The Old Mule

Angels in America

Of course, I am always a year behind. But Angles in America an incredible movie (I can *not* call it a series). And yes, I do know who really wrote the thing. Here is the best line:

"...respect the delicate ecology of your delusiums." (sic sic sic)

Yaddo

Sylvia Plath has been one of my favorite poets for many years. This month, forty years ago, she finished writing her last great collection of poems just before her suicide. Initially rejected by the publishers, the collection went on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1981. She wrote frantically in the early morning’s light, before her two children awoke.

The Center of Town

Today I remembered a morning in Mexico City, home of 27 million people, the second largest city in the world. This old marsh is the longest continually inhabited urban area in the western hemisphere. And it is sinking.

Glass

Eclipse

This is the season of eclipse. As days move forward, humans settle into routine. Wise beings know well the battle against entropy, the need to keep the bones moving. I woke up tired from a long nights rest. Dreams disturbed me; uneasy Monday – smooth aches and dull longing. The rest is ahead and in a fog of confusion I move in those general directions.

I wonder of oceans and pirates, bright feathered wings, and shells. I think of the mountains, always the mountains. How are we to hold up this measure of urban pretense? How are we to maintain this gazing forward at stoplights as if no beings existed, in warm blood, to our left?

Nicaragua

I would normally try not to link to a major news organization, but this story on Nicaragua is too fascinating to miss (and I do love NPR):

Captured

This new photographer, Josh Rothstein, is capturing moments with amazing clarity.

The Unknown City

The fair was in town. There was a gypsy show with fire batons. A woman twirled metal hoops around slim hips. She had a cowboy hat and a painfully kept smile. The men wore long braided hair, sandals and whooped about. Drums were beaten; women swooned. We walked around the back side of their tent after the show. We were off to see the goats and the miniature giraffe. The woman’s hoops were propped against a trailer. A lasso lay nearby.

The whole scene was something so unusual, like these items where abandoned remnants from some other life. It seemed as if the veil had been lifted and the trick played through. The same way a person might feel after a long nights drunk, waking up to find some cast-away from midnight’s debauchery – a wig you might have worn or a rumpled costume.

There are people who live in no place fixed. There must be a freedom in the initial letting go – the un-possessing. A freedom and a horror. A traveling life of movement and stillness. A being and a moving through. These are people who’s lives turn with the movement of planets. In night they drive forth, and in day they face our smaller worlds, our crowds, our nameless faces in the arena of the unknown city.

Different Homes

There are many places in the world where time moves in different patterns. Yesterday I visited an office of tight chairs, cords, machines and faces. People entered, sat, and did not seem to speak. There was a potted plant tilted against a corner.

Last year, we flew over the Sierra Norte. I knew the scene bellow; smoke billowed from clay houses propped up by ancient earth. These were old lands, farming places with streams and loneliness. Each yard had a crop of lima beans, tufts of aster, and red hot poker plants. There was soup and weathered hands and a wind from someplace so different I can not explain.

Last night I was lifted from stillness by a dream. There is no way to prepare for life’s living – the images endless, the being too real. In sleep, novels of history grab us, tell us what is true, and plead with us to listen. We wander out into yards and look heavenward, wondering of our journey. People’s lives unfurl in different patterns: slowly, carefully, or all at once. In our homes we are most alike, huddled against our families, wondering.

La Trinidad Organic Coffee Cooperative

Lives are full of wonder and fear. Such forces unite us as communities and drive us out on lone treks through wilderness. In the city, it is best to remember the farm.