Just One Cricket Now 2016

Sitting in the kitchen bay window of an evening.  Drafts of cool air cascade down for the first time this fall.

Outside, just one insect is calling, slowly,                   pausing sometimes.

So different from the CACOPHONY of just a few weeks ago.

The Life in this woodland I inhabit now going to sleep for the winter.

Soon to be seemingly fallow, but later actually future flowers with myriad winged and scampering neighbors among them.

Yet the evergreens stay green, reminding us that death is never permanent, but merely waiting, ever greens providing shelter and hope for those expecting spring.

Below the ancient oak

The once mighty leaves, now brown and crumbly, actually 

Life turning over a new leaf.



May the coming dark days be warm and fulfilling, and take all to a vital spring.

Let a Temple Happen Where You Are

Find a Place, and, knowing the right beginning, look around you.

See, feel the Pattern of Life around you.

Express that Pattern there, just where you've chosen

Greet the dawn, watch transits of each star's zenith point, see how folk come and go, and how the water flows.

Mark the pattern, notice noon, sing when place-moments move you.

Dance, freely as your body moves in it, there, those moments you choose
Regularly, moon-thly, cross quarterly,
To witness the evolution of that Place you chose into that
Place's Temple.

Let a Temple happen where you are.

Last week's visit to Armageddon

Yup, it is a specific place on the globe, Har Meggido (Armageddon).

A remarkable representation of the worst of human behavior.

For thousands of years a fort commanding a critical pass between Cairo and Damascus.

Embattled!!  Boy, was this Place embattled.

Har Meggido.  Now a sandy mound of the remains of 26 separate layers of dead cities, each dreamed into being, invaded, defeated, destroyed, salted and burned, covered in sand by the next city to be dreamed into being . . . .

Talk about the bad habits of our Ancestors.

No wonder the ancient bible writers thought the Great Battle would happen there.  So many other worlds had ended there, regime after regime, orthodoxy after cataclysmic orthodoxy, so many uprisings and downfalls.

And now, a Tell, a mound, ruined foundations packed with the sand of all their fine finishes and the crushed bones of many of their ravaged inhabitants.

You gotta wonder - is our species capable of learning another script?

I mean, is the beginning of the next world really gonna kickoff on the plains of Jezreal at the foot of Meggido, following the bloodthirsty pattern laid down in so many histories, many of them lost forever.

Do folks seriously imagine that there might ever be a "winner" in the silly ancient drama of King of the Mountain?

So, what if we redefined what was supposed to happen on that fateful day at Har Meggido?  Wrote an alternative future for the Place-Moment so many fear, and so many times others pine for.

Merriness, Our Ancestors Knew 2023

MERRINESS,OUR PREDECESSORS KNEW

BCW– White Plains - Winter Solstice 2012

CreativeCommons Copyright

MERRINESS,OUR PREDECESSORS KNEW

BCW– White Plains - Winter Solstice 2012

CreativeCommons Copyright

Ourpredecessors knew, so they left us this merry tradition,

Theyknew that these dark times often gave rise to dark things.

Thatdark fears were often enough

Toengender real darkness among us.

Theyknew the remedy for our personal, intimate terror –

Terror that the world might get stuck justthis way,

Dark, hopeless, unredeemed,

Theyknew that one ancient sensibility might

Keepthe hearth fires burning long enough,

Gatherus together in affirmation of community and family,

Mightsustain us through the doubts long enough

Fornew possibilities to make themselves evident.

Theyknew that among us, gathered, we could kindle a spark,

Tendit into a gentle, warming, life sustaining

Blaze

OfMerriness.

Merriness.

BeMerry.

Long before Hallmark forgot why St Nicksmiled that way,

Long before typographers knew it looked goodon a card,

Our ancestors stood outside the widow’s door

Singing their hearts out, hoping merrinessmight get inside and warm her cold heart.

Thebrightness of red berries, found

Cold,isolated, draped among trees,

Gatheredby loving hands, bough on bough, into a radiance of vital RED,

Inspiringjust the passion needed in these times.

The scent of balsam,

Green,

Balsam sap dripping, life lurking

Waiting its cue –

Even though all other life seems to havefled.

So you, behind your well closed doors.

