Turtleing Toward the Light

As I understand it December 25th is the first day after the winter solstice in which the position of the rising sun can be discerned to have shifted from the day before, at least with the naked eye. In the northern hemisphere we are gaining daylight now but in the few days between solstice and Christmas, there seemed to be a pause in the length of days. I like that pause.

I thought it must have snowed when I woke up in a dark, hushed world this morning. Snow had been forecast. The top on my head was pounding so I knew the barometric pressure was low but it was too dark outside to see through the windows and I dug deeper to try to ease my aching head and to await the tipping point when desire for coffee would outweigh the disinclination to scuff through a chilly house and brew it.

Silence persisted and so did the sense of benevolence that wrapped me in the soft darkness. The electricity was on. I could hear a fan running. What was the silence?



This year I traversed the winter holidays as though on foot, as though I were a turtle. I moved as slowly as possible. I hosted one large potluck party (but all I did was decorate, which I love doing) one dinner party for six (but I started preparing two months in advance), Christmas Eve with just three others close to me and no gifts, and on Christmas Day I slipped gently across the 60 miles that separated me from my mother in her assisted living facility and enjoyed just being there and taking it in.



I think partly in response to this slower pace there has been a sense of openness in my heart that I have been hoping would appear if I did less and attended more to the moment.



Like the turtle in the garden, I stopped frequently, before and during the holidays, to reflect, doze, snack, stare into the distance. This spacious quality to the days hasn’t been a constant though. It has flickered in and out in the wind of excessive thinking.



Thinking and feeling in obsessive circles is, I think, endlessly seductive and building a habit of presence may be the work of a longer life than I have before me. Moving fast from thing to thing, thought to thought, seems necessary sometimes and yet is numbing. I see that the more I am able to expand thoughts and feelings into a sense of inclusiveness of other people who might be thinking and feeling things similar, the more this sense of spaciousness and peace prevails. The more compassion I feel for all of us and the less lonely I am.


It’s not easy to remember to do this, and I am not skilled at it when I do remember, but the amazing thing is that even small, unskilled movements in this direction bring a good result far in excess of our efforts.



When we expand our preoccupation with our own emotions to include a sense of the emotions of all others, who also suffer and rejoice, and when we pass on to ourselves and these others a healing peace that is beyond us but which can come through us to that place of suffering or rejoicing, we are participating in a holy magic. It is a true entry point into a transformative life. Or so I now believe. You can get to it a number of ways but first you have to slow down. Way, way down. There must be at least 100 traditions of faith that teach how to do this but in the end, the practitioner is still alone slogging it out in his own inner cyberspace.



Twice during this holiday I woke up laughing, bubbling over with an hilarity that stayed close to me all day and which, from time to time, would recur without reference to whether or not laughter was seemly in that moment. And that was funny too so it started me off again. I was seeing with fresh eyes the humor of  behaviors of the day before; mv vanity driven gestures, mostly. It's been way too long since I had a great laugh at my own expense.



There are reasons for dark feelings. Everyone has reasons and, big or little reasons, they seem to fill us up. Someone near me is caught in a life threatening addiction. The suffering I glimpse on her face haunts me with the need to think and wrestle and grieve and act I-know-not-how. But I'm trying to stay slowed down and and quiet rather than flash into a well meant action that will not help. There are memories and judgments that grind like broken glass through my psyche, unresolved though I work on them every day. And there is sadness. And there is disappointment. And there is desire. We can practice with what we are given.



But in the slow pace I’ve set this holiday season there is enough silent time to entertain these difficult feelings with creativity. I wish it for everyone.



I have provided myself with a fire in the stove, good wood, a comfortable armchair and a few gentle tasks that are close to nature. There are plants to attend. Their requirements are communicated in meek silence and their gratitude for care is seen in their thriving. There is sweeping I can do or polishing, if I’m so inclined, and these tasks might be done with silent mind and open heart. As the joy of this sometimes overtakes me, again, I wish it for all people.



On Christmas Mother spoke at length about a memory she was going to record for posterity. In halting starts and silent moments of visualizing the past and making sense of it, she told a long story about her courtship by my father in their college years. It was a creative combination of things that happened in her twenties and things that happened decades later and which my sisters and I still remember, seen and remembered by her as a single event. When I found myself holding my breath, not wanting to take in this fabrication, I adjusted and breathed my way through an acceptance of the fictionalization of our lives.



Well, what I told her was true. “It’s a wonderful story, Mom. Anyone would enjoy reading it.” But what I'm now thinking is that in some way, her version may be truer than fact.



She smiled with pleasure. “Do you think so?’



“Yes,” I said, thinking ‘I’ll add it to the stories I make up about my own life. And then I'll forgive myself for being human.’



We held each other when I left, or I held on to her. I do not want to let her go. But I am. She has a destination she is slowly embracing as she creeps around, stares into space remembering her fictions, having little snacks, and I cannot go with her. She is leaving piece at a time.



As I write now it has been three hours since I woke up and still my part of the universe is hushed and pregnant with something very good.

And I still don’t know what it is. But the snow has finally begun.

I am so glad to be old  enough to finally be capable of slowness. I no longer hurry for any reason but I attend more fully, I believe, to the moments as they scroll by and everything they bring with them. I try never to hold my breath to avoid taking in what is happening, though anything that can happen will happen at some point and I'm still thrown into chaos by unkindness, perfidy, fear and regret but when that happens I sometimes have the opportunity to remember that it’s the same for us all; that we all travel the same road and are endlessly meeting ourselves in each other as strangers, only to recoil or embrace and maybe learn.

In that spaciousness of discovery we can wish the happiness and forgiveness to each other that we wish for ourselves.

Joy, peace and generosity of heart to all.

Fortuna, Seneca and A Golden Eagle Pass

I drove to the forests of Maine to see if I could shut-up.

I could not.

Torrents of monologue were pouring through my head and would not be damned or re-directed. I was off-balance and ill. I was preoccupied. I needed this vacation.

For days I spent at least 20% of my time looking for keys, money and the flashlight that I misplaced in rotation. I chatted to myself while I searched. It was as if my things were swimming away from me like trout seeking quiet spots amid the splash and roar.

They could not be blamed. They were only doing what I was trying to do . . . find peace.

It had been 19 years since my last solo camping trip. That adventure had been out west where they admire all kinds of independent eccentrics, uncritically and on principle. I traveled for 3 ½ months, lived in my Mitsubishi Gallant and felt pretty cool. New Englander’s love eccentrics too, but new-comer eccentrics, of a certain age, car-camping in national parks, well, somehow it had a whole different ambience.

