Tag: Nature

My Grandmother’s Scrapbook

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held together by shreds of faded fabric, pages torn, inside inked December 1914, that cursive once on chalkboards all across america, found it in the trash where my father had placed it, rescued history, my hands cradling the past, how could you throw this away?, i thought, but never said a word, her poems carefully pasted next to drawings of men and women, little girls, dolls and dogs, lakes with sailboats, christmas greetings from the 20’s, dance cards, foxtrot, lindy hop, young love in pencil marks, pressed carnations, color long gone, diaspora of flower petals wedged into the treasure’s every crevice, army v. navy football ticket, pink powder puff once pressed on a face, my grandmother’s, her life still here, with me forever. 

Green Tea

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matcha, genmaicha, sencha, bancha, kabusecha, tencha, all of the cha’s, and the list goes on and on, and you thought it was just trader’s joe’s moroccan mint, cardboard box, bits of green wrapped in plastic squares, no, the earth offers more, from india, china, new zealand, sri lanka, south carolina, taiwan, bangladesh, hawaii, fields with leafy bursts of light caffeine, subtle, translucent hot water, in a glass, a mug, on lips through throat into stomach, mind alert with awareness of dirt, warm humid rain, lots of rain, to create moments of wonder, sipping stillness.

Palo Alto Hermit

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I live two blocks from the Apple store, don’t own a cellphone or a TV, don’t have an internet connection. Some weekends I unplug my phone and I’m an ascetic, surrounded by my volumes of John Muir, Jane Kenyon, A Buddhist Bible, and my journals of poetic plodding. I watch them on their headsets, talking to the air, talking about technology into technology. They fill the Starbucks on University Avenue with their napkins, sketching schematas of the next IPO. I’m a walking anachronism, a luddite they call me, voluntary simplicity, I call me. Doing the mental math, I calculate whether I’m the only one in all of Palo Alto completely disconnected. Maybe a couple of Stanford religion majors without TV, but none would be internet free, no, that is just me, 1 out of 66,000. But there is Greg, that isn’t his real name, no one knows his real name, he drags his feet, toes sticking out of his shoes, his long, unkempt blondish brown hair jutting in all directions. Greg and the other homeless people by the creek are my kin, my kind, fiber-optically missing, invisible, off the grid. One night I meet Larry Page at a Stanford pub, we don’t talk about his company, Google. He tells me he likes Dance Dance Revolution, but only does it in private. The seven minute conversation sticks with me, like the mornings when I see Steve Jobs at the farmer’s market. Me, Steve, and Larry, we’re in this thing together, makes me feel like I’m a part of the team, the future. But all I teach about is the past, the Cherokee, the Californios, the buffalo, the removed, the replaced. I hike miles on Sundays, Butano Ridge Loop, Foothills Park, my fern-filled temple, my isolation, my solace. I try to make sense of it all, the movement of time, my standing still. After many days, maybe hours, I plug my phone back in, walk down Kipling Street, go to the library, check my email.

What is Wisdom?

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not old body parts: craggy eyebrows, gray hair, beard, failing eyes, not dusty books: shakespeare, socrates, aurelius, arendt, not words: erudite, precocious, sagacity, percipence, not education: cambridge, oxford, harvard, princeton, not military: combat, boot camp, target practice, bombing, not politics: president, judge, senator, prime minister, not bragging: instagram, birkin bag, nantucket house, porsche panamera, but rather: nameless nature, lakes, oceans, trees, mountains, timeless, perhaps one day dead, but still wiser than….

Mosquito Bite No More

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somehow mosquitoes know how to bite without being seen, back of the arm, an ankle, they love me and i love them back, sort of. let me explain. mosquitoes mean summer, they mean i’m outside, maybe by a sea, a pool, a river, a lake, or somewhere at night, under the moon, or stars, and i’m not paying attention to their fluttering about, their quest for blood, because at the moment they bite me, i don’t care. but then there is that sweet itch, the phantom slap, as if they were still sucking. a few minutes later i forget the bite, and rejoin the happenings of july or august. the next day i might itch the bite, or near the bite, contemplate how far the swelling has spread over skin, this can be tormenting and enthralling. sometimes i rub it with hydrocortisone cream, sometimes i drown it in scalding water so it itches even more. it is my souvenir, my summer tattoo. a couple days go by and the redness diameter is less, the scratching urge disappears. another day or two and i search and search for where it once was, but like time, it is gone.

When Capri Spoke

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i have seen the goats nibbling on me, and the tan skin glistening with mediterranean sea that surrounds me, i grow perfect red and orange tomatoes, green arugula, and lemons, never to be forgotten, my sun is famous, kids even drink it with a straw, i’ve changed since the roman days when tiberius used to throw unfortunates from my steep rocky cliffs, now yachts undulate near my shores, celebrities film me with their phones, visit me in july and august, i am the mastic trees, bougainvilla, the bees, and cicadas, i am shady pathways through woods, and luxury hotels, i am the smell of grilled octopus and aperol spritz, summer in the square, i hear it all, dutch, spanish, italian, german, english, arabic, french, tamil, russian, swedish, i am the world on an island, but when winter comes i hibernate like a bear, rain, fog, and wind engulf me, daylight disappears in the afternoon, the caprese families stay on me, i hear their children, watch them walk to church on sundays, they slumber softly at night, i bless them all.