I am circling around God, around the ancient tower, and I have been circling for a thousand years, and I still don’t know if I am a falcon, or a storm, or a great song.  (link to full poem)

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What’s in a Name

Polly Jenkins ManOctober 15, 2024  Thatch-roofed Irish Cottages.  Aurelia C. Brown 1961 When they brought her to be baptized, she was given her mother’s name, Aurelia. But when her father peered into her cradle he announced, “her hair looks like thistledown”.  Her infant halo of white thistledown hair was an aura that never left her, especially when that hair turned the soft white of her later years. The name defined her; her will o’ the wisp ways, her desire and her decisions to go wherever the wind blew and her spirit led; her unique, fey wonder and curiosity about the world. And thus, the beautiful child with the thistledown hair was, from that day on, known as Thistle.  An accomplished and prize-winning artist, a sailor, a life-long adventurer and my father’s much younger half-sister, she was my aunt and my godmother. Friends and acquaintances used to ask me about her name, imagining that someone called Thistle must be a prickly person, like the purple Scottish wildflower. Sometimes that was true. She was determined to follow her inner guiding light and not always patient with those, particularly my accountant father, who could never understand yet another Thistle exploit. But I believe it was that spirit which allowed her to choose exactly how she moved through life. Thistle showed me how to be an independent woman that followed her talent, her dreams and sense of adventure wherever it might lead. She was the young woman who once took me, a shy, fearful ten-year-old who had hardly ever skied, to the top of Spruce Peak in Stowe, Vermont and told me, “just head downhill.” Years later, she was the aunt who showed up at Columbia- Presbyterian hospital in Manhattan a few days after my first child was born. Since her visit happened to be on the Fourth of July, she came equipped with champagne and firecrackers, popping the cork of the former and setting off the latter. A moment later, what appeared to be the whole maternity staff rushed into the room, believing a bomb had gone off. They gave Thistle quite a dressing down while my baby girl slept right through it! Thistle won a Fulbright to paint in India in 1960. Somehow she once managed to get herself invited to take tea with the Maharajah of Jaipur. While sitting on the terrace, she saw one of his handsome horses in the pasture and asked if she could paint it. “Of course you may. Please come back in a day or two so he will be ready.”  She returned at the appointed hour and found, to her amazement, a groom next to the horse holding a large brush and a bucket of gold paint; “to paint the horse!” The Thistle moment that I cherish above all is the day she told me the details of the trip which she had arranged to fulfill Mum’s lifelong dream to visit Ireland. Thistle changed her own trip back home from India in order to spend time there with my mother. Two months later, my mother died, tragically and violently.  Finally, all those many years later, it was during that telling that I was able to see into the troubled, dark places that my mother had long carried within. Better than all the rest of my family, Thistle understood my mother; her struggles, her hopes, her very soul.  In the telling of that tale, I saw a side of my aunt I hadn’t known previously: her deep wisdom about human nature and an intuition that guided her understanding. No longer was she simply the fun-loving, unpredictable, risk-taking adventurer. That day she became a true godmother, a God-given mother to me. Thistle helped me laugh and helped me weep. She showed me that I could be equally at home sleeping by a campfire in the woods or dining with the rich and the famous. She taught me to stretch myself artistically, intellectually and spiritually. She showed me that what the world thinks I should be is never as important as how my Spirit is leading me. Thistle has been gone for many years. So why do I write this now? Because on this October day, as I see thistledown departing its earthbound flowers; as wisps of white quietly leave on the breeze and knowing that soon they will all be gone, I like to imagine that Thistle too floated off on a gentle breeze at the end.  How beautifully they drift into the sky!  How lovely are they in their dying, leaving a blessing at the end of their life. As Thistle-down did for me. […] Read more…

