A Tidings of Magpies

still praying... Hardware Sparrows by R. T. Smith Out for a deadbolt, light bulbs and two-by-fours, I find a flock of sparrows safe from hawks and weather under the roof of Lowe's amazing discount store. They skitter from the racks of stockpiled posts and hoses to a spill of winter birdseed on the concrete floor. How they know to forage here, I can't guess, but the automatic door is close enough, and we've had a week of storms. They are, after all, ubiquitous, though poor, their only song an irritating noise, and yet they soar to offer, amid hardware, rope and handyman brochures, some relief, as if a flurry of notes from Mozart swirled from seed to ceiling, entreating us to set aside our evening chores and take grace where we find it, saying it is possible, even in this month of flood, blackout and frustration, to float once more on sheer survival and the shadowy bliss we exist to explore.

Busy couple of weeks at Chez Distracted; nothing too full of importance, just a bunching up of annual ICU competency days and junior year meetings with HoneyHaired's high school college counselors. Monthly volunteer work. And ACLS--Advanced Cardiopulmonary Life Support which is required every two years. You'd think after this many years of critical care nursing performing in a cardiac arrest would be easy-peazy, but the trouble is they change the basics every two years. So, for old-timers it gets a bit like trying to remember the new name of that old store at 7th and Race, formerly known as Shillito's and now, who the hell knows. Then there's the performance anxiety of trying to save ResusciAnnie through her several long and drawn out life-threatening calamities in front of folks watching you for mistakes. Not running in to help as in real life, but standing back and judging. The Simon Cowells of life savers, they are. We have New Important Changes happening at Big F...

by Andrew Hudgins These are what my father calls our raven days. The phrase is new to me. I'm not sure what it means. If it means we're hungry, it's right. If it means we live on carrion, it's right. It's also true that every time we raise a voice to sing, we make a caw and screech, a raucous keening for the dead, of whom we have more than our share. But the raven's an ambiguous bird. He forebodes death, and yet he fed Elijah in the wilderness and doing so fed all of us. He knows his way around a desert and a corpse, and these are useful skills.

One of the Butterflies by W. S. Merwin The trouble with pleasure is the timing it can overtake me without warning and be gone before I know it is here it can stand facing me unrecognized while I am remembering somewhere else in another age or someone not seen for years and never to be seen again in this world and it seems that I cherish only now a joy I was not aware of when it was here although it remains out of reach and will not be caught or named or called back and if I could make it stay as I want to it would turn to pain.

http://disasterrelief.mohhaiti.org/brads-blog Will post more later, just an update from an organization where another friend of mine is working.

Kindness by Naomi Shihab Nye Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth. What you held in your hand, what you counted and carefully saved, all this must go so you know how desolate the landscape can be between the regions of kindness. How you ride and ride thinking the bus will never stop, the passengers eating maize and chicken will stare out the window forever. Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness, you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho lies dead by the side of the road. You must see how this could be you, how he too was someone who journeyed through the night with plans and the simple breath that kept him alive. Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. You must wake up with sorrow. You must speak to it till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows and you see the size of the cloth. Then it is only kindness that...

Team Craig

A friend of mine, Francoise, is from Haiti and what's left of her family is there. She's leaving sometime next week with a group of nursing/medical personnel through the help of National Nurses United and the California Nurses Association. Any donations to this organization are welcome to get more nurses to Haiti. Also RAM--Remote Area Medical Volunteers-- is looking for anesthesiologists and CRNAs who can leave immediately for the Dominican Republic to assist in surgeries needed for the victims. Both have websites, are on FaceBook, and both are keeping a blog/journal. I have no doubts that those who come to visit this blog send their prayers and love for Francoise and to all those she goes to help. Right now we're trying to get her shifts covered and work with the hospital to ensure a position for her when she returns. That may require an act of God. National Nurses United Remote Area Medical Volunteers

Joy by Julie Cadwallader Staub Who could need more proof than honey— How the bees with such skill and purpose enter flower after flower sing their way home to create and cap the new honey just to get through the flowerless winter. And how the bear with intention and cunning raids the hive shovels pawful after pawful into his happy mouth bats away indignant bees stumbles off in a stupor of satiation and stickiness. And how we humans can't resist its viscosity its taste of clover and wind its metaphorical power: don't we yearn for a land of milk and honey? don't we call our loved ones "honey?" all because bees just do, over and over again, what they were made to do. Oh, who could need more proof than honey to know that our world was meant to be and was meant to be sweet? ***** A foggy morning in CinCity. Temperatures yesterday warmed into the 40's and any memories of The Snowstorm That Stopped a City are tucked in small white mounds under the pine trees in b...

by Billy Collins In the usual iconography of the temple or the local Wok you would never see him doing such a thing, tossing the dry snow over a mountain of his bare, round shoulder, his hair tied in a knot, a model of concentration. Sitting is more his speed, if that is the word for what he does, or does not do. Even the season is wrong for him. In all his manifestations, is it not warm or slightly humid? Is this not implied by his serene expression, that smile so wide it wraps itself around the waist of the universe? But here we are, working our way down the driveway, one shovelful at a time. We toss the light powder into the clear air. We feel the cold mist on our faces. And with every heave we disappear and become lost to each other in these sudden clouds of our own making, these fountain-bursts of snow. This is so much better than a sermon in church, I say out loud, but Buddha keeps on shoveling. This is the true religion, the religion of snow, and sunlight and winter geese barkin...

