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Posts Tagged ‘Bill Griffin’

Join the Lays

Posted in Christian themes, Imagery, music, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , on December 23, 2022| 14 Comments »

Lessons & Carols

Linda and I opened our favorite Christmas present early. In November, our friend and fellow vocalist, Rebecca, had invited us to sing with her choir for their Festival of Lessons and Carols this fourth Sunday of Advent; their small group was dwindling in size and they had no tenor. Becky is a director of deep sensibility and infectious joy, and her husband Eric is a virtuoso organist and musicologist. If a naturalist is someone overcome with wonder at the organization and life history of tiny wildflowers and beetles, then a musicologist is one who discovers wonder and creates joy in the ecology of music.

The Lessons are a series of readings from Old and New Testament that reveal God’s presence in the world: creation; prophecy of the Messiah and the promised kingdom of peace; the arrival of Immanuel, God With Us. Each lesson is punctuated with music, the Carols. For this year’s service, Eric compiled a sequence of early American hymns and folk tunes, melodies that were once on every tongue but through the decades have largely fallen from familiarity and favor: Shape Note, Shaker, Appalachian, Moravian. We practiced, we rehearsed, and on Sunday morning with the Corda String Quartet and thundering pipe organ, we sang.

 

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THIRD LESSON: The king is coming and will usher in a reign of justice for the poor and peace for all of God’s creation. There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, and a branch from his roots shall bear fruit. (Isaiah 1:1)

Behold a Lovely Vine
. . .
Shall feeble nature sing
and man not join the lays,
O may their throats be swell’d with notes
and fill’d with songs of praise.
. . .
++++++ Jeremiah Ingalls (1764-1838)

If nature itself sings the praises of earth and all it holds, how can we help but join in? Lays are medieval ballads, songs sung by minstrels. This hymn from 1805 retells Old Testament prophecies using metaphor and symbolic imagery. Interwoven is the theme that Nature fulfills its purposes and exists in harmony with the flow of creation. May we humans hope to be restored to that same harmony and oneness? Nature may become our “spiritual training ground.” Poetry and song throughout the 19th century reflect this vision of the perfection of nature as an example for humankind, as in the book length poem Wilderness and Mount by Ellen T. H. Harvey:

Here is the field: the insects in the grass
Sing praise as by their little tents we pass.
They are in harmony with all God’s move:
Ah, why can man do any less than love?

++++++ Ellen T. H. Harvey, 1872

Observation, identification, contemplation: is it possible that these insignificant grasses and insects reveal wisdom? Is it possible that I might see past the fractures and trials of my daily preoccupations to discover a truer purpose? To love?

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NINTH LESSON: John unfolds the great mystery of the incarnation. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. (Gospel of John 1:1)

Surely at my age, threescore and ten, I have discovered my life’s purpose. I have degrees in biochemistry and medicine; I’m a trained and certified naturalist. Where is God in all of this? Where is the natural theology that integrates quantum reality and molecular genetics and the transcendent experience of oneness with the universe?

Word – Logos – is intrinsic and essential to every atom and its component quarks, to nucleic acids infinitely recombining, to each minute dust-like spore of the luxuriant fern, to tangles of neurons from whose organized chaos arises thought. Word is that which calls us; that which explains and enlightens; that challenges and assures; that speaks the inchoate and expresses the ineffable, uncreated and continuously creative.

Word is the beak of the finch and the long tapered nectary of the orchid. Word is Hawking radiation and Planck’s constant. Word is the affinity of carbon to bond with nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, and most wonderfully of all with itself. Word is the specific heat of water which permits a planet the proper distance from its star to moderate its climate.

Where is God? In all of this. There is nothing that is not God.

We have words, paltry words, but we use them the best we can to express Word. Sometimes we call it poetry – non-linear, condensed and rarified, transcendent. Ponder the individual words and they scatter like grains of sand running through your fingers. Cup them and hold them whole, lift them on the wings of music, organ and strings, melody and harmonies. In this fullness and flow of words we might hope to experience Word.

A crescendo sung by a choir – a goldfinch plucking down from a thistle – a speck of grey-green lichen on a metal post: O may our throats be swell’d with notes!

