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Full Moon in Belfast

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Happy Full Moon

The Egg Mirrored, or, Right Back at Ya
Tree1209

Four Quartets 4: Little Gidding
I

Midwinter spring is its own season
Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown,
Suspended in time, between pole and tropic.
When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire,
The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches,
In windless cold that is the heart's heat,
Reflecting in a watery mirror
A glare that is blindness in the early afternoon.
And glow more intense than blaze of branch, or brazier,
Stirs the dumb spirit: no wind, but pentecostal fire
In the dark time of the year. Between melting and freezing
The soul's sap quivers. There is no earth smell
Or smell of living thing. This is the spring time
But not in time's covenant. Now the hedgerow
Is blanched for an hour with transitory blossom
Of snow, a bloom more sudden
Than that of summer, neither budding nor fading,
Not in the scheme of generation.
Where is the summer, the unimaginable
Zero summer?

If you came this way,
Taking the route you would be likely to take
From the place you would be likely to come from,
If you came this way in may time, you would find the hedges
White again, in May, with voluptuary sweetness.
It would be the same at the end of the journey,
If you came at night like a broken king,
If you came by day not knowing what you came for,
It would be the same, when you leave the rough road
And turn behind the pig-sty to the dull facade
And the tombstone. And what you thought you came for
Is only a shell, a husk of meaning
From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled
If at all. Either you had no purpose
Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured
And is altered in fulfilment. There are other places
Which also are the world's end, some at the sea jaws,
Or over a dark lake, in a desert or a city—
But this is the nearest, in place and time,
Now and in England.

If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
Here, the intersection of the timeless moment
Is England and nowhere. Never and always.


II

Ash on and old man's sleeve
Is all the ash the burnt roses leave.
Dust in the air suspended
Marks the place where a story ended.
Dust inbreathed was a house—
The walls, the wainscot and the mouse,
The death of hope and despair,
This is the death of air.

There are flood and drouth
Over the eyes and in the mouth,
Dead water and dead sand
Contending for the upper hand.
The parched eviscerate soil
Gapes at the vanity of toil,
Laughs without mirth.
This is the death of earth.

Water and fire succeed
The town, the pasture and the weed.
Water and fire deride
The sacrifice that we denied.
Water and fire shall rot
The marred foundations we forgot,
Of sanctuary and choir.
This is the death of water and fire.

In the uncertain hour before the morning
Near the ending of interminable night
At the recurrent end of the unending
After the dark dove with the flickering tongue
Had passed below the horizon of his homing
While the dead leaves still rattled on like tin
Over the asphalt where no other sound was
Between three districts whence the smoke arose
I met one walking, loitering and hurried
As if blown towards me like the metal leaves
Before the urban dawn wind unresisting.
And as I fixed upon the down-turned face
That pointed scrutiny with which we challenge
The first-met stranger in the waning dusk
I caught the sudden look of some dead master
Whom I had known, forgotten, half recalled
Both one and many; in the brown baked features
The eyes of a familiar compound ghost
Both intimate and unidentifiable.
So I assumed a double part, and cried
And heard another's voice cry: 'What! are you here?'
Although we were not. I was still the same,
Knowing myself yet being someone other—
And he a face still forming; yet the words sufficed
To compel the recognition they preceded.
And so, compliant to the common wind,
Too strange to each other for misunderstanding,
In concord at this intersection time
Of meeting nowhere, no before and after,
We trod the pavement in a dead patrol.
I said: 'The wonder that I feel is easy,
Yet ease is cause of wonder. Therefore speak:
I may not comprehend, may not remember.'
And he: 'I am not eager to rehearse
My thoughts and theory which you have forgotten.
These things have served their purpose: let them be.
So with your own, and pray they be forgiven
By others, as I pray you to forgive
Both bad and good. Last season's fruit is eaten
And the fullfed beast shall kick the empty pail.
For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice.
But, as the passage now presents no hindrance
To the spirit unappeased and peregrine
Between two worlds become much like each other,
So I find words I never thought to speak
In streets I never thought I should revisit
When I left my body on a distant shore.
Since our concern was speech, and speech impelled us
To purify the dialect of the tribe
And urge the mind to aftersight and foresight,
Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age
To set a crown upon your lifetime's effort.
First, the cold friction of expiring sense
Without enchantment, offering no promise
But bitter tastelessness of shadow fruit
As body and soul begin to fall asunder.
Second, the conscious impotence of rage
At human folly, and the laceration
Of laughter at what ceases to amuse.
And last, the rending pain of re-enactment
Of all that you have done, and been; the shame
Of motives late revealed, and the awareness
Of things ill done and done to others' harm
Which once you took for exercise of virtue.
Then fools' approval stings, and honour stains.
From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit
Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire
Where you must move in measure, like a dancer.'
The day was breaking. In the disfigured street
He left me, with a kind of valediction,
And faded on the blowing of the horn.


