Sticks and Stones

The farm field has an old persimmon orchard and three cedars like three sisters, among the tree varieties. My job is to pick up sticks before the mowing and bring them to the burning pile.

The road into the field is lime rock where, on occasion, I’ve collected treasures of stones with preserved shells.

As a child I knew, “Sticks and stones will break your bones but names will never hurt you.” But as a fifty-six year old counselor, learning new ways to view life, I wrote, “Sticks and stones will break your bones but names will make you cry, until you want to die.” I had people my age who could still tell me with lingering discomfort the unkind names they’d been called as children.

In my village, when the RR gates are down, there is a fairly regular pattern of cars to the left but motorcycles might line the entire width. This day, a car pulled up in the wrong position. The train passed, and I moved ahead. An oncoming block of motorcycles faced this car and behind them, others were unable to move. My window was down, and I heard a voice loudly complain, “You idiot, you idiot!”

Words are one of our primary relationship tools. Our word choices may cause a person to carry a good feeling or a bad one for a lifetime. At the spiritual center I worked at, we used to say, “It takes one to know one,” as a reminder that we are capable of all acts, since all exists in all of us.

My realization is, “We can look at our own faults instead of the faults of others. If a mistake is made, a good response offers understanding that may be remembered a lifetime.”

Candle Lighting Ceremony

My husband, Paul, and I had come to the Unitarian Church on a wintry night, where on a small table in front were short, white candles with one lit in a box of sand.

As I faced the pews, to my surprise, I started to speak quietly of a miscarriage ten years ago at Christmas. I’d begun to bleed from a three-month pregnancy. I remembered two things. From a wheelchair, I’d looked at a jar of fetal fluid the doctor had left on the nurse’s counter as evidence. It was upsetting to see. Soon after, it was time to be released, and I could not reach Paul. Emotional, I called a neighbor who arrived just as my husband did.

I was still awake this cold night, propped up on bed pillows, when I saw a young boy’s face in the upper left pane of a window. I had a feeling of his looking like Paul’s family with blondish hair and fair reddish skin.

I’m told the soul has not entered a fetus at three months. Whatever is true, I felt this young boy’s face had been called by the lit candle, perhaps to absolve and complete. I could only wonder. I had a good feeling in my heart and hoped for peace where this memory had been loosed from.

My realization is, "Grief will lie in stillness, until it sees a face peering at it willing to say good bye to the energy of holding, to clear space for the energy of new unfolding."

From Copper Beech to English Chintz

My childhood bedroom had a wide-bottom, maple rocker with flat arms and faded, well-used cushions of pink and blue. In it, I looked out a colonial window to a brick walk, Prospect Street, and the Davidson’s front porch. But the main attraction was a copper beech whose golden spring leaves would become summer’s green, as gray branches filtered the setting sun and blended dark caves into the night. Comfort, quiet, peace, time to reflect, friendship were words I didn’t think of at eight or even at thirteen. But still, the beech was my companion through spring rain, summer cicadas, autumn’s dying, and then snow.

Where I write at my computer now, more than a half-century later, I’m near a north bedroom window of tall panes of sliding, screened glass. A small wooden desk fronts the window and looks directly out on an English Chintz—an Indian species of tree new to me. The trunk of the chintz is ten inches around with branches spreading six feet out and above the ground floor. Small leaves flirt with a regular breeze, giving me both privacy and an airy view. I feel peaceful looking out. A Myna bird often perches on the wall behind with a song of various verses. Comfort and calm, twin feelings arrive—though it’s the friendship I especially feel—a bond between the tree and me that in the mode of feelings is a distant relative to the copper beech.

My realization is, "All nature may be imbued with human feelings that reflect back to the giver, so there is both giving and receiving in natural harmony between humanity and nature."