Gifts from the Trail

For Siblings Day

A gold coin slipped to each of us ©Stella Body, 2021

Those for whom light is blood … -quote from Tim Bowling

Today, as I step into the morning kitchen, my arms leave me

to lift and stretch outward – my own body surprising, involuntary, sibling-stemmed

as a young plant. Single and yet limbic, surrendered.

Once, twice, three times the shrug comes over me, remembering

how we five emerged in clusters, buds on a stem

nudging each other, stretching limbs, into the bliss of light-engendered Earth.

Those for whom light is blood,

the fisherman-poet wrote, the phrase surfacing now

in the mist of my sleep-strewn mind

as a habit I share with trees, young shoots,

all lives that rose with me, and are now rising

to the touch of the Spring sun

I think of our parents, barely twenty

when their too-many offspring began to surface, foundering

among the murk of all we did not know.

How one thing shone

like coltsfoot, the first flower,

like a gold coin slipped to each of us –

that each awkward, new-limbed

body would be released often under the sky,

into tongue-licks, delicate sun-touches, light-love

to stir our blood.

A gold coin slipped to each of us ©Stella Body, 2021

Those for whom light is blood … -quote from Tim Bowling

Today, as I step into the morning kitchen, my arms leave me

to lift and stretch outward – my own body surprising, involuntary, sibling-stemmed

as a young plant. Single and yet limbic, surrendered.

Once, twice, three times the shrug comes over me, remembering

how we five emerged in clusters, buds on a stem

nudging each other, stretching limbs, into the bliss of light-engendered Earth.

Those for whom light is blood,

the fisherman-poet wrote, the phrase surfacing now

in the mist of my sleep-strewn mind

as a habit I share with trees, young shoots,

all lives that rose with me, and are now rising

to the touch of the Spring sun

I think of our parents, barely twenty

when their too-many offspring began to surface, foundering

among the murk of all we did not know.

How one thing shone

like coltsfoot, the first flower,

like a gold coin slipped to each of us –

that each awkward, new-limbed

body would be released often under the sky,

into tongue-lick, sun-touch, light-caress

to stir our blood.

Birds Fly Up

Birds fly up (Sketch for a new paradigm) ©Stella Body 2021

A New Year and a nearly new pair of hiking boots– hand-me-downs from my son, who is growing up–startles me when I look below.

Birds fly up from where my feet have been –some skilled scorer of soles has set sky-creatures in the ground — not just a few, but flocks and flocks, who rise from the first-fallen snow.

The pattern imprints my presence, yet lifts the weight of winter, pandemic and being human, toward a country of featherlight, fleet-beating hearts.

The shapes enter my spirit so I step with suppleness through the rest of my day, neatly skirting household chores and deskwork.

I find instead what might be a new paradigm, where I give instead of trying to hold what’s been given, where I seek out seed from the store-shed’s horde.

Could I become the one who is scattering, instead of scattered, who is sowing from my life into the lives who share with me this time, this earth?

In answer, jays, juncos, doves plant percussive rhythms in my footfalls; drum what was cold and still, till with me, all around me, vibrance is raised.

Dear readers,

I have only one resolution this year — to help those in need as best I can. The pandemic has suddenly stretched the gap between those in comfort and those without, to the size of a chasm. The new homeless are not drunk old men. They are young North Americans, whom the banks and big corporations refuse to hire, choosing instead to send jobs offshore to avoid paying minmum wage. Many of the new homeless have young children, who are now facing a pandemic winter outdoors with their unemployed parents.

Government has not adjusted homeless shelters, job-training programs or hiring legislation to address the problems of these families. Those of us who care: mothers, fathers, people who want to stop suffering, need to act now. Please sign the petition below to stop North American jobs being sent off-shore.

http://chng.it/Dgzy8bcJ

Wishing us all a kinder 2021,

Stella (Stella Body, who also writes under the name Serene Chopin)

Alone under the Moon

Alone under the Moon ©Stella Body 2020

Lover of loneliness and wandering,

of upcast eye and tender pondering… – Keats

A day twice-wintered, by season and by long lock-down…

All my antidotes – the brief fureants

I dance from kitchen to front hall

to set my blood coursing,

the huge desk, fashioned to the shape of an artist’ palette,

where I try to scribble colour alive with songs — fail

in the five o’clock of first-lost light,

are smothered by a shirallee of shadows.

Finding joy in a pandemic is like playing flapdragon over live coals,

trying to pluck tiny moments of sweetness from liquid fevers,

pretending I’m immune

to singed fingers

or brandy’s bludgeon,

that would only flail inside my skull.

No defense

against the night ahead.

Until the foundering ship, my month-long, moldering matutolypea

finds cure, finds float

in a small sea of light

below the oven door–

light I can’t trace to any human source.