III

There are three conditions which often look alike
Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow:
Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment
From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between them, indifference
Which resembles the others as death resembles life,
Being between two lives—unflowering, between
The live and the dead nettle. This is the use of memory:
For liberation—not less of love but expanding
Of love beyond desire, and so liberation
From the future as well as the past. Thus, love of a country
Begins as attachment to our own field of action
And comes to find that action of little importance
Though never indifferent. History may be servitude,
History may be freedom. See, now they vanish,
The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them,
To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.

Sin is Behovely, but
All shall be well, and
All manner of thing shall be well.
If I think, again, of this place,
And of people, not wholly commendable,
Of no immediate kin or kindness,
But of some peculiar genius,
All touched by a common genius,
United in the strife which divided them;
If I think of a king at nightfall,
Of three men, and more, on the scaffold
And a few who died forgotten
In other places, here and abroad,
And of one who died blind and quiet
Why should we celebrate
These dead men more than the dying?
It is not to ring the bell backward
Nor is it an incantation
To summon the spectre of a Rose.
We cannot revive old factions
We cannot restore old policies
Or follow an antique drum.
These men, and those who opposed them
And those whom they opposed
Accept the constitution of silence
And are folded in a single party.
Whatever we inherit from the fortunate
We have taken from the defeated
What they had to leave us—a symbol:
A symbol perfected in death.
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
By the purification of the motive
In the ground of our beseeching.


IV

The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre of pyre—
To be redeemed from fire by fire.

Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire.


V

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make and end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from. And every phrase
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together)
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph. And any action
Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea's throat
Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start.
We die with the dying:
See, they depart, and we go with them.
We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them.
The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree
Are of equal duration. A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails
On a winter's afternoon, in a secluded chapel
History is now and England.

With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this
Calling

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

T. S. Eliot

Happy Full Moon

Tree409

Full Moon 9/15/08

Tree

Happy Full Moon

Tree

Another Full Moon is upon us. I have enjoyed watching it slide past my window behind the computer every evening this week, paired with a bright planet that I spent some minutes trying to find online with no success.

Thursday and Friday one bizarre event happened after another.

Yesterday morning I was collaring and graining my goats, and noticed that Sir Nicolas, who I tie last, had his head stretched up against the wall-his usual place, but the unusual fixed position of nose to sky caused me to wonder if he had bracken poisoning. Goats are supposedly not susceptible to bracken poisoning, but the symtoms include staring up into space.

I kept collaring goats, and when I got to Nic a few minutes later, I immediately saw the problem. The poor guy had caught his beard on a nail head and could move. The hair was snaggled around and around the nail. Quicly I called the Willow to stay with the goat, and sprinted off to the house for scissors in knee high rubber boots-through the kitchen to the scissors and back through without taking off the boots-sprinting back through the yard and a voice in my head saying "never run with scissors" ack!

No, I didn't trip and stab myself; I ran right up to Nic and with one quick snip he was free, staggering slightly and having a quick drink of his own pee...(boy goats do that a lot). I checked him for dehydration and he was fine-ate his grain, but walked, didn't run, down to his hay afterwards...

He stood right there snaggled while I tied seven other goats, and never made a sound.

Poor chap, good thing I check them twice a day. Actually I don't do a head count at night, but I think I might start now.

Later in the afternoon, our fishing trip was delayed by pond visitors-no boat;I saw a large man with an unruly child and a dog, and I had a bad feeling. After sulking a few minutes, I decided to go ahead and dig the worms with Willow, and by then they had left, so fishing was back on.

Imagine my suprise and disgust when I realized they had FLEA BATHED the dog on the shore...the whole area reeked of insectide, with just a handful of soap mixed with dog hair on the saturated ground. I know from past experience the odor of flea shampoo and the fact that the label states quite clearly NOT to introduce it into any waterway as it is toxic to fish and pondlife.

Moron.

It didn't stop the fish from biting, though. The Firebird caught two small sunfish and lost a huge one to a snapped line after the bobber disappeared and the drag on his line started screeching. The Willow had some great casts on her own. I wore shorts this time, so I didn't mind wading into the weeds after three or four miscasts.

She landed a pumpkinseed and another good sized-bass-a bit smaller than the day before. Hooked in the jaw again, and this one I couldn't get out so I cut the line close to the jaw and let him go. I hate to leave a hook in, but the site of the jaw bleeding had her nearly in tears, and I just could not seem to get the hook free.

Today Willow helped me give Peko a bath-in our tub with a five gallon bucket of warm water and Pantene shampoo. He was such a crazy happy dog afterwards-racing around the house like mad. Now he is all shiny and smells good.