Where will you go to make Merry,

Risking the wolves in the shadows,

Where will you find the others

Whose laughter, joined with yours

Might affirm this weakening faith

That in spite of all harrowing horrors

This life, this light knows its way backamong us,

And we, some of us,

Will, soon enough, find ourselves livinganother springtime?

Merriness, Our Ancestors Knew by Bice C. Wilson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Merriness, Our Ancestors Knew by Bice C. Wilson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

My Father Loved to Walk in Rivers

MY FATHER LOVED TO WALK IN RIVERS

BCW 2 July 2012 V3

My father loved to walk in rivers

In kills,

In burns,

In streams and their many branches.

He loved to crawl on his belly

Up to Litchfield farm meadow brooks

Spying out the Brookies ,

Alert but lazing outside the current behind a boulder, 

Expecting

Something other than his lure.

He took me to the waterside and walked me in.

Showed me places to leave the car and slip down,

Beside the bridge,

To the shady verdant banks

Beside lakes and riffles.

And I, I find him by rivers

Though his ashes drift in the great Atlantic,

His carbon becoming parts of so many beings.

My Father loved to walk in rivers,

The current pressing on his thighs, eyes watching

Well, everything -

Patiently watching the morning's heat warm the gravel where nymphs of amazing soon to be damselflies wait for their cold blood to stir,

Them then to swim up to the surface film one last time

The hatches of micro-fauna, cracking their carapaces, 

Shouldering out, pumping up, then 

Drying their wings  before flying,

Never to swim again, except in dying.

The flashing curving fish rising to grab Mayflies

Who'd hoped to launch into the last day of their life this time,

But dreamt of different ends.

Watching the way the cobbles and banks shaped the flow of all the life that washed

Into this stream, this day.

I love to walk in rivers,

I find US there

All of us,

My great grandfather

Who threw pebbles at Dad's childhood bedroom window before dawn

And eloped him by ladder,

To catch the morning rises.

Uncle Steve, his baby brother

Who could feel the fish,

In any water, fresh or salt,

And fill platters with summer dinners among cousins

My sons, Noah and Ian,

Marveling at his woods lore

His knowing of how rivers run,

Of who lay where in which riffles.

Then them walking into the river,

Tentative at first, watching

Well, everything.

I've never stepped in the same stream twice,

Yet on every strand, every bank, sandbar and in many headwaters,

I love to walk in these great rivers

Among our all our ancestors and all of our descendants 

So, Tell Me, What's So Bad About A Gentle Recovery?

I don't understand. Pundits fill column space bemoaning the current gentle recovery.  I don't see the problem they see. We're recovering from an expansion built on irrational exuberance. That didn't work out too well for me. How was it for you? Maybe a deeply considered, mindful recovery is the better way. What do you think? Be Well, Bice C. Wilson, AIA Principal Meridian Design Associates, Architects, PC

Vaudeville Wisdom for the Levant

I prefer to call the land east of the Mediterranean, south of Turkey and north of Egypt "The Levant". The Levant is a landscape you can walk across.  The Middle East is no place.  Try, map it.

The Middle East was a term invented by a geographically ignorant American diplomat in the 1700's. 

But why discuss the Levant?  Because hell is life there just now. Because I've been there, and had tea in welcoming houses, and laughed with good people.  Because I know it was once forested with great trees, and verdant with life, song, and prolonged interludes of joy.

And now, our Levant?  Now centuries of bad blood and unredeemed hatred, extended misunderstandings and tragic circumstance, NOW, our levant reminds me of the vaudeville wisdom I often shared with my sons.  It goes like this:

Kid comes to me hurting.  Tells me, "Dad, it hurts when I do this!".  I remind him of the vaudeville doctor, whose answer to the same question from a vaudeville patient was elegant, simple, and hard to actualize.  He said:

"Well, how about you don't do that?  Let me know next week if it doesn't feel better."

And so, Vaudeville Wisdom for my cousins in the Levant, for Bashir Al Assad and the refugees of Bab Al Amr, and for those crossing the Orontes River into Turkey just now in heartbroken darkness and for the tribes of Syria, Israel, Palestine and The Lebanon: if you want the pain to decrease, how about you stop doing that thing you keep doing?  Can't hurt to try.

Be well,

Bice C. Wilson, AIA