 Well, it looks like we're in for it. While we won't get a direct hit with storm surge, we will get heavy rain and high winds—probably. It should be an interesting weekend and next week. I don't know yet if we will have to evacuate—if we do, I most likely won't be posting on Monday . . .
 Recently I watched a documentary about the discovery of some ancient Mayan cities. They could only be seen from the air, and the searchers then had to hack their way through dense jungle to find them.
That reminded me of a Rilke poem: "Dear darkening ground, you've endured so patiently the walls we've built, perhaps you'll give the cities one more hour . . . before you become forest again, and water, and widening wilderness in that inconceivable terror when you take back your name from all things." This poem seems particularly appropriate here too as we enter the height of the hurricane season!  Walt Whitman: "A morning glory at my window" (or a Bar Harbor sunrise) "satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books."
 David Whyte:
"Remember the way you are all possibilties you can see and how you live best as an appreciator of horizons, whether you reach them or not. Admit that once you have got up from your chair and opened the door, once you have walked into the clean air toward that edge and taken the path up high beyond the ordinary, you have become the privileged and the pilgrim, the one who will tell the story and the one, coming back from the mountain, who helped to make it."  Jordan Pond, Acadia National Park It has been raining everyday now for quite a long while. Ground is soaked, streets are sometimes flooded. And we are entering the peak of hurricane season—should be interesting . . .
 A. R. Ammons:
". . .everything is magnificent with existence, is in surfeit of glory: nothing is diminished . . . I said though I have looked everywhere I can find nothing lowly in the universe . . . I whirled through transfigurations up and down, transfigurations of size and shape and place: at one sudden point came still, stood in wonder: moss, beggar, weed, tick, pine, self, magnificent with being!" Last week was stormy: one afternoon a heavy storm rolled through—high winds blowing the rain sideways, trees bending in the wind, streets flooding. The street outside my window had water rushing down and deepening until a car trying to move up it just stopped, then got out of the way. Water over the curb, stuff floating on top of the water in the street and on the sidewalk: nature at its most dramatic. And then another evening, clouds rushed west past my window and the sunset grew astonishing in color and shape. Interesting week, here!   Chinese Garden, Missouri Botanical Gardens Wendell Berry: "there are limits to what a human language can say. One may believe, as I do, in inspiration, but one must believe knowing that even the most inspired are limited in what they can tell of what they know. We humans write and read, teach and learn, at the inevitable cost of falling short. The language that reveals also obscures."
I think this is true of all creative work. Nothing one makes is ever completely what one would like to see at the end—this is one reason a painting, a print, anything, could also be worked on further. |
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