The sailors of Cinque Terre, five fishing villages on the Italian Riviera coastline, could locate their homes from the sea by their distinctive colors. 

To the Sailors of Cinque Terre

Stacks of houses hold fast

to rocks which fall straight

into the sea.

From your boat,

your eyes move across their graying silhouettes,

which darken, moment by moment,

at dusk.

Until, just as the sun is setting,

a final shaft of light

brings the mountain to pastel life.

Terra cotta, saffron, pistachio and pink

call.

And your eyes fix on the color of your heart

as you steer for home.

Even in the moonlight,

color is your lodestar.

Terra cotta, saffron, pistachio and pink

sing, like a sirens,

beckoning you home.

photo by Collyn Ware

For Griffin, almost five

Three goldfinches sit on a wire.

They punctuate the cornflower sky

like saffron exclamation points.

Look! Look! Look!

Wren-bodied, but mighty,

their golden breasts blaze

in the noonday sun.

These are waifs with heart.

Like you at four-almost-five

with eyes that flash in the spaces between minutes

and hands like hummingbirds

that tease the air.

But you lean into me,

a favorite book between us,

and we linger in the land of words,

in the leisurely way that lines wrap around

and into the next, spilling

onto a new page, extending the story.

Until, fingers aquiver,

you take my hand and pull me out the door.

Look! Look! Look!

Three goldfinches on a wire,

and one boy

who punctuates my life.

With love,

your Grandma

Song of the Cottonwoods

The summer voice of the cottonwoods

lies transparent in baby breaths

on the water.

It floats in faint wisps

in the channels and along the shoreline.

In the evening at the water’s edge,

you can dip your hands into the shallows

and catch a whisper,

a single syllable of promise.

There is sacredness in words unspoken,

in such fragile potential that moves,

as it will,

in the breeze.

And at dawn when the day is a rosy glaze

upon the lake,

there are filaments so fine

that they are lost in the light.

This is the song of the cottonwoods.

Shannon Vesely

June

The mingling of wild honeysuckle and sweet clover

is the fragrance of early summer.

In the morning dew, the presence of its perfume

floats above the green fields like a veil,

behind which is the sunny face of June.

She lingers in a small windowless room

off the sacristy.

Soon, she will take her father’s arm.

Soon she will stand at the altar

in those still white moments of prayer and proclamation.

And then, her veil removed,

she will kiss the brighter face of a bridegroom

whose very heat will singe the top notes

of honeysuckle and columbine,

will smolder in the bass notes of clover

and mown grass.

And later from the bridal bed,

the sweet scent of peony

will be just a memory.

Shannon Vesely

Both the bluebird and the indigo bunting are elusive birds. I hear them in the woods behind our house, I see their dark silhouettes in the tops of the trees at the edge of our timber, but I rarely have the chance to see them close enough to take in their blue splendor. Still, I crane my neck every time I hear their songs and scan the treeline for any flash of blue.

These are private birds, indeed. Except for the cadet blue of the common Blue Jay, brilliant blue is an anomaly here in the Midwest. Each spring, blue birds and buntings could flaunt their colors amidst the browns, russets, and grays of native birds. They could, but they do not. And this is what makes their allure even more precious. Their privacy is a ten-carat sapphire hidden in a pile of limestone and shale.

In his Notebooks 1951-1959, French philosopher and author Albert Camus writes:

Find meaning. Distinguish melancholy from sadness. Go out for a walk. It doesn’t have to be a romantic walk in the park, spring at its most spectacular moment, flowers and smells and outstanding poetical imagery smoothly transferring you into another world. It doesn’t have to be a walk during which you’ll have multiple life epiphanies and discover meanings no other brain ever managed to encounter. Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself. Find meaning or don’t find meaning but ‘steal’ some time and give it freely and exclusively to your own self. Opt for privacy and solitude. That doesn’t make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. But you need to breathe. And you need to be.

