I Was Amelia Earhart, part two

more excerpts from Jane Mendelsohn's I Was Amelia Earhart....  Read more about the book with a review here: http://www.janemendelsohn.com/novels/i-was-amelia-earheart/

Amelia in the Electra cockpit, c. 1936

"When she thinks of her father now, she sees him at the end of the day.  That's his time of day, twilight, or just before.  The late afternoon, when the sun is setting, when it feels sad and beautiful, like the last day.  When the sadness is too unbearable to think about, and this makes you strangely cheerful. (93)


The heat will take over the island.  It will keep up all day and all night for several weeks.  The sun bears down, the air is still, the deafening hum goes on.  The things that will happen could only have happened during a heat wave.  Everything becomes quite unreal and it seems as though there is no future.  It is impossible to think about the future during the heat wave.  All during the heat wave we have the feeling, even in the darkness, that we need to escape from the sun.  (97)


Fot long stretches of time we're completely silent.  Long after sunset we're still sitting there, on the sand.  I recognize the terror of the quiet, the silence of flying.  Everything is moving, but everything is still. (99)


But before all this, there was the dry storm.  The storm between the heat wave and the rain.
The heat wave lasted for several weeks, at the end of which we were strangers.  We had changed so much, the heat had taken so much, we were strangers to ourselves.  We spent our time together, but we barely spoke anymore.  What was there to say?  We were desiccated, blistered.  Noonan had done everything he could: he'd built us shelter, he'd perfected his device for extracting water, he'd made us a little boat.  But still the sun was too much for us.  One day, he went out in his boat, and by the time he came back he was bleeding from the heat.  He'd covered himself, but the sun had burned through his protection, and he was so cooked that his skin peeled and then bled. (104-5)


I think it was then, during the storm, while we were waiting, that he finally understood what had happened to us. (107)


She spends the morning watching the birds pick at the debris, she watches them fight over fish and pass over urchins, and she does not realize for quite some time that Noonan is among them, squawking and clucking and bickering.  She sees him when he is already deeply engaged in conversation with a bird of paradise, gesticulating madly, with his radio in one hand and a piece of fish in his mouth.  She calls out to him, but he doesn't respond, and she sees him walk away from her, lost in argument with a bird, and then soon afterward she sees him round the bend of the beach and disappear from her sight.

Then she feels completely alone.

Three days later, on an exquisitely clear night, she found herself in the traditional state of a stranded islander, with a melancholy composed of memories and regrets, and too much time on her hands.  Noonan had survived the storm with a poetic stoicism, taking their exile to its purest extreme.  He appeared that night wearing flowers in his hair, he danced alone on the sand in the transparent moonlight, and before daybreak she decided that he was lost to her and to the rest of the world forever. Heartbroken with grief, she had gone to sit in the cockpit, where his singing couldn't reach her, and she put on her goggles and her skullcap in an effort to overcome the desire to join him in his madness.  It was a time of torment, which ended at dawn when she sighted the shore of her island through the broken windshield of her plane, and she decided once and for all that she had taken this journey in order to escape the madness of the world, that she didn't give a damn if she was alone, she wouldn't go crazy, and that she would live the rest of her long and brilliant life on this wild and desolate island. (107-9).

I Was Amelia Earhart

Lately, I've been engrossing myself in the beautiful prose of Jane Mendelsohn in her book I Was Amelia Earhart.  It is a "brilliantly imagined," fictional account of what happened to Amelia Earhart when she and her navigator, Fred Noonan, disappeared off the coast of New Guinea one glorious, windy day in 1937, never to be seen again.

I need to return this book soon, and I want to be able to read these words again as I want.  So, I propose that perhaps they are beautiful enough to be worth sharing with the greater public here  while I can simultaneously store excerpts from the text for my later access.  I will break excerpts into several postings....  I hope you enjoy the narrative....


Excerpts from I Was Amelia Earhart by Jane Mendelsohn.....

So, the sky.
It's the only sky that I can remember, the only one that speaks to me now.
I am flying around the world, there's nothing but sky.  The sky is flesh.  It's the last sky. (4)


Sometimes my thoughts are clearly mine, I hear them speak to me, in my own voice.  Other times I see myself from far away, and my thoughts are ghostly, aerial, in the third person.

