Self Rule

Rule #6.

Rule #6 is don't take yourself so seriously. That is, according to the authors of The Art of Possibility by the Zanders, a husband and wife 'team', co-authors. Guy gave me this book about two years ago. He gave it to me again (intentionally) this past Christmas, and I'm reading it this time.

Remember levity.



So the book espouses ideas about garnering more and more and more possibilities in life. It's about contributing to ourselves and to each other. It's about successes they have had with students; their successes and the students'. It's about noticing the difference between our calculating self and our central self.
It's an easy read; one you can pick up and put down, flip through and find a nugget to roll around in your heart and mind for a while.

How easy it is to take myself less seriously and not seriously at all! How freeing it is. How useful and how available it is.

Rule #6 is about Letting go, loosening up, laughing at a lack of laughter at ourselves. I'm enjoying the process of not taking myself so seriously. What's so serious anyway?

Sometimes I think poetry is serious, but is it?

Mockingbirds, by Mary Oliver

This morning two mockingbirds
in the green field were spinning
and tossing the white ribbons
of their songs into the air.

I had nothing better to do than listen.
I mean this seriously.

In Greece, a long time ago,
an old couple opened their door
to two strangers who were,
it soon appeared,

not men at all,
but gods.

It is my favorite story--
how the old couple
had almost nothing
to give but their willingness
to be attentive--

but for this alone
the gods loved them
and blessed them--
when they rose out
of their mortal bodies,

like a million particles
of water from a fountain,
the light swept into all
the corners of the cottage,

and the old couple,
shaken with understanding,
bowed down--

but still they asked for nothing
but the difficult life
which they had already.

And the gods smiled,
as they vanished,
clapping their great wings.

Wherever it was
I was supposed to be
this morning--

whatever it was
I said I would be doing--

I was standing
at the edge of the field--

I was hurrying
through my own soul,
opening its dark doors--

I was leaning out;
I was listening.

Perhaps, it's really not so serious, this life. Perhaps it's all simply beautiful. Like falling snow.



And the Zanders are clear: there are no other rules to remember.
Just Rule #6.

Of nature, on course

I walked into the Ladies locker room at the Y a few days ago and heard a woman crying. A mourning from deep inside her was coming out. The eight or ten women in the locker room were not immune to her crying. Her loss was palpable.

I approached the locker I usually use and saw her on the floor in front of a locker, her stuff sprawled around her like a moat. I knew her to be a yoga instructor. Her head was down just inside her legs---seated indian-style. Another woman was sitting on a bench further down from this crying woman.

She sat as a nest for herself, making a womb of her body. She sat in self-protection. As I reached the locker I would use and took my coat off, a woman approached her, crouched down slowly and hugged her. From this, the crying woman's mourning went deeper, her wail grew in strength. Being touched by a person allowed her sadness more space. She was being heard, being felt, being lived by all of us. This woman's hug strengthened the crying woman's will.

Some women were dressing to leave; some were dressing for working out but I am quite sure we all felt something inside ourselves, identifying with this woman. The loss was hers; but hearing and sensing her, it became ours. For me, now ready to swim, there was nothing to do but feel her pain and then my own.

The winter has been hard for me. I've stayed home a lot this year. I've cried for my loss in relationship. I've cried for the death of a friend's father. I've cried in missing my family, in loving my sister and feeling her fear. I've baked granola, comfort food.

I write and think and think about writing and wonder and listen and watch and email. I tutor and make cards and do the basics of living, making a life, but it's harder than usual this winter.

There is strength in sadness, in giving up, in letting it out. And there is strength in sharing it. I'm quite sure she was heart broken.


Winter breaks nature down for renewal in Spring. I'm convinced we break down, too, being of nature and not immune from any part of nature, think as we might that we aren't. I'm convinced we are always on track, even when we think we aren't. What do you think? Why do we feel such as we do sometimes? How are you feeling?

I'm off to walk, to admire the trees, to see how they do what they do, being such grand models of being, baring it all.

silent music, an oxymoron

Einstein in 1926 told Heisenberg it was nonsense to found a theory on observable facts alone: 'In reality the very opposite happens. It is theory which decides what we can observe." We miss what happens and only observe what happens in theory. ..... Hmmmmmm.

In 1952, a composer named John Cage performed a musical piece that he wrote called 4'33" consisting of 4 minutes and 33 seconds of no musical instruments played, no sounds. On the pages of the piece is this word: Tacit.

tacit |ˈtasit| adjective
understood or implied without being stated

Listen (Silent) to the piece.......you can join the audience:
john cage's 4'33"


(Ob)serving silence, a poet wrote:

The Silence
by Wendell Berry

Though the air is full of singing
my head is loud
with the labor of words.

Though the season is rich
with fruit, my tongue
hungers for the sweet of speech.

Though the beech is golden
I cannot stand besides it
mute, but must say

"It is golden," while the leaves
stir and my hope is, and my aim.
A song whose lines

I cannot make or sing
sound men's silence
like a root. Let me say

and not mourn: the world
lives in the death of speech
and sings there.


It's still winter and it's rainy, drizzly in Asheville. My house is gray, without lights on. The small portable heater warms me. Haze comes in through the windows. I see and make observations, guesses about how things are, judgments. I sit in my interpretations and discover that maybe right, maybe wrong, maybe neither.

But it's time to make granola for a granola pie....................................because I still want to open a Granola Bar.

silent night

We have cold noses in Asheville....and cold hands and toes, smoke coming out of our mouths.........It's been really cold, the minus temperatures with wind chill, brrrrrr. Bundled up, people are huddling close. Ah, this is good. The cold knows what it's doing. '-) Letting nature hibernate and attracting people to stay home, light fires, and walk close to one another. Though the sun shines, the pulse of the city is subdued. It seems so are our lives.

