“The Manner of Its Death”

thispedestrianlife, , , , Leave a comment

I’m back after taking a little break to delve into my other creative projects! I wrote this poem just this morning as memories of my 4 year old daughter skipped through my brain. In her poem, Emily spoke on one her favorite subjects, death. She seemed to be saying that one should be able to choose their manner of death, much as she chose her burial attire and the manner in which she wanted her own death to be recognized.

When she ventured outside her Amherst home, Emily explored as an avid naturalist, and spent much time surveying, cataloguing and appreciating the wide variety of life forms. As a mother of two young children, I sought to get them outside as much as possible and to let them learn from and experience all the wonders of the natural world. On one particular trek through the woods in back of our North Carolina mountain home, my 4 year old daughter came upon a tiny fallen bird, unmoving and sadly dead. This poem is about how she reacted.

The next morning we arrived at the doorway to her Montessori preschool and she presented the Directress with the shoebox containing her discovery. As all good teachers do, during morning circle she used it as a teaching moment, as the littles solemnly passed the box around and they talked about what might have happened to the tiny bird. A simple playground burial followed, with the preschoolers expressing their genuine and heartfelt care for the tiny creature. Life is beautiful and poignant, gentle and harsh. May we all be as bold as preschoolers in expressing that same kind of genuine and heartfelt care for each other.

“The Moon Is Distant From the Sea”

thispedestrianlife, , , Leave a comment

Very distant indeed. It’s an average of 238,855 miles from Earth. And yet, its gravitational pull makes it a mighty force. Orbiting Earth approximately every 27.3 days, it is the second brightest object in the sky, reflecting the light of our brightest, the Sun. Some analysts see poem #429 as a metaphor for Emily’s obedience to God and others see her likening the sea’s obedience to the moon to reversing women’s customary obedience to men. Given our shared aversions to joining the organized church, and to being told what to do by anyone, I lean toward the later interpretation.

As an elementary teacher, I loved to incorporate poetry into not just my language arts instruction, but into the other subjects I taught as well. One year my 3rd graders studied and memorized Frost’s “The Road Not Taken”. Another year I orchestrated a spoken word play of Paul Fleischman’s Joyful Noise, Poems For Two Voices, a delightful book of poems about all types of insects. When lesson planning, I often sought out poems about Math, Science and Social Studies and found them to be very effective tools for teaching all sorts of concepts.

Today’s Carol and Emily Project poem is a short and sweet poem illustrating the moon’s tidal force.

Tim and I

thispedestrianlife, , Leave a comment

In researching Emily’s poem #196, I learned that the “Tim” in her poetry is thought to have been an alter-ego of hers. Recognizing as she did, the inequities that existed between girls and boys/males and females during her time, she was often outspoken about them in her home. In public she wasn’t perceived as boyish, but inside her home, by her own family, her behavior was often likened to that of a “rascal boy”. Beginning in 1862 she wrote quite a few poems in a masculine voice.

My Carol and Emily poem #196 is dedicated to a dear friend of mine named Tim, whose physical body left this world far too soon. His spirit still lives on, in his children, grandchildren, family and friends, and precious memories of a really good guy live on in my heart. We miss you Tim <3

The last time we were together, he took me to see some land he wanted to buy and shared his dream of starting an airboat business, taking tourists for rides on the St. John’s River and through the swamps and marshes of its estuaries. Although that dream was never realized, I can see him with that pirate smile on his face, doing that and thriving, something he spent many post-Vietnam years attempting to do.

Art by R. L. Lewis

References

Patterson, Rebecca. “Emily Dickinson’s ‘Double’ Tim: Masculine Identification.” American Imago, vol. 28, no. 4, 1971, pp. 330–362. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/26302664. Accessed 25 Apr. 2021.

The Portrait

thispedestrianlife, , , , Leave a comment

Emily must have written poem #188 while she was dreaming of sunshine and warmer days from her chilly bedroom in Amherst, Massachusetts. She seems to opt for skipping Fall and Winter altogether and staying warm while enjoying the life abundant in Spring and Summer. Here in my corner of the world, there’s usually no lack of warmth or sun, so on this beautiful April morning I breakfasted on my lanai and imagined this scene and the romance of discovering that you are considered someone’s sun.

Happy Saturday from Emily and I. May you enjoy and feel both the warmth of someone’s love and the Sun’s warmth, with plenty of sunscreen of course!

Seafoam Memories

thispedestrianlife, , , , Leave a comment

Certain places hold sensory and muscle memories, and bring special moments back to mind. The shore and ocean do that for me. As the tides move in and out twice each day, they bring forth and take away, reminding us that life does the same. Today, the first line of Emily’s poem #86 and the South winds blew the briny air and sent seafoam and memories of a past love, dancing across the sand and through my mind.

