or not thinking, you may well argue.)" The people he knows personally feel quite differently. But today he took that line of reasoning a bit further. Who elects these politicians and allows them to have such fearsome powers over us? Why, we do. It's like that bumper sticker says, "We deserve the politicians we get." And then there's the other one, the one that says "If you're not outraged, you haven't been paying attention." OK, Edward wonders - where's the outrage? Too bad for the few of us who are trying to solve the problems of the world. The rest of the lot is perfectly happy to drive their SUVs, eat their high fructose corn syrup laden foods, get fat and watch telly. They'd fiddle while Rome burns, only learning to play the fiddle is too much work. They deserve what's coming, Edward said tonight with a mournful shake of his head.

Cheer up, I told him. Have you had your medications checked recently? Or maybe what you need is another pint. This one's on me.

Clive's Sleep Study, Pt. 2

So Clive goes to hospital, and they wire him up from head to toe, and tell him to go to sleep. He's a bit disquieted by the video camera that's mounted on the wall opposite his bed, but to his surprise he dozes off and sleeps surprisingly well.

A few weeks later he returns to the doctor. The results are strange: all night long Clive spent only 3% of his time in REM sleep. Twenty-five percent is considered the norm. Most of the night he spent in either Stage One or Stage Two sleep - what the doctor called "useless sleep." It's no wonder he's been feeling so dragged out.

The doctor says come back for another sleep study, and we'll follow that up with a Multiple Sleep Latency Test. That's when you stay in hospital all day and take 4 or 5 naps.

Clive wishes he could go for the next sleep exam tonight, but the soonest they can get him in is Sept. 12, nearly a month from now. So the story slowly goes on. Meanwhile, Clive says he feels like he's in a fog, sleeping his life away.

On the irrelevance of classical music

Friend Alex called the other night, and we got to talking about music, and classical music in general. Alex, who is classically trained and owns an extensive CD collection - who has been know to be moved to tears by a Beethoven adagio or a Brahms symphony - tells me that he is tired of classical music. It's all noise, he says. It's all noise and emotion, and he's reached a point in his life at which he can no longer tolerate such excesses. "Why rub raw all the hurt and loss you've been trying to keep inside by willingly listening to a piece that will tear your heart out?" he asks.

Besides, he says, all that classical music, all those symphonies and sonatas and that lot, have become museum pieces. To go to a concert of classical music is to be surrounded by Q-Tips - skinny old people with white hair. Name the last piece of classical music that has amounted to anything, he challenged me. To find anything that will pass the test of time you have to go back to Bela Bleeding Bartok, and that's going back more than half a century. No, he says, the old stuff is all noise and emotion, and the new stuff is rubbish and will be relegated to the dust bin soon enough.

So Alex now tunes his iPod to the Polar Chimps, Emperor Rudolph and The Little Prince. I commented that classical music can hardly be called irrelevant if it can engender such a strong response from him, but Alex won't listen. He's funny that way.

Simon goes missing

It has happened to him often enough. In the early morning half-state between waking and opening his eyes Simon often finds himself not knowing where he is. His sense of disorientation is centered mainly on the relationship of his bed to the door. Because he doesn't know where he is, he can't remember where the door is. Then, as he rises to the surface of consciousness he feels the room realigning itself around him, until things snap into place with an almost audible click and he knows that he is in his own bedroom.

But this morning the feeling of disorientation went further than that. This morning Simon woke up not knowing who he was. There was none of that "oh, today's Saturday . . . I need to get to the post office before noon . . . I'll stop at the library . . . and there's a party this evening" that usually runs through his head when he wakes up. There was no thought but "who am I?" He seemed to be in a bare white room, and there was no question of finding the door because this room had no door at all. He lay in bed in the white room for seconds . . . maybe minutes. Then the white walls slowly took on color; the familiar objects of his bedroom slowly appeared, and Simon remembered that he was Simon.

And the strangest part of it all is that never during the experience did he feel at all alarmed.

Simon goes to a concert

Late Monday afternoon Simon got in his little silver car and drove to The City to attend a concert by his favorite band, The Little Prince. He went alone, as he does so many things. Although Simon has been a fan for almost ten years, and owns many of their albums, like "When You Are Feeling Naughty" and "The Disastrous Hostess," he had never seen the band live, and he was quite excited.

