"Unbearable to watch these endless silk threads rain through the sky...Leisurely flowers fall to the green mossy earth." – Wang Wei, "A Young Lady's Spring Thoughts"











At night along the garden paths the rain has retreated.
It is a small war won today by the elegant crabapple.
How long they all waited inside the pulsing buds.
The light in the sky drifts off and fades over the lake.
The strongest perfume in the room there is little doubt.
As we stoop to smell we wish the rain away for May.  

Touching the Earth

"To practice beginning anew is to bathe in the water of compassion. Compassion gives us a chance to return to the joy of being alive" – Thich Nath Hanh, from Touching the Earth








I

There are many practices available to us to exercise spirituality, but do we take advantage of them? We perceive that there used to be a day in our not too distant past that people regularly exercised in prayer. We could easily conceive of a farmer, for example, who, directly connected to the land in a caring relationship, prayer for rain, sunshine and growth for harvest, would be a natural motion of mind and belief. Continue to move back through generations. With lives difficult, and phenomenon unexplained, we pause in our days to reflect and love the powers of this earth and, for some, the powers of something unseen. Why is it then that it is only in this particular generation that we no longer pray or pay heed to phenomenon, the earth, humility, our ancestors, what is possible, and what it is that we should avoid for the sake of decency. As we reel sometimes through the hours of the day in reaction to a scattering of loud voices and strange disparate images, we might come to see that now, more than ever, we all must cultivate some form of reverence, prayer, meditation, whatever you like, but that is something that is a daily reminder of gratitude and appreciation, at the very least. That there is any cultural pushback against these notions – that meditation or prayer, often seen as two sides of the same coin – is not a particularly heartening trend in our culture. If one man believes in a god, but another believes in the bio-spirituality of the earth, are either wrong, or should either be chastised or distrusted? In a time of spiritual limbo, it must be understood that it is those who might frown upon a spiritual exercise that are the very onlookers who need the most assistance in their lives, for they have lost fundamental tenets of any spirituality – tolerance, compassion, humility, reverence, and the list goes on. People of this generation must strong and willful. They must listen to the messages that they are receiving from within and realize that these messages, by definition, cannot be created merely from within in isolation; we are independent creatures, yes, but we are also product of our times, of our culture, of our education, and of our particular earth history. We are poised right now to cultivate those messages within and turn them into practices that release us towards the values listed above. For one person it is art; another it is traditional (genuine) prayer; for another it is meditation; and for another it is natural experiences.

In May we could consider the rain strings of crystal jewels.
A single raindrop that slides across the metal railing a lace.
Oak buds have bloomed along the riverside and I wonder
if there is a land so pure that jade blooms in every direction.

Such simple lines to create above. Prayer, poetry, reflection, art, whatever the case may be, takes only moments. We may feel lost inside any given time of day; we stay busy in order to avoid this, and then we look back to our hours and realize that perhaps nothing was particularly memorable. We sit down long enough to eat dinner and as we peak outside maybe there is a tree or river, a farm field, or a garden. We realize that this is the peace and decency that we have been waiting for, but we can't quite explain it. Why am I spending all of my time doing everything except for the very thing that provides me some connection or solace? It is upside down, convoluted. In a way, we are all still farmers, hunters, gatherers, but living at a time when none of these might be practiced. We live inside days filled with everything except what we are genetically. The way of spirituality, at any level, will have to do to some degree just as much renunciation of this 'opposite life.' When sitting at a desk inside an office which has no windows available to the outside world, consider visualizing the image of the natural world. Hold onto it and thank it. Write something down and make a promise that, after work, you will take a five minute walk among the trees. Don't just thank the trees, but thank yourself for having this message inside you already. It is there and always has been.

