ps pirro

lost & found in flyover country

So Many Rooms

In my house there are so many rooms
I can wander for days and not visit them all
The tiny room where the pony waits
The tall room where tomorrow hides among the
Out-of-season clothes
On the high shelf in the closet
The dark room pitched at that strange angle
Where it is always half-past midnight and
No one ever sleeps.
In the wallpapered room at the end of the hall
I find a door where once there was a wall
And sun shines through curtains that used to be flowers
And stardust gathers like stories
Behind the old sofa.

We Need to Be Unstoppable

The future is bigger than our imaginations. It’s unimaginable, and then it comes anyway. To meet it we need to keep going, to walk past what we can imagine. We need to be unstoppable. And here’s what it takes: you don’t stop walking to congratulate yourself; you don’t stop walking to wallow in despair; you don’t stop because your own life got too comfortable or too rough; you don’t stop because you won; you don’t stop because you lost. There’s more to win, more to lose, others who need you.

You don’t stop walking because there is no way forward. Of course there is no way. You walk the path into being, you make the way, and if you do it well, others can follow the route. You look backward to grasp the long history you’re moving forward from, the paths others have made, the road you came in on. You look forward to possibility. That’s what we mean by hope, and you look past it into the impossible and that doesn’t stop you either. But mostly you just walk, right foot, left foot, right foot, left foot. That’s what makes you unstoppable.

~ Rebecca Solnit, What Comes After Hope

Obvious to You

I’ll bet even John Coltrane or Richard Feynman felt that everything they were playing or saying was pretty obvious. So maybe what’s obvious to me is amazing to someone else? Hit songwriters, in interviews, often admit that their most successful hit song was one they thought was just stupid, even not worth recording. We’re clearly a bad judge of our own creations. We should just put it out and let the world decide.

~Derek Sivers, Obvious to You, Amazing to Others

Midwest Brain Drain

Once, I’m told, the alluvial soil was deep and generous here,
and the seed knew its way and took root with abandon, eager to
send up tender spring green, the joyful noise of a million small
leaves unfurling beneath the bright blue Indiana sky.

And all the fertile farmland was deep like a secret, soil like
ebony, inked with mystery, and the seed knew, and we all did, too,
how so much that matters takes place in the dark.

Now the secret is out, it’s loose in the lab, the mystery bleached
like bones in the desert, all the darkness bled into mud brown rivers
shallow and poor with nothing to hold them.

It’s a different sort of midwest brain-drain, seeds gone stupid with
quarterly profit, laying tight in parsimonious dirt and we call it
progress, but the seed knows, and we do, too, that all the patents in
the roundup ready world won’t bring back that joyful noise.

I Miss Joe Bagaent

He’s been gone for a couple years now, but his website is still updated. The film from which this interview is excerpted is available for purchase (dvd and download) here.

Here is one of Joe’s later essays, beautifully raw and full of humanity. A long one, and bittersweet, if you can bear it.

One Big Workhouse

It may be my bias, or my imagination, or my distaste for toil, but from here America looks like one big workhouse, “under God, indivisible, with time off to shit, shower and shop.” A country whose citizens have been reduced to “human assets” of a vast and relentless economic machine, moving human parts oiled by commodities and kept in motion by the edict, “produce or die.” Where employment and a job dominates all other aspects of life, and the loss of which spells the loss of everything.

~Joe Bageant,  The Iron Cheer of Empire

Missy Goes to Work

Missy took the bus downtown and got off at Sixth and Vine by the YMCA where she worked in the daycare soothing crying children whose own mothers worked in offices three floors above. Life is hard but not so hard, a punch card slipped into a slot, the machine slap of a time stamp, the overheated scent of swimming pool chlorine and the echoed voices from the spin class down the hall. Missy fished a key from her bag, made a small deposit of her worldly possessions into a yellow metal locker not so different from all the metal lockers at school, all the metal lockers at the bus station, she turned the key and tucked it deep into her pocket, pushed through a door into primary colors, soft bears and plastic spoons, where the babies were already crying and the diapers were already in need of a change.

Raccoons

We have trapped three raccoons in the past several months, using a live trap baited with marshmallows. My boyfriend transports them to a wooded area near the river about 6 miles away. Is it far enough? It hardly matters when there are cousins and in-laws waiting to move in. Our house is old. There are many — too many — nooks and crannies into which a determined critter can squeeze. When I come out and find another one in the trap, I feel sadness along with satisfaction. I’m conflicted. But I must be strong. They’re kind of cute, but I really, really don’t want them in my house.raccoon

Still, my raccoon saga is nothing compared to my friend Amy’s. She and her husband have trapped 14. Fourteen!  Here’s her latest update.

Stand

If you stand where you are long enough
Tomorrow will come to you
All on its own
Washing across your sandy feet like
The incoming tide
Of the wise, wide ocean.
Stand where you are and it will
Make a new day all fresh and salty clean.

Like Hands into a Pocket

Your history disappears into the folds of an apron
like hands into a pocket, your body of work the carcass
of a feeder pig pulled from the depths of the unreliable
Hotpoint that came with the house you never wanted but
the house said I think you need me and so here you are,
With your apron, and your picnic roast,
and all the empty pockets (still) waiting to be filled.

Foreign Land

“It is difficult to commit to living where we are, how we are. It is difficult and it is necessary. In order to make art, we must first make an artful life, a life rich enough and diverse enough to give us fuel. We must strive to see the beauty in where we are planted, even if we are planted somewhere that feels very foreign to our own nature.”

~Julia Cameron, The Sound of Paper

Seven Breezes

Standing on the side of an Indiana back road
I look in nine directions and count seven breezes
going by, the one that cools, the one that warms,
the one that passes without a sideways glance,
the one that carries the scent of the past,
the one that carries the scent of dry rub barbecue,
the one that stirs the red dust at my feet, the
one that makes the daylilies nod and bow and wave
in idle greeting and me at the side of the road
standing, waving back.

Tiny House, Big Heart

I don’t know why I’m compelled to do some things and not others. This morning I gave this tiny-home-builder a small donation to help her rebuild after a devastating fire. I don’t know her. It just seemed like the thing to do. Plus the little animation is pretty sweet.

Road Trip

There’s nothing like a road trip
Miles upon miles of landing strip for
Your soul to come down out of the
Clouds, the fog of what you’re leaving
Meets it midway in the sky
And waves bye bye.

Hard as That, Too

Here is the part both hard and easy:
When you see what’s missing and it’s
all that you (simply) stopped doing while you
went about earning your keep, all the choices
you made in favor of a full wallet, which isn’t
ever so full, is it? Not nearly so full as what
isn’t there, what was (simply) left out
all the songs that you stopped writing all the pages
you stopped filling all the soul that stopped
pouring from your pen. So hard, I know, to see them
not there but not there they are, and the easy,
and the hard: what you pick up, and what you put down.
Simple as that. Hard, hard as that, too.

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