I had kept everything from my westering days in a small closet designated for that purpose so when I decided to go car camping in Acadia National Park I opened the shrine to see what the mice had left me.

The old Bic lighter still worked. The AA batteries still had some juice. Nineteen year old Sterno still heated coffee and two decade old duct tape still held up make-shift screens in the back windows of the 95 Subaru Legacy I was calling home for this trip. Each item of my earlier adventure was a little artifact, the whole closet of gear, a private shrine to faith in pilgrimage.

Yes, bad things can happen to you when you travel alone and live in a car. People politely and kindly pointed this out to me when they learned of my plan. “It’s not the same world as it was in 1993.” I listened. Their kind caution added to mine.

But what I suspected was that human beings were probably still being human. And that the world is a good place wherever you are until it suddenly becomes a bad place. But that can happen to you at home among family and friends. It is the nature of things. The Romans believed this was a result of the well- endowed, but amoral, goddess Fortuna, who delivered abundance and calamity obliviously and without regard to circumstance or merit, and the philosopher Seneca taught that the key to surviving the very real possibility of disaster with some measure of grace was to practice a profound acceptance of tragedy from the get-go.

Seneca lived at about the time of Christ and he had ample opportunity to practice his own philosophy, living, as he did, under the rule of first Caligula and then Nero.*

The world can become your worst nightmare in a second. Embrace Fortuna, implies Seneca. Let her largesse and destruction be okay with you and, as they alternate in your life, you will be happier for the equanimity you have cultivated.

Off I went with Fortuna in the heavens above me, a mattress in the back of the Legacy, $1165 in cash, my National Parks Golden Eagle Pass and some camping equipment that Norman Rockwell might have found inspiring, or at least Andy Warhol, and a brain so full of talk I’d have left it at home if I could have.

The forest floor in Acadia is strewn with lime colored moss. It flickers in sunlight. You walk cushioned in the woods, as if on 4 inches of foam. The squirrels are little, with big eyes, the darkness utterly black and moonlight splashes white fire in the interstices between branches.

In a waxing moon the clearing where a tree has fallen hosts a pillar of white light as if awaiting a ceremony or an alien landing.

Slowly I began to see and hear. I began to listen to my talk from an inner distance where it was less disruptive, more instructive and, okay, comical. I watched my old hands make coffee in four square feet of lighted surface on a wet wood table where the steam of the thermos was arresting and an ancient pot holder was so lovely I could have wept.

When the sun came out I walked. Banks of golden ferns and small red mushrooms left me momentarily without thought. No commentary was possible. Each pebble, cry of crow, shiver of water, visible pulse in my skinny wrist became a testament to the ephemeral nature of the individual items of life and the dear enduring field of energy that gives, supports and receives back it’s individuals. . . every snowflake, every soul, every word, every moment, I believe.

I had eight days in Acadia plus two days driving on each end. The first and last day there were in full sun. Every other day it rained; no phone, no computer; lots of books and audio books. I watched water sluicing down my car windows abstracting the woods into a bleeding silver, green and black brilliance and I strategized how best to plan my walks to the bathroom and the pros and cons of waiting another 24 hours before taking a 3.5 minute/ $2.00 shower at coin-op. My first adventure there had been accompanied by the sounds of a couple two stalls over having sex.

Surprisingly I had little to say to myself about this.

Last time I car-camped I was 44, cuter and unencumbered with symptoms of aging. At 67 I was often dizzy, off-balance, arthritic, allergic to the purchased food of convenience stores and most restaurants and my back was killing me. I did not feel strong and brave. I felt old and tentative. I had one jarring fall and had to walk two miles bruised and soaked. I talked to myself a lot about that. I wondered if I’d ever be able to give myself this kind of retreat again and whether or not it was doing me any good.

But you know, there were eiders at Seal Cove. I’d never seen them before. When I found them in the field guide I was as happy as I would have been to see an old friend. The water burned platinum, the water fluttered in blues, the water melted amber and jade. Layers of natural art peeled off moment by moment like sheets of acetate, revealing ever new versions of the same subjects before me. It never stopped and it is happening there now without me, the hours washing every subject with new weather and light changing them; not just how they look to an observer but what they are.

The miraculous is unfolding constantly in the wild places we have saved. And the gifts keep swimming in and out of existence in a field of creative lust, even when we cannot be there to see it happen and even if we don’t recognize that the formless ground of existence, the crucible from which this all comes, is an inexhaustible love. That’s my take on it.

Buoyed by this time aside, perhaps my encounter with the all-too-familiar people of my life, the patterns and field of my home can also be glimpsed as new . . . fleeting and more worthy of attention than I have felt them to be. The self-talk can maybe cease, or slow, as a familiar earlobe comes into view, or a patch of sunny dust on a decrepit table, a cloud tumbling in transition outside my same old window. We have been dust. We will be dust. For a few moments we have choice, and a voice.

I’m home again, temporary recipient of Fortuna’s abundance; quieter, happier for the existence of a few dozen square miles of natural beauty mercifully preserved for us. Here is a poem by Mary Oliver that illustrates what I feel about our need for wilderness and large protected natural areas as a base for human sanity. We don’t need to live there. We can't. We need to visit. We do need to know that the wilderness exists.

*Consolations of Philosophy, de Botton, Alain, 1st Vintage International ed., New York: Vintage Books, 2001,c2000.

Spring

By Mary Oliver


Somewhere
a black bear
has just risen from sleep
and is staring
down the mountain.

All night
in the brisk and shallow restlessness
of early spring
I think of her,

her four black fists
flicking the gravel,
her tongue
like a red fire
touching the grass,
the cold water.

There is only one question:
how to love this world.
I think of her
rising
like a black and leafy ledge
to sharpen her claws against
the silence
of the trees.

Whatever else
my life is
with its poems
and its music
and its cities,
it is also this dazzling darkness
coming
down the mountain,
breathing and tasting;

all day I think of her –
her white teeth,
her wordlessness,
her perfect love.

Between Here and There

Tasks and the needs of relationships un-scroll before me today like the prairie once spread its options before pioneers of the American West. I’ve neglected my responsibilities in favor of a love affair and, while I’ve been so blissfully occupied, the ‘to do’ list I keep running to maintain momentum against entropy, just slipped away. I did not miss it. But now, today, I do. I don’t even know where I put it and I’m not in a position to live without its gravitational, its navigational, properties.