"If you like quietly in bed in the very early morning, in the half-light before time begins, and listen carefully, the language of crows is easy to understand. 'Here I am.' That's really all there is to say and we say it again and again." – Louise Jenkins, from "The Language of Crows"







Eagle Eye

What had been high marsh is now slowly marching waves of water through trees and over tin signs. Every floating cluster of spring limbs a refuge – an otter hunched up over little stand of bent cattails nibbling, five feet away from the kayak, a green stalk peppered with duckweed. One unrhythmic paddle stroke and a stick thin heron, blending against an overhanging willow, rises up and careens west against some unseen thrust of wind. Carp smack their way out of a new impoundment, lowering their dorsal fins flat against the surface then back in to swirl around the pool gauging the warmth of the sunlight. I flip both blades one more time for traction between trees that are usually above ground and display fishing lures caught in the side of their trunks like a dazzling brocade and look up to see the keeper of things – old eagle eye, poised like a brown garment, shaped like shield, motionless, except for a white head that rotates, bent forward a little bit, looking down at me, considering me as something likely sillier than nothing as upriver a pulse of the flood released over the spillway and soon here will be swimming in riches.

Odes to Monona

"The vast immortal suns and the long-enduring pensive moons shall again shine." – Whitman, from "On the Beach at Night"









Little White Roses

Father and child walk away from courts,
the sand and the concrete
wide open under the Yahara Park oaks,
where the small bands of canvasbacks sun,
glistening green heads
velvet and luminous as lit felt,
and find two jutting rocks to watch
the friendly blue day stay, finally, permanently,
no longer a temporary guest of April.

Shoes off, the clear shallow water
cool up over the white toes, cool over the ankles
cool up to the white knees,
have they seen each other over winter?
Doe the season set out a slumber
that does not awake until long days of May
turn like slow pages, white after white
the stories on the pages grow,
and along the side street houses
the tulips and daffodils grow, yellows
like sun flares, purple gentians
that lean in behind them, they on the rocks
listening to voices other than their cold own.

Bookmark these days on the rocky beach.
Bookmark the gently fingers
of sun across the front of the the neck,
out there, the fisherman, who are they
but neighbors of water,
neighbors of spring,
the fish they hook still cool and young
little white roses
by stems that grow up through
the ever shifting water columns.

On the Yahara Nature Center
A Sam Slater Mystery

"In idle moments, when there were no pressing matters to be dealt with, and when everybody seemed to be sleepy from the heat, she would sit under her acacia tree. It was a dusty place to sit, and the chickens would occasionally come and peck about her feet, but it was a place which seemed to encourage thought."  – Alexander McCall Smith, from The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency








Chapter One

Some of the younger ones from the neighborhood, which was one of the oldest in Madison, WI, along the river that connected two lakes, would get away with calling him the old man even though, truth be told, he wasn't all that old, and that the gray hair no doubt gave that illusion and the way he carried himself, still solid and coordinated, but slow, also fed the illusion. There was more, though, about Mr. Slater that made him particularly successful in his little neighborhood 'projects,' as they were called – Sam was quite pleasant, perhaps even showing a strong sense of flightiness, and would found, as often as not, outside of his little neighborhood nature center, fiddling around in his garden, plucking weeds, or pulling whatever vegetable or herb planted in his back courtyard and bringing them inside for long session of cooking. In other words, it seemed much that Slater was a bachelor and retiree, married to the world around him, nose in a book, or hand on a fry pan. The nature center offered many things to many people and it wasn't treated so much as a business as drop-in education center, for Old Man Slater used to teach at the college level "many classes" but was becoming something of a hermit stuck inside the dark walls of academia.  He would bring what he knew back out into the light, open his doors to neighbors, friends, and take parents and their children on short hikes waxing as poetic as he could, without losing their respect, of course, the soulful beauty of incorporating nature back into their lives, "right there out in front of you!" In other words, Sam Slater was a Quixote, he knew it, and would spend his waking hours making sure to preserve that idea that innocence, once lost, is awfully hard to recover.

