12
Aug
Sandpiper at surf”s edge, Assateague, VA, May 2008
During our newlywed days in Baltimore, Seelye began his dissertation. Early mornings he walked to his lab, returning about 5 pm for a 45-minute run, bath, and dinner. Usually he spent two more hours after dinner in the lab.
I mourned my mother, wrote thank you notes for lovely wedding gifts that manifest to this day the love held for both our families and friends. I read cookbooks and searched Baltimore markets for fresh and new ingredients, learning scientifically to plan, assemble, and produce nutritious and multi-ethnic meals.
Of his mother Lucy’s cooking Seelye claimed that college food was better, but she had discovered Adele Davis and bequeathed to us blended smoothies, use of whole grains, and son Carl’s favorite carrot cake, the cream cheese icing decorated with healthy currants and candy red hots. While Seelye delighted in my mother Grace Mary’s meals, her advancing alcoholism rendered consistent teaching and reliability dicey. I did make sure to learn her vinaigrette, stove-top souffled omelets, and the festive Seeley family rolled stuffed crepe recipe called “Germans”. During my high school years, the Bulgarian-born neighbor, Jeannie Robell had schooled me to eastern European delights, Russian borscht, baklava, chicken and leek pies, bureki, even the process of presenting a sheep’s head!
To compose his title and opening sentence, pad in hand, Seelye stretched out on our sofa and I on the polished wooden floor of our sunny walk-up apartment, head to toe so we could talk. He intoned variations on “The Slow Motion of a Finite Flat Plate Towed Through a Viscous Stratified Fluid,” convulsing us in giggles. The word flat cried out for a companion silent e. Not intuitive with the physics, repetition imprinted the words. I grasped the metaphor of the forward and rearward wakes generated in the wave tank of salt-layered water of graduated densities. How to cut in life a forward wake of appropriate energy, confidence, buoyancy, neither too weak, nor too strong?
In 2008 we visited Gettysburg, PA, during the 145th anniversary of the battle, July 1-4. Narrated by Morgan Freeman, the explanatory film in the brand-new Visitors Center raises three questions: 1. What is the meaning of the union? 2. How to end slavery? 3. What is the meaning of citizenship? Accompanying the narration, the historic pictures of African Americans as slaves, free persons, and soldiers enlivened the Civil War more than I had ever experienced. That the narrator emphasized also that the third question is still most active today resonated with Sarah Starkweather’s doctoral thesis on issues of citizenship for expatriate Americans, their children, power to vote, and secure Congressional representation. Sarah and our son Carl married in Seattle on July 20th.
Although the scenery of Gettysburg is pastoral and beautiful, the bloodshed was horrific and sadness pervades the memorial stones. Cubic markers at ankle height along both lines record L.F. and R. F. for left flank and right flank, indicating just how densely packed the combatants stood, how vulnerable the men, horses, trees and plants were to the intense fire. Philadelphians, 80 miles away, heard the bombardments.
Today, those three same questions loom in our public and private lives: How to create and preserve union, how to end slavery, gender/racial stereotypes, and what does citizenship mean? What are our wakes, fore and aft? How to be a wake, be awake?
Sailing to and away from Rodebay/Oqaatsut, Greenland, 17 August 2008
Leaving Upernavik, Greenland, watercolor by Maria Coryell-Martin, 2005
17
Jun
Carl”s Vibram Five Fingers, Boat-tailed Grackle in Grapevine, Texas
First, we all occupy our bodies. Over a lifetime, that embodiment can be uneasy as our bodies grow and change on a timetable of their own. Nor have we yet decided on the place of consciousness, awareness, thinking. But the electric connection of synapse can surpass ordinary time, and the effect of forgetting, entering the cloud of unknowing, can prevision the realm of the dead.
In Israel, occupancy declares foremost in the stones, the highways, the crenellations of new settlements, in the watersheds, the rocky wrinkling of the earth’s crust defined as country, place, holy. Occupancy manifests acoustically as well, in the noise of jet planes overhead, in traffic, in unmufflered carts penetrating the winding streets to supply market stalls and construction sites in the Old City, in the sound of water flowing in planned courses and fountains. Sometimes, silent seeping in springs make green brushstrokes on rocky outcrops as at Wadi Kelt near Jericho. There the ancient Byzantine Orthodox Saint George’s monastery clings to the canyon wall as if stuck on by superglue. Within the holiest Christian Church of the Resurrection in Jerusalem, among the eastern denominations who depend on unamplified human voices, their powerful organ declares the occupancy from their portion of the Roman Catholic Church.
Above all in Israel, bristling with guard towers, barbed wire, searchlights the outsize, winding, forbidding separation wall asserts occupancy. Often bracketed by demolished concrete piles, the former homes of people whose occupancy is denied, the fractal boundary of cement, steel, barbed wire, observation posts, imprisons implacably. The wall imprisons both occupiers and occupied.
Thinking about occupancy, where people can settle with legitimacy, stability, and hope presence can develop to residency and citizenship. Describing pathways for embattled peoples to make new lives together, Desmond Tutu has written a book, No Future Without Forgiveness. Further, changes in the cold regions of the world, the dry deserts and wellsprings like the Himalayan plateau where five great rivers of the world begin their journeys through the most populous countries of the planet, now call us to new sensitivity, new courage to forgive, share, cooperate. Might we cultivate new habits of occupancy to promote just, intentional, citizenship in the world?
Demolished home, Bethany, February 2008. Greenland laundry, May 2005 (MCM).
13
May
My mother’s favorite beau of mine is teasing me on Mother’s Day.
