Poetry Friday : Instructions for how to get ahead of yourself while the light still shines

If you have a bike, get on it at night
and go to the top of the Brooklyn Hill.

When you reach the top
start smiling - this is Happy Valley Road.

Pedal at first, then let the road take you down
into the dark as black as underground
broken by circles of yellow lowered by the street lights.

As you come to each light
you will notice a figure
racing up behind.
Don't be scared
this is you creeping up on yourself.
As you pass under the light
you will sail past yourself into the night.

Jenny Borhholdt, Miss New Zealand: selected poems
(Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1997)

Because this poem has always made me smile!

More Poetry Friday once it's Friday at Great Kid Books.

everyday resurrections

I took this photo yesterday, although I should probably say chance took it. We stopped at a park on the way home. The carpet of autumn leaves under the trees was calling us to run scrunching. I took some photos on my phone of the girls kicking the leaves around, and then I as I was putting it back into my pocket this happened. A photo-fluke.

This photo looks a bit like my life at the moment. Lots of things going on, balls in the air, my head spinning. Tomorrow our house sale will go unconditional, and our purchase of the big house in the bush will go unconditional as well. When that happens I will tell you all about it! So exciting!! But as you can imagine there has been a lot going on, and all at the eleventh hour.  Not just house stuff either. There have been so many words I've written to you in my head over the last month. So many things I've been thinking about that I just haven't had time to write. So my head feels a bit like that photo too.

Yesterday my Dad fell five metres from a tree he was trimming in my sister's back yard. It is a very large tree, and the huge branch he had just sawn off swung around instead of falling straight. It swung right round to the opposite side of the tree, round to the ladder Dad was standing on. It broke the ladder and sent him flying. How he ended up with nothing more than an enormous fright and plenty of bruising is a miracle.

Then last night I went to Taize Prayer at the Fransiscan Friary. It was a moment of clarity in the midst of all the spinning, like that spot at the top of the photo that's almost in focus. Suddenly everything was still. We met in the chapel, the chairs in a u-shape around a collection of candles and autumn leaves on the floor at the centre of the room. Incense hung in the air. I looked around at the random bunch of people gathered. Some older, some younger, but all at home, all happy to be there. I was a newbie but I didn't feel out of place. It was a sacred hour of sung chants, readings, and silence. It was like sitting down beside a cool mountain stream and taking a big drink.

The readings were for Easter, and the one prayer we all prayed together was this poem by Joy Cowley.

Easter Sunday

This is the day of festival
and we thank you, O God of celebration,
with hymns of praise rising like balloons
and banners of love waving from our hearts.
Today we dance with the angels
round all the empty tombs in our lives,
celebrating transformation,
from grief to laughter,
from darkness into light.
Today we glimpse the truth
of suffering and death
as we move with you in your Jesus song
of resurrections without end.

This Easter I thought of something I'd never thought before. What happened in that moment directly after Jesus' resurrection? When Jesus is standing on earth, breathing our air again. The ground has shaken, the stone has been rolled, the soldiers have fled, and there is no one in the garden except Jesus, all new. What was he thinking? How was he feeling? What did he do? Did he touch his body all over just to be sure? Did he sit and stare at his hands, remembering? Or did he walk through the garden, talking to God, taking a moment alone like all those other moments alone we know he took. How did their conversation go?

I like the line in Joy Cowley's poem about dancing around "all the empty tombs in our lives" and the idea of "resurrections without end." We celebrate the greatest resurrection at Easter, but what about all the other, everyday resurrections? When problems that seem to have no answer are suddenly resolved, when two friends get over a disagreement and embrace, when despair hanging over a heavy heart lifts, and when a man falls five metres and gets up without a broken bone, what do we do? Do we stop and witness these extraordinary moments? Do we stop to breathe again, to sit and stare at our own hands, to see how new we are?

Light and truth, life and laughter. They come to us in spite of our brokenness, in spite of our ignorance, and despite the darkness that threatens. Our own everyday resurrections.

I'm seven!

"The moment a child is born, a mother is also born. She never existed before. The woman existed, but the mother, never. A mother is something absolutely new." Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh

Seven years ago yesterday I was born. At the end of a long weekend of on-and-off labour my first daughter arrived by emergency caesarean at 8:30 in the morning on Sunday 28th March, 2004. In that moment she made a mother of me. Since then that date has been etched in my memory, at first representing the shock and disappointment I felt at the circumstances of her birth, and then as time and other birth-days healed that memory, as a wonderful, joyful day of celebration.