When the World is Too Much

Polly Jenkins ManSeptember 25, 2024On days when I feel, like the poet, “that the world is too much with us,” I often turn to one of a handful of poems that through the years have brought me a measure of solace and peace.  Today is one of those days: the news of the world is all about “guns and computers.” “…getting and spending, we lay waste our powers, little we see in Nature that is ours.”  Today I turned to the poet Mary Oliver, but she didn’t speak to me in a way that she usually does. Seeking another way for comfort, to escape from the barrage of bad news, I took myself to a well-trod path by a nearby pond. “I went to the woods (to) see if I could not learn what it had to teach.” Hardly ten minutes had passed when I heard the unmistakable “krunk “of the great blue heron, arriving on its pterodactylic wings. It settled onto a graying, water-bound stump, standing there, majestic; a silent statue on its wooden plinth, gracing me with its presence.   “Ahh”, I sighed, or it might have been “Amen”; and walked on. Scrubby bushes bordered the path, now and then opening up to allow a  narrow window of water, where a duck was gliding along. My first thought was, ho-hum, it’s probably just another mallard or black duck, such an ordinary sight. However, I reminded myself, that while I’ve seen many thousands like it in my life, I had probably never seen this one before.  So I raised my binoculars to see, instead, in full multi-colored plumage,  a “wood  drake (resting) on its beauty on the water.” A complete surprise: first, the “pop” of the iridescent green, russet, tan and its red eye; next, astonishment that on an early autumn morning, the drake appeared in full breeding plumage.  But then, what do I know. Nature never fails to amaze me. I am rarely disappointed by the poem that I read each morning, which is why today was an exception.  Yet never did I expect that in the woods, pondside, I would find the right poem waiting for me, the very poem I needed. It was there that Wendell Berry’s “The Peace of Wild Things” had taken form, become alive, manifest to me on this ordinary day, during a quiet ramble. When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still waters. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light.  For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.   This poem hangs, illustrated and framed, above my bed. A mantra, you could say. So how can I, how could anyone explain the synchronicity of my sightings today with the creatures of a poem that is often my lodestar? “Fools give you reasons, wise (ones) never try,” because there is no logical explanation. So, therefore… “When turning and turning in the widening gyre …(when) things fall apart, …when the center cannot hold”: your center, my center, our nation’s center; when our planet itself is barely holding on, teetering on the edge of “mere anarchy, loosed upon the earth”, then… Go to the woods, sit with a poem, defy rational explanations and lose yourself in wonder. For a time, “rest in the grace of the world,”  and be free.   A note: I have quoted a scattering of unlikely bedfellows in this essay. In order they are:  William Wordsworth, Mary Oliver, Wordsworth again, Henry David Thoreau, Wendell Berry, Oscar Hammerstein, William Butler Yeats. […] Read more…

This Day That We Have Never Seen Before

Polly Jenkins ManSeptember 2, 2024Every day, before we began to work, Charles would gather us in a circle, invite us to join hands as he prayed, “Heavenly Father, thank you for this day that we have never seen before.” Charles lifted up that prayer eighteen years ago, in a driveway of New Orleans, as the city was just beginning to recover from the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. I was there as part of a team from Concord and Acton, assigned to rebuild Charles and Winnie Wilmore’s house.  Charles is hard to forget; a retired postal worker who was living in a toxic FEMA trailer parked in front of the house that he and Winnie had moved into just three weeks before the storm. When they looked out the window of that cramped and shabby trailer, the first thing they’d see was their ruined dream. And yet, and yet…every morning, without fail, he would bow his head and thank God for a new day, a day that had yet to unfold, when anything might happen. And, if he’s still around, I have no doubt he’s saying it now. I want to be like Charles. I want to begin every morning, waiting for what the day would offer; to discover something I have never seen before.  I want to start each day with “beginner’s mind”, as a small child who is just learning about her world. As I did one day last week. In the blaze of the rising sun, a soft wisp of white floated in the breeze. A bit of thistledown? a small feather swept from an empty nest?  The day was bright with thin silk threads of rain falling silently over the far field. Near my feeder, a hummingbird, resplendent in her glossy emerald dress, stood on the air, moving neither up, down nor sideways, wings humming, drumming, until, quick as a wink, she dipped down, sipped and took off.   My door was left open; a honeybee flew in.   Finding nothing sweet, it buzzed out, in search of nectar. A  locust tree, standing tall near my porch, dropped its slender leaves, carpeting the grass in gold. Drinking my mug of coffee, I sat silently, remembering the poet’s words: “Every day I see something that more or less kills me with delight…”    I’m pretty sure what delighted Mary Oliver wasn’t something she’d never seen before.  Like Charles, her delight was about THAT  morning, a day barely begun. As for me, I have no idea how many hummingbirds I’ve seen in my long life, nor bees that I’ve let out of my house. But I have never seen THAT green bird, nor THAT bee. And while I’ve seen leaves float to the ground every fall for over 80 years, I had definitely never seen those golden leaves, for they weren’t even “a twinkle in the honey locust’s eye” last year. Many years ago my son, a brand new father, taught me a very wise lesson.  They had just brought their newborn daughter home. When I arrived a day or so afterwards, she was just waking up, ready to be fed.  I was the typical grandmother, yearning to hold her as soon as I could, and so I offered to change her before handing her to her mother. As I laid her on the changing table, my son came up beside me, looking skeptical, a bit anxious. “I think I can do this,” I said. “It’s not like I’ve never changed a diaper before!” “That’s true, Mom, but you’ve never changed MY baby’s diaper before!” Need I say more?!     […] Read more…

