from Skipping Church, by Suzanne Kelsey

The Buddha taught that attachment to anyone or anything or any place is futile because nothing ever stays the same. Change is the only constant. All is impermanent. 

For many years I witnessed this law of impermanence during my daily walks with Ginger in the woods near the Coralville Reservoir, then the postage stamp prairie on the edge of Ames, and the prairie in Scott County Park, north of DeWitt. Bloodroot pushes out of the ground in April like old, gnarled palms that turn youthful and flat as they rise, then old and leathery as spring progresses. Sweet Williams release their aromatic lilac scent for a few days in May, and then the smells turn musky and fade. Purple coneflowers bloom in June like they are forever, then pass the baton to their yellow cousins. In the fall a deer carcass gets picked over by hungry, cawing ravens; a hawk flies over with a screaming mouse in its talons. Canadian geese honk southward and then north again, leaving the old and sick behind.

All of this without a single complaint on anyone’s part.

Before her last days in DeWitt, even dear Ginger silently accepted her own impermanence as her eyes turned milky and her joints turned stiff. Toward the end, she chased squirrels only in her dreams, with yips and twitching paws.

If you let go a little, you’ll have a little peace, the Buddhists say. If you let go a lot you’ll have a lot of peace. If you let go completely, you’ll have complete peace. Mahusukha, the Great Happiness, the great release. Nature knows it and Ginger knew it.

—Suzanne Kelsey, Skipping Church: Notes from an Accidental Minister's Wife

from Walking Hadrian’s Wall, by Bob Royalty

Religion, many have argued, . . . [is] the “sacred canopy” placed over our social world to provide meaning and prevent chaos. We build religions to build connections with each other, to make our societies function, to connect our lives to the vast universe. 

Hadrian’s Wall is fake in that sense, a reconstruction of the Roman wall that is a tourist destination rather than a border; there is England on both sides of the wall wherever it crops up. I was participating in a ritual of sorts, a faux ritual, perhaps, walking the wall from Wallsend to Bowness-on-Solway. . . Ritual is part of the many social constructions of religion, just as Clayton’s Wall is part of the many constructions of Hadrian’s Wall, since all of it has been rebuilt at one point, either by emperors after Hadrian or by archaeologists. None of these different functions, for the wall or for religion, are bad. They just are. As a scholar of religion, I try to peel back the layers of meaning to see the different ways religion is formed and how it functions over time and within a society. In many ways I work as an archaeologist works on the wall, looking for layers, dating objects and repairs, describing the function in different times and places, trying to decide what was and what might have been, peeling back the appearances and the practices for the origins. Since I work on living religions, in particular Christianity, this often bothers people. Religion as a rule has not wanted this story told or its origins revealed. . . Religion wants the past as a beautiful image, not a messy reality.

—Bob Royalty, Walking Hadrian’s Wall

from “The Art of Isolation: Amsterdam in Corona Times,” SPAQ, by Kimmen Sjölander

But is there a silver lining for the world in this Covid pandemic? Or, to put it differently, in the language of logotherapy, what is the meaning of this time?

At any moment in time, all sorts of futures are possible—an uncountably infinite number of possible futures. Which future happens is only partly outside our control. To a great extent, it’s up to us.

And just as in research, when certain ideas are so ripe that multiple groups can simultaneously invent a novel approach (often leading to battles over patents and Nobel Prizes), the meaning of certain points in history is not only what ends up happening, but what could have happened. It’s the choice, the branch-point, the fork in the road, and the decision made. It’s not just the inn you find by accident after many hours on the road and the person you meet there who becomes the mother or the father of your children, and the stories you tell for years later about how lucky you were that you didn’t turn left instead of right; or the person next to you at the bar who puts something in your drink when your back is turned so that you wake up hours later in a room, alone, with your wallet and your dignity gone, and the stories you will tell then. When all of that is in the future, the meaning of a moment is in all the possible paths forward. Some lead to justice and a healthier planet, but some do not.

The meaning of this moment in time, of these Corona times, is in what path we choose to take. That is the meaning of this time . . .

Wisdom and the will to change: this would be the greatest silver lining.

—Kimmen Sjölander, “The Art of Isolation: Amsterdam in Corona Times,” Still Point Arts Quarterly, Summer 2021

from Old Stones Understand, by Stacey Murphy

   Leaves Let Go

It is not the way of leaves

to care about how they fall.