When I was very young, six or seven, I already wanted to die.  I already had the dream.  I wanted to escape, to go higher, to leave my body, and this made me seem ambitious, greedy for life.  When I was young, people hated my greediness, but they enjoyed it too.  A little girl filled with desire is a beautiful sight, ugly, but very beautiful. (10)


It went very quickly, those first few days.  They got out of the plane, and together they looked around and tried to make sense of their surroundings.  Then all of a sudden, as if part of the choreography of a dream, they set about performing the necessary rituals of survival. (62)


This is how we talk to each other now, in overlapping monologues.  We've been separated by fear.  Fear has set in, and memory, and blame.  I'm awake most of the night, waiting for a ship to see our fire, hearing in the wind the radio operator, hearing the scratch of his breath in the shifting leaves, comforting myself in my anguish with memory traces, the agonizing moments before I lost contact with the world. (74).


We couldn't have foreseen what would happen to us as a result of witnessing our own abandonment.  It seemed impossible that the plane hadn't seen us, but equally impossible that it had and then just flew away.  We never understood the meaning of the plane.  It abandoned us. It was too terrible to believe, that our only hope, our one salvation, that the messenger we had been waiting for, the protection we had expected, was out there, it existed, but not for us.  So at first we did not lose hope.  We did not even worry.  But gradually, in the hours and days to come, our hope abandoned us too, and all that was left was the memory of that plane.  Like children, we adored the plane that abandoned us.  We sat on the beach for a long time, waiting, cultivating our separate vivid images of the plane.  We loved the plane even more after it left us, as if that might bring it back. (81)


We didn't speak to each other for a long time.  We were angry and we blamed our anger on each other. There were no more planes, no ships on the horizon.  At first we kept track of the dates, counting the days, and then we stopped doing even that.
      It lasted a long time, and then finally we couldn't be angry anymore.  We abandoned hope, then worry, and then even our anger.  It was easy: we never tried to do it, we just did, finally, because we had no choice.  (82)

End of Summer, poem

Clouds pass quickly these days,
transforming and dissolving.

The half moon hangs in the sky, shrinking.
The hunting hawk overhead cries out.

The trusty darkness of the New Moon is coming
as the wind begins to blow in
the changes of the Fall.

blue moon

Today is the full moon, a Blue Moon, because it is the third of four full moons to take place in a season (in this case between June 2013 solstice & September equinox).

The last Blue Moon by this definition happened on November 21, 2010....

Where were you then?


and now a rendition of "Blue Moon" by Frank Sinatra
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vr0amOKCHo

for my soul-dog Nuva

A healthy woman is much like a wolf: robust, chock-full, strong life force, life-giving, territorially aware, inventive, loyal, roving.

~Clarissa Pinkola Estes

for the woman howling inside of us all...

a Spanish Gypsy Flamenco song...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Scus9teTdjo

the dew of little things

And let your best be for your friend.
If he must know the ebb of your tide, let him know its flood also.
For what is your friend that you should seek him with hours to kill?
Seek him always with hours to live.
For it is his to fill your need, but not your emptiness.
And in the sweetness of friendship let there be laughter, and sharing of pleasures.
For in the dew of little things the heart finds its morning and is refreshed.

-Kahlil Gibran (1883 - 1931)

2913 E 117th St

It has taken me over a year to get these photos of 2913 E 117th St, Cleveland to the computer so they are viewable, and the scene has already changed so much since here, and it will only change dramatically more, as this building is set to be demolished within with the year....

In the true spirit of wabi-sabi....

view the full series here at:

https://plus.google.com/u/0/photos/104335158602581059145/albums/5911261818765052865

Hope Transforms

Yesterday, I received a timely surprise postcard from a good friend with a quote from Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man.  It read:

"Man's hope can paint a purple picture, 

can transform a SOARING VULTURE 

into a noble eagle or moaning dove."

She had sent it to me to because I had told her about a vulture that I had witnessed one early evening, perched up on the chimney of the house next door.  My daughter, Rosemary, and I had been out saying goodnight to the moon, it had been near Full, when the giant bird made his presence known expanding his wings as if to flap them dry.  He clicked his sharp beak across the top of the chimney.  And after several serious gazing moments, he took flight, dropping into the air, soaring right over Rosemary & I's head.  I almost thought he was going to pick one of us up.  I thought, something dead is near.

