I had a pretty sleepless night trying to pull all my materials and information together for my 2011 taxes. It was really, really easy to put it off for the last nine months.. and I put it off til the very last minute. And I had to get it in to my accountant first thing this morning an hour away in my hometown. And that didn’t stop me from taking the backroads to get there. Love me some gravel roads. Everybody that you pass waves. Sometimes there’s a tractor moving slow. Sometimes there’s a cow in the road. You just gotta go with the flow. It’s pretty great to be out there surrounded by sky, fields, trees, birds, and nary a soul trying to pass you because you’re driving slow trying to snap pics out the window. There’s nothing superficial out there at all, and that’s one thing in abundance in this world that I try to steer clear of the most. “Forgive me pretty baby, but I always take the long way home” –in the words of Tom Waits.
The trees are approaching their peak of autumn color (tho you can’t really tell from this picture.. pardon my flash reflection in my car window — didn’t know it was on). This is one of my favorite spots on the drive — it’s a small area of trees but looks like a dense forest out of a fairy tale when you’re looking straight into it.
And I couldn’t go to my hometown without paying my cat a visit.. and then I took a catnap before driving home after having a hearty breakfast with my madre. This rose caught my attention as I was getting into my car. It’s just growing in the middle of the yard.
The end.
Endnote: Thank you to you folks who read this blog. I haven’t been doing much paper cutting as I’ve been trying to get lots of other looming things out of the way (like taxes, etc…). Working my way back into to a regular ‘cutting’ routine. Til next time..
And what he really meant to say was, don’t file an extension on your income taxes because you’ll just put them off til the last minute and wish there were more extensions.. I’ve been knee deep in receipts all day. My hands are covered with highlighter marks. I have to turn my info in to my accountant first thing tomorrow morning. In a city an hour away. Coffee brewing..
Melissa, the new owner of “Midnight Garden”, was kind enough to send me this photo after she hung my paper cutting in her home. I love the color scheme that she has going on. Look like it fits right in!
And again, a poem for everything (originally found in “A Path With Heart” by Jack Kornfield)
Now I Become Myself
By May Sarton
Now I become myself. It’s taken
Time, many years and places;
I have been dissolved and shaken,
Worn other people’s faces,
Run madly, as if Time were there,
Terribly old, crying a warning,
“Hurry, you will be dead before–”
(What? Before you reach the morning?
Or the end of the poem is clear?
Or love safe in the walled city?)
Now to stand still, to be here,
Feel my own weight and density!
The black shadow on the paper
Is my hand; the shadow of a word
As thought shapes the shaper
Falls heavy on the page, is heard.
All fuses now, falls into place
From wish to action, word to silence,
My work, my love, my time, my face
Gathered into one intense
Gesture of growing like a plant.
As slowly as the ripening fruit
Fertile, detached, and always spent,
Falls but does not exhaust the root,
So all the poem is, can give,
Grows in me to become the song,
Made so and rooted by love.
Now there is time and Time is young.
O, in this single hour I live
All of myself and do not move.
I, the pursued, who madly ran,
Stand still, stand still, and stop the sun!
Sunday was a little warmer and before heading home from Atchison, I took a little excursion out into the countryside to find some hedgeapples to autumn-up my front porch. And of course, I took my camera…
What things for dream there are when spectre-like,
Moving among tall haycocks lightly piled,
I enter alone upon the stubble field,
From which the laborers’ voices late have died,
And in the antiphony of afterglow
And rising full moon, sit me down
Upon the full moon’s side of the first haycock
And lose myself amid so many alike.
I dream upon the opposing lights of the hour,
Preventing shadow until the moon prevail;
I dream upon the night-hawks peopling heaven,
Each circling each with vague unearthly cry,
Or plunging headlong with fierce twang afar;
And on the bat’s mute antics, who would seem
Dimly to have made out my secret place,
Only to lose it when he pirouettes,
And seek it endlessly with purblind haste;
On the last swallow’s sweep; and on the rasp
In the abyss of odor and rustle at my back,
That, silenced by my advent, finds once more,
After an interval, his instrument,
And tries once–twice–and thrice if I be there;
And on the worn book of old-golden song
I brought not here to read, it seems, but hold
And freshen in this air of withering sweetness;
But on the memory of one absent most,
For whom these lines when they shall greet her eye.
“Faith is the bird that feels the light when the dawn is still dark.” -Rabindranath Tagore
