Starting and Restarting

[Image above is captioned: “Hoagy Carmichael* pretending to crank start a car.”
From the Hoagy Carmichael Collection at Indiana University.]

From whiskey river, still mining the William Stafford vein (and no complaints from this quarter):

The Gift

Time wants to show you a different country. It’s the one
that your life conceals, the one waiting outside
when curtains are drawn, the one Grandmother hinted at
in her crochet design, the one almost found
over at the edge of the music, after the sermon.

It’s the way life is, and you have it, a few years given.
You get killed now and then, violated
in various ways. (And sometimes it’s turn about.)
You get tired of that. Long-suffering, you wait
and pray, and maybe good things come — maybe
the hurt slackens and you hardly feel it any more.
You have a breath without pain. It is called happiness.

It’s a balance, the taking and passing along,
the composting of where you’ve been and how people
and weather treated you. It’s a country where
you already are, bringing where you have been.
Time offers this gift in its millions of ways,
turning the world, moving the air, calling,
every morning, “Here, take it, it’s yours.”

(William Stafford [source])

Not from whiskey river:

The Compost Heap

It waxed with autumn, when the leaves–
Dogwood, oak and sycamore–
Avalanched the yard and slipped
Like unpaid bills beneath the door.

In winter it gave off a warmth
And held its ground against the snow,
The barrow of the buried year,
The swelling that spring stirred below.

In summer, we’d identify
The volunteers and green recruits,
A sapling apple or a pear
That stemmed from bruised and bitten fruits.

And everything we threw away
And we forgot, would by and by
Return to earth, or drop its seed
Take root and start to ramify.

We left the garden in the Fall–
You turned the heap up with a rake
And startled latent in its heart
The dark glissando of the snake.

(A.E. Stallings [source])

…and:

from The Way To Start A Day

The way to start a day
is this–

Go outside
and face the east
and greet the sun
with some kind of
or chant
or song
that you made yourself
and keep for
early morning

When you feel the sun
you’ll feel
the song too.

Just sing it.

But
sound
don’t think you’re
the only one
who ever worked
that magic.

(Byrd Baylor, The Way to Start a Day)

…and:

In English, the word wander is only a vowel away from wonder, though it can be a complete rhyme when spoken by a Southerner. The two words also blur in the mind, where it takes a fresh eye to see the familiar, and if you wander just a little from the habitual you may stumble on the truly wondrous. For example, if I weren’t paying attention to the dawn on purpose this morning, I would have missed how slanting light hit the creek water near my house, revealing the shadows of a colony of water striders, insects that skim along on the surface tension of water. They were communicating through ripples, tapping a morse code of desire, the frenzied males at 90 times a minute, the females only 10 times a minute. Striders are tiny oarsmen hard to spot at the best of times, but the low sun magnified their shadows on the bottom of the creek, their footpads stood out, and they looked like an array of sliding dominoes. At such moments, time suddenly snags on a simple Wow!

(Diane Ackerman, Dawn Light: Dancing with Cranes and Other Ways to Start the Day)

Finally, here’s a favorite moment from 1988’s Beetlejuice, in which Michael Keaton plays the part of a hilariously wicked ghost haunting an old mansion. With two other ghosts, he tries a number of tactics to scare away a pretentious wealthy couple who’ve bought the place; this scene depicts one such tactic. The expressions of helplessness on the dinner guests’ faces always crack me up. (The Spanish subtitles early in this video clip can be a bit distracting. You’ll forget they’re there, though.)

________________________________

* Yes, that Hoagy Carmichael.