Summer Haikus

Not quite sure what happened in May, but here are a few summer haikus for June. They were written a while ago, of course, as we haven't seen much summer so far this year...

                I

Along the Isis

punts make their lazy way to

Folly Bridge and tea.

               

               II

Hot summer days when

peacock butterflies gather

on the buddleia.

                III

At Mortehoe we stop

for ice-cream and to caress

the ginger church cat.

                IV

Long hot summer days.

The weather breaks on the day

the exams finish.

In Davy Jones’ Locker

In Davy Jones’ locker is:

a tray of mint juleps,

a bunch of bright tulips,

a meerschaum pipe

and an octopus;

coracles used by the saints,

one or two missing persons,

decayed, a conch-shell horn,

an armchair, frayed,

and a trombone;

five thousand gold ducats,

a plate of Spanish doubloons,

an oyster or two

and a poltroon;

Ovaltine cans,

three fly-by-nights,

twelve anti-macassars

and sixty-five different

varieties of seaweed.

Davy Jones's locker is a euphemism for the resting place for sailors drowned at sea and their possessions.

On Reading: The Invisible Japanese Gentlemen by Graham Greene

Actually it’s only the girl for whom they are invisible. Eight of them, having a fish supper in a 1960s English restaurant, bowing and smiling and occasionally conversing in their incomprehensible tongue, and she hardly notices them. She has a good reason, of course. Perhaps two. She is dining with her look-alike fiancé, two miniatures hanging side by side. And she has just been given a £500 advance for her first novel. She imagines life in St Tropez, the boyfriend writing as well. He thinks the family’s wine trade offers more stability. Greene’s narrator/self is shocked to learn that she is one of his own profession. She deserved better of life, he thinks, and wants to warn her that a first novel called The Chelsea Set is no basis for her plans. Writing will get harder not easier and perhaps her publisher is a liar. With breathtaking economy of words and simplicity of setting, in just four pages Greene skilfully creates three disparate characters, gradually unpicking the lovers’ relationship and the writer’s disillusioned life. Conversation and  thoughts bounce between the bobbing, smiling invisible gentlemen like a ball in a squash court, only occasionally interrupted by a flurry of Japanese.

February in Norfolk

The mist swirls in at Holkham, gulls cry up.

A curlew calls, a plover turns up stones.

Among the dunes I find a set of bones,

a piece of glass, a shell shaped like a cup.

A row of beach huts painted pink and green

leads to a shoreline dense with razor shells.

A flock of twite and shorelark swoops and swells,

I shake sand from a starfish bright and clean.

We climb to the gazebo stair by stair,

look down on woods where snowdrops pool and splash.

With snap of wings and bright vermilion flash,

the redshank’s warning pipe disturbs the air.

At dusk a topaz barn owl hunts for prey,

its face a ghostly mask of Pierrot white.

Across the salt marsh, as it soars in flight,

we give our silent thanks for such a day.

Susanna Reece

Candlemas Poems

February 2nd

A mass of crocus candles
purple and yellow flames
set alight at dawn with
a lingering deep caress
from the Creator.

The Holding Cross

The wooden cross fits
in my hand like a corkscrew
opening up wine.

On Reading: Puffin Books 3 - the Lost Tribes

 In the early 1960s Puffin Books published a number of books focussing on Native Americans and their traditions and practices. By then, of course, the genocidal devastation that had been dealt to the Indian tribes of North America since the arrival of the 'White Man' in the fifteenth century was almost complete and it was far too late to turn back the tide. Two of the books described here are based on true stories about children, a boy and a girl respectively, who were the last members of their tribes. The names of these tribes were once legion, and it is the names that are often all that is left - in places such as Biloxi, Cheyenne, Delaware, Illinois, Iowa, Miami, Missouri, Omaha, Susquehanna) or in the name of a recreational vehicle (Winnebago), which is an horrific appropriation when you come to think about it. This tragic history is well described in all its horror in Jon E. Lewis's book, the Mammoth Book of Native Americans, which I am currently reading. But Lewis endeavours to be even-handed and he also includes writings that demonstrate the wisdom and spirituality of native peoples. This is the focus of these Puffin books, too.

Ishi, Last of his Tribe is a non-fiction book about the man (which is what Ishi means) who was literally the last member of the Yahi people of the Yana tribe of northern California. His ancestors were wiped out by gold prospectors in the 1860s but for a time, he and his sister, parents and grandparents managed to survive. When Ishi was found alone in 1911 his memories were recorded through the intervention of staff at the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnology of the University of California. The Museum Curator was Alfred Kroeber and his wife Theodora Kroeber is the author of this book. (An interesting side note is that the Kroebers are the parents of the author Ursula Le Guin.) Although this is a desperately sad book to read, it is also hauntingly beautiful. As the introduction says, "Everything Ishi did and knew belonged to a tradition which had been built up over thousands of years... Life was grim and sad for them in many ways, and it became more so as the years passed. But they could still find happiness in each other, in the trees, hills, animals and birds which they loved, and in following the way of their ancestors... It's a story of tragic destruction  but one which leaves us grateful that we've been able to preserve some knowledge of the Yana, and with the hope that something of their wisdom may have come down to us too." There is more information about the true story of Ishi here and here. A film of his story was also made in 1992 and can be watched free on-line here.

Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O'Dell is a novel about the Lost (or Lone) Woman of San Nicolas, who survived alone on an island off the coast of California for eighteen years. The story contains fascinating detail of how one resourceful human female preserved her life using the traditional knowledge of her people, the close connection she was able to establish with her environment, and her companionship with a wild dog; even though these same dogs had killed her brother. A film of this novel, which won the Newbery Award for Children's Literature in 1960, was made in 1964.