Fooling Around with the Old Story (cont.)

Polly Jenkins ManAugust 13, 2024That Old Story, Limerick-style.  Part 2, (in Egypt and so on) In Egypt, Joe had great success. But for others it was simply a mess. Israel was oppressed, distressed and depressed. To be free? “Twas only a guess.Then one day a baby was born to an Israelite woman one morn. His sister, brave Miriam made sure to take care o’him by keeping close watch on the shore.   The baby was placed in a basket since his mother did not want to risk that he’d be killed by the Pharoah, a guy mean and low who was ready to blow his last gasket.   When Moses (that baby) got older he became very strong and much bolder; telling old Pharoah “Let my people go!” Man, that dude had some chip on his shoulder!   Mighty Moses, he parted the waters for Israel’s sons and her daughters. Miriam led them in dance, in song and in chants as the desert became their new quarters.       But the people they grumbled and whined. For their life back in Egypt they pined. Moses picked up his staff broke a big rock in half. Out came water, more lovely than wine!   Forty years they roamed and they wandered while the hope they once had soon was squandered. “Where is God now?” they asked. “Who gave Moses this task?”  It was much worse than anyone pondered.   Moses climbed to the top of Mt. Sinai and said, “God, I really do try. This is tough, can’t you see? Why pick on me? How ‘bout you come on down from the sky?!” Now this tale will eventually end. But not for some time yet, my friend. God has much more in store, such as prophets galore. There’ll be kings!! queens!! and oh, so much more!     […] Read more…

Fooling Around with the Old Story

Polly Jenkins ManJune 13, 2024That Old Story, Limerick-style.  Part 1   First came Adam and Eve and the snake who said, “from this tree you should take the apple of life.” But it led to great strife And the garden they had to forsake.   Their sons were Abel and Cain. But by Cain was poor Abel slain. The earth he did roam never finding a home. Then later, it started to rain.   Old Noah, he built a big boat to keep pairs of creatures afloat. When the flood was all done, Out came the sun! Then once more was the world filled with hope.   Later on, from the country of Ur came Abram and his lovely wife Sar- ai. They longed for a child. Yay! after a while baby Isaac Sarai did bear.   But along with this tale we must tell Of the first-born, old Abe’s Ishmael. He was Isaac’s big brother Hagar was his mother. God loved both boys equally well.   By the time young Isaac was grown He found a fine wife of his own. Rebekah was swell. (They met by a well.) And twin sons were born in their home. Esau first, then Jacob the younger who tricked Esau because of his hunger. Jacob gave him some soup Poor Esau was duped of his birthright; he had it no longer.   Away fled the sly little brother Who was helped all along by his mother. Jacob slept on a rock And saw angels walk From one rung of a ladder to ‘nother. Well, the years they moved right along. Jacob’s big family grew strong With twelve sons; and his daughter whose story we oughta remember, since it’s been far too long.   She, Dinah, was carried away By cruel men whom her brothers did slay. Little Joe went south To a place at the mouth Of a river where crocodiles play. Now Joseph was Pharoah’s good friend So you’d think that this story might end With peace between nations And lots of vacations. But no!! big trouble was just  ‘round the next bend……… (to be continued)                     […] Read more…