 

On the other hand my life has been changed by love.  And I want that too.

 

Five generations of people have been born on earth in the length of time it has taken me to learn that a lasting love requires huge tensile strength of the creative self as well as the ability and desire to set that self aside for the good of the other, or the two of you together. If either one of those two capacities are missing, the structure is unstable. And living in love necessitates a fluidity of the inner world that allows you to go back and forth between the two. In other words, the list may not be an important part of the moment, but one needs to know where to find it.

 

I’m terrible at this. I’m either all momentum or all surrender but the transitions between these two states, which I think should take no more than seconds, minutes at the most, leave me feeling clubbed in the cerebellum. So I find myself sitting mouth agape, listening to the clock tick, watching the wind move leaves around, while I await the arrival of my single self and the ability to ‘get on with it’—whatever ‘it’ is. I still can’t find the list.

 

In service of my responsibilities I could do any of the following today: put wood hardener on the exterior damage of the bay window, epoxy and caulk the interior, vacuum, return phone calls, do one of the two art projects I’ve already been paid an advances for, mow two acres of lawn, make dinner, clean the refrigerator, get out the ladder and poison and putty borer bee holes. . . or wash my hair.

 

Surely I’ll do some of those things. And when I come across my list there will be things I can scratch off. But I am remembering Thursday with you at the hospital and I anticipate Tuesday, already pregnant with the six hours it will take me to drive to Annapolis and escort Mother to the eye doctor. Between here and there I court a sense of self large enough to both maintain what plans I have already undertaken and to embrace what I am becoming through love.

 

Thursday

 

You are up there in a windowless room

Having your guts probed,

Infused by a chemical warmth that will wear off

Long before we get the news.

 

Of course, there’ll still be wine.

 

I couldn’t wait in the claustrophobic grey

Of the area assigned to relatives with its relentless television

And its miasma of boredom and fear.

I bolted for the courtyard below.

 

Three ginkgo trees, picnic tables of dark green under wide umbrellas,

An embracing wall of flowers awaited defectors;

Yet I was the sole celebrant of the sunshine

And blue sky that embraced this hospital.

 

It’s your fault.

 

You’ve pulled the animal in me straight up

From where it’s been curled and waiting all these years,

Its presence suspected but never verified, its growl, its pulse, its ferocious

Capacity for pleasure claiming me; you did that.

 

Such creatures don’t sit docilely in waiting rooms

Once they’ve found their basic nature, their pulse.

They need a breeze. They need sun.

When waiting, they find a piece of earth and go to ground.

 

When it’s time to go in and claim you, I will.

 

You’ll be woozy and we’ll meander. Like old people. Oh! We are old people.

Oh! You who pierced me with a blue gaze,

Who revel in the parts of me others have barely tolerated,

I will hold your bruised arm in my knotty fingers and squeeze.

 

I will watch your sun-filled hair respond to the breeze.

 

Brothers and Sisters

I’ve been looking to other people this week, to get the answer to the question of how we can  have an elegant inner world. How can we be unflappable in the face of fear, worry, meanness and ill-intent against us on the part of others or against others for our own part. How can we find a home in our own mind that welcomes and nourishes us or how can we use our mind to bring us to the home in our hearts.




I’m a Christian so I asked Jesus first. He had nothing new to say on the subject. Just the usual, “When He, the Spirit of Truth, is come He will lead you into all truth” and “My grace is sufficient unto thee,” and “Turn the other cheek.”



“Yeah, yeah, I hear that but I just need something fresh, some new way to manage my inner world. I need something I can understand.”



“How about, Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me a sinner, have mercy?” said the still small voice within me.




“Ahhhhhhhhhhhh. Been there, done that,” I said.



So I called up the Dalai Lama in India where he and the gang escaped from Tibet to avoid extinction by the Chinese and thus have been able to go on doing something useful in the world, and he answered on the first ring. He answers his own phone, you know.



I barely gave him time to say his warm, personal, heartfelt “Hello?”



“Dalai Lama,” I said, “You’ve got to help me. People are out to get me. They’ve formed a gang and they’re bullying me with behavior that excludes me and judges me falsely and it makes me feel really really bad. It makes me scared. It makes me angry back. It makes me want to hurt them big time. What do I do with all this feeling?



“Sweetheart,” said the Dalai Lama. “You are the pickle of my eye . . . like an apple but a little too much time in the brine.” He paused. I don’t know if he was gathering his thoughts or praying. But eventually he started talking and here is what he told me in his soft, clear voice:



All of those who are for you, and all of those who are against you, and all the billions of people who don't know you, never heard of you and could care less about you, have four things in common. Listen and take this in. It includes me and it includes you:



1. We all want to be happy.

2. We all want an end to any suffering we may be experiencing at the moment.

3. We all are only thinking about our own selfish selves most of the time.

4. In a fistful of years we will all be very very dead and every opportunity to support each other, love each other, accept each other, build something good and hold each other blameless will be over. We will be dust.



There was a pause while I took this in and made a few notes. “Dust” I wrote.



“Yeah”, I said, “dust. But what do I dooooooooooooooo?”



“Have mercy on me a sinner,” he said.



“What?”



“Sorry, I wasn’t talking to you. Listen,” he said, “and repeat after me.”



1. Do no harm. That means stop being angry back. That at least puts an end to the ugliness on your end. We are all connected.

2. Be kind to everyone. We are all connected. Trust me on this; it’s the only way to go.

3. Try to be still at least once a day and know that God is God. That God is for us. And that we are all connected.



“You’ve been talking to the other Guy, I accused.”



“Yeah. We chat,” said the Dalai Lama. “Look, I’ve got to say good bye now. I hear on NPR that six of my dear friends back in Tibet have just been executed by the Chinese. I need to meditate on love.”



He might have had a little break in his voice as he said that last part. Then he hung up.



I guess he did me no harm. And I’m thinking about what he said. We are all connected. I can’t hurt anyone without hurting myself. And vise versa. We are one.



So today, I’m feeling pretty unflappable. My thoughts, are sort of corralled, at least ocassionally noticed, according to type. I like my thoughts. I always believe they’re going to save me and they never do, and they still take up most of the inner terrain. But sometimes I can get a little distance on them, and I think that's what the Dalai Lama was pointing toward. He didn't actually say 'get over yourself' but that's because he didn't want to do any harm.