Opt for privacy and solitude, neither of which make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. The blue birds and the indigo buntings are poster children for privacy and solitude, and we might do well to take a lesson from them. Perhaps our unwillingness to do so stems from a belief (albeit a misguided one) that there may be something more sinister behind that state of privacy. He believes he’s so much better than the rest of us; she is plotting something; he clearly has something to hide, etc. Those who value privacy are too often subject to such criticism. Failing to understand why anyone would opt for privacy, would need to breathe and to be, we look down upon them from social perches of superiority.

Some social media has, in many ways, made a mockery of privacy, choosing instead to air everything publicly, freely, frequently:

John Doe is drinking his first latte at the Starbucks on the corner of  Lattimer and Green! Jane Doe is starting day #7 of a new diet and exercise regimen destined to transform her in every way! John Doe’s son participated in the 25th annual county basketball tournament! Jane Doe’s daughter just befriended a new student who moved from Texas! 

Social media posts are sometimes like those infamous Christmas letters–but on steroids. You know, the ones that make you feel like you and your family are chopped liver? The ones that broadcast a family’s every triumph, every accomplishment, every plan that will make the world a better place. Those letters that get under your skin and cause you to justify your own family’s worth.

And what of these posts in which nothing is private? Are they valuable simply because they are public? Author Gore Vidal writes that Eventually all things are known. And few matter. If so many things are posted so that they may be known, will they ultimately matter?

French author Milan Kundera is less kind:

When a private talk over a bottle of wine is broadcast on the radio, what can it mean but that the world is turning into a concentration camp?

A concentration camp? That’s harsh–perhaps much too harsh. Still, he has a point. When what is private–and is generally best kept private–is broadcast, there may be unforeseen consequences: a loss of significance, intimacy, and sadly even integrity. Too much good stuff may dull our senses. Too much celebration may prompt us to turn a blind eye. When discernment is lacking, social media may be more of an assault than a refuge.

In her article, “The Psychology of Social Media” (Psychology Today, Nov. 14, 2016), Dr. Azedah Alai cites research that reveals that “engaging in upward social comparisons on social media is associated with negative outcomes for users such as lower self-esteem, and the potential for depressive and/or anxiety symptoms” (e.g. Vogel et. al., 2014; Vogel & Rose, 2016). In fact, Vogel’s earlier research (2014) reported that people tend to believe that others who use social media actually have better lives than they do. Our compulsion to scour social media in an attempt to keep up with the Joneses is literally making us sick. A healthy dose of privacy could be just what the doctor ordered.

And those who feel compelled to confess publicly? Often these confessions are desperate cries for acknowledgement, for affirmation, for some sort of connection. Certainly, there may be power and value in  connections with others who offer compassion and understanding. Private confessions, however, have the potential for so much more power and value. When you sit knee-to-knee with another human being who is willing and able to listen, it doesn’t get much better than this. In these private and intimate exchanges, we build genuine and lasting relationships that don’t depend on internet availability.

Don’t get me wrong. I use social media regularly and delight in pictures and posts from family, former students, and friends. To an extent, social media has made the world smaller, bringing people and places from far away right into your home. And for this, I am generally grateful. But I am more grateful that I can walk away from my computer and walk into the countryside around me. I am more grateful that I can choose to keep some thoughts, some feelings, and some dreams private. And I am eternally grateful that I can select with whom I will share these. Or not.

The first female Middle Eastern editor-in-chief of an English newspaper, Aysha Taryam claims that And so it is inevitable that the day has come when we write about privacy with such nostalgia, analyzing it as we would some unearthed fossil of a creature our human eyes had never fallen on.

Perhaps the fact that I am writing wistfully about privacy is evidence that we have come to look upon it with nostalgia. I can imagine sitting with my grandchildren and recalling those days when we had no wifi, when we learned to live with our own portion of solitude, when we relished a privacy that had everything to do with simply being and nothing to do with being antisocial. I can imagine explaining how some things are so precious that they need not be shared–or perhaps that they be shared with discernment.

