Field Note 1: The Word

I get hung up on words. When I looked up "field notes" and came to "field" I was delighted by the double yet connected meanings:

. to take care of or respond to something

. to catch or pick up something

. to give an impromptu answer or solution to

. a large tract of open country.

We are laboring in the field, sometimes at play, working, sewing and reaping, observing and reflecting.  Perhaps we are meeting there, as Rumi describes, where "out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing.... the soul lies down in that grass".

An image of us as musicologists or ethnobotanists comes to mind:  hat, recording device, net, notebook, looking back, present in the moment, looking to the future of a hot shower. We are all doing field work - we are curious, we are searching.  Poems offer me a chance to lie down in the grass, if only for a moment.

The Culmination Card

This morning one word arrived:
"Grandmother."
The message rang a clear bell,
accompanied by a mantle
shooed down by breeze-hands,
and surprised, I took it up wholly.

The grandmothers on the altar
were honored - on a bicycle, ample,
passing on their pearls, aproned,
emerging from confining marriages,
drowsed and crowned
under the motto, "She loved me."

Years of mothering, self-conscious,
I took up the clay and wedged it,
throwing it hard onto the
drying plaster, removing troublesome
air-bubbles, until, like an earthen bread,
it was ready to be shaped into a vessel,
fired then cooled ticking,
a vessel that can hold
this imperfect love -
this vintage emotion-water
and be set down full,
for the gods to drink.