"After Work" by Jane Hirshfield

Recently, I read the first poem in a book that's been sitting on my shelf, unopened, for a long time. "After Work" by Jane Hirshfield in her book Of Gravity and Angels. Of course the title intrigued me. “After Work.” Work isn’t a common word in the titles of poems.

I invite you to pause now and read the poem for yourself. Here’s a link to where the poem is printed. Please do click the link and read it. But don’t forget to come back. Or, if you’d prefer, click the link below and listen to me read the poem (with Over the Rhine, "May God Love You" in the background).

This poem is anchored in the the after-work space. Work is over, and it has likely consumed the mind and the physical energy of the poem's narrator. She has sat at a desk or stood at a work station or bounced here and there around other people's needs all day. Consumers, patients, customers, colleagues. Probably inside 4 walls, probably in indirect lighting, probably following a script of some sort, probably channeling from her experience and education only what is applicable to the task at hand. Eight hours later, more or less, and the work is done. Punch the time card, close down the machines, hang up the white coat, the apron, the lanyard with her name tag.

And the narrator enters the space of the rest of her life.

She enters full and whole and living space. Beauty is present. She calls to an animal, a horse, obviously known and loved. She offers a treat, corncobs. They look at each other eye-to-eye. And the universe is reflected in the horses’ eyes.
 

and in the night, their mares' eyes shine, reflecting stars,
the entire, outer light of the world here.

When I first read those last lines I nearly gasped.

During work, however you define work, our efforts are one teeny tiny piece of the whole, and here now, when work is done, is the remembrance of the whole. Here now is the need to reorient. The need to shake ourselves and remember, with each leaving of work, the immensity of the universe of which the work was a part. Shake yourself and expand. Relax your eyes and reorient to more than what you see at your desk, your work station, your register, your waiting room, your conference table. See the whole.

The reflection in these horses’s eyes is reminding the narrator and you and me to emerge from the tunnel of our days and newly re-imagine the universe in which we work and breathe and live.

~~~

[photo: early morning rabbit prints]

When you don't know what to do

I have a friend—a beloved woman, some years my senior, for whom I’m so grateful—who shares her wisdom with me from time to time. Back in November, after a difficult move of my father from his apartment into assisted living, which had been preceded by a couple difficult months, she sent me an email of encouragement. She included the words of a verse from the Old Testament, the book of II Chronicles. It’s a verse I’ve long loved, but it hadn’t come to my mind in a while.

“We don’t know what to do, but our eyes are on you.”

The story of the verse is that the people of Judah were surrounded by a vast enemy army and the King didn’t know what to do. So he prayed aloud a prayer that asked the Lord for help, ending with this admittance of helplessness yet a face turned toward God.

After he had prayed, someone announced he had a message from the Lord. “Do not be afraid or discouraged because of this vast army. For the battle is not yours, but God’s….[S]tand firm and see the deliverance the Lord will give you.” Then the King and his people fell to their knees and worshipped God.

The next morning, the men went out to face the opposing army. Instead of taking up weapons, the King told them to sing praises to the Lord. They began, and while they sang, the Lord set ambushes for the invading army. The people of Judah were saved.

That’s the story in which this wonderful line is anchored. My story doesn’t match that story, and I’m sure yours doesn’t either. There’s no enemy invasion on my block, no need for marching out to battle or the setting of ambushes. Yet, life is complex and often heavy. I’m so glad my friend reminded me of this line. In turn, I’m passing it on to you.

“We don’t know what to do, but our eyes are on you.”

~~~

[photo: polar bears at Como Park Zoo in St. Paul, Minnesota ]

Sally Franson's "A Lady's Guide to Selling Out"

I read a fun book over the holidays. A Lady’s Guide to Selling Out by Sally Franson. A friend told me about the book, which she had read after seeing Franson on the Swedish reality show, “Allt för Sverige” (The Great Swedish Adventure; season 10), a show that features Americans of Swedish descent who go to Sweden to learn about their family histories and that I have yet to watch. But back to the book. Casey, the protagonist, is an advertising executive working on a campaign to link literary authors with products their words will help sell. The strategy is genius until it’s not. Then Casey has to find her way out and save herself in the process. 

Franson’s writing was an intriguing blend of chick-lit plotting punctuated with deep literary reflection, something I didn’t expect in a book with the cover that it had. 

For example, while attending a reading in a bookstore, Casey, thinks about what it takes to mend when you’re broken. Because she is broken, because she is mending.

“But for a second there, in the bookstore, when time spanned vertically instead of horizontally, and love was at the center of the line, I forgot all about that.

It’s so simple, I know, but perhaps all it takes to mend, in the end, is people who love you. Who find you when you are lost, who come out with a flashlight when you’ve gone too far into the woods. They call out your name, you hear it, you are reminded of yourself. They remind you. They remember you. They re-member you.

And so you return the call. You put yourself back together again. Because, my God, you love them too.”

~~~

How to write a nature poem

My dear friend Jessica Brown and her husband Simon, recently made a short instructional video about how to write a nature poem: Seeing Eyes: How to Write a Nature Poem. Although they wrote it for a children's art festival, anyone, no matter their age, can enjoy and learn from it. The video is filmed in Ireland, where Jessica lives. I hope you'll watch it and maybe then write a poem! But even if you never write a poem, watching and listening to Jessica may inspire you to view the nature all around you differently, to have "seeing eyes."