It doesn’t matter

whether there are heavy, thunder-filled

clouds overhead

or miles of bright blue and sunshine.

A leaf doesn’t

cry out in pain if a harsh wind

tugs it from its twig

nor does it giggle with mischief if it

manages to break free on its own.

A leaf doesn’t

fret over which is better —

to swoop down in a wild, swirling canopy,

a rustling riot of yellow magic with hundreds of others,

or to flutter demurely to the ground

in a quiet, private moment.

No leaf even considers holding on,

resisting its destiny,

its part in the inevitable pattern.

For the leaf, simply letting go

is the thing.

—Stacey Murphy, Old Stones Understand

from About Franz: Remembering C. G. Jung—A Son's Story, by Mary Dian Molton

In retrospect, Franz carried in his presence a commitment to a very singular, very specific mode of hospitality that respects the history and tradition of the family and indeed something of the spiritual essence of his father and his place in the world order. But in no way was Franz Jung a mere tour guide of his father’s intimate surroundings. He was, instead, a man who managed to be cordially apart from the world of psychological inquiry while still maintaining a healthy respect for his father’s work and a lively interest in the people who associate themselves with the Jungian world. Something of his own poise in this effort seemed to have been a rather remarkable achievement of selfhood. He was both engrossed in his father’s story and somehow also quite free of it, a man involved, yet quite comfortably apart. 

—Mary Dian Molton, About Franz: Remembering C. G. Jung—A Son's Story

from About Franz: Remembering C. G. Jung—A Son's Story, by Mary Dian Molton

As I turned toward the stairs, I was met with a great surprise. I was faced by an enormous, stunning, blue-and-white star. It was painted on an inside corner wall, close to the stairway. I stood stricken, almost dumbfounded, by the star’s majesty and incredible power. I had neither read nor heard of this wall painting! Franz later said he thought it had never been photographed as the light is poor, and the distance from wall to camera would not be enough to get a good picture and do it justice. This was the only moment when I was completely alone during this trip to Bollingen, and it was also the moment in which I felt closest to the singular spirit of Carl Jung. Such glory in such a small and private corner. I remained there for a time, imagined Carl Jung standing just there, painting an image of such incredible symmetry and mystery in this silent, narrow space and thought of how he must have needed, for himself, to paint this glorious star on this particular wall. It seemed to me an act of highly personal spiritual intensity. Even now, I think of it as my own special surprise, maybe a symbol for me of the hidden power of Bollingen. I have never forgotten it. A truly wondrous star, so close. In succeeding years, when I’d again hear Carl Jung’s response to the question of whether he believed in God—“I don’t need to believe; I know”—I think of this star.

—Mary Dian Molton, About Franz: Remembering C. G. Jung—A Son's Story

from “In the Waters,” by Jeri Ann Griffith, Still Point Arts Quarterly, Spring 2021: My Deep Love of Place

I was no longer a child when I began to dream I could play the violin without having had any study or training. In the dream, I pick up the instrument and bow my way through a classical passage or a waltz. In the dream world, this is as easy as opening my mouth to sing. I can’t play the violin, and I don’t know what the dream means. Maybe that’s the point. It’s not necessary to understand the dream in any literal way. It’s only important to feel the mystery of its potential.

—Jeri Ann Griffith, “In the Waters,” Still Point Arts Quarterly, Spring 2021: My Deep Love of Place

from “Red Dust Suspended,” Still Point Arts Quarterly, Spring 2021

The first time I saw New Mexico, before I owned a cell phone or computer, I wrote a story about a woman who walked through the desert as the wind peeled the flesh from her bones. Her bones turned to dust and blew away. I meant it as a story of transmutation, dust returning to dust. That story foretold my own, how once in my lifetime a place grabbed hold of my soul. But it was never my land to own. I could only borrow it for an infinitesimal speck of time.

—Suzanne Finney, “Red Dust Suspended,” Still Point Arts Quarterly, Num. 41, Spring 2021

Now, in our own global pandemic, I consider how easily our familiar institutions can be disrupted and our sense of continuity shaken to the core. Yet everything on the Outer Cape is in a state of perpetual and reassuring impermanence; nothing ever stays quite the same. All you can do is be vividly awake to the living continuum.

