The whole world is afire, lit with blazes

Today, I revisited a former blog post from a friend and fellow writer, Celinda (here). She talks about listening to the quiet, and it struck me particularly this time (for more reasons than her Annie Dillard reference…though we all know I live and breathe that woman’s written words).

See, I was thinking about this concept yesterday afternoon…I had the afternoon off and excitedly chose to go to a park with a towel & a book to read the day away. As I stretched out on my stomach, I tried to read and just couldn’t. I looked around the lawn and saw a handful of people reading along, so I would try again to no avail.

I was so distracted by the calm of nature. When I heard the birds, I would think of the birds. When I heard an insect buzzing, I stopped and tried to find him in the grass. When the sunlight hit my book page in a warm and unfolded way, I had to stop and watch it.

The natural world is a place of peace, but I’m seeing that peace doesn’t always mean silent and unmoving. Nature is neither of those things. It is constantly moving and alive and growing, rounding all those corners in a buzz. And it’s doing all those things entirely outside of us.

Because nature doesn’t need us to thrive,
but my own thriving has everything to do with nature.

 

 

All Content © Jess Mansour Scherman

My eyes so soft

[Hafiz]

Don’t
surrender
your loneliness so quickly.
Let it cut more
deep.

Let it ferment and season you
as few human
or even divine ingredients can.

Something missing in my heart tonight
has made my eyes so soft,
my voice so
tender,

my need of God
absolutely
clear.

The morning after rainfall

The almost-sun brings a glow to the gray sky,
still gray.

In absence of backlight, tree leaves are their own fixture,
bright and questioning,

blues lacing the holes of speakers, I pray for something
majestic
        a sign to push me to one side,

and yet, I continue over that bridge, neon
trees to my shoulders

                         as gray becomes white.

All Content © Jess Mansour Scherman

The resurrection of the dead saints and martyrs

Those nights when the cold bites straight to our bones
without trying.
No one speaks, hoping to keep every ounce of heat
in our bodies still.
So we stand, we look, we breathe lightly,
and wonder if we’re really there
                                 or how long we will last if we are.

              Seasonal;

We get lost in the leaves, folding in on us,
lost in the empty spaces between words, trying
to climb through the seconds between blinks of our own eyes.
The lashes will catch us, you say,
                                 so we keep walking.

              When the seasons stop spinning

and the dead rise among us;
     out of chaos, life is being found,
hands grabbing at wine stems and bike handles,
grabbing at the hands of the spirits on the other side of the curtain, reconciled
to an existing reality.

Circles of ghosts, circles of dust:
                                 we all sleep in the dust of the earth.

All Content © Jess Mansour Scherman

Sitting on someone else’s porch

Early afternoon. It’s March, but feels like June. The sky is cloudless, touches of moisture lace the air, and I am surrounded by white curtains. On every wall, stretched across the windows; the sunlight that sifts through is soft and aerated, and the way it folds in on me makes me think I’m enveloped in the clouds, accented with wicker furniture. Before I can prevent the inevitable cliché, my mind draws images of heaven, wondering if there will be white curtains like these. Though surely they won’t be paired with cigarette butts, two small dogs constantly vying for my attention, and the intermittent commercial to interrupt the music from my Pandora station. And surely I would not wake in heaven and dress myself in a worn sporting goods t-shirt & mismatched floral skirt, hair knotted back into a bun for fear of sweating on it. And surely my writing in heaven would not be primarily encouraged by my own infatuation with the shadow the sun casts behind my pen with each movement. And surely my fingers wouldn’t be swelling from the heat, leading me to remove my wedding band and set it on the table next to my coffee cup—consequently making me think of my husband while he works, sweating over his tools, cursing the same heat I am celebrating. And surely, in heaven, he would be with me. Next to me. And my thoughts of him wouldn’t  be interrupted by these dogs licking at my toes and casting protective barking fits toward any passing man or squirrel who looks at me wrongly.

The more I think of heaven, the more mesmerized and lost I feel, knowing that it could just as easily be this front porch as  it could be streets of gold and gates of pearl. That people could just as easily bring their cigarettes and their dogs as they could bring their dancing and golden crowns & chalices.

I often ask myself: what is your salvation? Because yes, at its core, it can be God, but I sometimes get this feeling that God sends us things to save us here, on earth, to save us while we’re living—a mother you wish to never part from, a lover who feeds your soul every time you breathe, a craft that brings you to life through your practicing it.

