This day is quite an illustrious day in history. You might not have realized this.

Duke Ellington and Maya Angelou were born on April 4th.

“April 4” is one of the only dates mentioned specifically in a U2 song. Tis true.

AND I was born on April 4th. Yep, it’s me birthday!*

*If you want to want to give me a present, leave me a comment telling me about something small that someone does for you that makes you feel loved.
April 4th birthdays and years
1896: Tristan Tzara, French poet
1899: Duke Ellington, American band leader
1914: Marguerite Duras, French writer
1915: Muddy Waters, Chicago blues singer
1928: Maya Angelou, American poet

April is also:
Guitar month, Humor month, AND Kite flying month. April truly rocks.

“The sun was warm but the wind was chill.
You know how it is with an April day.
When the sun is out and the wind is still,
You’re one month on in the middle of May.
But if you so much as dare to speak,
a cloud come over the sunlit arch,
And wind comes off a frozen peak,
And you’re two months back in the middle of March.”
- Robert Frost

“Spring is the Period
Express from God.
Among the other seasons
Himself abide,

But during March and April
None stir abroad
Without a cordial interview
With God.”
- Emily Dickinson, Spring is the Period, #844

More Spring poems here. (Takes awhile to download.)

In the last few days, something about honesty, something about not fooling each other, and the line, “lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.” from this poem by William Stafford have been popping into my head: 

If you don’t know the kind of person I am
and I don’t know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dyke.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant’s tail,
but if one wanders the circus won’t find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider—
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give—yes or no, or maybe—
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

There is someone in my life who I feel like telling: Just come out with it! “the signals we give–yes or no, or maybe– should be clear.”

Where do you need to communicate more clearly in your life? I want to communicate more clearly. There is also the truth that “Freedom is the right not to have to lie.” (Camus) And I don’t expect anyone to tell the truth when it would be too damaging to them in some way. So, I also aknowlege my own part as a truth receiver and want to give people enough freedom that they can dare to tell me the truth.

I think that has been a big issue for me in relationships and maybe it would help if I let go of expectations and prepare myself to accept whatever they tell me. Ach lieben! I also want to be independent enough that I can dare to tell the truth. 

Writing about truth telling reminds me how grateful I am that when I had an existential crisis this summer, no one I talked to shrugged. No one gave me pat answers.  The people I talked to were honest and exquisitely real with me.  I am deeply grateful for that.

I dreamt that I had plans with someone, but right before he came over, I fell to the floor with exhaustion. This is only a slightly dramatized version of my real life. Last night my friend never came over, I called her, and fell to my bed with exhaustion at 7:30. I knew this would mean I would wake up way too early, but I just couldn’t hold out until 9. That’s why I called my mom at 5:30 this morning, an hour and a half after I woke up. And how I had time to read poetry before I called, which came in handy as my mom missed the first hour of church while talking to me. In acknowledgment of her lost hour of church, I decided to give her a mother’s day sermon. I got it from The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart which I was reading this morning.

I was worried because when I read it earlier in the morning, I started crying at the first sentence, having read it before and knowing what was coming. I tend to cry when I read things to my mom, even if it didn’t make me cry on my own. “Don’t worry,” I told my mom before I started reading it, “I cried earlier, but I’m fine now.”

What Happened During the Ice Storm

One winter there was a freezing rain. How beautiful! people said when things outside started to shine with ice. But the freezing rain kept coming. Tree branches glistened like glass. Then broke like glass. Ice thickened on the windows until everything outside blurred. Farmers moved their livestock into the barns, and most animals were safe. But not the pheasants. Their eyes froze shut.

Some farmers went ice-skating down the gravel roads with clubs to harvest the pheasants that sat helplessly in the roadside ditches. The boys went out into the freezing rain to find pheasants too. They saw dark spots along a fence. Pheasants, all right. Five or six of them. The boys slid their feet along slowly, trying not to break the ice that covered the snow. They slid up close to the pheasants. The pheasants pulled their heads down between their wings. They couldn’t tell how easy it was to see them huddled there.