—William Bless, “Outer Shores,” Still Point Arts Quarterly, Num. 41, Spring 2021

image credit: m01229, Cape Cod National Seashore, 2014. Wikimedia Commons 

from “The Power of Belief,” Fires of Heaven, by James B. Nicola

You know beliefs are “myths more true than fact,”

but some believe that what they believe’s exactly
true, and even murder is no sin
but their responsibility when in 
the presence of the devil, which is you,
no matter that you know it isn't true.

In any time zone, any latitude
where people have endured, the attitude 
endures. The ecumenical is not
welcomed, nor an elucidating thought
allowed. In my experience the danger
is most acute wherever you're the stranger.

—James B. Nicola, from “The Power of Belief,” Fires of Heaven

from The Clue of the Red Thread, by Julie Tallard Johnson

When we are willing to explore what is truly possible, what is truly possible will be revealed to us. 

—Julie Tallard Johnson, The Clue of the Red Thread: Discovering Fearlessness and Compassion in Uncertain Times

from The Clue of the Red Thread, by Julie Tallard Johnson

The richness of our life comes from making meaning with what arises day to day, moving forward with increased clarity of who we are and what truly nurtures us. 

—Julie Tallard Johnson, The Clue of the Red Thread: Discovering Fearlessness and Compassion in Uncertain Times

BABETTE’S FEAST 

One of the lessons I took from “Babette’s Feast,” a short story by Isak Dinesen, is the magical effect good food can have on the consumer. The twelve dinner guests that gather around the table to eat Babette’s sumptuous meal are elevated in thought and speech by the superb cuisine. Old wounds are healed, unrequited love is acknowledged, petty gossip is forgotten. Good food affects my psyche too—like a sunbreak after days of gray skies. A simple preparation of asparagus mimosa elevates my mood. A rich dish like osso buco satisfies my soul. A perfect risotto makes me incredibly happy. I don’t know why. I only know it is so.

—Susan Knox, “Sustenance A to Z,” Still Point Arts Quarterly, Winter 2020, “Food and Memory”

from The Rhythm of It, by Anita Sullivan

Poets have always walked the world with their ears extended like antennae, sifting the air for poetic snippets. They know the basic rhythms by heart, but need a constant supply of new images and ideas to pour into these rhythm patterns. . . . The only catch is that poems have a mind of their own. Each time we try to marry a rhythm pattern to a set of words that seems to fit, the pattern is either smitten or not by the supplicants. If not, we can’t look to meter or rhyme to bail us out; we have to put on our boots and go back out onto the land, like a bridegroom becoming worthy of his ideal bride.

—Anita Sullivan, The Rhythm of It

from The Grammar of Untold Stories, by Lois Ruskai Melina

Some fifteen years later, not long after we’d moved onto our land, I turned the dirt on the south-facing side of our house into a vegetable garden with raised beds I built myself. I filled them with carefully measured proportions of topsoil, sand, compost, blood meal, and bone meal, concocting a balanced environment of calcium, phosphorous, nitrogen, and potassium. I turned the mixture over and over, placing the spade into the dirt and stepping on the ledge of it, until the loam and the bone and stench were one.

When the soil was ready, I planted: basil and oregano and sage in peat pots that I started inside under ultraviolet light; sugar snap peas and red leaf lettuce early from seed; zucchini and spaghetti squash a little later; red peppers, Japanese eggplant, and finally, Roma tomato seedlings when I was certain there was no chance of frost.

For a few years, we had fresh salads, well-seasoned chicken and fish, and an August of zesty stews made with peppers, tomatoes, and eggplant. But the growing season in our microclimate was too unpredictable, too short. There were too many rows of green tomatoes hanging in the garage each fall. The rich soil and the cool climate, I decided, were better suited to roses like those my mother planted wherever we lived.

Despite my own passion to reproduce the gardens of my youth, I discouraged my husband from propagating our farm with the hardwoods that reminded him of his origins—oak, maple, and hickory—trees that grow slowly, live forever, and drop richly colored leaves in the fall. I’m fond of them, too, but I didn’t want to be like the early settlers of the West who brought cuttings of their favorite Eastern plants with them, trying to make the strange open spaces of the West look familiar. I didn’t want a farmhouse that pretended it was in Ohio. When my husband showed me a small hickory tree, I placed my hands on my hips before passing judgment. “Put it behind the barn where I can’t see it,” I told him, as though it was a rusted old bicycle. He ignored me.

