Tree Lore

My husband googled "tree lore" the other day and sent me this beautiful poem.

I had to share:

The earth gripped both her ankles as she prayed.
Roots forced from beneath her toenails, they burrowed
Among deep stones to the bedrock. She swayed.

Living statuary on a tree's foundations.
In that moment, her bones became grained wood,
Their marrow pith,

Her blood sap, her arms boughs, her fingers twigs,
Her skin rough bark. And already
The gnarling crust has coffined her swollen womb.

It swarms over her breasts. It wraps upwards
Reaching for her eyes as she bows
Eagerly into it, hurrying the burial

Of her face and her hair under thick-webbed bark.
Now all her feeling has gone into wood, wit her body.
Yet she weeps.

The warm drops ooze from her rind.
These tears are still treasured.
To this day they are know by her name - Myrrh.

- Ovid, Metamorphoses: Venus and Adonis, 10 B.C.Translated by Ted Hughes, Tales from Ovid, Farrar Straus Giroux, 1997

"the odd uneven time"

the above is a quote mz. plath used to describe the transitions in life, namely her transition from summer and school and back again, and the transitions in season.

so apt for right now - "August rain: the best of the summer gone, and the new fall not yet born. The odd uneven time" (124).

c'est magnifique, non? And it's exactly how I have been feeling lately. Nothing is wrong, but just now things are starting to even out - or I am in an upswing out of the chemical depression. Who even knows? But I do know that it has been odd and it has been uneven.

"The responsibility, the awful responsibility of managing (profitably) 12 hours a day for 10 weeks is rather overwhelming when there is nothing, no one, to insert an exact routine into the large unfenced acres of time - which it is so easy to let drift by in soporific idling and luxurious relaxing. It is like lifting a bell jar off a securely clockwork-like functioning community, and seeing all the little busy people stop, gasp, blow up and float in the inrush, (or rather outrush), of the rarefied scheduled atmosphere - poor little frightened people, flailing impotent arms in the aimless air. That's what it feels like: getting shed of routine. Even though one has rebelled terribly against it, even then, one feels uncomfortable when jounced out of the repetitive rut. And so with me. What to do? Where to turn? What ties, what roots? as I hang suspended in the strange thin air of back-home?" (118).

Know what else:

1. purblind: nearly or partially blind
2. paltry: insultingly small or utterly worthless
3. pluvial: pertaining to the rain; rainy
4. corollary: a natural consequence or result
5. tacit: understood without being openly expressed; implied
6. unremunerative: not yielding profit

(perhaps she was studying the "p"s in le dictionary?)
(p.s. sometimes i dislike sharing the words i don't know, like people are going to be shocked that i was stupid for a second. don't be shocked. it happens de temps en temps).
(p.s.s. i know i have been reading this book for quite some time, but lest you think i am not attending to it because i am only on page 118 - not so! not so. it's meaty and so much to take in...so i treat it like the 2000 Bordeaux it is - sipping it finely in small portions so as to really palate the flavor.)

hope you feel alive today somehow,
mme. bookling

"Not all who wander are lost."

I saw that phrase on a bumper sticker yesterday (on a car who also boasted a different sticker saying, "The only Bush I trust is my own," ah, but I digress) and since I am neck-deep in yet another existential vocational crisis, this phrase stuck with me.

I have had a direction since I was 15. I KNEW beyond a shadow of a doubt that I would be an English teacher. I pursued this unwaveringly for 10 years, stepping into my first classroom at 24, full of hope and direction (well, as much as a cynical melancholic can be). I left that classroom three years later resembling very little semblance of a human, much less of myself.

While I have spent the last two years recovering quite well from the experience, I still have not quite bounced back from the lack of direction. When I quit teaching, I divorced a journey to which I was blindingly committed. For this loss, I was not prepared.

Hence the constant dilemma.

So then I decided to work on opening a bookstore - great idea and still in the works BUT for the following:

1. This economy
2. Personal debt

So I have to wait at LEAST 2 years before I can really pursue anything there - and I doubt I can stay in this shit-sack of a job. (And that's the thing, the job sucks, but the paycheck DOES NOT).

So if I am deeply honest, all I want to do now is go back to school for literature. NOT AT ALL to teach or do anything responsible with the $25k it will cost me to get through the program, but just because I really love it. It will make me a better bookstore owner, yes, but I would be lying if I said that was the motivation.

I am just hungry for knowing.

I have school envy this September. I want new pencils and book bags. I want to wander in the bookstore with a syllabus and find the delicious text books that I simply HAVE to buy for class...I want to go to class in the morning and write, write, write...you know, that coffee-infused time from 9-11 when you forget you exist because your concentration on subject is so keen.

So I am dreaming today of this life - looking at websites and thinking of moving to any school who can accept me and my sad GRE scores. And then, for now, for today - I am content reading Wikipedia's entries on Sylvia Plath and Carson McCullers. After which, I will begin reading T.S. Elliot's The Waste Land and find a commentary on it as well. I LOVE daily assignments.

So in the next 10 years -

1. MA in Literature
2. Birth a child or two
3. Open a bookstore
4. Write a novella

See, I am not lost just because I wander.

And yet, there is something sad about solving a philosophical crisis within me with a plan - with a direction. Maybe it's not what I need - though it certainly feels like it. Maybe I need to find a place inside where I am okay standing still with a few years of my life.

But I fear I am entirely incapable of this.

~mme. bookling