God-given Daughter

Polly Jenkins ManMay 28, 2024I was fourteen when my handsome and adored older cousin asked me to be his baby daughter’s godmother. The tradition went back at least three generations. My mother had been his godmother and he was my godfather. All of us were teenagers or younger when presented with such an awesome responsibility. As a loyal daughter of the Episcopal church, I was well aware of the duties of a godparent; although at fourteen, and living many miles away from that baby girl, the whole “raising her in the true faith” business didn’t seem to make much sense.  I don’t remember, and probably hadn’t even attended her baptism. They named her Holly, which I loved because it rhymed with my name. There were two or three occasions when her family traveled to my hometown to visit my aunt, her grandmother. She was a little blonde pixie, a cute child. Yet she didn’t interest me very much. My world at sixteen or seventeen consisted of sports, school, boys, dances and preparing for college. In short order, over the next ten years, my mother died, I was married, finished college and had three children. That little girl, far away in another state and often another country, was growing up, going to school and becoming a teenager. Life was full for both of us. I remember less than a handful of occasions when we saw each other, very briefly, in the succeeding thirty or forty years. Fast forward to the spring of 2021. Seemingly out of the blue, Holly called to invite me as her guest on a yoga retreat in New Hampshire. The retreat was by a lake which we both loved; where we had each spent many summer weeks yet hardly ever at the same time. How could I say no? Yoga, at a favorite place and the opportunity to get to know my goddaughter after more than 60 years! I have no idea what prompted her to invite me, and I suspect that she felt somewhat the same. Yet, as we both realize now, it was meant to be. Something, or Someone was at work. Holly was my summer miracle. Yes, we did some yoga. And some swimming and canoeing. Those were the underpinnings but not the blessings. We talked, and talked, and talked some more. We saw in each other another woman in our family who knew the secrets, the joys, the betrayals and the love; very little of which had been acknowledged in our family history. At the same time, my own daughter, living in Australia, was beginning to show the early symptoms of dementia while Holly’s mother was in her last months of living with Alzheimers. We were exactly what the other needed. Holly and I see each other now frequently. Our journey together continues as our individual lives as mothers, grandmothers and wives unfold and change. Although fourteen years lie between us, at this stage of life, they are merely a wrinkle in time. . […] Read more…

April 19, 2024

Polly Jenkins ManApril 27, 2024Next year, on this day, Concord will celebrate the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the battle at the Old North Bridge.  I imagine it must have been a day like this one, an early spring day, a day that I “went to the woods”, following advice from Henry David Thoreau. By a small creek, freshened by spring rain, I found these: fiddleheads, small as a baby’s fist, pushing their tender bodies up through mud and leaf litter; skunk cabbages, unfurling in the slough and ripple of the rill: green shoots slim as sharpened pencils and yellow knots of leaves-to-come hanging from birch branches. A traveler, intent on their path to a distant destination, foot following foot, would pass by here, its small miracles of early spring unnoticed. A wanderer, instead, unhurried, will bend down to gaze upon earth’s uncorked energy spouting towards the light. Dylan Thomas, erratic, ingenious Welsh poet wrote: “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower drives my green age.” Do you feel it? Feel that force, the pull? Feel winter’s cold grip loosening in your body, softening your spirit, summoning you to uncurl and stretch your body skyward, your face uplifted to the rain? Perhaps it’s no accident that April 19, with its fierce force of spring, was the day that women and men of Concord began to throw off the heavy cloak of England. How I wish that the fire in their bellies had led them not to violence but to seek freedom by other means.  They were, however, as we are, imperfect people.  Oppressed by the British, they in turn were oppressors; keeping slaves and stealing indigenous land. What if we could distill a pure, unsullied liqueur from the blood of that battle and use it to feed seeds of promise; promise that from the smallest fern to the widest prairie and the deepest ocean, our planet will survive. The time is now. Spring is calling. […] Read more…

