A New Beginning - Moved to Madeira

 

As I type this blog entry it's about 11 AM here in Campanário on the island of Madeira. The upper balcony has the best view down the valley to the Atlantic ocean and sitting here affords me the fresh air and sounds of our new home. Roosters crow at each other across the valley, dogs bark at anything moving or out of place, the occasional goat bleats from one hillside or another, pigeons (or maybe a neighbor raises doves?) coo back at the roosters, and song birds chirp and warble from all directions all the time. Every quarter hour bells toll from the church tower over the hill to our right. Heavy trucks labor slowly up the road down below us, struggling up the incline as they pull out of one tunnel and run up the hill into the next tunnel. A neighbor hammers at something in his garden and someone somewhere calls someone's name. The cool breeze coming up the valley smells of the clean ozone of out-at-sea mixed with verdant and floral notes.

A happy rural seat of various view;
Groves whose rich Trees wept odorous Gumms and Balme,
Others whose fruit burnisht with Golden Rinde
Hung amiable, Hesperian Fables true,
If true, here only, and of delicious taste:
Betwixt them Lawns, or level Downs, and Flocks
Grasing the tender herb, were interpos'd,
Or palmie hilloc, or the flourie lap
Of som irriguous Valley spred her store,
Flours of all hue, and without Thorn the Rose:

     - From Paradise Lost, Book 4, by John Milton

Today the horizon between sea and sky is just visible. The weather this past week has been unseasonably cold (we are told) and frequently the sea is smudged into the sky by a fat thumb of haze such the end of the valley is a wall of ombré blue. From palms to potatoes, cabbages to sugar cane, bananas to orchids, everything grows and blooms here, side by side. Most of the homes around us have large vegetable gardens terraced beside, above, or below them. Meticulous rows of well-tended crops put our little overgrown lowest-plot of land to shame. A ceder, a fig tree, and hillside scrub make up our garden so far. Give us time, good neighbors!

Our house, like most houses here, is built on the vertical. Some are arranged to flow down hill, level by level, others run up hill, and very few are single story. It's a function of the very vertical nature of the island's topography. Houses, like gardens, are terraced. Ours runs down from the road: carport at road level, kitchen/livingroom/utility down one more level, bedrooms down the next, and a smaller sitting room with fireplace at the lowest level. Each level has a balcony or terrace, all facing the same valley/sea direction.

I'm not sure how long it will take for this to really sink in, but this is our new permanent home. Well, as permanent as anything in life really isn't, anyway. A small village countryside clinging to steep sub-tropical hills on a small island way out in the middle of the Atlantic ocean; a bit of Portugal closer to Morocco than Europe.

From the balcony, glittering birds were visible

circling an indigo stain of current

that wound like a river through the pullucid ocean.

Perhaps the current was a wake, still trailing

phosphorescent from the night before,

left by other, distant islands that proceed us.

And beyond the current and circling birds, the horizon

marked a distance we'd cross again in the dark.

Once on an island, it made no difference where we went

so long as we stayed at sea.

     - From Island, by Stuart Dybek

We arrived on the island a bit over one week ago, in the midst of one of the most powerful thunderstorms I have ever seen and one, we are told, this island has rarely (if ever) seen before. We are still waiting for the tropical weather to manifest (it is only 14 C as I sit typing, mid-day) and we have even had to invest in a portable heater for the living room as homes here generally have no built-in heat or AC - another function of sub-tropical life. We have the fireplace on the lower level, but keep forgetting to buy matches, so we don't know yet if that makes any difference for the floors above when lit.

For now, we are busy finding our way around the complicated twisting hillside roads and freeways, getting the things we need to finish furnishing our home with at least the basics of everyday life, and taking care of the little technical issues that come with setting up in a new place. When and where, for example, is garbage and recycling picked up, what is the closest best grocery store, how do we obtain proof of our local existence-in-residency for customs to let our few small shipped boxes through to be delivered, etc.?

More than anything, though, we are full-time engaged in soaking in this new, beautiful, and amazingly different adopted homeland of ours, thankful we are able to make this move, and pinching ourselves to prove it isn't just a big happy dream.

sea-fresh floral breeze,

small red roofs flowing down hills

into endless blue

     - Haiku, 2021-04-06 (Me)

[Note: I will commit to keeping my Finite Musing blog re-kindled and regularly active from our new location, for the two or three who might be interested.]