In a few days, my little cabin near the woods will be completed, thanks to my husband’s carpentry skills and willingness to make my dream come to fruition. Even though it is a mere 100 yards from my house, it is far enough and separate enough to provide me with an ample supply of privacy and solitude. This will be my Walden, and like Thoreau, I will go to the woods because I wish to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I will write in this cabin and choose what–if anything–will become public. In truth, I suspect that much of what I think and write will remain–as it should–private.

And if I happen to see a blue bird or an indigo bunting close enough to take in its blueness, I will choose to keep this private, too, reveling in an intimate moment that truly matters.

for my mom on Mother’s Day

A white rabbit dozes in the shade by our chicken coop. Under the grill, his white son watches the yard warily. The gray son hops from the base of an oak tree to the edge of the timber, while his mother crouches beneath the cage that was her former home. Only the white daughter is missing. Until I spot her ears sticking up from the brush by my husband’s trapping shed.

In the spring of 2017, I bought two rabbits (of unknown gender) for my grandchildren for Easter. And these bunnies lived happily together in their hutch until the morning when I opened the cage to feed them, and there were three hairless babies squirming in the corner. This was when Tiger, the proud father, got a new home. Two had become five! And the five were soon separated, each in his or her own cage.

All winter, I fed, cleaned, and unthawed hundreds of frozen water bottles. Because my grandchildren have recently gotten a new puppy and had long lost interest in the cute bunnies that had grown large and become much less cute, I pronounced that we would let them go, loose them into the wild (the timber that surrounds us). Hearing no protests, I waited until two weeks ago when I was convinced the grass was greening and the weather cooperating. Then I let them go.

I was prepared for a collective bolt for freedom. In those moments before sleep, I had feared for their lives as they were forced to survive in the wild. They needed a Rabbit Grylls (a Bear Grylls for would-be wild rabbits), a helper, a mentor for the transition from kept to independent living.

But alas, I worried for naught. They didn’t bolt. The woods didn’t beckon them. The grass was not greener on the other side. In short, they stayed with what was familiar, often sleeping below the very cages of their captivity. When I woke this morning and looked out of my bedroom window into the backyard, there were Tiger, Cocoa, and their offspring–now official yard rabbits–grazing on the rain-drenched hillside.

Familiarity breeds content, claims writer and columnist Anna Quindlen. The yard rabbits wholeheartedly agree, preferring the familiarity of the mown yard to the tangle of timber that surrounds. They co-exist with the cats and dogs and have become a common sight as I work in the yard or play with the grandkids on the swingset.

Recently on a trip to my family home in Kearney, Nebraska, I found myself seated in the same auditorium I sat in for assemblies during seventh grade. Now renovated into a performing arts center, my old junior high dazzles with a spacious and well-appointed lobby, a remodeled auditorium with cushy seats, and restrooms that look–and smell– nothing like the ones I remember. My mom had taken me to an evening of Barry Manilow’s greatest hits. One of the youngest in the audience, I sat beside my mom and her 80-year old friend, waiting for a Canadian gentleman and his band to take the stage.

Surrounded by senior citizens (oh wait, I am a senior citizen now!), I was taken back to the spring of my seventh grade year when I tried out for cheerleader on the very stage in front of me. I was instantly transported back to those moments when I stood on the wings of the stage, pacing and running through the cheers in my mind in preparation for my tryout.

And then I was in Miss Lindstrom’s math class on a Friday afternoon, listening as she read (in character–beautifully and bizarrely in character) a weekly chapter of Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby. Long before political correctness, Miss Lindstrom reveled in her weekly oral performances, and we listened, lest she pull out the ruler she used to rap our knuckles.

