Just so we are clear – I harbor no illusions about which one of us takes the pictures.  The magnolia are in charge.

This might be the prettiest thing I’ll see all year.

That’s up to Magnolia.

It’s spring, and I am lugging the camera everywhere in a purse as large as a carry-on suitcase.  My usual destinations – Westmoreland Park, UW Arboretum, Olbrich Gardens – are unabashedly crammed with small-scale, blooming trees whose low-hanging branches flaunt their fragrance and petals in our ever-so-grateful, blissed-out faces.  After the frozen air has moved on, we can’t help but want to see ourselves reflected in these proud survivors.  They kept their magic hidden throughout circumstances that could have done them in.  They may even have been made somehow more beautiful by their struggle – or so we like to think.  Just like us.

This year, when it comes to seeing magnolias, I feel like I am all thumbs.  In previous years, I have poured myself into the lens, and come out “magnolia” on the other side.  But this year, I am having a harder time hearing them, or giving in to them.  I don’t think that we have grown distant; in fact, I suspect the opposite is true.  Over the years, “the magnolia in me” has changed from a figure of speech to a real presence, a place as true as the parking lot.  I can’t travel the same path to magnolia now, and for this very reason – ironically – I find myself somewhere I have never been before.

I know quite a few people who claim they don’t like martyrs.  I think what they mean is they don’t like how they feel when another person tries to set their own self-interest aside, and defer to what they want.    It can be pretty frustrating to figure out where to get lunch with friends like this.  Even though I am an Aries, that doesn’t mean I never want other people to have their hearts’ desire, too!

I can tell you exactly why self-sacrifice makes me uncomfortable:  it is most often a way not of giving to others but of keeping the attention firmly focussed on the person sacrificing.  The flip side of it is always, always some kind of submission from the other person.  This internal, psychic gesture is one I was explicitly trained how to make from a very, very early age.  “How can you be happy when you are still not sorry for what you did to me?”  How, indeed.  (If these words don’t resonate with you, then you are clearly A) not of Irish Catholic descent or B) un-acquainted with any bona-fide narcissists.)  In order for another person to be happy, I have to be sad.  This is how self-sacrifice is born.  As simple as that.

Self-sacrifice is a game of fun-house mirror distortions – and the quality of heart that suffers the worst distortion is compassion.  Compassion gets so confused with “giving ’til it hurts.”  If giving hurts you, how can it help another person? (Ummmm, I know this thought isn’t original, nonetheless, it is my own discovery.)   Isn’t it better to be honest?  Admit you’ve given all you can?  Or confess that you want the focus back on you for a while – and why shouldn’t you want that like every other beautiful thing in this world?

Oh, dear lord, we are supposed to be so many things.  Vulnerable but strong, connected but independent – creative but cooperative.  The big clues to how I am feeling are in the words “supposed to” and “but.”  How can I dream when all the time I am asking myself, “Is this really my dream – would it really be good for me?”

Just dream.  Maybe the dream only needs itself to accomplish its work.

The Menomonee Falls dump is on my route to work.  Sometimes there are more birds there than you have ever seen in one place in your entire life.  I never have the right equipment with me to capture the experience of watching them move – in their hundreds –  as one entity from sky to branch and earth.  Fortunately, it doesn’t matter what equipment I have with me.  One heart and two eyes is enough. Oh, and time.  A split second of time.

Do you ever have this feeling of accelerando – like the music of your life is being played just a little too fast for your fingers to keep up?  It’s not that you can’t play through this passage of melody – but you just wish you could slow it down, and practice a little more.  Then you could take your seat in the orchestra for another performance – a better, more polished performance, where your skill meets the demands of the score, and liberate its potential beauty for one fleeting, forever moment.  In fact, you are focussed on this reverie even as you stumble and twist your way across the strings and keys of today’s movement.

But it is not to be – not ever, ever going to be.  You will never be any better prepared for today (or god help you, tomorrow) than you are right now.  And I suppose that means we may as well relax.  “Do not fear mistakes – there are none,”  Miles Davis said.  And I suppose what he meant was not merely be brave, but play –  because we are always only playing, and the music is moving on.

It seems that even while she dances, she is dreaming.

Well, just one more….you don’t mind, right?

The last time I wrote was probably in January.  By wrote, I mean, practiced writing by putting words onto paper in some sort of formal way.  Which ideally is an everyday ritual, but I would be happy now to manage a few times a week.  The ligaments of words and tendons of thought need stretching, and fresh circulation.  On its own, my mind is no good at that.  Paper and pen are required, or my heart just squiggles away from the slightest pressure to show itself, like mercury on glass.

I think its time to stop delaying.  “Until” is such an ugly word.  It belongs next to “should” and a few other guilt-laden conjunctions whose sole purpose is to poison the present moment with failure.  “Until my room is organized, until I am not sleeping next to box lids and clean socks, until until until…”

Throw away my socks, if you find them, but keep my notebooks and all the words.  That is where you will find me – pages and pages of the heart of me.

Congratulations, robin, you have made it home again,
to peck your first wriggling meal
from between impatient shoots
that greenly dare the chilly air to stop them.
Our cheeks are yet as red as purple finch’s head
when we face the dogged wind
that must surrender now – or soon –
to Life as bright Spring.