Category Archives: happiness

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together a part

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I match my breathing to yours . . .

We are swaying with the trees apart then together

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you’re sleep drifting with

the breeze . . . I reach up

to feel what the leaves are seeing

above it all anything can happen

. . . just like you were saying

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even in the distance when things are unclear . . . both there and here . . . I think

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*

we are happening to each other

we are happening apart and together

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and some things work that way . . .

apart but together . . . a part of together in

the quanta of possibilities and serendipities

like the way we can only see the wind

because we hear the trees

© Liana 8/2020
(drone photos by C.G.)

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“This is not the happiest day of my life”

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the pandemic closed all the other doors so
they got married in the barn his great-grandfather built

this turned out to be the best place of all . . . four of us including the minister were there . . . we stood on our marks and took off our masks just when they walked in

the bride and groom made promises they were already delivering

IMG_1780-001He told her this wasn’t the happiest day of his life because his life was just beginning now . . . there was so much more to come.

Unknown's avatar

in the distance now, a wedding

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Each was a map of time and places and other faces

stretching out straight every morning to the Moon

where she had wondered . . .where he had pondered

not lost but wandering a thousand stars too soon

Each wrote the book . . . each knew its parables

Each brought a feast . . . each wrought their miracles

Both worlds created rivers of hopes deltated where

She plotted her points . . .  He measured what mattered

they navigated the nights and the days towards

each other . . . and found just the right space apart

and together . . .  here they stand . . . joining

their wondering and wandering . . . not lost

but discovering themselves in each-othering . . .

now and forevering all the mornings

. . . all the Moons

for Michael & Stephanie who finally found each other
& will be married at an appropriate social distance
on the 16th Day of the Flower Moon of 2020

© Liana

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Unknown's avatar

sun tides

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The rise and fall of tides across the desert . . . not from the moon but the sun
. . . make waves of light, not water

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. . . agape at the colors inside the hoop of horizon, my eyes do all the breathing

IMG_0005-001IMG_9601The Havasupai people who have been the guardians of the Grand Canyon for almost a thousand years are said to have left without a fight when the white man told them their home was too beautiful to keep to themselves.IMG_9617IMG_0005IMG_0034

. . . yeah, I seriously doubt that.

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IMG_9642He told me a better story . . . about novice-hiking too far in to get out until the next day and needing to spoon with his brothers to keep warm that night.IMG_9665They weren’t afraid . . . spent the night laughing at their plight and then at the feeling of laughter shivering and bumping into itself . . . contagious . . . I imagined the sound of them moving on a wind wavelet through canyons . . . still.IMG_9678

 

 

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der mittendrin

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At the Bebelplatz in Berlin where the Nazis torched all the books is a monument you can see below the clear surface: empty bookshelves underneath. Empty.

My friend JM translated the plaque for me:
“Where they have burned books,
they will end in burning human beings.”
– Heinrich Heine, 1820
IMG_3057No step is your own in Berlin. But we all have places to be so you walk. You are walking with one foot on stolpersteine . . . engraved with the names of the Jews taken from that house in 1943, and the next house. From every house they were taken then murdered at Riga or Auschwitz or wherever. You are walking on their sidewalk . . . one foot on a stumbling stone, the other foot is on its way to the market for erdbeeren, schaumwein and tulpen.IMG_2970JM lives here part of the time . . . until he has to come back for chemo. He takes me all over the city. We are pausing where little Jorg and Lothar chased after a ball into the kill zone and were shot dead on March 14, 1966. Their mothers weren’t allowed to retrieve the small bodies of their little boys from the spot where a couple is having a picnic today.
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But it is sunny and warm, and there is no longer a wall separating this city. Dogs are chasing balls across the grass that is now a park. These are happy dogs, I say, not German Shepherds. JM says German Shepherds can be happy, too.

Not East German Shepherds, I insist. I’ve seen the movies.

Later, we walk up into the sunlight from the u-Bahn on steps announcing which Jewish businesses were torched or vandalized or closed here at the Hausvogteiplatz during the pogroms in the late 1930s.
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Then I am in the middle of it.

“It” is die Musiker Mittendrin at Konzerthaus Berlin . . . and we are sitting randomly amongst the musicians who are playing Wagner’s themes. This part of the concert house wasn’t bombed, JM whispers . . . and I am vibrating with sound . . . in the mittendrin: the middle of it.

If there were plaques everywhere marking such things, we would all be alternatively screaming or singing im der mittendrin.

 

Knowing what we know, do we get to be happy? Even though JM is dying . . . while we are laughing, because we are happy . . . and shouldn’t we be happy? Thoughts of these days will be as happy and as they are sad for me. Don’t we get to be happy, if we can, with whatever time there is left to any of us?

“This was not judgment day—only morning.
Morning: excellent and fair.”
– Wm Styron, Sophie’s Choice

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Unknown's avatar

What Space Faith Can Occupy

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I believe that witness is a magnitude of vulnerability.
That when I say love what I mean is not a feeling
nor promise of a feeling. I believe in attention.
My love for you is a monolith of try.
The woman I love pays an inordinate amount
of attention to large and small objects. She is not
described by anything. Because I could not mean anything else,
she knows exactly what I mean.
Once upon a time a line saw itself
clear to its end. I have seen the shape
of happiness. (y=mx+b)
I am holding it. It is your hand.
~ TC Tolbert

 

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Keats has guests.

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Keats, an orange-billed Mute Swan who lost his mate years ago I’m told, tolerates the visit of a pair of Trumpeter Swans this morning. “Mute” Swan is a bit of a misnomer. Believe me, they can make a ruckus when anything gets into their territory. So I was surprised at the congeniality between these competitors for food and space.
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I was also surprised to see Trumpeter Swans at all. Although native to Michigan, a very wet place that is ideally suited to this water fowl, the more aggressive Mute Swans have gobbled up the territory until a relocation program brought their numbers down by half between 2010 and 2015. Trumpeter Swans are endangered in many states, but making a comeback here in the Mitten.
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I’ve never seen Trumpeter Swans in these headwaters before, nor the lake just to the south where I lived for four years. So I decided to put my coffee down and try to capture photographic evidence should the credibility of this sighting ever be called into question.
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They were as interested in me as I was in them when I went out to the bank with my camera and Ophelia, my zoom lens that I didn’t even need since they didn’t fly away. They glided over to the water in front of me very cooperatively. I wish I’d had Armand, my 72mm lens that would have done them more justice photographically. I hope they come back, or stay. Keats, apparently, and I, definitely, would be so happy to have them.

Unknown's avatar

a tran’quill place

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I am on the morningside of the water pen
-insula pollinated with light through pines
birch, oaks and redbuds

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the backyard woodchuck is Russell and
the mink is Melissandra and I named
the swan Keats but the Sandhill cranes
say their own unpronounceable names

sometimes I ponder what it means
to be this contented in a place where the
deer have eaten all the daffodils and most
of what I write is with my finger on the water

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I have even marked my height on a doorsill
to measure how much shorter
I become every year I grow older
and new here

 

~ Liana 5/18