The forsythia outside my window has given up the brilliant citrus yellow and is fading back to the sticky green leaves. I am trying to hold a dull panic at bay. My aim is to steady myself, my nerves. I do not want to doom scroll exhaustively, rants and laments of our country’s frightening descent into chaos. Look out your window, I tell myself. Write about the forsythia’s brave first burst that ushers in the redbuds’ purple halo. See the lime green of spring grass and tiny leaves. In Dostoevsky’s The Brothers’ Karamazov, Ivan, the … Continue reading Ars Poetica by Trudy Hale →
Ireland’s goddess Brigid, patroness of practicalities such as farming, infants, and dairy labors, is associated with Spring and also poetry. And why not? How many metaphors are woven into the season, how rich with avenues that lead from the physical world into the realm of myth. Somewhere in history the goddess Brigid morphs into St Brigid in a merger of Christian and Celt practices. Interesting that in the fifth century AD there was much blending of faiths, as though it was not entirely an either/or adherence but an and. Celtic tradition created bridges between the … Continue reading Spring! by Sharon Ackerman →
I will never forget the first time I read Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and its startling portrait of the character Pilate. When Milkman first meets her she is standing very still, dressed in black and cradling a round, luminous orange in her palm. That image never left me, suffused as it was, with archetypes of The Crone, The Magician, The Shadow. Morrison knew how to make heart-stopping use of instinctual images. Plumbing deeper, I think the portrait of Pilate personified the Earth Mother, her darkness and her light, her life-giving power and her predation. … Continue reading Spring’s Memory by Sharon Ackerman →
March 19. It was the first day of spring. Cardinals trilled at dawn. Trees were starting to smudge pink, white and green. I smelled mulch, and fresh, overturned earth. Beauty and hope were in the air. And there too was the invisible dread, the dark underside, the quietly, stealthily spreading Covid-19. I wondered if it was safe to have contact with friends across the street, across town, those recently returned from other states and foreign ports? President Trump had recently declared a national emergency. My husband, John, and I qualify as “elders,” however … Continue reading What to Do in the Days of Corona Virus? by Elizabeth Meade Howard →
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