Today I've been sitting on the fence, so to speak, once in awhile, and watching my thoughts prance around. I had an image in my mind, and I think the Dalai Lama sent this to me, but maybe it was the other Guy, of my brothers and sisters and me sitting up here on the fence, their thoughts and my thoughts all in the corral stomping and shaking like wild horses, and we laugh. Now, when I imagine this, the Chinese are here too, AK 47's slung over their backs, a little blood spatter on their chests. And the dear Dalai Lama; he is with us.



Elegant? Well no but the view is pretty good from the fence. And I like sitting with my family, talking trash and watching the dust blow by. See it sparkle in the wind?

Stripped Down and Convenient to Occupy




Ernst Barlach: Old Woman Laughing

When I used to imagine what it would feel like to be old, back when I had logged in maybe nine years, a girl with flawless skin, I couldn’t imagine myself ever becoming an old woman. That dangling soft crepiness, those twisted fingers and toes, the possible foot long hair growing out of a facial mole (of which I would be unaware due to poor vision,) it would not happen to me. All that softness gone to seed was repellant to my straight, clean, limber nine year old self.



Mother drove the family car oblivious to the forensic scrutiny I was giving her appearance or my conclusions as an investigator of the crimes of time against the human body. Over the years I watched her skin turn to coarse, loose fabric, her jaw line ruffle. I took in her make-up and her earrings, her good hair, but even with all that help, I didn’t know how she could let herself go out in public that way.



I imagined myself getting old like a man, like my grandfather, somehow skipping the vulnerability of the whole breast growing, menstruating, constantly probed business of womanhood and going straight to strong, wise and slender with an unflappable awareness of human folly and little to lose.



I am now a somewhat old woman myself; twice the age of mother when I used to critique her skin. I was not protected by any magic from becoming curvy and I eventually enjoyed the changes so repellant to my nine year old self. But now, approaching 70, I’m back to wishing I were somehow tougher, leaner and altogether less vulnerable. As I head toward wizened I’d like to be wise, not decorated; measured and responsive, not busy, and stripped of clutter. And I keep thinking there must be a way to achieve that state. And I keep thinking I should already have accomplished that.


Being a man would not have helped me. I know that now. Old men really aren’t protected from the need for medical probings. They are not immune to grooming errors caused by poor vision, they’re just in the habit of shaving. Their skin gets so thin that the pressure of fingers can make it bruise. They are not tough. They can still be hurt in their hearts no matter how much detachment of intellect they may court. And it’s no easier for them than for women to be by-passed by power, have their wishes dismissed, or their intentions become humorous to others. They are not protected from pain any more than my mother was or I am.



So what does a stripped down psyche look like anyway? How does one become unflappable? Does it mean you just don’t care if you care? Or does one’s acceptance of human folly need to go so deep that one feels little but a slightly sad or slightly happy benevolence toward other people? Maybe even find the hilarity in the human drama? Is this possible? That's what I saw in my grandfather.



A stripped down body would be lean and strong but not obsessively so. It would be covered with comfortable, easy-moving clothing of little variety.



A stripped down home would maybe have, what?, 15-100 permanent items in it? (Would that include clothing?) And it would be convenient to places of interest, pleasant to occupy, have an extra chair or two for company?



Where do you start in your goal of achieving this? With the body, I guess. But the real battleground for simplicity is in the mind where we are alone, and absolutely accountable, and mostly out-of-control. What are the mental requirements for an elegant inhabitance of our psyche?



To be continued . . .

click here for the Time's Magazine U.S. article on 100 Things

The Wood Rot Solution: Recipe for Stopping Wood Rot

Ordinarily I enjoy household projects once I am committed to the task but repairing rot in an old wooden window frame is a job I faced with dread. The bay window where I have my indoor flower garden was constructed around a huge piece of wood-framed glass rescued from an old pharmacy under demolition 30 years ago. The rest is cinderblock and rough sawn oak stained Jacobean on the outside and painted white in the interior.




The geraniums and I got along well. They thrived on the neglect I dished out and the same plants were in place over 20 years, blazing red. Once a month or so I’d soak them and a couple times a year I’d whack them back and pull out the dead leaves but mostly the giving was on their side.

Then two weeks before Christmas they all died in about three days and after I hauled out the corpses I could no longer ignore the daylight coming in through gaps in the wood frame and supports under the window. Both the inside and the outside frame were disasters.

I did not want to go digging in there. I got through the holidays by placing potted poinsettias in the bed to hide the disaster, a tactic that was hideously expensive for a very temporary and purely cosmetic solution. As advised by White House Nurseries in Sparks I let the soil 'rest' for 6 months. But by June I had a dinner party on the schedule and that room was where we would be dining. The poinsettias were history.

I bought 20 new geraniums from White House and my beloved helped me repot them, knowing it would probably be more than a month until they could be put in the soil of the repaired window.



Last week, when I began pulling out the rot created by condensation over the years, I saw that the whole 8’ x 7’ piece of glass was supported primarily by a two inch section of solid wood and that most of the support beams could be flicked away in chunks with my ungloved finger.



Having no money to take on a replacement window or an expensive repair I found this state of affairs overwhelming. I kept finding new places where a screwdriver could be pushed all the way through the beams. There were things going on in there I didn’t want to know about; ant, or termite, infestation for one.



The Light of my Life found a recipe online for a solution to stop rot that you could mix up yourself. It’s 50% anti-freeze, 28% boric acid and 22% borax (as in Twenty Mule Team Borax. Yes, they still sell it. I got it at Wal-Mart.) You have to cook the mixture. I thought surely the fumes would be toxic but he assured me this would not be so and he was right. There was very little odor at all. (see recipe below)



I applied the mixture with a turkey baster kept in the tool room for various non-food applications. I soaked the wood in this solution, put a fan on it and waited for it to dry.



In the meantime I found a place to buy wood petrifier and filler which is supposed to harden the soft areas. I had to buy a case of it because it was a special order. And the garage in town sold me some epoxy auto body filler that I know from past experience can be troweled in to replace the missing wood, then sanded and painted to match the existing, such as it is. The total cost will be about $350, I think. But a replacement bay with operational windows would cost close to $6000 installed. That’s not happening.

It’s going to be a long job and there was no way it could be finished and new geraniums planted before our dinner party last Sunday. We placed new potted geraniums in front the work and guests had clear view of the surgery if they chose to look. It didn’t spoil anyone’s appetite.

Since this is a project in process I’ll start with the pictures I have so far and add as the work proceeds.