by Paul Zimmer Some years back I worked a strip mine Out near Tylersburg. One day it starts To snow and by two we got three feet. I says to the foreman, "I'm going home." He says, "Ain't you stayin' till five?" I says, "I got to see to my cows," Not telling how Wanda was there at the house. By the time I make it home at four Another foot is down and it don't quit Until it lays another. Wanda and me For three whole days seen no one else. We tunneled the drifts and slid Right over the barbed wire, laughing At how our heartbeats melted the snow. After a time the food was gone and I thought I'd butcher a cow, but then it cleared And the moon come up as sweet as an apple. Next morning the ploughs got through. It made us sad. It don't snow like that no more. Too bad. please note: photo by Nathaniel W. Casey

by Vera Pavlova and translated from the Russian by Steven Seymour 17 Why is the word yes so brief? It should be the longest, the hardest, so that you could not decide in an instant to say it, so that upon reflection you could stop in the middle of saying it 81 I think it will be winter when he comes. From the unbearable whiteness of the road a dot will emerge, so black that eyes will blur, and it will be approaching for a long, long time, making his absence commensurate with his coming, and for a long, long time it will remain a dot. A speck of dust? A burning in the eye? And snow, there will be nothing else but snow, and for a long, long while there will be nothing, and he will pull away the snowy curtain, he will acquire size and three dimensions, he will keep coming closer, closer ... This is the limit, he cannot get closer. But he keeps approaching, now too vast to measure ... please note: photo by Candace Dwan

by Tom Healy We offer in evidence our grocery list— its crabbed scribbled archeology of hunger shorthand reckoning of how we've settled arguments whether the week augured skim milk or vodka cantaloupe or ice cream little proclamations smudged on the back of an envelope his marks and mine a currency the exchange of whim and sustenance an account not just of comfort and ordinary cravings but how we've construed the necessities of rescue and surrender

Hubby's up and off for work today. I think I might have awakened early anyway. It was one of those mornings when the worries of life come jumping on the bed demanding a little tickle and attention. You know...the dentist bill, the paperwork for that damn committee at work, why is my head still hurting, what if I lose my job, how can I help CollegeGrrrrl with tuition, what to cook for dinner??? None of which are easily, or best, answered at four o'clock in the morning. Thankfully, there's the blogosphere. From mon ami with her spit and baling wire I found a book on transitions, and from Miss Lydia at Writerquake and her friend, Valerie Walsh , and her friend, David Tobocman, I found this-- --exactly what was needed with a snoozing cat at my feet, a snoring dog on the floor, a warm cup of coffee beside me and a lighted page of words on my lap. The sun is out now. I believe there might be some homemade pizza for dinner and a George Clooney movie for lunch.

by David Whyte Above the mountains the geese turn into the light again Painting their black silhouettes on an open sky. Sometimes everything has to be inscribed across the heavens so you can find the one line already written inside you. Sometimes it takes a great sky to find that small, bright and indescribable wedge of freedom in your own heart. Sometimes with the bones of the black sticks left when the fire has gone out someone has written something new in the ashes of your life. You are not leaving you are arriving. please note: art by Tobin Rogers at tobinrogers.com

by Gary Snyder Who was this girl In her white night gown Clutching a pair of jeans On a foggy redwood deck. She looks up at me tender, Calm, surprised, What will we remember Bodied thick with food and lovers After twenty years.

I believe I've written about this before, especially since I see I have a tag labeled "Kairos vs Chronos," but the topic has come up again at work over the last few weeks. Illness and death are devastating at any time, particularly poignant over a holiday. A car accident with traumatic brain injury and death on Thanksgiving takes on more baggage than had it been on a Thursday evening in the middle of August. Forever in the minds of those that remember, that death will be associated with Thanksgiving and grief will add another layer to the day. But really, don't we still associate the major events of our lives by the calendar divisions we've imposed on time? And, won't grief have a place at the table on Thanksgiving no matter when the accident occurred? My daughter was born a week before Halloween. My mother-in-law died the Sunday before Mother's Day, my brother on Memorial Day weekend. We use holiday celebratory events as markers to divide the long, rollin...

by Mark Jarman Instead of casting them out of paradise, Instead of making them labor in pain and sweat, Instead of instilling tristesse after coitus, Instead of giving them fire to burn their house down And light their way into the outer world, He could have split them, each with a memory of the other, And put them each into a separate world.

by Mary Oliver All winter two blue herons hunkered in the frozen marsh, like two columns of blue smoke. What they ate I can't imagine, unless it was the small laces of snow that settled in the ruckus of the cattails, or the glazed windows of ice under the tired pitchforks of their feet— so the answer is they ate nothing, and nothing good could come of that. They were mired in nature, and starving. Still, every morning they shrugged the rime from their shoulders, and all day they stood to attention in the stubbled desolation. I was filled with admiration, sympathy, and, of course, empathy. It called for a miracle. Finally the marsh softened, and their wings cranked open revealing the old blue light, so that I thought: how could this possibly be the blunt, dark finish? First one, then the other, vanished into the ditches and upheavals. All spring, I watched the rising blue-green grass, above its gleaming and substantial shadows, toss in the breeze, like wings.