Reflections on knowing the time
small brave thing #246
Hello beautiful human,
I crack the window by my desk each morning to hear the crickets and see the particular gold and slanted light of September fall across the books and paper piles. I’ve been sick with a bad respiratory virus for a week, even as we continue to navigate larger health issues within the family. Cycles of illness and health, progress and return. My kids are both now launched once again into a new school year—the younger has already texted me a list of all we forgot on move-in day. It feels, in this balanced, Equinoctial moment, like I can take a breath—not a deep one, though. I still have a hacking cough.
I measure my months by the moon and my year by the sun’s path through the solstices and equinoxes, and the cross-quarter points between those events. So this equinox weekend marks a new moon stasis at the same time a transition from late summer’s wane to the beginning of autumn. The crickets take up where cicadas left off. I think there’s one in my family room. It sings along to the British detective shows I watch, undaunted by my two subwoofers rumbling, and I have to say, holding its own.
Memory rushes forward in the quiet and spills its own abundance. Whatever the gifts of summer were, they’re consigned to scrapbook pages and albums now, slide shows that flicker across memory’s screens.
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How do we know what time it is? I have clocks in my house but they’re all broken. I don’t need clocks to tell me the time when I have the sun, moon, and trees outside. The other day as I emerged from a sinus induced fog, the elderberry suddenly announced it was time to pick the berries.
The September afternoon was warm and mellow as I waded through the grasses and past the apple trees. The heavy umbrels of purple-black berries fell into the bowl as I clipped them. Once back in the kitchen, I used my fingertips to gently wiggle the berries from their delicate stems. I simmered them with ginger and honey, to make a syrup. Now I take a spoonful each morning to boost my immunity. I simmer rosemary to freshen the house. My life a patchwork of old and new, subwoofers and syrups. That elder I just harvested I started from a twig I cut three and a half years ago from the elderberry at the Big House., before I left. That healthy bush in turn was a volunteer we never looked for. It arrived thriving at the wilder edge of the yard. My friend Marian found it on a walk through the yard with me, Oh Elder, she said. That’s a guardian.
How do we know what time it is? What if the clocks are lying to us? Or what if we each carry an internal clock—or multiple clocks?—moving to our own rhythms. Rosemary helps us remember. Marigolds line the path for the ancestors to find us. When my first child was born nearly twenty five years ago, I felt like I was 102 and would never feel young again. As I gathered the pieces after my divorce I felt like a toddler just learning to walk and easily knocked off balance. I know how many candles are on my birthday cake but I don’t think that means very much, somehow. I keep recovering parts and pieces of myself, writing poems again, starting to dance, remembering. Putting myself back together. Some days I feel like a Raggedy Ann doll with my stitched heart. Some days I feel like a tree.
Meanwhile, I’m on the couch surrounded by tissues and tea as I rest, rewatching Foyle’s War, a British detective series set in WWII on the south coast of England. Where I am in the show, the Americans have just showed up. What a relief it is to watch, ninety minutes at a time, a story that takes place when we were fighting Nazis instead of becoming them. As my country continues to be overtaken by fascist clowns and their lackies, I find—not hope, but something deeper: the will to endure, maybe, in the trees, bushes and flowers of my backyard. The river flows. The cranes fly over, belling their call. The cranes have been here since dinosaurs were their neighbors. The Baraboo hills stopped the glaciers.
I find myself yearning for quiet and space, these days. To be able to stretch into the page, the project, the moment. To listen. To find leisure to connect the pieces of my life into patterns that fit and make sense. I am out of focus with myself, a little. Maybe you are too? I work on my poems without a clear idea of why. I journal, I drift through the house and wash a few dishes but never quite finish the job. I have no clear destination. Only, always with me, the urge to slow down, slow down even more. Break another clock. Listen, listen even more closely. For what or who I don’t know.
I can let summer go, but not without a note of gratitude. Where I live, people escape to the Dells, to their cabins and “places up North,” each summer. The town I live in calls itself “Where the North Begins.” And once again time blurs and shimmers slightly and I remember this moment is part of a larger much larger pattern. People have been traveling in this greater mid continent region to gather here for their summer reunions going back so far we have only oral histories and buried fragments to learn from. Think of it.
They too heard the cranes.
xo
S
I believe our world needs new stories. what if those stories lie curled within us like seeds? This is An Inviting Space to experience where and how we might discover, recover and nurture the secret, magical gardens of soul day by day. Starting where we are, as we are.
A Celebration Corner for sharing the Good Goodies
We are in for a long season of resistance and we each have roles to play. Check out
‘s Social Change Map if you’re wondering how you fit and what you can do.And here’s an easy one from
, inspired by Norway’s resistance in WWII.
Want to connect? Here’s where you can find me in the months coming up:
Reality check: you’re right. This is a really dissonant and distracting time to be alive. And if you feel stuck, ungrounded, in a muddle, or just want to hear yourself think while someone who has some pretty badass skillsets listens, you can reach out for a sounding board conversation any time.
Around here, I’m in the Circle on Wednesdays, when we gather via zoom at the Well to strengthen our listening and creative practices in community. Join the Circle here. Or, if you want to just try it out sometime, sign up for an upcoming Wednesday and join us. There’s more to come!
Want to find some other inspiration through play? You can experience a playshop with me in Missouri October 3-5, I’ll be presenting “Play/Ground” with the wonderful Elizabeth Shepley at TLAN’s conference, The Power of Words.
November 13 The Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets is hosting my online workshop, “Three Questions and a Poem,” a workshop designed to generate new material and new approaches to listening, for poets and non-poets alike.
Your support is welcome, and your attention and time are true gifts. Thank you.
Love this, Sarah. I think about time a lot. I’m a huge Doctor Who fan, but also because it’s very circular, shrinks and expands, and isn’t what we think. We try taming it. Constantly.
Take care of your good self, lovely lady. Keep smelling rosemary and sipping tea 😘
A beautiful piece that pushes my mind beyond “time.”💕