Simon arrived in The City early enough to get a place at the front of the queue, and when the doors opened he was able to take a spot only several feet from the stage. As there was no seating, Simon stood and waited forty-five minutes for the concert to begin. As he waited, he listened to the people around him talking. Simon saw that he was easily the oldest person there, but because of his age and the fact that he had chosen to dress all in black, he was invisible. All around him he heard people talking about songs and podcasts he liked to listen to, but since he was invisible he decided not to try to join a conversation.

The concert began with a performance by a group called Twin Photographers. Simon didn't know much about them, but when they started to play he decided that he did not like them. Every song sounded the same, with over-amplified drums and guitars. Simon saw the singers' mouths moving, but he heard their voices only occasionally above the din.

Mercifully, Twin Photographers stopped playing at nine o'clock, and the stage crew began setting up the stage for The Little Prince. The band took the stage at nine-thirty to a swell of applause and cheers from the crowd. Simon felt his spirits rise as each band member took his or her place at the microphones. They felt like old friends.

The concert was wonderful. Simon lost himself in every song. From time to time he caught himself locking gazes with members of the band. It was a strange sensation, but Simon imagined that the band members were thinking, "who's that guy who looks like someone's dad?" Simon was not invisible to the band.

The experience left Simon feeling elated for several days. However, by the third or fourth day he began to realize that the world of kinship he felt with the band members and their fans didn't really exist at all, because Simon was the only one who knew about it. He began to feel like the narrator in The Little Prince's newest song, "Little Hop Toad," whose best friend is a picture on the wall. Pictures are good listeners, but in the end they make poor friends.

gone

empty room.
empty walls.
empty windows.
empty shelves.

all gone;
nothing left.

close the door before the echoes get out.

Hiving the Bees

To the bee yard I go, garbed in white for the sacred ritual;
Like a priest I bear the box of humming bees before me.
I don my vestments: the helmet, veil, and gloves.
From their casket the bees drone their ancient chant.
Incense from the smoker drifts in lazy curls.

The box is struck upon the ground;
The voice of the choir swells.
Now the syrup can is withdrawn,
Now the queen and blessed attendants,
Couched in royal palanquin.
Now the hive is opened wide to receive them;
Ancient odors of beeswax and resin rise.

The queen is ensconced in the Holy of Holies;
Her buzzing minions are released to follow.
The devoted rise to swarm in dervish dances;
The pious crawl on the landing board,
Entering the temple in patient procession.

The lid is replaced, the hive is sealed.
For seven days and seven nights
It shall be left untouched,
The new queen and her subjects
Their mysteries to perform.

In an Instant

In an instant you were gone. You slipped through the narrow space between door and door frame into a world impossibly large - a world of space and light and cold where everything was strange and nothing was familiar. In place of a comforting ceiling there was a fearsome dome of crystalline blue. In place of confining walls was the infinite, and the air was full of the din of a thousand sounds. Terrified, you flew. Voices called your name, but you could not find them. A cold breeze lifted you and you flew to the east. You passed over a forest until you came to a place where the trees gave way to a glittering oblong pad of ice. At the far end of the ice stood a Mountain. The wind coming off that Mountain caught your wings and lifted you far above the open, icy plain. Cold that you had never felt wrapped around you ever tighter and tighter, and the chill wind lifted you to the very edge of the sky. There, at the moment that feathers, bones, skin, flesh, and hot beating heart fell away, you found a crack in the cold blue dome and you passed through it. As you went, you looked back once more - with regret? - then turned and entered a land of soft golden light and you became one with the gentle, susurrous beating of countless wings. A never-ending song of peace, love and healing filled the air. And so it was that you were welcomed to the Land that always is, always was, and always shall be.

On a Blue Day in April

On a blue day in April I stand on a sunny rise
Above the tumbling waters of Great Brook and look
Into the cellar hole and the crumbling remains of your farmhouse.
The irregular hole in the ground, lined carefully with boulders
You dug from the earth now fills slowly with leaves and branches,
Rusting cans, and beer bottles shedding their labels.
My son finds what looks like your front door step,
Now obscured by the rough branches of a weedy tree;
My wife points out the pale tips of the day lilies
Your own wife planted years ago beside the granite slab.
They reach, tender and green, toward the warm April sun.

