Peace like a River

Sometimes this yearning starts up in the summer. A yearning for the south, where I grew up. A yearning  for the marsh outside of Charleston where my brother and my friend Happy Erwin and I spent hours wandering shirtless and barefoot. Sinking in the marsh mud. Talking in hushed tones about how the crabs would eat you if you sank too deep. Eat out your eyeballs. We slapped at mosquitoes and watched the pelicans lope across the sky. I loved the cabbage stink smell of the mud at low tide and walking up to the 7/eleven, covered in mud and bites, to get an icee. Past the graveyard and the haunted house. It seemed in every moment there was magic. It dripped down from the moss and rose out of the marsh. Sometimes our mother took us out to the Angel Oak on John’s Island. That tree is 1300 years old, her branches long as octopus tentacles reaching up to heaven and snaking yards and yards along the ground. if you sat under that old tree and listened real close you could hear the angels sing.

Here, in the northeast, on the farm, it sure gets as hot as any southern summer, but the marsh is fresh water. Fed by a river instead of the ocean. There is magic here too, but to my untrained eye, sometimes it’s harder to find. You have to search. So, the other day, because I was homesick and in search of memory I went down to the river to play.

The air was cool. Gusts of gadflies skimmed the smooth surface. I let my memories of the south get all tangled up in this yankee river and all the old spirituals I used to know rose to the surface… Just when I thought my soul was lost, I heard the angels singing. O sisters lets go down let’s go down come on down o sisters lets go down down to the river and pray…I’ve got peace like a river in my soul I’ve got a river in my soul…

I ran those songs all together as the sun fell down the sky. I sang loud and splashed around and took the pictures. Off in the distance my husband mowed hay, his tractor rattling across the field.

Here are the pictures that came.

Lifetimes in Bermuda

My house in Bermuda is called Ardsheal. She is old, at least 300 years, and sits on top of a hill overlooking Hamilton, the main city in Bermuda, on one side and the Atlantic stretching down into the Bermuda triangle on the other. The Hamilton side is constantly changing, the town growing into a small city, evidence of the times we live in, never enough, never enough, got to have more, more concrete, more cars, more noise, more money…. The view from the other side of the house is timeless and this is where the ghosts gather, where the view has never changed, the ghosts are clustered in thick pockets and running into them is like getting tangled in the fine filaments of a spiders web. Not unpleasant, but a little sticky, noticeable for sure.

So , What does this all mean?
I have no idea.  

There may really be ghosts or they may be the fancy of my imagination. Everyone is free to believe whatever he or she chooses. But for me, they are there, and the stereo turns on by itself and so does the air conditioning, floors creak, and when the house is empty I hear them whisper. The culmination of all this is that I feel I am constantly living in the presence of layers and layers of human time. It reminds me of the continuum of existence. And how one step leads into the next. And how decisions made 100 years ago shape how we live today. And how it’s important to be aware of our thoughts and our actions and keep growing, otherwise we may stay fixed in time, ethereal and not quite of this world but simply floating through. And yet, I feel protected by the ghosts in my house. Swept into the understanding that there is no end of time, only time periods, as we understand it. 

This past week my friends Lee and Mee came with their children to do a workshop in Bermuda and stayed at Ardsheal.  ( Mee, knows something about ghosts and has a fascinating theory about ghosts and memories by the way, which I hope she writes about on her blog.)  On Sunday night, Lee put on a dinner party to honor the spirits of the place. We sat at the big dining room table, 11 Bermudians and Lee and Mee and Jerry and I. We made a toast to the ghosts and they came out to play. There we were, the visitors, (that’s how I count myself) and the Bermudians that carry the last five hundred years of memories for their ancestors in their genes, and then the ones from the other side, who joined us, for the party. The ghosts swirled around the dinner and through the house that night, like the apparitions in Disneyland’s haunted house. One in particular came to Mee to say to me that she was worried about all the change. That the house is her house. And I had to concede. It seems she’s been there for at least a hundred years and I have only been there for fifteen years! Anyway, she is worried about what is going to become of the house and I had to gently explain that I had to move on, I couldn’t stop time. I am not willing to really become of this place where the living memory is impossible to decipher from the memory of the ancestors. That I was not stopping here in time but going forward. The change that is rumbling in the world seems to be reverberating through all levels of reality, even the world of spirit and memory. You can get stuck and hang on or you can go with it and move forward. See what’s around the next corner.  I'm going with peering around the corner and moving on.  