So yesterday was a good day. We had done all the big celebrating over the weekend (museum trip on Saturday minus the picnic, and a family dinner on Sunday night) and I breathed a sigh of relief and relaxed. Paddy took Isobella and Greer out to a climbing wall centre. I had a quiet morning cleaning up after the night before and we had our violin lesson in the afternoon. A lovely day, but still full enough that by the time I got to bed I hadn't had a moment to write. I lay down to sleep tired, but with my mind full of words. I told myself that I'd write in the morning, but I really wanted to write. I wanted to write while it was still the 28th of March.  I wanted to write that date at the top of the page of my journal. So I did. 

Seven years is not long. I'm a newbie, only just beginning my life as a mother, and yet I can hardly remember what my life was like previously. On the 28th of March 2004 I was changed forever.

Motherhood is both a gift and a burden. Preparing to give birth for the first time is like preparing for a journey to a country you've never been to before, without knowing the climate, customs, or language, and without a guidebook or even so much as a map. Oh you may think you have a guidebook. Good advice and a book or two can seem like adequate preparation, but when you finally land on foreign soil you realise that anyone who ever told you they had been there themselves was actually talking about a completely different country. Neighbouring perhaps, but different nonetheless. Seven years ago I stood alone on the tarmac of motherhood. Everything around me was strange and unfamiliar. In panic I tried to run back to the plane. Too late, it was gone.  

Mothering is a lonely, unknown journey. I spent the first weeks of Isobella's life wishing I could be pregnant again. My life as I had known it had disappeared before my eyes and I couldn't do anything to get it back. It didn't help that the depression which had been an unwelcome guest in the past was knocking at the door again, demanding to be let in. I was in that fragile post-surgery stage after my caesarean, and exhausted. I felt like a stranger in my own life.

But now I wouldn't have it any other way. I wouldn't exchange those anguished moments for anything. I watch that big girl of mine, all seven years of her, as she explores the world with bright eyes. She's never still, she never stops asking questions, her imagination is nothing short of bizarre, and she's caring, affectionate and thoughtful. I live each day hoping to God that I do her justice. I've learnt so much from her and from mothering her. It has been the same with all three of my girls. Those girls are one of the biggest reasons I'm who I am today. They've been the making of me.

I look at babies now in wonder. Right there, in that tiny squirming bundle, is a person. A whole life's worth of dreams and talents and personality. Mothering is such a privilege. We get to grow alongside these small people and watch them emerge.  Like a child longs to see that moment when the butterfly finally emerges from its chrysalis, we see it. Every day, moment by moment, mothers get to see the butterfly.

A good friend of mine is about to give birth to her first child. I'm excited for her. I can't wait to hear about this brand new life which is about to burst out. The baby is due any day now. She's in that limbo land mothers know all too well. She's a writer and this is her poem.

Waiting

Each night I go to sleep expecting you might wake me.

But last night it was rain,

torrential, sheeting past an open window.

Then the fan switching itself on and off,

tending an invisible guest.

Later, what sounded like a bird, but was probably

a moth, flew laps the length of our hall.

Nothing to do but lie in the dark, the two

of us on either side of the same door,

ears pricked, waiting for a knock.

Marita Hastings

Today

Today I sort-of cleaned the house

I sort-of tidied it too

the kids were sort-of happy

baby slept, sort of

we ate a sort-of lunch

the shopping got done

minus onions

so it was a sort-of dinner

I sort-of watered the garden

and sort-of folded the washing

and then I sat down and wrote this sort-of poem

My Dream is to Wake Up

My dream is to wake up with nobody else in the house
except me
and the light switches which go on and off at my bidding
and the toaster which toasts when I need it to, for my delight
and does not require keeping quiet while it sleeps
or feeding it, or taking it to the toilet.
None of these things are required by nobody else.

If there is nobody else in the house
I can have a bath, run it and get into it without any lifting,
without the taking off of clothes, other than my own, which I do without thinking
and I can sit there without washing anybody’s feet, other than my own
which is, exactly, a pleasure.
And when I get out of the bath, with nobody else in the house,
I find that the blinds do not talk back to me when I open and shut them
Indeed,
They sit at exactly the precise angle I require of them, without complaining!
And the table too, supports my cup and these hands all on its own,
The very task I require of it, without any murmur it all.
I don’t even have to ask.

Oh the joy of a house inhabited by nobody else,
An empty house, just me and the things I need,
Things that in this moment exist only for me.

Whole worlds could exist, whole other lives could be begun and carried out completely
Here, in all this space, with so much time
And oh the quiet – can you hear it?