Like Wendy after Peter Pan, I’m lifted

by the act of following, eyes spilling – over floor, up

to counter, then out and through

the straggly trees—to meet a shameless boldness,

an unmasked moon.

A face not divided by Covid-protocol, not pursed PSD-tight

but open, smiling like an Elizabethan sun, frilled

now by cloud, but beckoning, beatific, an answer

to my benisons.

I scramble together mud-gear, notebook, boots

and as I hop the fence into a ravine,

the vapour slips suddenly from the sky,

a blanket shrugged off.

Now searchlight-strong beams stroke the earth,

lay down path after path before me, slough

from me like shed skin

the cramp of being indoors, the cabin-fever cowering.

Legs long-manacled by lock-down laws swing out

unhindered; the brain that swelled and throbbed against my skull

eases, a blister under the lance. The dwelling, a too-tight shoe

is kicked off, let dangle

in the distance.

No great adventuress, I,

but when the enemy is everywhere,

there’s a slip from sight, a dip below the radar

the body keens toward

and I touch that subdued thrill —

Even the delicate hairs of my inner ear,

stunned near-deaf by radio virus numbers

prick up now and taste

what I become:

unconfined, unfindable, beyond the count,

a little noiseless noise, among the leaves.

Here’s wishing each of you a Happy New Year. May your pandemic preventions work, and may 2021 bring new loves and no more lockdowns.

Walking into the Wind

Walking into the wind ©Stella Body 2020

Leaning upon the wind that moves the mind… -quote from Jean Garrigue

I walk toward the western sun, through lit grasslands

of spiked teasels, purple asters, new-fired goldenrod,

tree silhouettes dipping and swing-dancing in the lake’s arms,

on waves of wind that stretch long, pliant limbs

up into the hills.

The lit, dark-lit, leaf staccato scorches my eyes,

the bold breeze body-searches my clothes,

but I move deeper into autumn’s wild waltz,

feeling its fierceness –

the seeds, the globules of light, my own clustered cells, livening,

my skin, like the world’s, reddening – the moist air rolling in spirals

around me, as though this might be a time of growth,

as though to remind

every heart in the North, now

That what presses against us

need not make us slump,

but can lift us, buoy us, make us go lighter

into any dark that comes.

Wind over Water

Wind Over Water ©S.Body 2020

When I arrive, the northern lake is still. A plate of glass. A playing card, twin mountains reversed into each other, illuminated from above and below.

In the distance, a shimmer of evening traffic, too faint to remind me of what I’ve left behind. A pandemic, a lost job, a place I may no longer be able to live.

I have come here to remember why I’m alive. To summon concentration, intense as a cat who mimes black tree shapes to stalk prey. To sink my eyes so deep in the lake, I will more than see, I will feel, the moment when an answering breath begins.

Now ripples, scarcely credible, faint but resolute, as the tune from an infant’s lips. They come a long distance, reaching from far, like each newborn on Earth. Pulled from inchoate matter, the mineral substance where life begins.

Gradual as sound, the waves begin to cross the water. The south part so far unchanged, dead still. The north quickening, an attentiveness my body feels.

I have come for the moving water. The moving Earth. To know I am born to this, to feel them both from inside.

Shifting, drifting, alive with multiples, the whole lake is moving now. As though what I’m seeing are not ghosts of light and shadow, but real creatures, dancing down from the sky. As though the pit of this small lake is so deep, it holds infinity, universe after universe, further than mind can fathom.

So, I come to know, I will return. Over and over, I will come unlearned to this shore and wait. Each time I will watch for something. Small as a greenfly or vast as twilight, it will wash over me like a blessing. Like those Baptists who fling themselves into the water’s arms, like the Zen wanderers who walk nature’s path till their bones fold, I will return.

Element of Launch

Element of Launch ©Stella Body 2020

A woman wearing a hijab is taking two children out in a canoe. I watch the lake unfold its hugeness, the sky bring its boulders down. She hesitates a moment, but once in, she sits dead center, straight as Joan of Arc, saddled by the twin forms of her daughters, front and back.

Now I lose sight of her for a while, behind willows, and return to my notebook. When I look up, my eye is caught by something red, moving fast. It’s her boat, at full glide, and she, paddle erect, chin raised, as though to bask in the space she has found. The current of her joy so strong I could lean into it, bathe in it, be lifted.

When I wrote this journal entry I was about to give up. My shoe was broken, I had just sat down in poison ivy, and now fire ants had found their way into my hiking shorts. I was looking for a path out to go home, when I first saw the young woman with the rented boat. Something about her made me come back to the shore and watch. The lake’s steady glide soon dissolved the mishaps from my mind, and my blood cooled to a meditative calm.

When she reappears from behind the trees, her silhouette is an icon, a spirit-image that sets me free. I can feel her breathe in lake, sky, the liquid light all around her. Her daughters, part of the same shimmering shape, take infusions of strength from her, make her power their own.