"Infinitesimal
star,
you seemed
forever
buried
in metal, hidden,
your diabolic
fire"    – Neruda, from "Ode to the Atom"






Ode to Fog


Where do you come from
my foolish friend,
taking over
at night, when no one is looking,
the rolling lips
of the coming green
of valley
and the poor buds
just now seeing outside
of the tips of their limbs?
I never see you coming.
I am sent happy
all day by the showers
of sunlight
that serenade the gentians
purple beautiful
earth snakes that rise
like cobras,
as do I and all the others,
and the river
now passes by in its velvets,
the robin
spins its eyes
to the passers by,
for it is spring, alive!
And yet like an army
of darkness you come,
such evil in the sky.
I wonder if love
is night,
where the wanderings
of the light
fade into the soil
where seeds only tingle
and agitate?
Only you would know
such things,
fog,
thief of stars,
thief of planets,
thief of our understandings
of the past,
for I see fog
too in distant mornings
for the farmers
of the worlds of the past.
May wind
will blow you away,
as the earth shifts
in its subtle
seed
of blazing darkness

Notes on Cocina Espanola 

"But just as it's impossible to talk of a single cocina espanola (Spanish Cuisine), it's impossible to talk about a single, nationwide cocido. Cocido can be defined only in regional terms, each with its distinct accent..."   – Spain: Recipes and Traditions from the Verdant Hills of the Basque Country to the Coastal Waters of Andalucua, by Jeff Koehler









With a much anticipated trip to Spain upcoming in a couple of months, it feels like it is time to turn attention back onto the wonderfully comprehensive cookbook Spain by Jeff Koehler. With lines that read like the following, from an introductory page dedicated to Tapas and Appetizers, it's hard to resist the visions of lively and bright restaurants as well as small kitchens that line along the avenues of Salamanca and Madrid, two cities we hope to visit: "In those bars, with a small glass of local, spritely white wine called Txakoli (or equally small glass of beer called zurito), you generally pay by the number of toothpicks on your plate at the end. In the 1980's and 1990's, these were miniature showcases for the culinary creativity of la nueva cocina vaca (New Basque Cooking), that led the wave of avant-garde Spanish culinary expression." Now, it is always a trick to take cooking inspiration from a country that you have not yet visited, but on the other hand what better way to get to know that country than to learn their cuisine alongside as many bits and pieces of their language as you can. And so, for starters, I tried a nice Catalan Flatbread with roasted red peppers last night as a kick-off and, as eating the final result, could most certainly see how this encounter with tapas could forge a new way of seeing happy hour! I looked at the picture first, and then quickly scanned the ingredients suggested, going off of the advice that more often than not a flatbread tapas will include ingredients found in the kitchen and has no real restrictions. I picked up some Naan bread, roasted red peppers, a thin zucchini and some olives and anchovies. I already had a tomato at home along with a secret ingredient that I decided to line over the top at the end.

We have a built-in stove top grill on our oven and so, for the first time in a long time, I fired that up to crisp the naan bread on both sides, took them out and sent a few strong drizzles of olive oil over one side and began to line the surface with semi-diced fire roasted red bell peppers, zucchini wheels, and some cubed tomatoes. I tossed some quartered olives over that and then anchovies relatively sparingly (a brilliant addition, but no need to overwhelm everything else with the potent saltiness). The flatbread looked colorful at this point, but also dry and I didn't trust that the olive oil was enough. I remembered that I had some ricotta cheese left over in the refrigerator and decided that I wouldn't likely go wrong with a few tossed clumps of white cheese for texture and creamy contrast. I broiled until brow over the top, but then baked to in order to tenderize the vegetables a bit more, took it out, cut each naan into quarters, and it was a surprisingly rich and even at times sweet (naan bread) flavor and texture. No doubt that the singing star here ended up a contrast between the zingy anchovies and olives versus the depth of the soaked red bell peppers, the ricotta adding a depth of variety, all in all a very nice companion to a zurito or two.