Behold a Lovely Vine

Behold a lovely vine
her in this desert ground;
the blossoms shoot and promised fruit
and tender grapes are found.

It’s circling branches rise
and shade the neighb’ring lands;
with lovely arms she spreads her arms,
with clusters in her hands.

This city can’t be hid,
it’s built upon a hill;
the dazzling light it shines so bright
it doth the vallies fill.

Ye trees which lofty stans
and stars with sparkling light;
Ye Christians hear both far and near,
Tis joy to see the sight.

Shall feeble nature sing
and man not join the lays,
O may their throats be swell’d with notes
and fill’d with songs of praise.

Glory to God on high,
for His redeeming grace,
the blessed Dove come from above
to save our ruined race.

++++++ Jeremiah Ingalls (1764-1838)

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And of course the most important and utilitarian facet of the word Lays is that it rhymes with Praise.

Thank you to Central United Methodist Church, Mt. Airy, NC.
Thank you to Rebecca Cook – she lifts her arms and we raise our voices.
Thank you to Eric Cook, master of multiple manuals, for devising this inspiring program and equal thanks for his copious and enlightening notes.

Ellen H. T. Harvey, Wilderness and Mount: A Poem of Tabernacles. John Bent, Publisher; Boston, 1872.

Brett Malcolm Grainger, The Vital Landscape: Evangelical Religious Practice and the
Culture of Nature in America, 1790-1870. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard Divinity School (2014).

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IMG_7952

 

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Darkness

Posted in family, Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , on December 16, 2022| 19 Comments »

 

[with 4 poems by Joan Barasovska]

In just a few days our home planet will reach that point in its yearlong circumsolar peregrination at which it will feel the maximum effect of its 23 degree axial tilt off the perpendicular. In other words, today is way too close to the solstice for us to have waited until 3:30 to begin our 5 mile hike.

Byrd’s Branch to Grassy Creek and out to the far terminus of Forest Bathing: when we turn at last to retrace our steps we see that the shadows have lengthened into no shadows at all. Splitting the utter stillness as we skirt Klondike Lake, fifty geese suddenly spook and lift and wheel over us. The urgency of their wings is the sound night makes when it is falling too fast. As we leave the creek and climb up from the shadowy vale, we do regain a bit of skyglow from the western horizon, that thin chill winter platinum that can’t penetrate between the gray trunks closing around us but which persists in the pale leaves covering the path. Light still leads us on.

Serenely quiet here. No breath of breeze, no quarreling crows, no road noise. The squirrels have hushed their startled rattling up the hickory trees. We can’t see into the cloaked woods; we imagine we’re entirely alone until our last companion calls. A Towhee sings his plaintive two-note motet, his mate answers, and they ferry us along the trail.

Here’s the road crossing, isolated rural lane. Only another mile to our car – a mile through Mr. Byrd’s close-planted white pine woodlot. Shall I describe the pathway leading down into the embrace of those lowering dense-woven needled boughs?

It’s dark!

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Sore Throat

The best light in our rowhouse on St. James Street
is from the tall front windows in the living room.
I wait by the window in my pajamas for Dr. Barol
to ring the doorbell and for his jolly voice.
I’m to sit on the piano bench where he can see best,
his black leather bag beside me, its jaw wide open.
He stands above me in horn-rimmed glasses and bow tie,
shakes down the mercury in his glass thermometer.
He tells me to say AH and says, Open wide.
My tonsils are infected again, he tells my mother.

I want him to convince her to pity me.
Tell her I must stay in bed for a week.
Tell her to be nicer when she talks to me.
Don’t tell my mother that sickness
is what I crave most of all.
I’m sure he can tell. He’s shined a light
in my throat and ears so many times
he must know my trick.
I’m a little girl who believes she can
make herself sick just by being sad.

The nurse at school, Mrs. Marx, knows me well.
She rolls crinkly paper down the padded leather
table so I can rest with her if no one else is there.
She plays the opera music she loves on her radio.
I know she knows my secret, but maybe
she forgives me. From the bottom of my being
I want the gentleness that only sickness gets you.