Despite the cold and my protestations for being out in it, walking (with) Scout is a must. He loves the cold. And this week, like last winter, I have learned to enjoy each and every walk no matter how cold. Step, step, step, step, step, step, step, step, step, step, step, step, step, step, step, step, step, step, step, step, pulled backward for a moment, step, step, step, step, step, step, step, wind pushed to the side, step, step, step, step, step, step, step, being blown back, step, step, step, step, step, step, step, I go. It is life, step, step, step, blown back, blown back, step forward, blown back, and on and on....until I have to stop and adjust my scarf or pick up after Scout or turn aside from the wind's way.

Walking remains a joy, a high light to the day, a respite from my constant pushing to do or be or think or produce or somehow prove myself. On the walk, there's only the walk. And potential silence, no cars, a windchime instead or a bird or listening for the breeze's quick brush through......almost still and silent.

Here's a thought from Thoreau that I find some truth and some agenda in::"If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen."

Here's dear poet Robert Frost::
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.


I think in winter we have fewer miles to go before we sleep. Sleep seems so relevant to winter. It demands we sleep well, and perhaps even more hours of the night. My energy is often sapped from walking Scout three times a day as well as working and moving and being. The number of layers, two pairs of socks, sometimes three shirts, a scarf, and a big coat is a job in donning. Yesterday, I wore two hats, the warmth of which I wouldn't have thought, but wow, you might try it! I'm tired at the end of these days, which are not always productive ones at all. I sit a lot. And think or read. Writing comes when it does. But not a lot of activity going on here in me. I'm home and feel at home being home, my own form of hibernation.

Sleep comes earlier in the night's path than in the spring and summer. Some magnetic force takes over and being in bed seems like the next step in my day. And the rite of sleep each night alters itself, but I find that I am listening for silence. An interesting endeavor, listening for silence. I don't live overly busy nor do I hear too much traffic or people while at home. Music plays a small portion of my day, the tv barely at all. Still silence is something that one must tune into, otherwise the levels of communication inside have much to say. So before the light goes off, but after reading, I've been listening for silence and feeling into it and looking for it too. Can silence be seen if not heard. And how ironic is this that listen and silent rely on the same letters.

the book of silence is the book my mother gave me for Christmas. Every Christmas since I was very young, my mother gives me a book. Either one she discovers from reading and perusing as many new york times and new yorkers as she does, or one I pick and make a particular request of (I dearly remember my W.H. Auden anthology that blew away in August of 2005 but which she replaced on December 25th, 2005). This year the book of silence. Reading any book we tend to get absorbed whether it grabs us or not. We try to identify and participate in the writer's story.

In my life, I've enjoyed my own company since a child, so Maitland's pursuit resonated with me immediately. Staying single through my life, there's a lot of solitary time and a lot of quiet that I wouldn't call silent. No other bodily life other than mine (Scout is a quiet, gentle dog). I didn't know about silence like Maitland's silence, but my mother knew me well enough to know I would be absorbed. And I am....thanks Mom!

The front flap reads::"In her forties, after a noisy upbringing as one of six children and an adulthood as a vocal feminist and motehr, Sara Maitland found herself living alone in the country and, to her surprise, falling in love with silence. In this fascinating, intelligent, beautifully written book, Maitland describes how she set out to explore this new love, spending periods of silence in the Sinai desert, the Scottish hills, and a remote cottage on the Isle of Skye....Maitland's journey into silence holds surprises and setbacks, but mainly reveals a deepening happiness. Her story culminates in her building a hermitage on an isolated moor in Galloway, and as she guides readers through experiences of silence in this new home, she evokes a sense of peace that includes the reader in its intimate tranquility.

I promised my friend Guy to lend him my book when I finished it. .....Having finished it last night, I find myself unwilling to lend it away. I want it here through the Asheville winter, where and when I intend to pursue and attend to more silence, perhaps more peace. More dark and by way of that more light. I think that's what this book is offering::in our loud and unclear times, silence is a balancing ingredient.

So seeking to stay covered, shore up my energy, keep a low profile, be small, place a gentle footstep on the earth, I hope to silently make myself of it all, instead of above it all.

the poetry of 2010 begins

Postscript by Seamus Heaney

And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the
Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightening of flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully-grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you'll park or capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.
Is today a new year for you?

If so, how do you measure your old year?

Where did it go?

And how like the spring?


Little Things by Sharon Olds

After she’s gone to camp, in the early
evening I clear our girl’s breakfast dishes
from the rosewood table, and find a small
crystallized pool of maple syrup, the
grains standing there, round, in the night, I
rub it with my fingertip
as if I could read it, this raised dot of
amber sugar, and this time
when I think of my father, I wonder why
I think of my father, of the beautiful blood-red
glass in his hand, or his black hair gleaming like a
broken-open coal. I think I learned to
love the little things about him
because of all the big things
I could not love, no one could, it would be wrong to.
So when I fix on this tiny image of resin
or sweep together with the heel of my hand a
pile of my son’s sunburn peels like
insect wings, where I peeled his back the night before camp,
I am doing something I learned early to do, I am
paying attention to small beauties,
whatever I have—as if it were our duty to
find things to love, to bind ourselves to this world.


Please see Michael Kenna's photograph here:
michael kenna's photograph

If the light doesn't go out, can you or I lose our way?