We laugh as he retells his conversation with the friendly clerk at the bank when she inquired what he might be doing for me on Mother’s Day? “She’s not my mother!” As we are unpacking bags in the tiny kitchen from our excursion to the Dupont Circle Farmer’s Market, he says with a kiss, “You could write your next essay on rebar and rhubarb.”
At his favorite cherry tomato and spinach tent, I snagged the last bundled few stalks of pink-red rhubarb. Another seller offered piles of green ribs, but knowing that the green stems under the leaves are toxic, they held no appeal. The color red, especially rhubarb red is important to me, so I steered clear of them. Nearby, Twin Springs Orchard from Orrtanna, Pennsylvania, still offered greyed wooden boxes full of over wintered green, yellow, and red apples. Although looking a little tired on the outside, they have proved dependably crisp and tasty on the inside for fine snacks and outstanding rhubarb applesauce.
As for the invisible ribs of rebar cemented in the walls and floors of our apartment building, like the fresh organic foods from the market that nourish our more stressful life in the capitol city, its presence ensures the stability, solidity, and longevity of the building. Inside the windowless kitchen, the rebar forms a Faraday cage and prevents the transmission of cellular phone signals. In the Washington, DC kitchen I cannot both cook and talk on the cell phone.
Permanent ribs of iron rebar resemble the rigid stalks of seasonal spring and early summer vegetable rhubarb. As things unseen and seen, imbedded and subsumed, inside and outside, both strengthen life, health and happiness.
On Mother’s Day when our children were small, the old beau would often give me a good book with a twist, the time to read it. This day brought a neat variation on the theme. Nurturance and gift. Mother wit and mother love. Ribs and ribbing.
03
May
The Pulse of a Salt Oscillator, a Meditation
In describing the Rule of St. Benedict (480-540) in Seeking God, Esther de Waal describes the keystone of community and personal life as relying on balance, proportion and harmony in body, mind and spirit. She writes that the purpose of the rule is to create a favorable environment in which the balanced life may flourish.
Stability is fundamental and means more than not running away from a place or people, rather, “not running away from oneself.” Stability permits us to recognize the connection of inner and outer, to respect and order disparate elements within ourselves, our relationships, and in our physical bodies.
Benedict distilled his life experiences into clear directions.
Listen to one another, and to God. Listen with sensitivity and openness. Practice the hospitality of the open door, the open heart, and the open mind.
In 1970-71, Seelye wrote a paper for the Amateur Scientist column edited by C. L. Stong of the Scientific American.
In pondering St. Benedict’s Rule, the experiment Seelye devised to demonstrate the salt oscillator entered my mind as a metaphor, to illustrate the dynamic in living with balance, proportion, and harmony.
Picture a clear glass beaker filled with fresh water placed on the base of a ring stand. Clamped to the stand above the beaker is another container (the home model was a frozen juice can) fitted with a small-bore tube at the bottom and extending halfway into the water in the beaker below. Pinch the tube closed and fill the upper container with a colored salt solution, for example, soy sauce. Release the pincher on the tube and observe the flow downward of the heavier visible fluid into the clear fresh water. Within less than a minute the downward flow will pause, then reverse direction. The oscillation will repeat until both upper and lower fluids are in balance for saltiness.
Seelye Martin in San Francisco, 12/07 and at Seeley Lake, Montana, 9/05
20
Apr
Fellow pilgrim Reverend Terry Burke snapped the picture of me in the Roman bath in Herod’s fortress palace at Masada, Israel on February 4, 2008. Not far north lie the ruins of the Essene community at Qumran, our next stop. Moses would have seen the region from Mt. Nebo across the Dead Sea, the promised land he was not to enter.
During my first visit to Jericho with my parents in 1954, the Dead Sea was markedly broader, the scrolls recently discovered and in the process of being dispersed for analysis. That day it rained for the first time in forty years! The cool temperature cancelled our swim. However, Charles collected a chunk of salt to ship home and taught me the story of Lot’s wife. Humid summers in Lexington vaporized the salt over the next two decades, raising questions for me about what lasts, what hardness means, and the power of water over rock.
During the pilgrimage with St. George’s, I appreciated that the college made the arrangements and marveled at the many changes in the fifty-four years between my journeys. Preparing for the rigorous daily schedules, I felt torn like Bethany sisters Mary and Martha between Girl Scout preparedness and Lot’s wife’s looking-back salt pillar. Chiefly, I meditated on water, life-giving, scarce, purifying, essential.
Snow fell on Jerusalem during both my wintertime visits. In 2008, exposure to spouse Seelye’s work on satellite images of earth and icy regions enhanced my understanding of the tectonic plates, of Mt. Hermon and the sources of the Jordan River at the head of the Rift Valley. I thrilled to walk along King David Street, the divide between the Mediterranean watershed to the west and the Jordan River valley to the east. I better understood the rush of water and debris through wadis, gulches, the dangers of erosion, the grace of snow to percolate soil and replenish underground springs.
During the storm, snow blanketed the riven city, muffling sounds as everyone sought shelter. The day after, the city sparkled in powdery crystalline beauty.
Along Salah Eddin Street young men ebulliently rolled snow folk sentinels on the sidewalks. Though the worn ancient stones were slippery, everyone seemed to enjoy the pause from routine, the clear atmosphere and white ground.
Inevitably, the snow melted. Traffic, business, tensions resumed. More aware of the land underfoot, I observed the occupancy of it. Stony land, stony hearts, stewarding water. Water seeping, running, dripping for irrigation. Water, in plastic bottles, in springs, in baptismal fonts. In the rainy season and along the steadily evaporating Dead Sea, I pondered on the physical world, the spiritual world in my sightlines. What can one person offer, influence, or aid?