Recipe for stopping wood rot, killing ant infestations, and repairing remaining damaged areas.


1. Using a screwdriver and small wire brush, or hand held electric rotary tool, clear all loose rotted wood out of the area to be treated. Vacuum the area, if possible, to get up dust and small loose pieces of wood debris. Protect from further water damage.



2. Mix together in a three or four gallon pot:


• One gallon antifreeze


• Two quarts plus one cup boric acid powder


• One and ¾ quarts borax powder


3. Cook and stir until all dry ingredients are dissolved and mixture is boiling. Allow to cool.


4. When ready to use, mix 50/50 with anti-freeze and apply mixture liberally to prepared wood.


5. Allow to dry while continuing to protect the area from water.


6. To firm up soft, remaining wood find PC-Petrifier Wood Hardener. (PC-Products is located in Allentown, PA and their website is: www.pcepoxy.com)


7. Apply as directed

 8. Fill missing wood with PC-Woody or Bondo Automotive Epoxy (http://bondo.com/)


9. Sand, paint or stain and caulk to match existing.

Mothers Day: A Meditation on Altruism and Personal Pleasure

Why can’t Mother’s Day be easy and a little magical like Ground Hog Day?

I am on my way to Annapolis to visit my Mom, speculating on the cost/benefit ratio of the holiday, as an SUV with driver and an immense bouquet of flowers strapped as co-pilot in the passenger seat, weaves in front of me and through traffic, him doing 90.

On Ground Hog Day you are not penalized by a sense of guilt if you don’t actually observe a specific ground hog and whether or not she sees her shadow. You are not penalized if you forget about the holiday altogether. But there is special added value to the day in that prophesy is being made. If she sees her shadow you get six more weeks of winter.

Believe it. They’ll talk about it on the local news that night.

As a mother, I’d like to have this power of prophesy that ground hogs possess. How about, if I see my shadow on Mother’s Day my daughter will receive an unexpected gift in the following six weeks. She could be anticipating this with pleasure, even if she’d just noticed it was sunny that day and thought of me, poking my head out of my abode and walking slowly, squinting, into the front yard. Every day she could be aware that a gift was about to arrive. And it would arrive. Life is funny that way.

My Mom rolled slowly through the doorway of her apartment curved over her walker, eyes peering cautiously. Pretty as always, this time in lavender jacket and pants, a pink flower provided by staff, drooping just a little bit from one lapel, she was looking for me. I had called to tell her I was coming but she was maybe a tiny bit shocked to see my sister and brother-in-law also waiting for her in her apartment.

We chatted gently for an hour, my sister and I each hemming a pair of new pants that mother couldn’t wear because they were too long. I’d purposely come down early to raid her closet while she was at lunch so we could work on them. Otherwise it would have been “No no no. I’ve got plenty of pants. I don’t need you to do that.” She still said it but it was too late. We had pants in hand.

We each brought flowers and stories about what was happening in our lives . . . questions for her. There was some laughter, mostly because my sister is a very funny woman, but probably Mom didn’t follow much of that in spite of the fact that she’d been forced to unplug her ears and fork over her hearing aids for examination. As usual she was wearing them with either no batteries or dead ones.

Mom loves the fact that she can hear once they’re powered up. We can tell this by the expression of amazement and delight on her face as the world comes back into auditory focus for her, but always, she is adamant that she doesn’t want us messing with them and coaxing them away from her has become an art form. You can’t sneak up on them like you can the pants. Every time it’s the same.

We were only there an hour and a half and the affection we felt was palpable but I’m sure Mom was exhausted by the time we left.

 

 

 

I saw my shadow.

Back at home I was visited by my own dear girl and her gigantic, hairy, musical darling boy, my 17 year old grandson. There’s always an instrument around his neck, or handy, and music pours off him like water. She brought two bottles of malbec and a card. Such a good girl.

We three are always happy together. I had provided all the materials for ‘The Pepsi Challenge’ because the last time we had convened there was a vociferous discussion about the relative merits of Coke versus Pepsi; each of us believing we could tell them apart. In fact, only I could do so when put to the test, and the pleasure that gave me would have been Mother’s Day gift enough. Do you think they let me win?

Nah.

My daughter read out loud an article on altruism from the March 5th issue of the New Yorker while the boy and the old lady duked it out over a game of Chinese checkers. This rivalry has been going on for years. I won, by one move, after he generously let me go first; a fact he was quick to point out when I won. Did I mention I won?

At the end of the long article, we were all relieved to hear that scientists now, for the most part agree, what makes us human is the fact that we are shaped by both the genetic imperative to co-operate for the good of the group and to compete selfishly for our own good. Among all the species, we are stuck in between the urge for altruistic action and the killer instinct of unmitigated competition. What a surprise.

We listened to Knut Bell ‘Wicked, Ornry, Mean and Nasty”and Billie and Dede Pierce, ‘Blues and Tonks from the Delta’ and my grandson played accompaniment. We all kept time to the beat. It was impossible not to.

I gave my daughter a hand rub. She works so hard. We were happy. We were content but the mothers were exhausted. What was that about altruism? Something connected to genetics.

Okay, maybe he didn’t let me win but he did let me go first. Pretty altruistic for a 17 year old.

I believe we’ll have six weeks of good weather and I am right. Because today is drizzling grey and I’ve got sunshine. In my prayers, I’m sending that sunshine to my Mom.

Suddenly Awry: Notes from Love in the Slow Lane

I can’t believe falling in love can be so exhausting but it’s that way for both of us. The difference between zero companions and one companion is like the difference between having one head and two. You are suddenly seeing the world two ways at once and that expansion is taxing; especially if you thought it could not happen to you. . . if you’re closing in on, or just leaving behind, your 70’s.

Gentle inquiries of each other pepper the day; would you prefer this or that? Shall we do (whatever) now or later? Are you hungry or should we go for a walk? Are you busy? Do you have time to hear this? Arggggh! This is so complicated! Help me think! Does the music bother you? I should go home and let you have your (something something) in peace. Oh don’t go. I miss you so.

This all takes emotional fiber and we both wish they sold it at Walmart.

They say living alone requires strength of character and of course it does. You have to be able to withstand the ferocious sense of silence, the isolation that feels not just existential but sometimes real, three dimensional and organic, like maybe you really are the last person on the planet. But you get used to it.

In time people find that aloneness is not as all-encompassing as it seemed at first. There are sounds in the silence and they indicate lives going on. We can investigate and discover that we share space with other life-forms. There is T.V. and there are movies. There are plants and pets; we have the telephone; email; music and books. And, of course, you get out and about.

