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Sep. 20th, 2025 08:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
greenstormThe last two days I rested, and spent some time gathering tomatoes from the garden before frost, to ripen indoors.
Today I visited with my high school art teacher who was driving through, and I taught pottery and more specifically handbuilding with slab templates.
Then I came home, passed out for three hours, and have now read two Li-Young Lee poems. His work keeps getting better. It isn't possible.
I was having trouble moving yesterday, just too much has happened in the last month, and to be honest today I couldn't remember where my blinkers and windshield wipers were half the time n the same truck I've been driving for years. My wrists were too weak to hold mugs easily the last two days. But I made it home. I slept in a ring of cats. And for a week I will rest, garden, and exist within the space of equinox.
Soon it may be time for another space of poetry, time to clean the chimney for winter fires, and time eventually to take up pottery at home again.
My art teacher wanted to reassure me that she thinks I've made a good life and she admires it and that I shouldn't feel bad about it. I told her that I don't think I'm supposed to like my life much -- I was supposed to be smart and do university well and high powered jobs -- but that I like myself and I like the life I've made. I told her the way she ran her class, letting me do what I wanted and being supportive, may have saved my life during that time. She showed me pictures of her 12 cats and we talked about my 5.
It's not that I don't like people. It's that I'm person-selective, like Avallu is, and didn't know it because I used to select so effortlessly.
The pottery studio was so full today, we have a new sculpture member and then there was the class (only 5 of the 6 came back, the 6th may have had some lung issues down there) and Rose dropped by some of the work she'd made at home and every surface was covered with people making such an array of objects with such a diversity of approaches that I could almost believe that humanity really is a diversity instead of an unbreachable duality, and that it was going to be ok.
Arise, Go Down
By Li-Young Lee
It wasn’t the bright hems of the Lord’s skirts
that brushed my face and I opened my eyes
to see from a cleft in rock His backside;
it’s a wasp perched on my left cheek. I keep
my eyes closed and stand perfectly still
in the garden till it leaves me alone,
not to contemplate how this century
ends and the next begins with no one
I know having seen God, but to wonder
why I get through most days unscathed, though I
live in a time when it might be otherwise,
and I grow more fatherless each day.
For years now I have come to conclusions
without my father’s help, discovering
on my own what I know, what I don’t know,
and seeing how one cancels the other.
I've become a scholar of cancellations.
Here, I stand among my father’s roses
and see that what punctures outnumbers what
consoles, the cruel and the tender never
make peace, though one climbs, though one descends
petal by petal to the hidden ground
no one owns. I see that which is taken
away by violence or persuasion.
The rose announces on earth the kingdom
of gravity. A bird cancels it.
My eyelids cancel the bird. Anything
might cancel my eyes: distance, time, war.
My father said, Never take your both eyes
off of the world, before he rocked me.
All night we waited for the knock
that would have signalled, All clear, come now;
it would have meant escape; it never came.
I didn’t make the world I leave you with,
he said, and then, being poor, he left me
only this world, in which there is always
a family waiting in terror
before they’re rended, this world wherein a man
might arise, go down, and walk along a path
and pause and bow to roses, roses
his father raised, and admire them, for one moment
unable, thank God, to see in each and
every flower the world cancelling itself.
Today I visited with my high school art teacher who was driving through, and I taught pottery and more specifically handbuilding with slab templates.
Then I came home, passed out for three hours, and have now read two Li-Young Lee poems. His work keeps getting better. It isn't possible.
I was having trouble moving yesterday, just too much has happened in the last month, and to be honest today I couldn't remember where my blinkers and windshield wipers were half the time n the same truck I've been driving for years. My wrists were too weak to hold mugs easily the last two days. But I made it home. I slept in a ring of cats. And for a week I will rest, garden, and exist within the space of equinox.
Soon it may be time for another space of poetry, time to clean the chimney for winter fires, and time eventually to take up pottery at home again.
My art teacher wanted to reassure me that she thinks I've made a good life and she admires it and that I shouldn't feel bad about it. I told her that I don't think I'm supposed to like my life much -- I was supposed to be smart and do university well and high powered jobs -- but that I like myself and I like the life I've made. I told her the way she ran her class, letting me do what I wanted and being supportive, may have saved my life during that time. She showed me pictures of her 12 cats and we talked about my 5.
It's not that I don't like people. It's that I'm person-selective, like Avallu is, and didn't know it because I used to select so effortlessly.
The pottery studio was so full today, we have a new sculpture member and then there was the class (only 5 of the 6 came back, the 6th may have had some lung issues down there) and Rose dropped by some of the work she'd made at home and every surface was covered with people making such an array of objects with such a diversity of approaches that I could almost believe that humanity really is a diversity instead of an unbreachable duality, and that it was going to be ok.
Arise, Go Down
By Li-Young Lee
It wasn’t the bright hems of the Lord’s skirts
that brushed my face and I opened my eyes
to see from a cleft in rock His backside;
it’s a wasp perched on my left cheek. I keep
my eyes closed and stand perfectly still
in the garden till it leaves me alone,
not to contemplate how this century
ends and the next begins with no one
I know having seen God, but to wonder
why I get through most days unscathed, though I
live in a time when it might be otherwise,
and I grow more fatherless each day.
For years now I have come to conclusions
without my father’s help, discovering
on my own what I know, what I don’t know,
and seeing how one cancels the other.
I've become a scholar of cancellations.
Here, I stand among my father’s roses
and see that what punctures outnumbers what
consoles, the cruel and the tender never
make peace, though one climbs, though one descends
petal by petal to the hidden ground
no one owns. I see that which is taken
away by violence or persuasion.
The rose announces on earth the kingdom
of gravity. A bird cancels it.
My eyelids cancel the bird. Anything
might cancel my eyes: distance, time, war.
My father said, Never take your both eyes
off of the world, before he rocked me.
All night we waited for the knock
that would have signalled, All clear, come now;
it would have meant escape; it never came.
I didn’t make the world I leave you with,
he said, and then, being poor, he left me
only this world, in which there is always
a family waiting in terror
before they’re rended, this world wherein a man
might arise, go down, and walk along a path
and pause and bow to roses, roses
his father raised, and admire them, for one moment
unable, thank God, to see in each and
every flower the world cancelling itself.