As dawn overtakes a small backlit screen

The wind is thrashing the house in gusts that shake the windows and whistle over the gutters this early and dark November morning. It's not quite 5:00 AM and I am already up and sitting here in my windowed corner seat. The wind isn't actually pushing through the window panes behind me, but my soul feels just as if it were. I feel colder than the temperature in the house suggests I should.

In the center of things
between the pressing of the window and air
---a small space---
there is a meeting that defines
nothing, everything 

 

- Rachel Sherwood, from Windows

It has been almost a full year since I last wrote anything in this space, and what a wind-slammed storm of a year it has been, this pandemic year.

The politics of a leader's narcissism and the opportunistic indifference of those who have actively stood by has leveraged the biases of our citizens to further secure the transferred power and wealth of the already privileged. 

...we ought never to have let actors
         enter the city, with their songs

& long noses, making a joke
         even of our deaths. Take them,
those who have died with those
         still living. Dispose of them some way.

     - Tom Disch, from In a Time of Plague 

In April we should have moved to Mexico, except that the world closed down in the weeks just before then. Our flight was cancelled, as were most of our plans. We spent a lot of our home-tied time making new plans and putting them into action. Now, with luck, we might be off to Portugal as early as February.

The sun is almost up now, and through the rain and the light of early morning I can see the hummingbirds returning to our little red feeder, still swaying in the last light winds. This light passing through the windows behind and beside me augments then overtakes the illumination from my phone's little back-lit screen. It is time to make the coffee.

I lived in the first century of the world wars.
Most mornings I would be more or less insane,
The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,
The news would pour out of various devices
Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen
I would call my friends on other devices;
They would be more or less mad for similar reasons.

     - Muriel Rukeyser, from Poem (I lived in the first century of world wars)

 

Light ghosted, lit within

It is an early, dark, and cold December-Wednesday morning as I pick this blog up from where I last left it off. As I inch toward retirement and relocation in a few months, I hope to have more time to spend processing out-loud here, for my usual target audience of one.

Retirement is the commute I am making and musing about today.

[Walks in from stage left, toward the small folding card table and chair -center stage- with paper and pen on it. Pulls the chair back and sits down. Picks up pen and starts to write, reading aloud...]

I think the truly difficult part of retiring from a many-years-in-one-place career is that we come to see ourselves, mostly, as the reflection-of-ourselves from a consistent core group of people who surround us on a near-daily basis. A group of people we come to spend as many hours with — and sometimes more — as those we love and hold most dearly. When we walk away from that singularly steady mirror, we can easily lose sight of ourselves. If we measure our value, our existence, by how we're seen, this loss can be paralyzing. Even a well-centered soul will have to adapt to this loss of reflection to some extent.

Lit from within is the sole secure way
to traverse dark matter. Some life forms — 
certain mushrooms, snails, jellyfish, worms — 
glow bioluminescent, and people as well; we
emit infrared light from our most lucent selves.
Our tragedy is we can’t see it. 

We see by reflection. We need biofluorescence
to show our true colors. 

   - Robin Morgan, The Ghost Light

And the process of retiring - the days, weeks, months between the formal declaration, date setting, and finishing out the time remaining - is a gradual fading process. The mirror reflects us less and less with each passing week.

Still called on, still required to show up, still absolutely expected to be working, still absolutely working, but less present nonetheless. When the conversation turns to future things, to planning or discussing the next steps of some project or vision, I fade a little bit more. "You won't have to deal with that!" or "You won't even be here!" become common lines, complete with laugh-track.

In the past I've seen this from the co-worker viewpoint. By the end, you hardly expect them to show up for meetings or workplace events at all. They are all but gone even before they have actually left. Now that I am on the other end of this process, it feels familiar and strange. There are times I want to shout, "Hey, I'm still here, you know! I am still working and contributing!" and yet there are already other times when I want to acknowledge that I'm no longer that invested in something happening six months from now (thinking, "Why am I even sitting in this meeting?").