But it doesn’t really work that way.
My throat is so sore. My mother’s angry
that I’m sick again. She has too much to do.
She makes me Cream of Wheat
with brown sugar. She pours medicine
from a brown bottle into a spoon.
She takes my temperature, gives me baby aspirin,
puts cool washcloths on my forehead, changes
the sheets. She does all that she should do.
I need what I can’t name.

Joan Barasovska
from Orange Tulips, Redhawk Publications, The Catawba Valley Community College Press, Hickory NC, © 2022

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Darkness. It creeps to overtake you whether you mark its arrival or not. Once surrounded, engulfed, overwhelmed, you may imagine that the darkness is all. That there is no way out, that there is nothing other than darkness.

Joan Barasovska’s Orange Tulips, a memoir in narrative verse, is a path into darkness. The world of this girl child opens with joy but already hints of inexplicable sadness; the adult journeys through suffering, doubt, pain, the wrenching temptation of hopelessness. Despair is palpable.

But no life is a single arc. There are many stories and their outcomes are not foreordained. An unexpected door may open into light. The arc of another person entwines with our own and we are touched, changed. As memoir, Joan’s story begs to be read cover to cover, front to back in a single sitting. I am lifted into the promise of light by the possibility of healing and redemption in its final pages. I am finished with the book, but it is not finished with me.

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1963

I’m a merry Girl Scout in green uniform
and felt beret. My troop is walking east across
the Schuylkill River Bridge. It’s an old bridge,
prickly sandstone under our palms.

You can sit on the ledge if you’re brave.
You can stand on the ledge if you’re foolish.
We look between the columns way down ito the water.
How deep is it? Miss Kelly doesn’t know.

What I care about, in one breath, is the impact of a fall.
The magnet of the gray river. The sick.
I don’t ask Miss Kelly why people jump.
She knows about hikes, knots, campfires.
Starting today, I’m the authority on jumping.

Merit badges, saddle shoes, jokes I am famous for.
I am nine, maybe ten.
Now I have a secret so strong it makes me dizzy.
On my honor, for God and my country,
it’s 1963 and I have fallen down.

Joan Barasovska
from Orange Tulips, Redhawk Publications, The Catawba Valley Community College Press, Hickory NC, © 2022

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All Wrong

Done so many things wrong
I don’t know if I can do right.
+++++++++++++ – Tracy Chapman

The built world defeats me.
My apartment, the building
where I answer phones,
the sidewalks I walk on,
have all done great things
to my nothing at all.

If I were in charge
this city would be empty,
wind blowing soot.
Just look at me!
A shandah, disgrace,
such a smart girl,
dropout, breakdown,
breakup, crackup.

I am twenty.
I read long novels.
I walk and walk.
I only feel well
on trains and buses.
I draw odd diagrams
in small books.

I don’t wonder
why I’m done for.

I only want to be
as useful as a sidewalk,
to hammer one nail straight.

Joan Barasovska
from Orange Tulips, Redhawk Publications, The Catawba Valley Community College Press, Hickory NC, © 2022

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The Day I Walked on Fire

it wasn’t fire
it was gingko leaves
the sun lit them yellow
they were juicy with heat

the day I walked on ginkgo leaves
I imagined they were fire
that my shoes were melting
that my feet were burning

and I felt no pain
on that autumn day
when I burned to be
a holy woman

Joan Barasovska
from Orange Tulips, Redhawk Publications, The Catawba Valley Community College Press, Hickory NC, © 2022

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2017-02-11 Doughton Park Tree

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Singing

Posted in family, Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , on December 9, 2022| 8 Comments »

 

[with 3 poems by Aruna Gurumurthy]

One directs from the piano while he plays, his left eyebrow for entrances, the right to cut us off. Another tells us stories about her middle school students, then gets us to open our mouths like grownups. The beautiful one coaches our vowels with a baritone so luscious even we ourselves begin to believe. The one with a degree in percussion can direct 6/8 with his right hand and 4/4 with his left – simultaneously. The one no longer quite young requires all her sopranos to sing as if they are. The forever younger one jokes with us constantly until someone sings a terminal s at the end of the upbeat instead of the up of the downbeat (some in the tenor section refer to this gaff as “showing your ess”).

And all of us gathered around our director? We sing.