We passed on fishing tonight and made a pizza run as the sky was darkening. We passed right under a wicked storm cell on the way home-me praying to get home before it hit. I had never seen such an odd sky-it had cracks running through it, and rolls, and things that looked like small funnel clouds...sorry no pic; although I had the cam I was booking it to get home.

The Firebird turned on PBS to catch emergency broadcasts..and three seconds later, there it was. Yes, we had passed right under it, but it was headed away from us. Thank goodness.

I grew up in thunderstorm country, but seeing two foot diameter oaks snapped like matchsticks last summer has left me with the desire to be home when the next one hits.

Happy Full Moon-itis

All week I have been watching the moon grow. Wednesday I intended to go out at dusk and photo the moon just rising over the pond, but loud voices revealed the presence of other pond /moon enjoyers and deterred me.

Last night I had a case of full moon itis. I was wound up and tired, still trying to catch up on my R&R, so I turned in around midnight. I was trying to get comfy, and all of a sudden a loud squawk, and the two white roosters, each of whom claims a high perch in trees on opposite corners of the house (one right outside my window, thanks very much) started crowing. Yes, at midnight.

The moon was full and high in the sky-I don't know if they thought it was high noon, or what?
Finally I sat up and looked out the window, and seeing no pack of coyotes or invading aliens, I rapped sharply on the glass, demanding, "What's going on out there?" IN response the two roosters, being chickens, shut up.

I tried to get comfortable again, and I could hear goat horns crashing and crashing. I have two large wethers that are kept separate, because one of them is mean to the little goats. I was sure I was hearing the sound of large goats beating up small goats, so I dressed and wandered outside to check. Everything was normal-the little goats taking advantage of the midnight sun to play King of the big boulder. Sweet.

That was last night. Today we had to run some errands, including a dump run, or transfer station as it is now. The old dump was a back-up and dump landfill. At the transfer station, everything goes into bins to be hauled away, with separate stations for recycled items.

I have the system down fairly well-first the general trash, then cans, glass, general metal, around to number two plastic, mixed paper, and cardboard. This week I had a bag of stuff from an old woods dump that we cleaned up on the property. Yes, even out in the middle of nowhere, one can find the remains of mankind years ago. In our case, we have excavated several small piles of trash from about 40 years ago-which is now just glass and rusty cans.

I was trying to sort the glass from the cans and debating whether the rusty cans should go into the can barrels or the general metal dumpster (wow, real rocket science going on there...hehe) and was approached by a nicely dressed woman .

"Where should I put the blue glass?" she asked .

I suggested she set it to the side since the barrels are only labeled "green, brown, or white"
Then she had some other things she had questions about-mostly plastic, which I took for her in my now empty sack to go into the general trash, as our station only recycles number two.

She was apparently cleaning out stuff for her folks-ancient liquor bottles and odd plastic bits, a box of ancient reader's digest books.

She drove back over to the general trash area to get rid of the rest of her non recycled plastic, and I took my two , now empty paint cans over to the metal can. By the time I came back, or about 30 seconds from the start of this story, one of the guys that worked there had spotted the blue glass bottle and tucked it under his arm like a college quarterback making his first touch down.

Ok, blue glass goes to the guy. :D

I wondered about the woman afterwards, her folks..if they were still alive, or moved away, and was she cleaning out the summer home?

We moved on to the next stop.

The out of state driver plates have arrived. We went the rest of the way into town with me spouting off plates as they passed.."Massachusetts, Virginia, NorthCarolina...I think that was Texas!"

I made sure I was on my best host-state behavior, pausing several times to wave "visitors from away" into traffic-tricky spots that still rely on common small town courtesy to keep traffic flowing at intersections.

One place at the top of town had received a very expensive makeover including a traffic light-which has turned that spot into a living nightmare. From two or three directions turning drivers still have to rely on common courtesy to get through-but that is now dictated by if the light is green or not. We made it through town alright, but one had to wonder at the reason for the light, since traffic can barely go 10 mph down main street .

We had a chance to go through the expanded grocery store-and the saplings were goggling with awe at the atrium complete with twenty foot tall fake trees in the produce section.

We just needed something for supper-with the heat and travel time unless I take an ice chest, meat purchases are limited to that night's dinner when so far from home. We were in the express lane, and suddenly a woman behind me said, "What beautiful children you have."

I said, "Yes, I am VERY lucky," very sincere; I often think how blessed I am with my children!!!
She was about my age, and looked tired and sad and lost in thought as we walked away. I had to wonder about her story, her children, or the children she didn't have...

and despite all the little crazy annoying things that happened today, my ego wanting to scream..."grrrr...why me?" I found myself thinking about the two women I had spoken with today...the well groomed woman with or without parents, the tired rumpled woman with or without children...either might have been me in an alternate reality... and how did their days go?

Happy Full Moon. ;)