~~~

[Photo: Nearby beauty]

The Clean Daughter by Jill Kandel: A memoir of adventure, grief, and mercy

My friend Jill Kandel has just released her second book, The Clean Daughter: A Cross-Continental Memoir (North Dakota State University Press). Her new book is a memoir that tracks a couple different aspects of Kandel’s life. It is about her cross-cultural marriage, Jill from North Dakota and Johan, her husband, from the Netherlands. It is about living in other foreign cultures, with Johan’s job taking them to live in Zambia and Indonesia. (If you’ve read my blog for awhile you may remember that I wrote a post about her first book, So Many Africas: Six Years in a Zambian Village.) It’s also about Jill’s difficult relationship with her father-in-law, Izaak, a “judgmental and arrogant” man who made a controversial final decision about his life. This is the thread that interested me the most.

Years after her father-in-law died, Jill set about trying to learn more about who he was and why. She spent years researching, traveling, talking to relatives and family friends. She uncovered the story of his life as a teen and young man as Nazi Germany took over the Netherlands and the years of recovery after Germany was defeated. She learned of her father-in-law’s heroism, his generosity of spirit in those dark days. Although the hurt she experienced from her father-in-law never completely went away, she came to see her father-in-law in a new light. She came “[t]o see him as human, both frail and strong, with foibles, faults, quirks, and grace.” She came to see her own judgments and arrogance in relation to him. Her story made me wonder about the unknown stories of people with whom I’ve had trouble relating. The stories of people whom I’ve judged. The stories of people I haven't paused to consider.

Just this last week my father and I have spent time thinking about and discussing a woman in our family ancestry about whom we only knew a bit of story. We started probing those few lines of story. We started wondering about and talking about what that story would have required of the woman. The shape of her life has now grown in substantial magnitude in my mind from what it was before. Whereas this woman had been little more than a name on our family tree, now she was a woman of great strength and bravery. We spent a couple hours; Jill spent years.

In the final pages of The Clean Daughter, Jill writes, “I’m learning to value mercy and to extend grace to both Izaak and myself.”

Setting my alarm

I’ve once again set my phone alarm clock to buzz every morning at 8:45. I first set this alarm after the shootings at Sandy Hook school in Newtown in December 2012. I had the alarm set for a long while but then lapsed into skipping it, then forgetting, and then the new habit was gone. Then came the Boston marathon in April 2013, and I set it again. I set it again after the Charleston shooting in 2015. Each time, I confess, I've let the practice eventually fade. After Uvalde, it’s time to set it again. If you’re wondering what I’m talking about, please follow this link to a short essay I wrote for the “Good Letters” blog of Image Journal back in 2013. Then, please, would you also set your alarm?

~~~

[Photo: taken of a toy dinosaur, no doubt lovingly placed, on a retaining wall I sometimes pass when I walk.]

Among the birch trees

I recently went to The Museum of Russian Art, which if you’ve read my blog for a while you may remember some prior posts about this beautiful place (which has had a Ukrainian flag prominently painted on the front of the building for the last couple months). The first painting I saw on this visit landed my attention and my affection as well. I’ve been thinking about it for several weeks. It’s called “Among the Birch Trees” by Akhmed Kitaev in 1962. I hope you’ll click this link to see the painting before you read further.

The painting seemed at first to be a picture of a forest of birch trees. Beautiful cream, gray, and brown bark, bright green leaves, long lean trunks. But then I saw the woman. If you clicked the link above, do you see her now too? Peering out from behind one of the trees is a woman. Was she posing? Or did the artist capture her as she was walking through the forest and just emerging from behind a tree? It almost seems as if she was hiding behind the tree and just now emerged to say, “Here I am!” There’s something playful about her. See the tilt of her head. Look closely and find the bouquet in one hand and the single flower in her other hand. She wears a clear plastic rain coat and a clear plastic rain hat held under her neck with a pink plastic tie, and a black purse hangs over her wrist. Her rain gear all has a pinkish hue. She wears a watch and a dress, not pants. Her hair is dark and worn typical of the 1960s.

She looks like an ordinary middle-aged woman of her time and place who went out to do some shopping on a rainy day, but instead of walking down gray sidewalks on a gray street to a neighborhood store, she instead stepped into the forest and there takes a stroll gathering flowers and being flirtatious with the beauty of the birch. I like to think that she is playing hooky from her errand to the store. That she ditched the errand and strolled boldly into the forest. Maybe she enacted a stealth walk, veering only at the last minute away from the store and toward the forest lest anyone notice. Maybe she hid around corners of buildings, kept her head down, bent over more than necessary to tie her shoe or fix a stocking to escape the questioning gaze of a neighbor or coworker. When the coast was clear, she made a dash into the forest and hugged the birch. She breathed deeply. Lifted her face to the sky. Leaned back against a tree and rested.

Or maybe she was simply taking the long way to wherever she was going. Adding joy and rejuvenation to her day wherever and whenever she could. I much like that idea as well. I love this painting and hope you’ll look at it awhile. Maybe you’ll come up with your own story about the woman in the painting.

~~~

[Photo: A slice of the painting described in the post. Click through to enjoy it in full!]