Element of Still

Element of Still ©Stella Body 2020

African Journal:

All afternoon, a small green frog sits near me at the far southern edge of a diminishing ‘mkondo’ (Swahili word for creek). Today, the water flows so slowly, it has begun to go backwards.

Still he doesn’t move. His skin is smooth, live green freckled with amber. His neck arches, almost lays down the length of his back, so intently does he look up at me. His eyes are gold –rimmed, voluminous, a fifth of his body weight. He is a poet of silence, born to see and know.

A delicate shimmer of blonde moustache extends across the width of each noble cheekbone. If I were his size, I would trace it with a tender finger, then tickle his underpouch, feel its faint swell of breath and release.

When I try a photograph, something strange happens. Though I point the lens right at him, he disappears. Instead the image holds what he sees, cloud galleons coasting down the sky, the sun’s lip pouting below them, like a live gold coin someone has swallowed to conceal.

Small though he is, he has much to teach an urban fidget – a full-body calm that leaves me spellbound. That so tiny a frame can summon a universe of stillness. That, inside this moment, I can be brought low enough, gentle enough to hear the whisper his presence makes in the world.

By the end of the day, though I never see him move, the frog has changed position entirely.

This entry, for me, cuts to the heart of what can be found by withdrawing, even briefly from the rush of urban life. Progress is the creed of cities, and in my own life, starting from a mind that is innately restless, I used to follow the quest to be always ‘on the move’. Yet even in my twenties, physically active and ‘successful’ by professional standards, I began to feel trapped.

Images of mice on a treadmill, or wanderers caught in a maze, appeared more and more in my mind. I felt so rushed that it had been years since I had allowed a single thought unrelated to work (or chores) to wander unmolested through my head.

I chanced to pick up a small book of Zen sayings, and though my attention span was short, I found that reading a few simple words from Lao Tzu somehow brought to my racing mind an immeasurable calm.

I briefly tried to sit zazen (cross-legged, in a prescribed posture) with a meditation group near my home, but my hyperactive body needed something different. I remembered that the founder of Zen had himself been a wanderer in Nature. So I began dropping out of the city into the ravines at the end of the day. After running or walking hard, my body released enough physical stress for me to rest calmly. Deep in the forest, or beside moving water, my mind loosened and became receptive to the rhythms around me. These were slower and kinder than those I’d left behind, often allowing me to feel completely still. On this level plain, this Serengeti of stillness, live ideas that had been elusive as wildlife, began to dance.

I kept up the end-of-day routine of ‘doing nothing’, and still do, especially when travelling. I realized that it was becoming the most creative and productive time in my day. I started bringing down a notebook, pen and enough food and drink to extend the free time. More and more new concepts emerged, starting always with appreciation for some quality of the natural world around me and then expanding into all areas of my life.

Eventually, while reading Deepak Chopra, I recognized that what I was doing was indeed a form of meditation. Focusing the mind on Nature is an ancient tradition, and can for some be a more effective pathway than sitting indoors with a group. Nor is the Nature tradition absent from Western religions, as the Christian Thomas Traherne wrote in the late 1600’s:

Your enjoyment of the world is never right till every morning you awake in heaven…and look upon the skies, the earth and the air as celestial…

For more from my African journal, and tips on which meditation techniques work best for you, see next week’s post: Five Ways to Find your Center

What flows here

What flows here (a piece for Canada Day) ©Stella Body 2020

It may seem strange to write about Africa on Canada Day, but for me it makes perfect sense. I remember arriving in Montreal as a teenager, still parched and shrunken from an ailment I had developed on the dark continent, where I was born.

Perhaps it was thirst, but I remember being stunned at the sight of so much fresh water. I had crossed a vast ocean from south to north, and yet now, as the ship sailed up the St. Laurence, it was a river that would run through my soul. Deep and fast as dye into clear fluid, I felt something powerful flood through me. Was it hope, or the sense that relief was near? I know only where it began, in my body, as a new energy, spreading in wildfire rivulets through my blood, coursing toward my brain.

It was the first of many swift–flowing streams I would follow in the new country, hiking deeper and deeper in, always finding strength. Finding also, strangely, within my hybrid, transplanted self, a confirmation that this new offshoot would grow and find nurture.

After marrying a Canadian and living here over twenty years, I am still learning the forest hymn of Canada’s dark pines — how water looms up in the trees as a presence, as a psalm they transmute into life. It is a song of silence, one I might hear only because I have known thirst. Below I’ve included Watering Hole, a piece I wrote about how rare water is in Africa. While I love both countries, Canada still astonishes me…

What flows here? Chlorophyll, liquid shade, fluids clean enough to drink. Yet also, within those who live together in Canada, I have found compassion, acceptance and love, as free-flowing as the waters of this place.

