They Are Falling All Around Me

Who can find a virtuous woman? for her price is far above rubies.

Well. It has happened again. A dear, dear friend has passed away. At a frightfully young age. With cruel speed and surprise. I can only hope beyond hope that she didn't suffer, but logic tells me otherwise. May she rest in peace and rise in the glory she steadfastly believed in. No doubt, I will attempt to string some semblence of words together that might convey the meaning she brought to me and the heaviness of such a loss. But not today.


Today there are these words, only:


They Are Falling
By Bernice Johnson Reagon/ Sweet Honey in the Rock

They are falling all around me
They are falling all around me
They are falling all around me
The strongest leaves on my tree

Every paper brings the news that
Every paper brings the news that
Every paper brings the news that
The teachers of my life are moving on

Oh, death comes and rests so heavy
Death comes and rests so heavy
Death comes and rests so heavy
Your face I will never see, never see you anymore

But I’m not really gon’na leave you
I’m not really gon’na leave you
You’re not really gon’na leave me

It is your path I walk
It is your song I sing
It is your load I take on
It is your air I breathe

It’s the record you set that makes me go on
It’s your strength that helps me stand
You’re not really gon’na leave me
(oh…)

I have tried to sing my song right
(I will try to sing my song right)
I have tried to sing my song right
(I will try to sing this song right)

I have tried to sing my song right
Be sure to let me hear from you

~

Related thoughts...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nD2a8ELXGJQ

Resisting Autumn

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Mantis Near Midnight

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Remembering 9/11

Tomorrow will mark the beginning of my 27th year as a teacher. Of course, it will also mark the anniversary of the end of the world as we knew it. Ten years ago, I stepped off a LIRR train and went to the KMART in Penn Station to buy school supplies for my new class. The loot was too heavy to carry onto the subway, so I hailed a cab and headed north while two planes headed for the towers. A few moments after I arrived at school, while unpacking my purchases, a co-worker ran into my classroom and asked me to turn on my television. This was not possible. It had no antennae and my tv was only occasionally used to view videos. My colleague was already sure terrorists were responsible for the news he had heard on the way to work that morning... that one plane had crashed into the WTC. I turned on the radio, but as students arrived, I had to turn that off.

There was a meeting scheduled for the faculty that morning. I remember NOTHING of that. As we left to go back to our rooms, where soon students would return from breakfast , we passed the model apartment, which was packed with people standing around a television that apparently had cable. Within minutes of arriving there, the first tower fell. A long time close friend spontaneously turned around to me and crying, we embraced. I remember asking the stupidest question of my life into her ear: "Did they get everyone out?" The mind simply cannot process such horror. You hope beyond hope. Our time was up, tho, in more ways than one. We all had to get back to our classes.

In an effort to keep everyone calm, we were essentially in a news black-out for hours at a time, unlike the rest of the world. I do remember turning the radio on again when students left for lunch and hearing about the Pentagon and the crash in PA. I distinctly remember turning it off when the students were about to return, and as I did, I thought that I would not be able to get home that evening because I was so certain that bridges around Manhattan would be the next targets and by the time the kids got on the buses, they would be gone.

Inexplicably, they weren't, although they were closed. At around 3 am the next day, my husband was able to get over one to come get me. Traversing the bridge home, I looked towards the empty skyline that my eyes have lingered on for nearly a decade now. Absence had become something you can see.

That early morning, the only thing visible was the huge plume of smoke. For weeks, whenever I was on a subway platform (outdoors in the Bronx), you could taste and smell it. Sometimes, even halfway out to Montauk, you could smell it as well. Walking through Penn Station every morning for months, you could see the families heading toward the Port Authority help offices and the growing Wall of the Missing. Also everyday, both to & from work, there were the firemen and recovery workers passed out from exhaustion on the floor waiting for their trains home. I remember walking through one morning that first week and seeing all the police and firemen... looking down at the floor, I recall the lazy observation that their shoes were covered in ash and then the split second horrifying realization and distinct thought "they never will find anyone---they are there, on their shoes!"

Every morning for months it was the same... passing the office of the family help center and the still growing wall... now a depository for recollection and totem. On the 2 train towards work, if I was not reading the biographies in the Times, someone was. Everyday I wept uncontrollably during that ride. The overwhelming sorrow was so palpable and so much.