Of course, this is exactly as it should be, since I won't be here to experience the future whatevers, and have little say in what those who will should or shouldn't do. But it is odd to experience.

We're told we should know when to retire. We're told to have a plan for retirement, or something to retire to. Nobody talks about the actual process of retiring, though. How are you supposed to act while you inch your way toward that publicly announced last day on the job?

Like a poor cell phone connection that cuts in and out, or nodding off while watching television, my participation in workplace conversations comes in and out of focus depending on the topic under consideration. Getting the budgeting process for the new year under way - check. Overseeing progress on goals - certainly. Setting next year's goals - um... Strategic planning and visioning - well, toss the old dog a bone and let him speak.

light fingers the house with its own acoustics
   - C. D. Wright, Floating Trees

There is this growing sense of being left behind, as the workplace moves ever forward while I step off to the side. This, too, is exactly as it should be. Part of retiring is stepping back and letting others step forward in your place.

One Christmas there were only
three of us, so we sang 

the round with one part missing.
I still listen to the fourth part — 

that’s the real ghost. 

     - Chase Twichell, The Ghost of

I don't want to leave the wrong impression here or seem unduly maudlin about all of this. A ghost, after all, is a soul who didn't move on when they should have/could have, and I have no intention of being a ghost. I'm excited about my future, looking forward to this next phase of my life, and quite ready to stand down here at work. I feel fortunate to have this option to retire now, to live abroad if I choose, and to travel.

And let's be clear: this isn't being done to me, but rather is something I am choosing to do. My coworkers are not being mean or inconsiderate, and there is nothing whatsoever wrong with any of their actions related to any of this. It's only that my action (choosing to retire) is changing the reflection I see in the mirror as time moves forward. It changes the way I am reflected back to myself, and that is both interesting to observe and at least a little bit disconcerting.

A song? What laughter or what song
     Can this house remember?
Do flowers and butterflies belong
     To a blind December?” 

   - Robert Graves, Ghost Raddled

So the trick in this retiring process, I guess, is learning by and shifting from an external reflection of ourselves for our directional bearing, toward navigating by our own internal light.

[Puts down pen, pushes back chair from table and stands. Then walks stage left and exits, leaving only the table, chair, and a single bare bulb for light on stage.]

The ghost light
is what they call the single bulb hanging
above the bare stage in an empty theater. 

    - Robin Morgan, The Ghost Light

I should leave it at that

As I head out the door this morning I pass by the hall closet and grab a jacket off its hanger. Finally, a cool summer morning. It feels good, right even, to this Pacific Northwest native son. As Timothy Egan writes in The Good Rain: Across Time & Terrain in the Pacific Northwest:

From June till September, nearly every day is perfect, with the 10,778-foot volcano of Mount Baker rising from the tumble of the Cascades to the west, blue herons and bald eagles crowding the skies, killer whales breaching offshore. The water is exceptionally clear, the result of a twice-daily shift-change in tide, when it sweeps north toward the Strait of Georgia, then back south toward the Strait of Juan de Fuca. In some places, the rip tides create white water like rapids on a foaming river. Being is bliss.

Being is bliss. Making time to be present for that awareness, though, is not always easy. It takes effort to pull back from (as Walt Whitman calls it) "...the procreant urge of the world."

There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now,
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.
     - Walt Whitman, from Song of Myself (1892 version)

I love Whitman for many things. Chief among them are his ability to distill, in his writing, the act of being present, and his ability to be wholly and apologetically comfortable with himself.

Welcome is every organ and attribute of me, and of any man hearty and clean,
Not an inch nor a particle of an inch is vile, and none shall be less familiar than the rest.
     - Walt Whitman, from Song of Myself (1892 version)

When summer cools down for a few days, like it is doing here now, I find it so soothing. As if I was suddenly aware of something that had been bothering me, but only through the awareness of its sudden absence.

Yet have I drawn a lesson from the spot,
And shrined it in these verses for my heart.
Thenceforth those tranquil precincts I have sought
Not less, and in all shades of various moods;
But always shun to desecrate the spot
By weak repinings, sickly sentiments,
Or inconclusive sorrows.
     - Henry Timrod, from The Summer Bower

So I'll leave it at that.