And when the performance began, the songs of my college years flooded back: Mandy, I Write the Songs, Can’t Smile Without You, It’s a Miracle, Looks Like We Made It–the hits kept coming. I could sing them all, could see myself on the dance floor of Dickie Doogan’s on a Friday night, could feel the way those songs shaped my young adult notions of love and life. It was all so gloriously familiar–the place, the company, the songs.

Pulitzer prize winning author Wallace Stegner writes:

I wonder if ever again Americans can have that experience of returning to a home place so intimately known, profoundly felt, deeply loved, and absolutely submitted to? It is not quite true that you can’t go home again. I have done it, coming back here. But it gets less likely. We have had too many divorces, we have consumed too much transportation, we have lived too shallowly in too many places.

It may be less likely, and perhaps we have lived too shallowly, but like Stegner, I do believe that the familiar draws us back to those places intimately known, profoundly felt, deeply loved, and absolutely submitted to. You can come home again. And when you do, you can leave the shallows for the deep waters of familiarity.

The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity, writes Austrian-British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Coming home again, I often find that the very things I took for granted now take on new importance. They shimmer in their simplicity and familiarity. A newly upholstered auditorium seat, a Barry Manilow tune, the scent of your mother beside you. What was hidden before when you were younger and home was a place to launch from is now magnified, awash in colors you had only imagined.

I spent several days with my mom, eating at the same table around which so many family and friends have gathered, sleeping in my old bedroom, sitting on the sofa and looking out at the blue spruce tree that has come into its own magnificence over the years. Home.

The familiar is underrated, I’m afraid. In our quest for bigger, better, and newer, we may turn our backs on the wonders of those familiar people, places, and things that are the essence of home. Truthfully, I think the rabbits have it right. What is familiar has it own unique parameters, and you can find hidden treasures within them for the rest of your life.

For me, my mom represents the best of what is home. Each time I visit, I drink another cup of coffee, for I’m never in a hurry to leave the woman and the place whose familiarity continues to sustain me.

Because I’ve been singing his songs and because he says it so well, I’ll let Barry Manilow have the last words here:

For Gracyn on her 9^th Birthday

Cross-legged, you sit before a pink plastic palace,

a remnant of your childhood now dormant

in the preteen years.

Brushing the mouse droppings and sawdust from its rooms,

you finger a canopy bed and mirrored vanity.

You suck in your breath

as you pull a yellow-haired doll from beneath

a tangle of tables and chairs.

Yesterday you delivered a handwritten birthday list:

shorts and tank tops,

cute sandals,

throw pillows for my bed,

decorative stuff.

I scanned the list for what was not there.

At nine, there would be no dolls,

no tea sets or tiaras.

At nine, we will talk fashion and décor

as we eat cake from yellow paper plates

with no trace of Disney princesses.

Oh, but you are so lovely

in this nether world of becoming.

Your freckles, once invisible, now spread across your nose,

a pale dusting of cinnamon.

Pink-polished now,

your slender fingers tease the air.

And your eyes, still blue enough to shame the sea,

speak light.

Still today, you will hold my hand

as we walk from my house to yours.

And palm to palm,

we will remember these last days

of April.

With love,

Your Grandma and biggest fan

Photo by Brian Schrack

The desire for symmetry, for balance, for rhythm in form as well as in sound, is one of the most inveterate of human instincts.

Edith Wharton

Early in my teaching career, I sat with a community college student in an empty classroom at the end of the day. He had come to see himself as a poet in mid-life. For months, he had been trying on different voices, different forms, different perspectives. Now, he said, he wanted to learn to write traditional poetry with perfect meter and rhyme. The rhyme part was coming along, but the meter? I’m struggling, he confessed. Teach me to hear the rhythm, so I can master meter. 

Truthfully, I had never considered how I heard rhythm and counted meter. I just did from as early as I can remember. I inherited an ear and love for the rhythmic symmetry of perfect meter. Iambic pentameter? Its five iambs registered in my ears naturally and musically. And iambic pentameter gone wrong? Like the gash of a bow raked wildly across violin strings, its discord was an auditory assault for me.