An Old Friend

Polly Jenkins ManFebruary 9, 2024She was always glad to see me. The day might be sunny, stormy, dismal or freezing, it never affected her mood, as far as I could know what her mood might be. While I have too often sensed others scrutinizing my looks and criticizing my opinions: “Did she comb her hair? Where did she come up with that idea?,” she never made me feel inadequate, unloved or lacking. She took me exactly as I was. Always on her face was pure joy when she saw me. A bad day would turn on her greeting me and I felt completely loved once more. She came to us when she was so very young and from day one brought cheer, energy and her fair share of mischief into our lives. Yes, she kept us on her toes and it was always worth it for the reward: a look of pure love and her soft presence. She grew up with the children and when the youngest child entered the teen years, she always knew when he was troubled, felled by all the usual teenage angst.  Some days I would come home from work to find my son lying with her, side by side on the floor. No words, just her gentle, comforting presence: “I’m here, everything will be okay.” Later, when that young boy had graduated from high school and was at home over a mid-semester weekend break, we came downstairs in the morning and saw that she hadn’t got up. We weren’t too surprised as over the past few weeks, her hips had become much weaker. That day, though, we knew. No one had to tell us. She told us with her eyes.  It was time, a time we knew would come but hoped it never would. “Do you want to come with us?” I asked my son. He shook his head and with one last hug went back upstairs. Later, after, my husband went into the shed to get the shovel, we notified the older children who came back from work for the ceremony in our backyard. As we headed outside to the garden, my son, the small boy who had been her childhood companion, now a lean six-footer, turned to me with tears in his eyes and said “Well, Mom, I guess I’m not a kid anymore.” Her name was Topaz. […] Read more…

Human Kindness at Trader Joe’s

Polly Jenkins ManSeptember 19, 2023It was a misty moisty morning. Because I had missed my group walk at Walden Pond, I was feeling as cloudy as the weather. Off, then, to do some errands, ending up at Trader Joe’s. I bought squash, cereal, onions, some fish and a few other things. While these were unloaded at the checkout counter, I searched in my messy pocketbook for my wallet. And kept searching. It wasn’t there. “No worries” the cashier told me. “We can hold them here for a few hours.” Since I wasn’t likely to return that day, given the weather and the distance, I asked, her, apologetically, if the items could simply be returned, when a voice behind me said, “I’ll get them.” A young mother, little girl in tow, came over and presented her credit card. She had heard the exchange at my checkout counter. True to my automatic reflex,  I was about to decline her offer: “Oh, no, thank you, you’re so nice but that’s okay”. However, seeing her open, happy face and beaming smile, I caught myself in time. From her expression it was pretty evident that her gesture of human kindness was important for her to offer.  I accepted. We talked for a few minutes, Katherine from Chelmsford and I, and I told her that I would definitely pay it forward. Her young daughter witnessed all of this. I bent down and told her, ‘You have a wonderful mother, but I bet you already know this.” I pushed my grocery cart out the door with wings on my heels and a huge smile on my face. The rain was still slopping down, the sky as gray as ever, traffic on Rte. 119 as backed up as ever.  Yet I was singing and smiling all the way home. I thought about her little girl, who is at that age when children soak up everything like sponges. I believe her mother’s spur of the moment gesture did not go unnoticed. This is a mother who models decent and selfless behavior to her child. It makes my heart glad to know that there are people like her in our community. We need lots of Katherines for children to grow up as good members of society, people who care for each other and the world. What a difference a moment of kindness makes! Katherine gave me a double gift: her generosity and an opportunity for me to do the same for another.  I hope that moment will come soon. […] Read more…