Today's Commute Playlist:

• Sherlock Holmes (audiobook read by Stephen Fry)

Early morning dark, rain falling, weekday-getting-ready routine, mildly melancholy-infused thoughts

Like a small campfire under a heavy canopy of conifer trees, the living room end table lamp creates a hub of visual warmth and light once I switch it on this dark early morning. The light radiates outward across the living room in fading concentric circles. Out the apartment window I can see cars moving slowly and quietly through the intersection of my little Hollywood-set-esque "downtown." The occasional pedestrian, hood up and slouching against the falling rain, shuffles sleepily in and out of the Starbucks across the road. Somewhere outside I hear a dog barking energetically for a few seconds, then back to the relative silence of the street and rain. The street lights glow, just like my end table lamp, and reflect in the rain puddles and the shimmering wet of the cobblestone-like street below. Most of the storefronts are only partially illuminated, still closed until an hour of morning yet to come.

In a future that feels almost like a past I’m positive is there—
But where? I think my life is still all conversation,
Only now it’s with myself. I can see it continuing forever,
Even in my absence, as I close the windows and turn off the lights
And it begins to rain.
   - John Koethe, from Ninety-Fifth Street

Celebrating our differences is one thing, living them is still something else. We are still sorted and described by the things that make us different (which, I suppose, is what the whole notion of "difference" is all about). As Kermit so famously sang, "It isn't easy being green." Kermit also sang:

Why are there so many songs about rainbows and what's on the other side?
Rainbows are visions, but only illusions, and rainbows have nothing to hide
So we've been told and some choose to believe it
I know they're wrong wait and see
Someday we'll find it, the rainbow connection
The lovers, the dreamers and me
   - from, The Rainbow Connection, written by Paul Williams and Kenneth Ascher

Early morning dark, rain falling, weekday-getting-ready routine, mildly melancholy-infused thoughts, I suppose. What is the freedom of choice? "...an individual's opportunity and autonomy to perform an action selected from at least two available options, unconstrained by external parties." (Wikipedia's definition works as well as any I've seen). But, really, what isn't "unconstrained by external parties" in a connected society? Every free choice is a negotiation with some sort of cost or consequence, maybe very small or maybe large.

Still, my grandmother takes my hand downtown
pulls me right past the restaurants that have to let us sit
wherever we want now. No need in making trouble,
she says. You all go back to New York City but
I have to live here.
    - Jacqueline Woodson, from what everybody knows now

Life is nothing, if not complicated.

But I like a rainy tuesday early morning like this one. I move to the kitchen and turn on the back right stove burner, the smallest burner where my little espresso pot, already set up last night with finely ground yerba mate, waits. I microwave a cup of whole milk, and wait for the pot to build up pressure and force the water up through the mate and into the upper chamber. Combine: my mate latte is ready. The only latte choice remaining is whether to take the time to enjoy it here or pour it into my thermos and enjoy it when I get to campus. I grab my thermos.

Hacking Gavin's woodpile

Friday, ever popular and confident, swaggers in with sunshine in his face and the weekend in his back pocket. The colors along the lane leading to the freeway are all oranges, yellows, and reds, made fluorescent by the morning sun's backlighting.

One can be tired, stressed, worried, distracted, disquieted, frustrated, angry, or even indifferent, but in that singular visual moment when Friday works his magic with sunlight and color it is all forgotten. This is a living-in-the-moment gift, a being present present.

Just don't turn on the news.

And everywhere the free space fills
Like a punctured diving suit and I'm
Paralyzed in the face of it all
Cursed with the curse of these modern times
   - Bruce Cockburn, from Gavin's Woodpile

Living in the moment can be difficult, though, when the information rushing in is all so horrific and hard to fathom. When I feel increasingly disconnected from the society in which I live because the risen order of the day is ripping access to life itself, let alone quality of life, from so many while fundamentally reshaping our nation's evidenced values to reflect the narrow self-interest of a very select few.