As we sat together peering over a poetry anthology, I began to read aloud, exaggerating the meter of each line. My student listened intently through an entire William Wordsworth poem and then said, I just don’t hear it. I could make an educated guess at the meter, but I’d be guessing. I just can’t hear it. 

And he couldn’t and didn’t–even after several tutorial sessions. He conceded that he would stick to writing free verse and leave the meter and rhyme to other poets. He desperately wanted to hear that symmetry of rhythm, the predictable metric pattern of many classical poems, and he understood this compulsion to be one of the most inveterate of human instincts. This is the power of symmetry. Even when we can’t achieve it or wholly understand it, its instinctual presence lives to remind us of what is perfectly there, just beyond our grasp.

There is something in us that loves and seeks such balance. A candlestick on either end of a mantle. A pairing of photos on the wall. Two silos of the same height and width silhouetted against a Colorado sky.

Socrates writes:

If measure and symmetry are absent from any composition in any degree, ruin awaits both the ingredients and the composition. . . Measure and symmetry are beauty and virtue the world over.

To a great degree, there is beauty and virtue in symmetry. Consider the intricate beauty of a snowflake. Each snowflake is unique, but each is completely symmetrical with itself. Or consider the beauty we find in such natural phenomena as romanesco brocoli, an amazing example of fractal symmetry. Each part of the broccoli has the same geometric pattern as the whole.

Symmetry is such a show stopper. Ladies and gentlemen, in the center arena: the coneflower! To your left: the fern frond! And to your right: the chambered nautilus!

And the Master of Ceremonies? Such exactitude displayed in so many magnificent creatures and creations can only be the work of an artful and mathematical designer. Symmetry flies in the face of chance and thumbs its nose at randomness. Mathematicians kneel, awestruck, in the throne room of the Golden Ratio. Musicians bask in the faultless marriage of treble and bass. In adoration, lovers marvel in the light of their beloved’s face: one eye, one cheekbone, one nostril mirrored perfectly in the other.

Novelist and playwright Stefan Zweig writes:

Art knows no happier moment than the opportunity to show the symmetry of the extreme, during that moment of spheric harmony when the dissonance dissolves for a blink of an eye, dissolves into a blissful harmony, when the most extreme opposites, coming together from the greatest alienation, fleetingly touch with the lips of the word and of love.

And what of the symmetry of extreme opposites, coming together from the greatest alienation? What of that blissful harmony when the dissonance dissolves for a blink of an eye? When two individuals, two extreme opposites, come together in respect and understanding, this is symmetry that can change lives. And when from the greatest alienation one warring nation with one particular philosophy comes together with another warring nation and philosophy, this is symmetry that can change the world.

Poet and Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott argues that if we break a vase, the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than the love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole. Perhaps it is in the reassembling, the coming together, the matching and piecing of parts to the whole that we love the best. For if we take symmetry for granted (and I think we do), recreating it makes us painfully aware of its magnificence. And when symmetry is restored, for a time at least, all is right with the world.

Humans may duplicate the perfect designs they see all around them, but they neither imagined nor created them. Symmetry is, indeed, an exquisite effect of a more exceptional cause.  In the sanctuary of symmetry, if we have eyes to see and ears to hear, we can find this exceptional cause in God. And seeking God, too, is one of the most inveterate of human instincts.

I dwell in Possibility –
A fairer House than Prose –
More numerous of Windows –
Superior – for Doors –

Emily Dickinson

In my middle years, I mostly lived in a hard-kept house with double-pane windows meant to keep things in. And to keep things out. Things like possibilities that glimmered tauntingly on the horizon. And doors? They were solid, oaken slabs that shut convincingly with no need for weather-stripping. Like most, my middle years were working years during which responsibilities and obligations left little room for possibilities. And in my middle years, my days marched with regularity inside the perimeter of these four walls.