But a lot of the mitigation to aloneness seems to come from developing a habit of self-talk. I am talking to people in my head. I am talking to myself and answering. I toss off one-liners to the cats, the car, the untrimmed shrubbery. And all of that is easy because it’s all an unimpeded flow of self with no hesitations, no balancing or challenging ideas. It is really me keeping my sense of who I am alive; keeping before myself an image of how the world is with little affirmations, little gestures that tell me where I fit into the scheme of things.

As a couple, self-talk is the first thing to go. Space explodes with points of view and different ideas of what and who we are. Everything peacefully taken for granted yesterday is up for re-examination today. I am not alone. I am loved. But if I’m loved then I’m not exactly who I’ve been thinking I was all these years. And all the little habits that identified me to myself are suddenly awry.

I love you. We are in our 8th, 9th decade of life. We thought we knew our individual terrain. Now I abandon myself to make you laugh. You attend with interest to my habits and pleasures. I want you to be afloat in the appreciation I feel for you and vice-versa. It’s all very, very different from being completely on our own, alone and entrenched and we are, both of us, shaking with exhaustion by evening. Maybe we are really just too old for this, I think.

But then we regard each other, our eyes hold, and there is an ocean of you before me. I am on the shore of you and you go on forever and there is no one else like you. You are bigger and deeper than even you know yourself to be. And maybe I am too. Shipwrecks lie wafting in the fathoms of our years. The surface sparkles in the light of our regard. We are two who have found each other at the end, and for a measure of time, before familiarity has limited our vision, before one of us has to leave, something in us has sense enough to tremble; and trembling, to hang on.

Tap Root

I’m sipping my evening martini, rocking the porch swing with the tips of my sneakers and looking east but I’m picturing what’s happening to the west, on the other side of the house, as the sun shatters in the pines.

All day I worked the azalea bed back there, the fork-tipped trowel thrust as deep as I could get it next to a tap root of thistle or dandelion, levering each one with the right hand, pulling it with the left, bits of dirt flying into my face and down my shirt, holding each dislodged plant in my gaze briefly to heighten the satisfaction of its removal, then flinging it over my shoulder onto the lawn behind me. Like a four year old, enchanted by repetition, my satisfaction builds. There’s another one! And another! Of course in choosing to work on the azalea border I condemned the cutting bed to another week or more of chaos and neglect.

Azaleas bloom before lilies, I reasoned, but it’s the cutting bed I’m picturing as I rock. The deer won’t eat those weeds I ruminate, over-chewing an olive to extract every molecule of flavor. Behind my head I picture their slender legs carrying them down the wood margin in the after-light of dusk, like bride’s maids to the altar in hesitation step, they make straight for the neglected hyacinth, lily and tulip greens, nosing unraked leaf mold out of their way, biting leaves off as close to the ground as they can.

This bothers me less than it should. All day I enjoyed manifesting my desire for a weed-free azalea border and every morning and evening the white-tail manifest desires in munching through my cutting bed. I work hard to see something I’ve only dreamed about take corporal form but I won’t  fence it or protect any of it. Why? I don’t really know. It doesn’t make sense.

I love the wild deer as much as I love having lilies at hand. I guess that’s the reason. And, no, there are not too many deer in my area. I’m surrounded by hunters. And anyway, some lilies always escape the foraging and give me bouquets I’ll bring into the house and enjoy this summer. I’ll cultivate a flower bed but it’s the wild things I root for in my heart as they fend for themselves in the margins they’ve been left.

For all of us there sometimes seems to be an element of common sense missing from the choices we make, and those of us governed more by patterned thinking, if pressed for rationale, sometimes have to scramble to assemble, in after thought, a reason for what we know is right and yet for which we have no ready explanation.

Those who are more logically inclined are not better off. They sometimes have to fib to themselves to make a syllogism work.

So, we’re all pretty silly. No matter. It’s no matter at all. I toast the tap root in us, so difficult to dislodge whatever it is I mean by that, and I toast endeavors illogical yet deeply enjoyed; to the wild and to the tame.

Nothing that Feels Like Work: An Easter Meditation

Like a lot of working people, I am tired today. It’s Easter Sunday and I want not to have to contain myself, gather myself up and thrust myself into activity, but to be a receptor, a receiver of the ‘big good’ that surrounds me.

I could have driven today to Annapolis to spend time with my mother, who may not have many more Easters. I could have gone to church. I could have made a dinner here and invited my grandson and daughter. I don’t see enough of them. I could have accepted the offer of friends to share a meal with them. I could have worked on one of the projects I’m invested in. I had to choose. I could only have one of these options.

I chose to do nothing that felt like work; to stand in place and enjoy the sun.

I’m stuck with a fragment in my head.

“Why look ye for the living among the dead? Christ is risen, He is risen, Christ is risen from the dead.”

It was Woods Memorial Presbyterian Church, Severna Park, Maryland, Easter 1971, and I sang in the choir. It’s one of the things I did while waiting for my husband to come home from Vietnam. Our daughter was not yet two years old. We had a composer-choir director in that church, whom we called Billy, and I do not remember his last name. He may have written this song that I’ve remembered.

What astounds me, Billy, is that while I was sitting in bed this morning singing this melody, which goes from haunting to joyous, my daughter called me. She opened the conversation by singing the exact same part of the song that I was warbling in my solitary space. It felt like some spiritual genetic echo. I must have been singing this song on Easter since 1971 for her to have known and made it her own. And now it links us to each other and to Billy and who knows?

Morning light rakes everything in its path right now, on my chosen day of rest, on the anniversary day, as the story goes, that a man named Jesus, dead and buried, disappeared from his tomb and two angels kept watch to tell where he had gone. That’s the story anyway.

My hand and pen throw shadow between themselves and the rest of me. This moment is vivid and feels potent. Believing the whole day stretches before me unadulterated by obligation I let myself pool into it. I let myself feel. I allow my senses to go seeping into the day to take in what I'm able.

I’m staying home alone today. This is my choice. It may not be the best choice but it is the choice I make. It’s definitive. It will make this day different from whatever else the day might have been.

The cold earth begins to steam in the Easter sun and I too quicken at the surface and in my imagination. I feel a part of the day and a part of all I observe. In the deeper, more remote recesses of my spirit there may be some imperative warming toward fruitfulness but I can’t identify it.