Anyway. Last year with these same thoughts and imaginings, I took photos and here they are. But before that

Mee’s blog www.princessknowitall.blogspot.com

Lee’s blog www.spiritrecovery.blogspot.com

What an adventure is what i know for sure.  
xxx

something new

feel like i have got back to myself, whatever that is,  and the other morning i woke at 5:30,  okay that's not a self i'm that familiar with.   anyway,  the mist was thick and i tromped out with my camera and for the first time in ages the inklings of a new project began revealing itself to me.  something about the end of the machine age.   hmm.   we'll see how it develops but here are some beginning images.  i haven't been ruthless with the edit.  that can come later.

the observer/ the observed.

my friend John Nelson,  who has an exellent  blog, www.jrnelsonphoto.blogspot.com,   gave me some good advice regarding editing.  he was referring to my post of the moon images,  and he was absolutely correct. "be ruthless with the photos," he said,  really only put what you really like.   so i am taking his advice and putting only one photo here.  i took it on my recent visit to bermuda.  it interests me because i can construe it in many ways, but primarily,  i am watching myself.    and there are two of me going forward,  the observed and the observer.    in the end the journey is our own and our greatest gift is the potential for awareness. to live in this gift requires ruthless editing.   it requires honesty of oneself that can be hard to look at.  and finally it requires love.   the te amo kind.  and so here we all are,  going forward, ultimately with only that to focus on.   

i am grateful,  deeply grateful,  to all of my people who have my back and  put out their hands to catch me when i falter .  you know who you are and   i hope you know that i am there for you in just the same way.  

and, Dick,  where ever you have gone you will always be in my heart.  We will miss you sorely down here.  i love you so, honey.   

te amo, te amo, te amo!!!

xxx

more about rats, odd as that is!

okay,  see life will always deliver.   i'm at the farm now and the day began with two rats sending rosie and heather shrieking from the barn.   apparently these rats did not obey rat rules at all,  instead of scurrying away,   they just sat in the sink and stared while rosie and heather screamed at them.   

heather said,  "they are so much creepier than city rats!  they are furry like some kind of squirrel or something.  i can't go back in there. you  go, rosie. "  

"no way."  

i thought i should go in and see,  take a photo even,  but now i catch my little lie that i told myself yesterday about preferring one kind of rat over another because totally,   no way was i going into the barn to see those rats.   barn rats or not.   ugh.  

and so we three humans scurried away and the rats are enjoying their time in the sink.   :)  

  

 

 

the conundrum of rats.

okay,  the rat is still really gross

Just returned from Bermuda.  It is an idyll.  and now am in New York.  the difference between the two places is so bizarre I can hardly hold it all. in the city there are so many realities jostling side by side, it's easy to shut down and pay no attention at all.  But if you decide to open, you find that  the veneer is thin. You can lift up the veil and peer underneath pretty easily.  and  this is exactly what i love about the city.  and love it i do, even if i'm done living here for the minute.   

 

I walked to the hudson river and dreamed my way along one of the Jettys.   suddenly a huge swarm of dragon flies descended.  seemingly hundreds of  these creatures,  quite big,  swooping and diving like helicopters around my head and up into the trees.  

a group of school kids aged about  8 or 9 began to scream at the dragonflies and swat them away. i tried to capture these antics on my little point and shoot camera but it wasn't quick enough.  a few feet a way two men fiddled with a movie camera and engaged in deep and serious discussion about something,  the dragonflies and swatting kids didn't exist in their reality.  a little further on  a painfully thin woman posed for a photo with her daughter, a group of tourists moved past, keeping close to each other as if floating through this reality and watching from inside a translucent bubble. and all the while, off in the distance, the statue of liberty lifted  her flame, still  celebrating an idea of freedom, in spite of everything that's gone on in the last 8 years.   

at the edge of the park,  people sat with their dogs reading the paper and lay sunbathing right on the concrete while underneath them, in the river,  float the detritus of modern life.   A single shoe, a HUGE bloated RAT, pale green and hairless now,  a giant feather, a swathe of plastic, bits of wood and garbage.   i focused on the rat.  gagged and began a whole big story in my head  about how gross the city is etc..  then i had to laugh.   so what did i think,  that  the rats in the barn on the farm are somehow easier to deal with than rats running through kitchens and over the garbage and floating in huge polluted bodies of water?

that's the reality i decided to go along with,  that i prefer country rats to city rats.   hey and what about the rats in Bermuda?  they are huge but perhaps less horrifying because they live in that little paradise?   did i decide somewhere along the line that the country rats are cleaner or more honest than the tough packs of rats in the city?   Could there be such a thing as an honest rat? A rat is a rat. It just is. I’m the one with all the thoughts and opinions and judgments of things. And how is it possible ever to judge when in one 30 minute stroll along the Hudson river so many different lives are playing out. Layers and layers of reality, all easily glimpsed if you stop for a second and watch.   if nothing else,  what a divine little game!  

 

moon on the water bermuda