On Grief

thispedestrianlife, , 2 Comments

At this very moment, each of us is either grieving or knows someone who is. Grief isn’t just reserved for one type of situation, event, or loss. We may grieve the loss of a friendship, a job, a home or a loved one. Many of us have been grieving the loss of a way of life for the last 14 months. So much has changed since March 2020 that grief and loss have become our daily companions. The toll on our personal and collective mental health has been massive and the ramifications of this period will be felt for years to come. 

There are days when we feel that swimming is impossible. And then all we can do is wade, and hope not to be taken under.

This quote about grief sums it up for me.

At this historic moment, as individuals, and as a country and a world, we wait for a verdict in the Derek Chauvin trial, and hope that we will not be drowned.

Peace and Love from Emily and I.

“The Nearest Dream…”

thispedestrianlife, , , , Leave a comment

In 1862, poem #319 was one of the 4 poems Emily sent along with a letter to the famed Unitarian minister, abolitionist, and well-known literary critic, Thomas Higginson, in response to his article in the Atlantic Monthly, “Letter To A Young Contributor. ” The article gave advice to young writers and Emily responded with a question for Higginson, wanting to know if he “thought her verse was alive”. That letter was the first exchange in a correspondence that would go on for 23 years.

Everyone needs someone to believe in them. But having that doesn’t always spell success. That recipe is much more complicated, of course. For some, it’s hard to believe in themselves, because of the way they’ve been raised, or just because they’ve never seen or experienced success actually being realized in their corner of the world. They often just need a taste. A taste that tells them it’s real, and that they can have more if they keep working at it. I was reminded of some of my students who struggled in much the same way. So I wrote this Carol and Emily poem…

References:

Dickinson Electronic Archive

Dickinson and Higginson (classroomelectric.org)

“Twas Just This Time- Last Year, I Died”

thispedestrianlife, , , Leave a comment

Of course not literally, but with all the angst I had as a teenager, I spent the majority of my waking hours wondering how we were going to survive the lockdown, quarantine, toilet paper shortage, and general malaise that the Covid-19 virus brought to our lives.

Once again, I was wrong. My husband deserves all the credit for carrying the weight of everything for the first few months until I rose from my funk and started to fully function again. And here we are, over a year later. Many of us are vaccinated and we’re all eager to travel and visit family and hug everyone! There’s so much we’ve all missed. And oh so many who will forever be missing loved ones who died from complications of Covid-19.

The vaccinations have brought us light and hope. Next week, I’m going to get to visit my daughter and grandson for the first time in over 13 months. Believe me, I’m going to hug them for a very long time. We’re so close to managing this. But we’re not there yet. Let’s all be smart. Wear our masks. Get vaccinated. Stay safe.

“I Cannot Dance Upon My Toes”

thispedestrianlife, , , Leave a comment

I took ballet for one short season, thinking it was something I might be good at. I was 100% wrong. There’s really not much more to the story. Like Emily, I admire the ability and the beauty of those who can dance, but it wasn’t for me. In her poem, she suggests that her simplistic, solitary lifestyle brings her as much joy as she imagines a ballet dancer has, lithely spinning and jumping so beautifully and gracefully across the stage.

Emily and I share a disdain for societal expectations of what a woman should say, do, or be. For me the only answer is anything she damn well pleases. Emily didn’t want to do any of the typical “normal” things women of her day were expected to do. She is said to have found hosting/entertaining and small talk painful and most especially didn’t want to become a wife. In a letter to her friend from school, Abiah Root, she wrote “God keep me from being a householder.”

This poem started a couple of different ways, listing things I could and couldn’t do, but ended up just being a fun little flirty poem directed at a love interest.

The Soul Selects Her Own Society

thispedestrianlife, , , , , , Leave a comment

Emily Dickinson didn’t shy away from the big subjects in her poetry. Human nature, self identity, religion, death and the dualistic nature of our existence (body and soul) come up frequently. Spending so much time alone seems to have given her the opportunity to be very in touch with her inner self. In her poem #303, she declares that the soul chooses who it lets in that inner circle of self and that no outside entity, man or institution, should have that power. I wholeheartedly agree.

In his book titled Anam Cara : A Book of Celtic Wisdom, the late Irish poet and philosopher John O’Donohue wrote about the ancient Gaelic term “anam cara”, which means “soul friend”. When we really connect with people, somehow we just know that we were meant to cross paths. We can feel it deep inside, in our soul. We call these people our soulmates, our best friends, our forever friends. Neither time nor distance seem to weaken the bond we share with them. We can be our truest, mask-less selves with these people and they do not desert us, ever. Like a robin builds a nest for her babies, soul friends offer a soft place for the other to land.

Wishing you all an “anam cara”.

References:

Anam Cara and the Essence of True Friendship: Poet and Philosopher John O’Donohue on the Beautiful Ancient Celtic Notion of Soul-Friend – Brain Pickings