I knew people who walked home covered in that ash. I met survivors. I met mourners. I cannot look at the skyline from my daily bridge traverse without seeing what is forever gone. And forgetting has never been an option.



Photo & Text copyright (c) 2010/2011 C.M. Carroll

If Ever Two Were One....

If ever two were one, then surely we.

If ever man were lov'd by wife, then thee.

If ever wife was happy in a man,

Compare with me, ye women, if you can.

I prize thy love more than whole mines of gold,

Or all the riches that the east doth hold.

My love is such that rivers cannot quench,

Nor ought but love from thee give recompense.

Thy love is such I can in no way repay;

The heavens reward thee manifold I pray.

Then while we live, in love let us so persever,

That when we live no more, we may live ever.

-Anne Bradstreet (1612-72)

Standing on the outer edge of summer, as I am,

I am most grateful to my husband who insisted

we take a vacation when I was content to focus

on my list of things that really needed to get done instead.

He was right, I was wrong....

~

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Labor Day

~

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My Sentiments Exactly....

End of Summer

An agitation of the air,
A perturbation of the light
Admonished me the unloved year
Would turn on its hinge that night.

I stood in the disenchanted field
Amid the stubble and the stones,
Amazed, while a small worm lisped to me
The song of my marrow-bones.

Blue poured into summer blue,
A hawk broke from his cloudless tower,
The roof of the silo blazed, and I knew
That part of my life was over.

Already the iron door of the north
Clangs open: birds, leaves, snows
Order their populations forth,
And a cruel wind blows.

- Stanley Kunitz

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The Net of Indra

For PJS ~ A Reposting On the Anniversary of His Birth


I have been listening to Joseph Campbell lately. I have been reading myths and fairy tales as well. I have been thinking of my own myth, after all, and seeing it in the perspective of universals is comforting to me, so... well, no big surprise.

Now, I have a friend who will begin his personal new year as his clock strikes midnight tonight. I was chatting with him recently and said I would write him a letter. I think he'll give me a pass when I forward him this post.

Campbell, in his Power of Myth retells an idea found in Schopenhauer's essay "On an Apparent Intention in the Fate of the Individual," in this way:

...when you ...look back over your lifetime, it can seem to have had a consistent order ... as though composed by someone. Events that when they occurred had seemed accidental and occasional or as if by accident turn out to have been indispensable factors in the composition of a consistent plot. So who composed that plot? Schopenhauer suggests that just as your dreams are composed by an aspect of yourself of which your consciousness is unaware, so, too, your whole life is composed by the will within you. And just as people whom you will have met apparently by mere chance became leading agents in the structuring of your life, so, too, you have served unknowingly as an agent, giving meaning to the lives of others, the whole thing gears together like one big symphony, with everything unconsciously structuring everything else...it is as if our lives are the dream of a single dreamer in which all the dream characters are dreaming , too; so that everything links to everything else, moved by the one will to life which is the universal will in nature. It’s a magnificent idea – an idea that appears in India in the mythic image of the Net of Indra, which is a net of gems, where at every crossing of one thread over another there is a gem reflecting all the other reflective gems....

The friend who celebrates his birthday tomorrow is someone, in truth, who I have barely known. Our paths crossed--- we've literally been in the same place and face to face ONCE , but the people we know know us. And I feel very close to him, indeed, because of conversations and pivotal moments we have shared and the influence he has had on me in them. Someone we both know says of friends "you're in my soup" which I suppose can be interpreted as you give me nourishment, warm my belly, and make me feel good. I say "you are on my roselle" and mean you balance me, you point me in the right direction, you help me find my way when I am lost. But I also see him as a character in the order of my consistant plot. He's in my story, he's in my dream, he's in my soup, he's on my roselle, he's in my net, and, indeed, he is a gem. And I wish him every good thing in his new year!


[originally posted 9/1/10]

The Buddha's Last Instruction

"Make of yourself a light,"

said the Buddha,

before he died.

I think of it every morning

as the east begins

to tear off its many clouds

of darkness, to send up the first

signal --- a white fan

streaked with pink and violet

even green.

....

Even before the sun itself

hangs, disattached, in the blue air,

I am touched everywhere

by its ocean of yellow waves.

....

And then I feel the sun itself

as it blazes over the hills,

like a million flowers on fire ----

....

- Mary Oliver