An unsolicited thought goes by. What, or how, does a leaf ‘feel’ when unfurling? Rather, how do I feel imagining this event?

If I sit among the oaks today, while playing hooky from the 'shoulds,' might I sense moisture slipping through root membranes, sap being drawn upward from the hidden places under soil, feel it pulled upward throughout a single, individual body trunk and sent in a fractal rush to feed its thousand fisted leaves? Might I not know something about leaves being pushed into irretrievable exposure?

Nature in rebirth mode both pushes and pulls until the commitment to be here and not there, is made. In being pushed and pulled into planetary exposure, to some time in the sun, to our work, to letting go, to falling, to spilling, to being taken back from whence we came there is no real choice. What might it feel like to slip out of this world and into yet another that has been prepared for us and where we are welcomed with joy as we have been here? What, if any, are our choices along the way?

As humans we can notice or not, be grateful or not, be here or be there, love or love not, believe or believe not. That’s all we’ve got for our time in the sun. That’s free will, right?

++++++++++++++++

I’ve finished the mowing in slow motion and am sitting on the porch swing again. Mowing isn’t work for me, I reasoned. It’s a form of rest. Blossoms of cherry are darting to and fro like bees and I review again a choice I made on a specific day a long time ago.

I cast my lot in believing that That which was creating everything, once upon a time, enlisted as human to draw our most specific individual one-of-a-kind selves into a conscious good eternity; to show the way to a place we could not go on our own terms or by our own endeavors. In other words, we could not get there alone. Hard to see. Hard to believe.

I decided to accept that an unimaginable quantum Love threw Itself, is still throwing Itself, in front of the cosmic bus to rescue us from the very limitations It gave us; to reveal something to us that is beyond our grasp. Love wants us to understand something of how it works and that we are wanted as participants. Love yearns to connect.

Whatever else they are, (history, myth, veiled knowledge, genetic memory, word of God) our stories are sign-posts pointing toward what can not be described by the rational human brain.

Who understands sacrificial love? And why would there be a self-limiting and a self-giving aspect to God, I wondered? Why would God take on human suffering?

Why would God not?

We were made and are being made. The eternal in the temporal can only be glimpsed when one pierces the other. It takes an event, at a point in time, to mark the place where a choice made is a difference begun.

A bus careening, a crowd or a political power out of control, a scene of horror at Golgotha, have a finite power that our eyes are made to see as total. But sometimes something happens and we sense a real transcendent power coming from an invisible porthole from a place beyond our comprehension which, having entered the story, changes the story. It always happens on a particular day. And on no day are we built to be nonchalant about encountering angels in an empty tomb. Even the believers couldn't believe.

To act on faith in the absence of real evidence feels potentially silly, possibly the wrong thing to do, so laughable and yet, at the right point in time, it can become the only choice that allows for enlargement and growth. You make it. You do something, you take a step in faith, and then things are different. Or they’re exactly the same and you are different. The point is that something happens.

Like sap rising comes acceptance that we are both loved and needed by love. We cave in, fall down or are drawn up toward the love that made us, through a chaotic whirl of life, into an eternal, and equally unimaginable, good beyond. Or so I decided to believe. It’s just something anyone might do one particular day. A choice, like any other choice. We pick. We change. And we ourselves become a sign pointing toward a larger story.

Should I have visited my mother? I don’t know. I chose to stay home and sing and mow and nap like a baby, trusting that someone would keep me covered; trusting that Mother too was being lifted up. I caught a cold. And sang with my daughter across space and time. Mother was fine. And I had an Easter I will remember.

Mowing for Joy

I completed the first mowing of the season this week, breath held in trepidation. My mowing style involves some tractor abuse, some would say, but I say it’s a matter of faith. I have faith in my tractor. I don’t like to lose my momentum by getting off to carry every downed branch into the woods; move every rock muscled up by thaw. Mostly I just mow over them, hoping for the best, teeth clenched, eyes squinted in empathy and mostly stuff I mow over breaks up. With repeated attacks in April all winter debris will have turned to mulch and gone flying by May. But in the interlude until we’re settled into a seasonal groove I worry about the spindles, the blades, the belts. I worry but I give no quarter.

I have tremendous faith in John Deere. My little 265 is 23 years old and has had a hard life. Several non-Deere salesmen over the years have tried to convince me that my tractor was over the hill.

One guy slyly offered to relieve me of it for $500.

Another salesman explained that I’d be much better off with a Simplicity because they didn’t have so many little parts (meaning parts that could be replaced for under $15.00) but that with Simplicity whole sections were all-of-a-piece (meaning when you needed a tiny repair you’d have to replace about 25% of your tractor.)

Did I really look that stupid? Was it the overalls? Or just my girliness?

Anyway, Johnny and I have been in love for a long time. I do most of the talking but I think maybe he does love me back. What else could 23 years of faithfulness in tough circumstances mean but love? Through thick and through thin, for better or for worse, he’s been there for me. And no matter what aspersions where cast in his direction by low minded people I’ve been staunch; I’ve never given in. I’ve never given up on him.

Once I rolled him but I jumped off in time to avoid death. A friend with a one ton pick-up and a winch hauled him back onto his wheels and patched him up.

Once he needed a short block. Well, who doesn’t. . . eventually?

Together we have experimented with different mowing techniques and how long it takes to execute each one. I will share them with you here in case you’d like to experiment with your own mowing.

There is your basic area mow where you divide the property into units that are then addressed efficiently one at a time. This is one of the speedier techniques and no doubt you are familiar with it but it has the flaw of being ungodly boring.

I’m fond of the perimeter mow because it is possibly the most efficient and you get to see a lot of scenery go by. Basically you start off mowing all areas as one from the far outside. In the beginning it doesn’t seem like you’re getting much done. It’s like saving a penny one week and then doubling your existing amount every week after that. For awhile all you’ve got is small change. Then bonanza! You do end up with some isolated sections that you have to go over your own path to get to, but that’s a good opportunity to look for skips.

Radiator mow is good for square and trapezoidal areas. You just fly down one side, turn back up into it in 10-30 feet and again at the top until you’ve formed a loopy zigzag through the grass. This is surprisingly fun and I never tire of it since it seems to come out slightly differently every time I do it.

There’s the circular mow where you start in the middle of the lawn and turn around like a dog deciding to lie down. You start with this tight little crop circle of fresh clipped grass in the middle of a sea of dandelions and for this reason I enjoy it most in May. For maximum pleasure you don’t turn on the blades until you are in the middle of the field.

