Some Days are More Zen than Others

Some days on daily headspa are more zen than others. Paul's poem on today's post, This is Where I Live, This is What I Do, has the flavor of a mantra, or the type of mindfulness reminder of place and moment that you'd find in meditation. I'm glad he wrote it and that I was reminded of it today when I needed it. That's the way with spiritual disciplines, they are practices; things one needs to encounter over and over not because you've forgotten or are unable to learn but because the act of encounter and re-encounter is an end in itself even as it is a pathway to a place both familiar and always new.

I was delighted to find the quote by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings to post on the homepage of daily headspa today. Rawlings wrote "The Yearling." Not as flashy as the books by the more current JK Rowling, but it did win a Pulitzer Prize in 1939.

My connection to Rawlings is through a place, her place in Florida. Here's what wikipedia has to say about it:

In 1928, with a small inheritance from her mother, the Rawlingses purchased a 72 acre (290,000 m²) orange grove near Hawthorne, Florida, in a hamlet named Cross Creek for its location between Orange Lake and Lochloosa Lake. She brought the place to international fame through her writing. She was fascinated with the remote wilderness and the lives of Cross Creek residents, her Cracker neighbors, and felt a profound and transforming connection to the region and the land.[6][7] Wary at first, the local residents soon warmed to her and opened up their lives and experiences to her. Marjorie filled several notebooks with descriptions of the animals, plants, Southern dialect, and recipes and used these descriptions in her writings.[8]

My brother and I went to the University of Florida which is in nearby Gainesville. Our family went out to the Yearling Restaurant once, a dark-paneling sort of place more cracker shack than eatery. More like a fish camp, really (fish camps are a middle Florida institution; rickety old places covered in Spanish moss and creaking with the tales of old fishermen). While we were there the power went out. I remember filling up on Sprite while we waiting for light to eat by. And I remember eating "cooter" or turtle. Mostly, I remember being there as a family, having a tiny adventure together in this exotic place off the beaten track at a time when the family connection was stretched as far as it ever had been...we kids were moving on and we wouldn't be back again.

Song of a Place

On the daily headspa blog we've just started a new weekly topic - sense of place is what we're looking into this week.

In the first post of the week today we brought up the way music connects us to place, using an interview from a program on Sunday night here in Australia with Lucinda Williams. You can read that excerpt, get to the vodcast with Lucinda, and find out more about Nacogdoches, Texas here at today's post on daily headspa.

In reflecting on the topic and the post myself tonight, I remembered this poem by Dennis Brutus: It's not a song, but it's title evokes the way music and memories of place are so often fused. Poetry is music anyway, eh?

Nightsong: City

Sleep well, my love, sleep well:
the harbour lights glaze over restless docks,
police cars cockroach through the tunnel streets;

from the shanties creaking iron-sheets
violence like a bug-infested rag is tossed
and fear is immanent as sound in the wind-swung bell;

the long day's anger pants from sand and rocks;
but for this breathing night at least,
my land, my love, sleep well.


The poem, which I found in a book I bought in one iconic place where I have lived, London, reminds me of another iconic place that is so very special to me, Alice Springs in the central desert of Australia. It's a place I want to sing to, a place of sand and rocks and violence and the day's long anger. It makes sense to me that the poet is a South African freedom fighter in terms of this connection to Alice, a place with its own still open wounds of struggle and colonial racism.

Dennis Brutus was imprisoned on Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela was also imprisoned. Tonight I am remembering a time of singing in Alice Springs, singing freedom songs in the community choir; songs about Robben Island. For me it was a time and place of great connection to other people, to the land, to a sense of place that, while not my own, nevertheless drew me in.