A LITTLE BIT OF GRACE

It's been  a while since I last clicked "publish" for a post on this blog.   Some Internet issues.  Some other issues.  Aren't there always issues?  How did that word come to be so common in our current speech?  For me, old fogey --or fogeyette--that I am, "issues" means journals, magazines, newspapers.  Bibliographic information.  Footnotes.  Or obituary terms for descendants or lack of. "She died without issue."  To me in writer mode, that means, poor thing, she died without ever getting published.  No issues of The New Yorker with her poems in them.  Just as well, I'd say.  Better not to be among the poets I've been reading lately in that magazine.  Nice people all of them, I'm sure.  But, you know, there are times when I think we have too many poems and stories buzzing around us, too many blogs, too much static of just about every kind grabbing at us.  Twitter.  Facebook. Flikr. All those links.   So many links everywhere you turn.


Truth is, I like links, I like writing about links in the chains that are both our bondage and our empowerment.  Family links.  Marital links.  The maddening links of child and parent.  Human and landscape, both inner and outer. The links with friends who can make you feel energized or depressed.  Inspired or envious.  I like the links some blogs painstakingly piece together, like the beautiful "Ornamental," created by my friend Nina Bagley, who lives in Whittier, North Carolina. She's an artist in just about every sense.  I don't know if she can sing, but I'd bet good cash money that she can.   She's a book/metal/jewelry artist who lives with her dog Walter, whom she takes on outings to the creek where he dives into the water like the good Springer Spaniel he is.  Visit her blog and enjoy a creative woman's perspective on everyday light and shadow.  Am I envious of her blog?  You bet.  Do I learn from it, enjoy it, relish the gorgeous photographs, her commentary that deserves something better than the stodgy word "commentary"?  Well, I woke up this morning wanting to set my laptop humming, so that I could visit her blog yet again.

 Her  posts have set me thinking.   Beyond the gray and grind of drawing closer and closer to my 70th year,  the sun still fires up the clouds outside my kitchen window, still beckons me to the doorway to watch it making its big farewell over-the top wildfire of clouds beyond my porch.   Maybe those gypsy clouds are the answers to questions I've been asking about blogging.

Why do I want to come back to this blog?  What makes me take the time on this never again to be late May afternoon, when I can see a blue so blue  through the trees that I want to leap into it from where I sit here in my living room.   That would take more coordination and sheer imaginative skill that I can muster right now, that leap, but maybe that's really what anybody who has blood still pulsing through the body  tries to do, however she can do it.  Leap right into all that green, making straight for that blue, then maybe deciding she liked the green better, the dirt better, and letting herself drift, or plummet, oops!, back again amongst all those links, all those duties, those roots.  Dust.  Dog hair.  Another meal to conjure out of leftover onions and zucchini.  More dishes to wash.

But then, I ask, 'So what?"

Do we have to go about sharing with everybody every little leap and lizard in our lives?  The turquoise lizard, for example, that skitters whenever I open the glass door to see what the dogs are barking at.  The elderberry sauce I made last summer to drizzle over pork chops.  How do we choose among all the stories, recipes, poems, posts, advice and warnings from Dr. Oz and Suzanne Somers?  I don't know.

All I do know right now is that my friend Nina's words and images have set me thinking about why we do what we do.  Or don't do.   Only connect,  E.M. Forster, that invaluable, brilliant, humane English novelist  nobody reads anymore  urged.  Make an honest connection.  That's what I want.  With a little poetry in it.  A little light sifting down through the green.  A little bit of grace.