There is the X mow but you end up with small awkward shapes spread far apart so it’s neither efficient nor fun and Johnny and I do not recommend it.

One of our favorites is message to god mow where you drive blades-a-fly while spelling out a word in cursive. You need a pretty big lawn or a tractor with a very tight turning radius to do this well and it’s not efficient. But if you count added value for mowing pleasure, and we do, this is by far the most fun. If a small plane happens by you might even get a wing wave. We have.

Finally there is crazy mow which is very inefficient time-wise but can be magically cathartic for those times when nothing in your life makes sense. This is where you just mow, with no pattern or agenda. You fly around trees, make a beeline to the blue bird house where you mow a square with a lot of fussy backing up and switching on and off of blades, you chase squirrels and cats which can be amusing if you’re in the right mood though, of course, you never get near them, maybe you mow backward for ten minutes or so, anything you feel like doing. Afterward you mop up. It looks quite crazy to observers, and if you live in suburbia, this will attract some, but it is the very pinnacle of self expression in mowing. If you’re having a bad day, the grass is up and it’s not raining, try it. It could save you months of psychotherapy.

That’s all the news from the front porch today.

Into The Woods

The giant is coming back to life. Veins, capillaries, are bulging at the tips, and I wait for this beast  whose arrival causes me such a whirlwind of feeling. I’m talking about spring. And I’m talking about a play I saw Friday night at Baltimore’s Center Stage called Into The Woods.

Spring is in a ripping tear to be born this year. I’m on the porch, of course. All the hairs on my neck stand up as I gaze lawn-ward at the writhing shag carpet under which I will some day lie buried. I howl every year in the face of spring. And every year I take her on like a dog takes on a bear. It’s a mythic struggle. I can’t win and I’m telling myself this as I change the oil in the tractor with care. The pollens, the aromas in earth’s birthing room, slip in and out of my lungs as I put in the new air filter. . . as I sharpen my blades . . . as I take a Zyrtec. . . as I face my darling enemy, that frilly, overheated, sticky messy Spring.

My fantasy is like the terrible legends recounted by the Grimm Brothers who brought to light the dark side long before Freud did. We need the wolf to be ‘the other.’ We need hates and fears to remain safely in the woods and and in stories, not up front in ourselves. Freud showed us that we are both the wolf and the flesh-eating giant as well as the innocent Red Riding Hood and the fair haired Rapunzel and Jack with whom we so identified.

Yet even after we've been shown that what we are fighting lies more within us than without, we are still all in the woods with giants. All our battles are mythic, even the silly ones, even the seasonal ones, and none of our actions are untainted by personal agenda. As Pogo says, “We have met the enemy and he is us,” yet we’re not much illuminated by the knowledge.

Friday night I drove home from the play letting the seductive air of spring blow through the car, letting echoes of the songs bounce between galaxies of synapses, treasuring the memories and associations triggered by the performance. The play is deliciously imbued with paradox. We laughed at the agony of those characters wanting the impossible. We saw how the longing for the beautiful woman, the love for dear ‘Milky White’ the cow, the golden harp, the baby whose arrival would make everything perfect, how all these things promised to the minds of the characters a Happily-Ever-After. We saw how desire threw them into the woods where bad things happened and where they often found themselves alone and on the other side of their happiness.

We laughed at the naivety of the mother who would send her little girl alone into the wolfish woods looking like a delicious morsel decked out in red. We laughed at the step-mother industriously cutting off the toes of her daughters so they could get their big feet into a glass slipper which would only fit the real princess. We laughed even as we became aware that our very theatre was in the woods and that we were all on hopeless journeys doing foolish things in search of impossible goals.

The banker on my left and the cancer survivor on my right both recognized the woods. They’d been told, as had I, that they could have that raise, that account, that five years, that beautiful view, if they could just bring back a piece of red cloak, a hank of yellow hair, five magic beans and do it in just two days, or six months, or with a positive attitude. We each entered the woods, maybe in a fuzzy haze, maybe in a white hot focus, but there we were, suddenly alone, confused, a sense of urgency driving us and danger lurking behind every tree. And losses were inevitable. Are inevitable.

So the second half of the play is about what comes after happily-ever-after. Apparently some people are so accustomed to happy endings being the last word on any struggle that they left the theatre at intermission, thinking the play was over. We thought so, truth be told. We walked out for a breath of fresh air and were gently notified by the doorman that the play was only half over.

The music got more beautiful in the second half; of course. I cried with the onstage survivors. The charming prince had not been faithful, just charming. The baker got his baby but lost his wife. Rapunzel had borderline personality disorder caused by the fact that her witch-of-a-mother had no sense of boundaries and Little Red Riding Hood had taken to carrying a large knife and had a distinctly un-childlike look on her face. The princess had abandoned the castle and it was she who sang to us the beautiful song of comfort, the song that redeemed our losses and forgave our foolishness, the fragment that played in my head all the way home:

Mother cannot guide you.

Now you're on your own.

Only me beside you.

Still, you're not alone.

No one is alone.

Truly.

No one is alone.

Sometimes people leave you,

Halfway through the wood.

Others may deceive you.

You decide what's good.

You decide alone.

But no one is alone.

It’s the princess I want to be, singing the song of redemption to the world’s wounded, looking so lovely. But of course she looked lovely. Her losses were not all that staggering. She knew she was a princess even if she’d given up her throne. She’d never been overly fond of the castle. And the prince? He had only been charming. He hadn’t had much metal in the long run. She hadn’t been heart-and-soul in love with the guy. So she didn’t look all that worn and battle scarred. She still had a song in her heart.

This princess, the one sitting in my seat, really was in love once-upon-a-time and spent a long time in the woods alone. This sleeping beauty has had to cut through eight acres of thorny briers to find the self she left behind dozing in a glass box waiting for rescue. This mother stupidly sent her daughter out into the world completely unprotected although at least she didn’t try to trim the girl’s big feet to fit someone else’s shoes. I’ll give her that. But foolishness has gone hand in hand with hope and tragedy in every step this princess has taken. And she’s hard of hearing. And her voice isn’t so pretty anymore. And one day Spring is going to roll right over her. There may be beauty in there somewhere learning to live with the beast. With another Spring.

Into The Woods is at Center Stage, Baltimore, Maryland until April 15, 2012. If I could have found Jenny Latimer online singing You Are Not Alone I’d have put the link here. I couldn’t. But this is a link to the song in another production. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xaxP_kErTU