Oh, but the earlier and later years! These years are a fairer House with numerous Windows. And there are superior Doors which, by their very nature, are open more than closed. This is a house that glimmers. This is a house of coming and going, of trying on and moving on. This is a fairer house, indeed.

Last week, I attended an event at my granddaughter’s school in which third graders researched and dressed up like famous figures. As I entered the gymnasium, I looked out upon a sea of possibilities, children who were living the lives of such men as Babe Ruth, Elvis Presley, and Albert Einstein and of such women as Rosa Parks, Indira Gandhi, and Annie Oakley–if only for a day. Gracyn stood along the north wall as Shirley Temple, her blond curls loosed by the April wind of two recesses.

Third grade houses are such fair ones! At 8, becoming the next Shirley Temple or Babe Ruth is not only possible, it is palpable. Just within your reach, a presence so tangible that you can see your life spread out before you, and it is glorious. Never mind that you can’t sing or hit a baseball. These are formalities, details to be swept out with the day’s dust. The doors are open, and you see yourself walking from possibilities into realities.

And if third grade houses are such fair ones, imagine the houses of preschoolers. Lewis Carroll, author of Alice in Wonderland, admitted that Sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. In this photo, Gracyn, as Alice, folds her arms against her chest as if to keep the possibilities from escaping. Her costume is merely the outside trapping of a heart whose windows and doors are magnificently flung open to impossible things of all shapes and sizes.

French poet and essayist Charles Baudelaire writes that Imagination is the queen of truth, and possibility is one of the regions of truth. She is positively akin to infinity. There is something akin to infinity when one lives in a fairer house. For seasons of my life, I remember how, in those minutes before sleep, I shaped and reshaped possibilities, creating stories into which I took on heroic roles of rescuing, creating, and inspiring.  And when I tired of one story, I tried on another and then another and yet another. From this springboard of infinite possibilities, I dove into magnificent dreams each night.

In my later years, I have found myself loosening the strictures of my formerly hard-kept house. As I wake many mornings–with the sun and not an alarm clock–it takes a few moments to realize that a bell will not ring every 45 minutes, that I won’t have to wolf down a meager lunch in 19 minutes, that I won’t have to plan bathroom breaks, and that I won’t haul a laundry basket of student essays home for grading. But when I do, a day of possibilities stretches out before me. I could take a walk along the old highway and stop to pet the horses in the small pasture off the south side of the road. I could read anything I want and for as long as I want. I could call my mom on the phone in the middle of the day. I could start a home project and finish it. Or not. I could wander the mall in search of something or nothing. English novelist, George Eliot, claims that the world is full of hopeful analogies and handsome, dubious eggs, called possibilities. Oh the handsome, dubious eggs called possibilities of these years! I may not have been able to imagine them in my middle years, but they are real nonetheless.

Poet Wendell Berry writes:

A man cannot despair if he can imagine a better life, and if he can enact something of its possibility. It is only when I am ensnarled in the meaningless ordeals and the ordeals of meaninglessness, of which our public and political life is now so productive, that I lose the awareness of something better, and feel the despair of having come to the dead end of possibility.

I am painfully aware that despair growls at the door of even the fairest houses. It comes in the shape of chlorine gas and fatherless children. It peers in the windows with sharp eyes of hunger. And we are tempted to pull our blackout curtains tightly to protect ourselves from the dead end of possibility. 

Still, there continue to be those who go about the business of building fairer houses. They can imagine better lives and see the glimmering possibilities of something better on the horizon. They choose infinity over dead ends, and they press on.

As I helped Gracyn out of her Shirley Temple dress and tucked a loose curl behind her ear, she said, “You know what I want to do when I grow up?” Sing, dance, star in movies like Shirley Temple, I thought? ” I want to start a slime-making company. I think this could really be big, don’t you?” From Shirley to slime in a single day. Such a fair, fair house of possibilities!