Antelope Singer by Ruth M. Underhill is a novel about an encounter between a white boy, Tad Hunt, on the wagon train to California and a sick Paiute boy, Nummer, who has been left behind by his family. Nummer helps Tad's family to survive the winter, eventually rediscovering his own family who share their food and some of their traditions with the Hunts. Underhill was an anthropologist and lived on Indian reservations for many years. Her novel confronts the prejudice, distrust and bad feeling between the two peoples then shows how respectful encounter can bring a new understanding. And, as is common in children's novels of this period, it is the two boys who show the adults the way, mainly because they haven't fully learned the prejudice and mistrust in the first place. (As the song from the musical South Pacific goes, you've got to be carefully taught to fear and hate*.) At the end of the book, Tad's Pa says " 'If I was writing advice to pioneers like some fellows do, I'd tell every last one of them to spend a winter with Indians before tackling the wilderness. Half the trouble and starvation they go through now just wouldn't happen. And they wouldn't need to take half the stuff they do. They could learn to make most things out of sticks and stones.' 'They could,' Ma said. 'Anyway, I'm glad I've learned.' " It is the boys Tad and Nummer who have taught the adults a new way. When it comes for the time for the two families to part: "They all stood silent. Tad understood now why Indians didn't say good-bye. It would be only a fluff of words. The two groups stood looking at each other. Between their hearts went the thoughts they had no language to express. You have done much for us. Now our lives will be different. We thank you. We thank you. We will never forget."


One final book I'd like to mention, is The Incredible Journey by Sheila Burnford. This was not published by Puffin Books but it is of the same vintage as the others, 1960, and was also made into a popular film by Disney in 1963. The film is now much more famous than the book but running through the original words of Burnford's tale about three animals who travel thousands of miles to return to their home is a deep love and knowledge of the North American wilderness. At one point the animals are desperately hungry when they come across an Indian camp fire where they receive food and kindness.

Burnford devotes nearly a whole chapter to this scene of 'warmth and brightness', where "The scent on the evening breeze was a fragrant compound of roasting rice, wild-duck stew and wood smoke." As the animals depart, "Only the woman who had first befriended (the old white dog) called out softly, in the tongue of her people, a farewell to the traveller... That night they became immortal, had they know or cared, for the ancient woman had recognized the old dog at once by his colour and companion: he was the White Dog of the Ojibways, the virtuous White Dog of Omen, whose appearance heralds either disaster or good fortune. The Spirits had sent him, hungry and wounded, to test tribal hospitality...He had been made welcome, fed and succoured: the omen would prove fortunate." It is disappointing that this scene did not make it into the movie.

It would be easy to criticise these books for being somewhat nostalgic for a lost world when it was safely too late to reverse the trend. But it is to be hoped that they contributed at least in part to bringing an awareness of the wisdom of these traditions to a generation of children growing up in the 1960s and 1970s in order that, like the families in The Antelope Singer, we too will never forget.

 *You've got to be taught

To hate and fear,
You've got to be taught
From year to year,
It's got to be drummed
In your dear little ear
You've got to be carefully taught.

You've got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a diff'rent shade,
You've got to be carefully taught.

You've got to be taught before it's too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate,
You've got to be carefully taught!

Why are we waiting?

And so the world didn't end on Friday, although a lot of people have felt the power of this year's Winter Solstice as a time of alignment, transition and transformation. It seems like every generation of human beings has some notion that theirs will be the last, that an apocalyptic event will occur or a rescuing Messiah will come to signal the end-time. None of us really know when or whether that will happen and in the meantime we have to deal with the world as it is. 

I've blogged before about the way in which Advent can get pushed out by the run-up to Christmas, just as the days from Christmas to the start of the New Year can get lost as an in-between time, the dog days of a year that it has already passed its Best Before date. And yet this is an important beginning time. For some it is the start of the church year, and for all of us it is an opportunity to "open to new light from whatever source it may come", as the Quaker Advices and Queries have it. I always like to remember that Christmas starts on December 25 (or January 7 in the Orthodox church tradition) and continues until the Epiphany, or Twelfth Night, twelve days later.  The Christmas Carol, The Twelve Days of Christmas, is an example of this tradition. In our house we mark it by exchanging gifts of DVDs from Boxing Day until January 6 (they take up less space than partridges, geese, swans, milkmaids and drummers etc and are somewhat cheaper!). 

Of course a lot of us have questions about the traditional Christmas story and whether it has meaning for us in the modern world. Maybe these days more of us are merely continuing earlier Pagan traditions of Yule and other festivals associated with the solstice and the seasons the natural world. And yet for me, the rhythms of the Church calendar also remain relevant, because it is here that we can encounter the call to personal transformation and growth. Although it is good that people no longer feel that they have to attend church out of dutiful dull observance, as human beings we nevertheless have spiritual health needs. It is in meeting these that we find meaning in our lives, as Victor Frankl famously showed in his book Man's Search for Meaning. 

I don't want a life-denying and ultimately unhealthy secularism to triumph. There are many who really need to hear the message of how deeply they are held by a loving and abundant God, or whatever other words we might use for this: Light, Source, Spirit, the Divine, Other, perhaps just a sense of a Higher Self beyond our personal Ego. But for this to happen within the current manifestations of the Christian church,  it must find ways to put its house in order. In this time of waiting for the light of the Christ-child there is an opportunity for the church too to have a new beginning. 

Here are my three Christmas wishes for a waiting world: a real humility and penitential action to bring justice for all church victims of child abuse; a recognition that spiritual marriage can encompass gay couples; and a final turning away from the deep-seated misogyny that keeps women out of the priesthood. The world cannot understand why we are waiting. I'm not sure that the babe about to arrive in the manger will either.