Currently, I am facing many deaths in my life, and I believe with every death comes Life.  This vulture, a hunter of the dead, the Gray Lady in bird form, who cleans up the dirty remains inspired me.  I took it as a great acknowledgment from the Universe that I am on my Path, and Death is necessary and glorious (just look at how he flew!).

Coincidentally, as part of the August Postcard Poetry Fest I am participating in (http://poetrypostcards.blogspot.com/) I just sent out postcards the past two days with poems about doves.  I will share one here, in the spirit of man's hope transforming a soaring vulture into a moaning dove.


Doves Separated

If you close the door
you won't hear the Dove, or
see his beauty or
feel his love.

You cannot have it both ways.
Quiet and joy is matched with pain.

He is unescapable
on every post and wire
unmated, lamenting,
as if his nest is on fire.

Close the door
and the coos will still vibrate,
for the Mourning Dove feels
with great weight
being separate.

written August 6, 2013


--------------------

As SMO wrote:
a large bird swooping from every rooftop
to surprise us all.

Thank you, smo!

---------------------
finally, for you to hear doves now where you are...

http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/mourning_dove/sounds

Walking

Today I was given the great opportunity to walk along the main four-lane, six-lane in some places, highway that goes through my hometown.  Since I was in elementary school I have watched as the wild fields of Queen Anne's lace and goldenrod turned to grass monoculture, strip malls, and paved parking lots with lamp posts.  It still continues in this fashion, and there are a few last stretches left of these wild fields, and one of the last one, perhaps the longest and biggest stretch has just begun to be bulldozed, built-on and paved.  Every time I rush by in my car, trying to get here and there in suburbia, I sneak gazes out the window as I dodge traffic, attempting to catch a glimpse of the gorgeous mountainous clouds and the trees that are left still blowing in the wind.  I have repeatedly thought- oh, I want to spend time in that field.  It wants to be played in, admired, gazed, loved.  It is the beauty of the Universe and we are just passing it by and then throwing it in the trash.  Today was my chance to be with it.

I got out of the car and walked, maybe 5 or 6 miles, up 611, headed North, along four traffic lanes of rushing cars with turn-off lanes, and little sidewalk to be found.  There was the small stretch of emergency lane on the road, and the occasional patch of grass.  I was amazed at what was revealed to me.  First, it was the whizzing cars that pummeled by unknowingly.  I realized there was a chance I could be hit by a car, walking so close with little protection, but walking on I went.  I sang loudly and felt the vibration of my lungs and diaphragm like the motor of an engine.  It fueled me forward.  Then the great field opened up, and I saw the glen in its beauty.  Solitude and serene despite the rushing around it.  I could feel that even as the Speedy Carwash will take this field's wild place soon, this spirit cannot be removed.  It is in the sky and the clouds, and the wind; this cannot be denied.

Then I walked further, and began to smile at the glory and the gift of my legs, and my body, and my strength to carry myself.  My health that keeps me alive and strong.  I felt trust in the Earth that supported me under my feet.

With little to no sidewalks, and so many cars, it felt like I walked in an urban desert and ventured alone like an Elephant.  Then I saw a narrow footpath worn into the thin strip of grass along the road.  I knew then I was not so alone on this sojourn.  Many had gone before me, and many would go behind me, without the protection of a plastic car- only the strength of their body.  They, too, knew the power of our humanity to transform the landscape just by living in it.  They knew that one day, we may all learn to walk again and come close to the concrete and be intimate again.  I was with others in my awareness of being alone and strong in my self.

After a few miles, I came across a little forest, forgotten for now until the real estate agency gets the call to start building.  I have seen this alcove many a time driving by, but standing at its level it looked completely different.  Just as I stepped in the direction of the field, away from the road, I heard a hawk.  The hawk alerted me it was there, and alerted others I was there, and flew to another perch showing me their great wingspan.  He perched, and we gazed at each other as I sat on a concrete scrap of litter.  The beauty. The honor.  I was on my path.

.............

And there is more to this, but I must stop for now and let my legs rest and see the sun as it sets.  I am grateful for this day and the miracles it has brought me.