Watering Hole

An eye cut into the earth.

A dewdrop, a sob, a tear

whose sudden moist light

startles me awake

from where I walk, in the soft felt

of an African dusk.

Air, a warm dust I taste

in the back of my throat,

until stepping over a small rise

I almost fall

into the well of your sky,

into your beating heart of light,

that pulls down the clouds,

and the whole day with them,

that pulls me there now also

as I look into depth.

At this hour, time rolls

from day to night —

opens, shifts, becomes measureless,

an image of all space.

In your water, my world blurs,

somehow more discernible

for being caught, reversed

in your slim oval

then released — a pearl

slipped from the eye socket

of a giant – Africa.

Rewilding

Return me, oh sun, to my wild destiny…the solitary peace…the wind alive like a heart… I want to go back to being what I haven’t been. -Pablo Neruda

As I grow older, I can’t stop asking this question: Who can show me how live with a light footprint? Will I ever close the gap between the original shared self I come from (the first-ever humans, traced to Africa) and the unwilling urbanite I’ve become? Lessening that distance has become the main work of my life. Some call this process rewilding. For me, this means simplifying my life so that I am in accord with Nature.

The piece below is a true story written for my father. As a young child he was separated from his parents by war and raised to the age of twelve by a tribe in Africa. It tells how he brought me back, so that my own journey of rewilding could begin.

See the Bushman (for my father)

You are twelve when they bring you to a white man’s school. Boys of your own kind laugh at you — you cannot speak the narrow words, your tongue wanders all over your mouth. River songs, sky stories spill from you like coloured birds, like beads you roll from the water stones; you cannot walk without dancing.

My grandmother’s smile lilts as she tells this story, the one I cannot believe.

You are the father who stands in a suit and asks for my report card. I have never seen the dancing boy. She says he was driven away by your teacher, the wooden yardstick he brought down on your head to keep your eyes from the window. He wanted you to think without the open sky.

* * *

Now, above us, that sky. In the distance a long muscle curve of hills. Around us, a valley that rises like a lion’s giant sides, rough skin slung loose on raw mountain bones.

We move like fleas across its hide — I feel tiny, awkward, prey at any moment for a restless paw.

For my twelfth birthday, you’ve brought me to the place where you were born. You tell me we might see someone, a Bushman. Not your father, you say, but a kind of king to all men. He lives on the first of the hills. Now I think of this man, hope we will find him soon. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t want to come here.

To grow up in the North is to learn hunger, the gleaning of light. We live on shifts between clouds, on vapours, dividings, small particles of hope. Africa was a warm glimmer my grandmother raised on the air, a rare light I watched for in your eyes, the muscles of your face. I knew nothing of the giant energy, the urging that insists itself now into my skin, my lungs, that wants to live in and through me.

By noon, the heat comes in rhythm, a slow rising of breath. All around, its rough presence seems to watch, and wait. My mind seeks out a weapon for this king we are following: a heavy stone tower that will dent the earth, lower and cool the savage light.

This, I tell myself, will be the Bushman’s home.

When we move up into the cooler hills, I hardly notice how a new growth sings out from everywhere — I’m watching the Bushman’s hilltop. When we reach it, it is bare. I become the shape of my mouth: a round, childish ‘O’.

But you’re behind me now, your hands on my shoulders: He is here…

You cover my eyes, free my ears for what I refuse to see. Listen.

For a long time, nothing. Only my own heart, the stubborn plodding of my climb. Then: small sounds, rhythms lightly played, the click and whirr of wings, a leaf’s flic-flac.

Between the beats, an absence — small enough to fit a man.

Element of Father

Climber of peaks, you I saw first on the steep

East coast of Africa, hurling your slender dark, a javelin

into the turbid waves, a chaos you craved.

I was not yet three, but a faint motherly

care-song pressed from my lips, a murmur

for the rosebud tenderness of your skin

in sun and salt.

Then I threw myself in after you, aiming

as I’ve done time after time since then,

for the distance, wanting the wild

in you.

Two years later, our savagery tamed,

we walk in long sleeves

down a woodland path in old Wales.

Then a stranger’s voice rings out –shrill

with longing, atavistic, untamed—

You answer at once.

Your larynx compresses into twistings

I’ve never heard, strange squeezings

from your lips, answers

for the need of the unknown bird,

an intercourse

that leads him to follow you

for many steps. /2

Unlicked cub that I am, I know it for music,

practice for years

to capture that moment

with dry mouth, unwieldy tongue.

Flying back to Kilimanjaro, I’m struck with fright

when a dark bulk looms

right outside my window.

It’s blocking all the light, I wail, discomfited

by the dark and your excitement that mounts,

evident in your eyes, your outward-turned head.

No, you answer,

still transfixed,

The mountain is our path to the sky.