The boys stood still in the icy rain. Their breath came out in slow puffs of steam. The pheasants’ breath came out in quick little white puffs. Some of them lifted their heads and turned them from side to side, but they were blind folded with ice and didn’t flush. The boys had not brought clubs, or sacks, or anything but themselves. They stood over the pheasants, turning their own heads, looking at each other, each expecting the other to do something. To pounce on a pheasant, or to yell Bang! Things around them were shining and dripping with icy rain. The barbed-wire fence. The fence posts. The broken stems of grass. Even the grass seeds. The grass seeds looked like little yolks inside gelatin whites. And the pheasants looked like unborn birds glazed in egg white. Ice was hardening on the boys’ caps and coats. Soon they would be covered with ice too.

Then one of the boys said, Shh. He was taking off his coat, the thin layer of ice splintering in flakes as he pulled his arms from the sleeves. But the inside of the coat was dry and warm. He covered two of the crouching pheasants with his coat, rounding the back of it over them like a shell. The other boys did the same. They covered all the helpless pheasants. The small gray hens and the larger brown cocks. Now the boys felt the rain soaking through their shirts and freezing. They ran across the slippery fields, unsure of their footing, the ice clinging to their skin as they made their way toward the blurry lights of the house.

This mother’s day sermon was brought you you by Braidwood’s mom’s daughter Braidwood.Happy Mother’s Day!

In response to Jo’s poem, here is the poem for my season. It is on my Netvibes portal page.

Throw Yourself Like Seed

Shake off this sadness, and recover your spirit;
sluggish you will never see the wheel of fate
that brushes your heel as it turns going by,
the woman who wants to live is the woman in whom life is abundant.

Now you are only giving food to that final pain
which is slowly winding you in the nets of death, but to live is to work, and the only thing which lasts
is the work; start then, turn to the work.

Throw yourself like seed as you walk, and into your own field,
don’t turn your face for that would be to turn it to death,
and do not let the past weigh down your motion.

Leave what’s alive in the furrow, what’s dead in yourself,
for life does not move in the same way as a group of clouds,
from your work you will be able one day to gather yourself.

-Miguel de Unamuno
Translated by R.B.

Via my favorite poetry anthology The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart; poems for men. (Ah well.)

Look: no one ever promised for sure
that we would sing. We have decided
to moan. In a strange dance that
we don’t understand till we do it, we
have to carry on.

Just as in sleep you have to dream
the exact dream to round out your life,
so we have to live that dream into stories
and hold them close at you, close at the
edge we share, to be right.

We find it an awful thing to meet people,
serious or not, who have turned into vacant
effective people, so far lost that they
won’t believe their own feelings
enough to follow them out.

The authentic is a line from one thing
along to the next; it interests us.
Strangely, it relates to what works,
but is not quite the same. It never
swerves for revenge,

Or profit, or fame: it holds
together something more than the world,
this line. And we are your wavery
efforts at following it. Are you coming?
Good: now it is time.

—William Stafford

Really, a lot of what I do in my life is internal. Some years when it might have looked like I was accomplishing nothing, I was actually working really hard, going to therapy and doing other internal transformation work. Many of my goals have to do with how I’m feeling and the processes I use and how I think. I feel like it’s my soul journey. So, this summer I decided that I wanted and needed to focus on my soul journey again, thus began: The Summer of Transformation!

I am making progress. Soul journey progress is always faster and slower than I think it will be. Faster because the slow and steady inner work I do can change everything in my outer life nearly instantly. Slower because I feel impatient and want to hurry and do inner work which is just opposite of how inner work goes, for me anyway. For me, inner changes are usually a result of practices, very slow and steady practices like writing in my journal or just being with myself and noticing how I am feeling. By their very nature, they can’t be hurried through. One result that I am noticing is greater self-acceptance and a feeling that my desires are good. Oh, that feels refreshing. It’s such a little seeming shift, but it is huge. When you know you can trust yourself, you don’t have to fight with yourself. (Especially pertinant for people who relate to the enneagram personality type 1.)

This is one of my favorite poems in that vein.

The Journey

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice–
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
‘Mend my life!’
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do–
determined to save
the only life you could save.

- Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—over and over announcing your place in the family of things.

Mary Oliver

I first found this poem at a website which offers poems to different Enneagram types. (The enneagram is a personality typing system.) I just typed a line into google and found it again on a UU website! Go UU’s! The exercises there will be a good match with the questions on Laura’s site.