We sing not merely phonating, mouths formed, palates elevated, cords vibrating. We sing not merely vocalizing, words in rhythm on pitch. Not merely making a joyful noise. Singing together is less about what issues forth from between our lips and more about what flows into our ears, listening to our brothers and sisters on either side. And the together in singing together is most of all about what we see, eyes lifted from the score, alert, watching our leader, his hands, her face, their power to slow and soften us into tenderness, to swell us to climax, to make us one.

Singing together: leader, voices, music, lyric, all coalesce into one wholeness, one flow, one message – the song.

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Madras

Tied in seventeen years of matrimony,
we lick the glazed onions and potatoes
of a masala dosa
from banana leaves at Karpagambal Café.

The scent and steamy ascent
of filtered coffee wraps around tunes
of the Tamil melody Ennavale.

He touches my swinging earrings
as I nod through tales of yesterday,
picking just the good ones,
the greener exits off the highway.

Breathless by the ocean, we watch
Earth’s blazing empress undress on miles of blue.

To heartbeats of the Ferris wheel,
we crack hot, roasted groundnuts,
glance at fluttering pigeons
and faraway people.

He pulls out three rupees for the jasmine braider,
tucks those flowers in my black curls,
smells the white, drooping malas
bounce in my hair
as we kick the wet sand on the pier.

Morning mantras resound
under the temple arches of Anna Nagar.
Garlands of marigolds sway to the singing breeze.
Devotees, we circle around the Ganesh deity,
break a coconut, drink the holy water
and make offerings for a good day.

We take a rickshaw to my mother’s brick cottage.
Crows caw on the neighbor’s wall
as we amble down the pebbled aisle.
A drop of dew slides on a hibiscus,
its yellow mellows even a passerby’s gloom.

I step on kolams, starry rice powder tattoos
on the foyer floor, dusting our rising dreams

of the shores of a white sand beach
dimmed by the dwindling sun,
where we curl our fingers
as the waves unfurl at our feet
and touch our breathing bodies.

Aruna Gurumurthy
from storySouth Issue 54: Fall 2022

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Cumin and mustard seeds pop in the oil, fragrant steam from onions, garlic, coriander, cardomom wafts us away from a cold, overcast day in the North Carolina piedmont to a warmer clime that gently challenges all our sense. Aruna Gurumurthy’s poems taste exotic. Sometimes the masala is hot and makes us sweat, sometimes it’s sweet and floral, but always fresh: an unexpected description, imagined encounter, cultural reference. Whether her setting is her home in Chapel Hill or her themes are as commonplace as home, motherhood, a morning in the garden or an afternoon in the kitchen, Aruna seasons each poem with a hint of something new.

Madras was runner-up for the 2022 Randall Jarrell Award of the North Carolina Writer’s Network. The Embrace and I Went to the Bottom of the Well are from Aruna’s 2020 book of prose poems, Down the Grassy Aisles.

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The Embrace

The growing vine, she helixes around the naked branches of the Oak. She travels through a gazebo, she dances about, the bounce loosening up a passerby’s grimace, with a musical glow, an oomph to the soul. Resplendent raw sienna, her body touches the tree. A cherub of twenty-four months, she has grown and crawls to embrace me. A subtle Shangri-La, a mystic Bethlehem, the dancing duos in he arms of Mother Earth.

Aruna Gurumurthy
from Down the Grassy Aisles, Kelsay Books, American Fork UT, © 2020

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I Went to the Bottom of the Well

They hated me, a timid teenager. They bit me with mean dragon faings, making me weak, shredded from within, stripped of my faith. The dragon’s fumes roared at me, turning its neck from side to side. I felt like a trembling half-dead cockroach. Left me feeling like they had shot me in the head, but I bled from down there. After it all, the dragon dove into the wter, escaping, extinguishing. I went diving too, to the bottom of the well. There lay a small, shining silver coin. I swam my way through layers of despair, arms as though mustering a breaststroke, and my fingertip reaching out for that coin – my faith. I had found my faith.

Aruna Gurumurthy
from Down the Grassy Aisles, Kelsay Books, American Fork UT, © 2020

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2018-02-09 Doughton Park Tree

 

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