Tree Time

Polly Jenkins ManSeptember 8, 2023I’ve been reading a lot lately about trees; about the forest community and how trees communicate with each other by means of thin filaments of fungi that spread under the forest floor. It seems that these fungal networks convey crucial information from one tree to another, including an alert that a tree is sick. Other trees then respond by sending healthy enzymes through those networks to the ailing tree. Trees appear also to send messages to each other in the air. For example, Suzanne Simard, a professor of forest ecology at the University of British Columbia, has observed how a Douglas fir that had been injured by insects sent chemical warning signals to a ponderosa pine growing nearby. The pine tree then produced defense enzymes to protect against the insect.* Hers and other forest ecologists’ research indicate that a forest is a supportive, integrated society.  Richard Powers has described it as “The Overstory”** by which I believe he means not just the forest canopy but an “uber-story”, an archetype for healthy human societies. As is true in human society, members do eventually die. A tree will fall in the forest and whether or not it makes a sound, as the quixotic question asks, it does have impact. So that, when that tree falls and dies, the answer is “leave it there.” It may be dead, but it’s life, paradoxically, isn’t over. Indeed, its contribution to the ongoing health of the forest will be as important as when it stood straight and tall. On my walks, I might find a newly fallen trunk that looks like this: dead wood. Further on, I notice one that may have been lying there many years looks like this: indications of soft green moss starting to spread with bright orange fungus making a home.           A bouquet of fungi attach to this much older log, feeding off the nutrients of the decaying wood as the ground beneath starts to digest it:  Farther along, as I make my way through the woods I see what I would never have seen in my lifetime had what I’ve shown you so far been all the same log, for this fallen beauty came to earth long before I was born over eighty years ago: Look closely at the bottom left where you’ll notice one small green leaf emerging from its moss-covered host.  This former tree has now become a fully mature nurse log, so called because it feeds young lives. Soft decaying wood provides nutrients for mushrooms and other fungi, for moss and green leaves that promise future trees. There are crevices and hollows where insects feed, snakes escape the sun’s rays and small animals find cover. A nurse log which, a hundred plus years ago, was a member of its forest community, is now its own community. A community vital to the preservation of a healthy forest. At what moment do we say that a nurse log is dead? Many human lifetimes have passed since it fell to earth. It will soon sink forever into the forest floor and disappear. Still, its life goes on, as evidenced in this final photograph.  . We can no longer see the nurse log but she’s not done yet. Here, this stretch of four or five small green leaves march along in a straight line precisely because they are rooted in their nurse log below. Several paragraphs ago, I wrote that the forest community could be a model for a healthy human way of life, or, as Richard Powers writes, an Overstory.  Stretch that metaphor a bit and apply it to the nurse log.  A tree in the community falls, but it does not die. I submit that the “death” of that tree is simply, as we have seen, a different form of life. Might it not also be a model for a healthy human way of death? What if, when our bodies die, we become nurse logs? Very literally, that can be so with a green burial, an increasingly popular practice that allows one’s body to be buried wrapped in a shroud, usually in dedicated green cemeteries, often in forests. Like the fallen tree, our bodies will nourish the living forest for years and years. What an incalculable privilege and gift to planet earth that will be! As tree communicates to tree, so too do we link together in human community. Our connections don’t die with us. In a way, we have been nurse logs all along; nurturing, teaching, loving, encouraging, modeling behaviors and ways of living in some fashion for those whose lives we have touched. Although eternal life might seem to be a promise only to those who believe in the resurrection of Jesus; as the forest teaches and nurse logs show, we are beings with a presence not only when we are in our bodies.  I may call it Spirit, others will say Soul, Qui/Chi or Energy; the name isn’t important.  All we have to do is believe the promise seen in that final photo where tender green shoots defy death: a visible sign of an invisible truth. Thoreau “went to the woods” to learn how to live deliberately, to learn what it had to teach. Can we not also go to the woods to learn how deliberately and lovingly it might be to die?   For further reading: *Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard. **The Overstory, a novel by Richard Powers The Hidden Life of Trees, by Peter Wohlleben Walden, by Henry David Thoreau […] Read more…