
A whole world in a puddle.
Monday Morning Musings:
“For words, like Nature, half reveal
And half conceal the Soul within.”
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “In Memoriam A. H. H. OBIIT MDCCCXXXIII: 5”
“Now it was only the rivers
that spoke of the rivers,
and only the wind that spoke of its bees,
while the unpausing factual buds of the fruit trees
continued to move toward their fruit.”
–Jane Hirshfield, “On the Fifth Day”
How will we remember these days
of grief and sorrow for our world–
the facts of buds on trees
and rivers that keep on flowing
concealing and revealing what lies beneath
in the upside-down world
where we gaze at transitory beauty
and fall, topsy-turvy
into its depths
as spring dances, mercurial,
swiftly fleeting,
yet heralding—the facts—
yellow-green wisps turn darker
the world gets hotter,
and trees reach up
to light,
and down to darkness
half-revealed,
half-concealed
thoughts glimmer
like tears
until they drop
salty pearls
leaving an alluvial trail
fertile with memories
and I think of this–and time
as I listen to words,
singularity, time and space,
the black hole left
in an absence
even as we remember
the time before we are born
when my mother meets my father
and holds my older brother on her lap.
And she is young, old, older, gone. . .
.
. . .and here.
On Friday night, we visited with our daughters via Zoom. This Friday Shabbat dinner has become a new ritual. We ate soup and rolls, the gift of friends, sustaining us from a distance. I baked the cookies we call Mommy Cookies because they are my favorite. My mom loved them, too, and I used to bring her some.
I watched most of “The Universe in Verse,” which was live-streamed on Saturday just before we had our own family Zoom memorial session for my mother. It was a somewhat surreal experience marked by technical problems, non-sequiturs, and some memories of my mom that we shared.
We weren’t the only ones with technical difficulties. I tried to watch the Sonheim’s 90th birthday celebration last night, but I gave up. Apparently, it did go on, over an hour later that the scheduled 8 PM start.
We finished watched Giri/Haji (Duty/Shame) on Netflix, which I highly recommend if you want something unique. I really liked it. It’s a Japanese-British production that is difficult to describe. A Japanese detective is looking for his criminal brother in England. The detective’s daughter joins them. It is a crime show and a family drama. There is romance, and action scenes, and there are other characters who become important and endearing. I wasn’t sure about it after the first episode, but I really did get caught up in this show.