Ferry Ride

Just a ferry ride away from San Francisco there's a whole other world.  Angel Island.  Such a great get away for a day.  A combination of a beautiful natural sight and a place steeped in history.  We  went in the museums which echo of the stories of the people that went through there.  The poetry is etched into the walls.  That poetry, that is still on the wall, is in Chinese as they were detained there the longest.The rooms are set up as they were then at the turn of the century and you can almost hear the anxious voices in all the languages waiting to be let into America. The ferry runs just twice a day so after a few rides on the rope swing we raced back to sail back to the mainland.  

Rock House

Carmel Point

      The extraordinary patience of things!

      This beautiful place defaced with a crop of surburban houses-

      How beautiful when we first beheld it,

      Unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled with clean cliffs;
      No intrusion but two or three horses pasturing,
      Or a few milch cows rubbing their flanks on the outcrop rockheads-
      Now the spoiler has come: does it care?
      Not faintly. It has all time. It knows the people are a tide
      That swells and in time will ebb, and all
      Their works dissolve. Meanwhile the image of the pristine beauty
      Lives in the very grain of the granite,
      Safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff.-As for us:
      We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;
      We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident
      As the rock and ocean that we were made from. 

      Robinson Jeffers

Winter's View

   The Uses of Light 

It warms my bones

    say the stones

                                                 I take it into me and grow

                                                 Say the trees

                                                 Leaves above

                                                 Roots below

                                                 A vast vague white

                                                 Draws me out of the night

                                                 Says the moth in his flight-

                                                 Some things I smell

                                                 Some things I hear

                                                 And I see things move

                                                 Says the deer-

                                                 A high tower

                                                 on a wide plain.

                                                 If you climb up 

                                                 One floor

                                                 You'll see a thousand miles more.

                                                  Gary Snyder

                                                                 

                                                                   

From Here to There

Really.  You want to go to school all the way across the country.  Really.  It's been almost a month.  Nate is so far across the country and we miss him so.  Stretched across the country.  We often think about him from here to there.  Eli can hardly stand the lack of wrestling and Magic games.  Emily gets away with a lot more picking at things.  Though the house tips a little when Nate isn't here I am thrilled at the connections he's making and how he seems to be just soaking in every ounce of that school.  That's what bouys me up and keeps me afloat.  A Gary Snyder poem here and there helps too. 

                                                               

How Poetry Comes to Me

It comes blundering over the
Boulders at night, it stays
Frightened outside the
Range of my campfire
I go to meet it at the
Edge of the light