Down hill from the cellar hole the ruins of the foundation
Of your barn form a great rangy rectangle.
The stones lie where, over the course of the years,
Earth has pulled them down, bit by bit.
Behind where the barn once stood there once was a pasture.
The sumacs and birches haven’t taken it over completely.
A robin still judges it open enough for his purposes;
He suspends his hunting in the yellow grass for while
To hide in the branches of a stunted maple as we walk by.
Great Brook continues its immutable, ever varying roar.
The sun hangs in the cloudless sky; the air is cool.

I envy the peace of the life I imagine that you once led here.
I envy the simplicity of a life connected to the land
And the rhythms of nature. These fields, such as they were,
This wood, this house, this barn - these were your world.
I long for a life so simply circumscribed.
I long to shut out the world, to let the rim of hills
That surrounds me here become my universe,
As I imagine, standing here in the April sun, it was yours.

But was your life so different from mine, or was it
Like any other human life, with its own worries, sorrows, joys?
I can never know what your world was really like,
Any more than you can comprehend mine.
The peace I feel here on this knoll is illusory.
It is only felt because the lives that were lived here have ended.
Your sorrows, your worries – the early frost, the stillborn calf,
The rotten tooth, the fever that took a child - have been felt
And have passed. They are ended, and fallen away,
Leaving no more trace of the pain they caused you
Than a few broken shingles and a mossy foundation
Can indicate the height and breadth of the house
That once stood where they lie.

The sun drops to the tops of the trees. The shadows lengthen.
My family and I move on, back into the woods to follow the path
That will take us out to the road. We go in companionable silence,
In single file, each of us absorbed in our thoughts.
As Great Brook roars as we walk back to our car and the world that waits.
We leave you behind. We leave the trees to their job
Of slowly taking back as their own what once briefly was yours
Above the tumbling waters of Great Brook,
On a sunny rise, in a blue day in April.

A Heron in the Nest

To continue this bird theme (hmm . . . does this say anything about the blogger?)

Yesterday I took a walk through the woods behind our house, down the path that leads to the meadow. I'm not really sure why it's called a meadow; what's there is under water. Apparently this was a grassy meadow before the beavers chose to block Willow Brook and create a large, oblong pond.

There are moments that must be magical, when one becomes firmly planted in the Now. Everything else seems to drop away as the mind focuses on the one thing. That's what happened yesterday. It was a beautiful late April afternoon. Daffodils and forsythia were in bloom, the grass was greening, yet a cool breeze blew from the north, as if to say that Winter has not completely released its grip. The sky was deep blue, and a caravan of small white clouds drifted from the north, passing in stately procession.

In the woods the trees were still gray, held in winter's torpor, but on the forest floor Canada mayflower was poking through the thick carpet of dead leaves. As I approached the meadow the pines and hemlocks whispered in the wind. I could see the pond through the trees, and saw the water sparkling and rippling.

At one end of the pond stand three or four dead trees, stripped of their bark, remnants of the meadow that once was here. In one of those trees a heron nest - a rough aggregation of sticks and twigs - has sat in the crook of a branch for as long as I can remember. I stepped toward the pond as quietly as I could and got to the shore just in time to see a heron perch on the side of the nest. It stood there motionless for a minute or two; if it saw me it gave no indication. Then in an instant the bird stepped down into the nest and settled itself into the nest so all I could see was its head. I stood to watch it a little longer, not wanting to scare it off the nest again. I wondered what the bird thought of the sounds of traffic that made themselves heard - faintly - over the sounds of wind and water. At the far northern end of the pond stood The Mountain, ancient pile of Kinsman granite, the landmark that means "home" to all of us who live in this area.

I turned from the pond in this magical moment of clean breeze, blue water and golden sun and headed back up the path to our house. A garter snake slithered across the path then stopped. I looked at it; it looked at me. A little later I encountered a red squirrel and it performed the same brief staring match with me. Coming over the rise and into the hollow that stands at the bottom of our hill I found wood frog eggs in a vernal pool - cloudy masses of jelly adhering to submerged branches, each mass holding the promise of hundreds of amphibian lives.

The path turns steep as it approaches our house. By the time I reached the top of the hill the sinus infection that has left me tired and in a funk all week finally caught up with me, and I sat on a flat rock to rest beside my wife's bed of daffodils and hyacinths. As I sat I looked out to the hills that stand to our south. Each rounded peak stood purple in the late afternoon shadows. The hills, the path, the woods, the meadow, and the flat rock upon which I sat and everything else that was illuminated by the golden sun were all bathed in the cool, blessed wind from the northwest. My head was sore and my arms and legs ached, the magic persisted unperturbed, without end.