One day I looked out the kitchen window, across the lawn and partway into the pasture, and saw him watering the tree. We squabbled over its location for a few days until he finally looked me in the eye, and with his chin set, said, “I want to be buried on this farm, beneath a tree like the ones we had in our yard when I was growing up.” He looked away before continuing. “And I want it to be in a place where you’ll see me when you look out the window.”

My husband was in good health, but as we moved into the second half of our lives, I understood not only his thinking about his own mortality, but the desire to have a sense of continuity--to bring his past to his present and imagine it his future. When we got married, my husband left the house he had lived in since he was one year old. He’d helped plant the hickory and maple in the front yard and measured his own growth with theirs. My family moved frequently. I learned to adapt to new environments. I did not become attached to a particular house, but to the gardens my parents created wherever we settled. When my husband planted hardwood trees and I planted tomatoes and roses, we were reproducing not just vegetation, but our histories. We were thinking of heritage and legacy, of unbroken chains, in broader ways than people do when they have biological children, because we had to.

—Lois Ruskai Melina, The Grammar of Untold Stories

from The Grammar of Untold Stories, by Lois Ruskai Melina

When I fell in love with my husband I fell in love with his grandmother and with their love as thick and rich as the tomato sauce she served at every family gathering. As a boy, my husband spent Saturdays with her, and together they tore advertising circulars and old magazines into bits, tossed the colorful paper fragments into the air like confetti, and then vacuumed them up. I sucked his stories into my narrative, using his family like caulk to fill in the empty spaces where the wind whistled through mine. When his grandmother, as short and round as my own, pulled me into her softness, I didn’t want to leave.

—Lois Ruskai Melina, The Grammar of Untold Stories

from Wind on the Heath: New and Selected Poems, by Naomi Beth Wakan

Reflections While Lovemaking

I lie and watch the snowflakes
descending on the skylight as
he explores my body. I give
an occasional sigh or moan
lest he think I am not completely
with him, but most of me
is pondering on the perfect symmetry
of each flake as it falls, and
as he enters me, I switch to wonder
at the chaos of the flakes
as they become a thin sheet
of mush on the glass. I seek
for patterns in their randomness.
As we rise together in our own
peculiar symmetry, I consider
the thermodynamics that allows
the flakes to pile up more at the top end
of the skylight, and while
he groans with contentment, I
muse on the ethics of multi-tasking.

—Naomi Beth Wakan, Wind on the Heath

from Wind on the Heath: New and Selected Poems, by Naomi Beth Wakan

Ambition

To reach an age when things
fall away unneeded,
as spent petals on a flower,
as Fall leaves from the tree,
as skins of summer snakes.
When Socrates passed the market stalls
he noted, “What a lot
of things I don’t need.”
Ah! that’s what I mean.

—Naomi Beth Wakan, Wind on the Heath: New and Selected Poems

from Singing the Land: A Rural Chronology, by Chila Woychik

Outside our artificial constructs—house, vehicle, shops, and schools—the real cosmos teems. We pass it or ignore it day after day, and then life ends without us ever having shimmered in the moonlight or cajoled along a rocky ridge bereft of civilization, without our letting the cry of the coyote raise goosebumps on our evening-chilled flesh.

We cart in pinecones to decorate our fall tables, embellish our cabinets with turban squash or yellow gourds. Organize perfect rows of viburnum or bottlebrush buckeye in a landscape stripped and homogenized to look like every other landscape for city blocks. Then we wonder why our eyes weary and our spirits sigh at the sameness. Why “getting away” often entails a trip to an uncultivated, disorganized setting; for rather than chaotic, nature is merely free, as we so often wish to be. Structure helps us achieve; random helps us breathe.

—Chila Woychik, Singing the Land: A Rural Chronology

from Singing the Land: A Rural Chronology, by Chila Woychik

The cold October air settles around my neck and I don’t really care that I left my scarf inside. The chickens still need fed and the sheep bleat. They need me, I tell myself; I am valuable. Then I finally realize I may never have anything earth-shattering and brilliant and Pulitzer-worthy and puddingish and great big like that one oak tree with the split trunk and diameter that would take three people to get their arms around, to leave a legacy about, then, when, it all and suddenly turns okay. There is peace. A softness falls. Sometimes it’s the simplest things.

—Chila Woychik, Singing the Land: A Rural Chronology