I remember crackling embers
Coloured windows shining through the rain
Like the coloured slicks on The English River
Death in the marrow and death in the liver
And some government gambler with his mouth full of steak
Saying, "If you can't eat the fish, fish in some other lake.
To watch a people die -- it is no new thing."
And the stack of wood grows higher and higher
And a helpless rage seems to set my brain on fire.
   - Bruce Cockburn, from Gavin's Woodpile

Like many, I struggle to balance staying informed, engaged, and active with the earnest desire (if not need) to shut all the news out. I'm reminded of another Cockburn lyric (from Broken Wheel) that didn't pop up on today's commute playlist:

Way out on the rim of the galaxy
The gifts of the Lord lie torn
Into whose charge the gifts were given
Have made it a curse for so many to be born
This is my trouble --
These were my fathers
So how am I supposed to feel?
Way out on the rim of the broken wheel

and...

No adult of sound mind
Can be an innocent bystander

Then I see Friday morning sunshine glowing through fall leaves again as I pull into the parking lot on campus, like a magnificent stained glass window—only better, and I hear:

Rain rings trash can bells
And what do you know
My alley becomes a cathedral
   - Bruce Cockburn, from Thoughts On A Rainy Afternoon

Surely there is a way to reclaim that which should be holy from the dystopia of the, "...curse of these modern times." Breath in deeply and savor these discovered golden moments like a talisman, keep our focus on people always as distinct and unique individuals, and draw on this to champion the change we need and want.

Today's playlist: all songs from a Bruce Cockburn playlist

• Maybe the Poet
• When the Sun Goes Nova
• Thoughts On A Rainy Afternoon
• Stab At Matter
• Gavin's Woodpile
• Turn, Turn, Turn

Poetry and photography

Tuesday morning, wet and grey. The coloring leaves of the trees along my commute route glisten and hang heavy in the steady rain. They slice through the visual dull of roads and skies like yellow and orange flames painted along the side of a flat-grey muscle car from the 70's. They pop.

I read a fun article on the Poetry Foundation site earlier this morning, comparing observational photography to poetry. Of the former, the author says, "With observational photography, emotion recollected in tranquility is only relevant if you have managed to capture it at the time. If there’s poetry, it’s often only by being quick." (Seamus Murphy, from Two and a Quarter)

Big hippie
This day was so slow
And i can see you feel it too
Sometimes you wish you knew karate
Oh, the things that you could do, like
Crossing in between the greens
Just because you want to
Not because you ought to
Oh, how can you ever explain
They can never feel your pain
Neither can you 

   - Fountains of Wayne, from Go Hippy

To be sure, there can be a fine line between observational and less-passive, more directive forms of photography, and "quick" can also require patience while you wait for just the right quality of natural light, time of day, or alignment of naturally-occurring circumstances to capture that special poetic moment. Very similar, in fact, to finding just the right word or turn of phrase.

The solstice gable of my roof is dialing
Noonaway gardens and the flutes are gone,
The first leaf slowly flutters summer down,
Yet here, anew, causing the light to be,
The children are coming slowly up the stairs,
The leaded stained-glass window on the landing
Shattering rainbows over the bannister. 

   - Thomas Hornsby Ferril, from The Children Are Coming Slowly Up the Stairs

Because poetry, too, has its quick moments. When a poet captures in words, however carefully selected, a specific memory-based moment in time they are no less observational than the photographer. Is it any different when the poet's words also conjure up a specific personal memory in the reader's mind? Murphy shares several quotes from Seamus Heaney's poem, Digging, to illustrate his point. Heaney is describing a specific memory from his own past, but his words perfectly capture a sound from my own past, too:

Under my window, a clean rasping sound 
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground: 
My father, digging.

In observing life both the photograph and the poem can bear witness both what we see on the surface and what we feel for what we have seen.

For he chases the balled up poems which I discard on the
   floor and so enjoys them despite their imperfections.
For he can move each ear by itself.
For from the side I can see through his eyes like water.
For he is easy in this life.
For he carries no cash.
For he does not have any pockets.
For he saves nothing, not even a bone. 

   - Hunt Hawkins, from My Cat Jack

Today's Playlist:

• Tamba Trio, Moça Flor
• Antonio Carlos Jobim, Águas de Março
• Glen Campbell, The Impossible Dream
• Spamalot, The Song That Goes Like This
• India Arie, Strength Courage & Wisdom
• Anita Baker, Giving You The Best That I Got