As much as I [and the rest of us] am unsure about heaven and the eternal, I somehow know that those things must be a part of it, whether there are white curtains & wicker furniture, or not.

All Content © Jess Mansour Scherman

Connectedness

[an excerpt from Nicole Krauss' novel, The History of Love]

As a child my mother and my aunts used to tell me that I would grow to become handsome. It was clear to me that I wasn’t anything to look at then, but I believed that some measure of beauty might come to me eventually. I don’t know what I thought: that my ears, which stuck out at an undignified angle, would recede, that my head would somehow grow to fit them? That my hair, not unlike a toilet brush in texture, would, with time, unkink itself and reflect light? That my face, which held so little promise—eyelids as heavy as a frog’s, lips on the thin side—would somehow transform itself into something not regrettable? For years I would wake up in the morning and go to the mirror, hoping. Even when I was too old to continue hoping, I still did. I grew older and there was no improvement. If anything, things went downhill as I entered adolescence and was abandoned by the pleasant attractiveness that all children have. The year of my Bar Mitzvah I was visited by a plague of acne that stayed four years. But still I continued to hope. As soon as the acne cleared, my hairline began to recede, as if it wanted to disassociate itself from the embarrassment of my face. My ears, pleased with the new attention they now enjoyed, seemed to strain farther into the spotlight. My eyelids drooped—some muscle tension had to give to support the struggle of the ears—and my eyebrows took on a life of their own, for a brief period achieving all anyone could have hoped for them, and then surpassing those hopes and approaching Neanderthal. For years I continued to hope that things would turn out differently, but I never looked in the mirror and confused what I saw for anything but what it was. With time I thought about it less and less. Then hardly at all. And yet. It’s possible that some small part of me has never stopped hoping—that even now there are moments when I stand in front of the mirror, my wrinkled pischer in my hand, and believe my beauty is yet to come.

One of the greatest beauties of storytelling is that through sharing little vignettes of seemingly obscure happenings or thought processes, things so much deeper can be communicated to the readers, even things not initially intended by the writer.

Through reading this passage, a profound concept struck me; no, it wasn’t that we should all love ourselves or that we should embrace the unique attributes of our appearances (although those concepts are important in their own right). Rather, I was struck with the idea of connectedness that is so very present in this passage.

The way the writer uses the speaker in this part of the story to describe his face—the eyes, the ears, the eyebrows, the hairline, the lips…and how they’re all connected, how one of those things offsets the other, how if the ears weren’t a certain way, the eyes, too, would be different. The face is divided into parts that all work together to create the whole—and so it is with our whole bodies, with our minds, with our entire being, really. The texture of my hair, then, by extension through some sordid circle of connectivity, affects my thoughts on philosophy or religion, and vice versa.

So it also is with people. We’ve all heard about those studies conducted about the six degrees of separation—the idea that we are all but six steps away from any other person on Earth.  It’s fascinating when you think about it in those terms, really how much of an affect our individual living has on the rest of the world. And to think of it under those precepts really makes a person call into question his or her own living.

My thought process, for example, went from musings on my eyes in relation to my lips, to my mind’s take on war in relation to how many steps my feet take in day, to my actions of love in relation to the way my next-door-neighbor goes on with his living. This kind of thinking puts a new weight on the daily decisions we make, the things we choose to fight for, speak on, write about.

I guess this is all to say that I sometimes get caught up in the apparent unimportance of the things I spend my time on or with…but those things are important, because, as some would say, by six degrees or fewer, they are affecting the entire world.

Idea vs. Skill

I wait tables every Wednesday night, which means that each week I find myself with a full daytime open to fill with whatever I desire. Of course, I use this time to rest and prepare myself for the stretch of hectic days to come. But I think we’ve all had those days where having virtually no agenda can drive us crazy. Well, that was this past Wednesday for me.

I woke up, enjoyed some coffee, watched the news, prepared some breakfast, and then sat down to some ever-reliable Netflix. Well, if you know me well, you’ll know that I’m kind of a busybody. Very rarely can I just sit and do nothing. In fact, I have to be doing about three things at a time to stay occupied—just ask my husband, it drives him crazy. So, drinking coffee + eating breakfast + watching Netflix did it for me for a while, but once the coffee mug & breakfast plate were clean, I got antsy. I didn’t have any knitting projects to continue or start, surfing the interwebs didn’t sound all that alluring to me, the apartment was already clean…so I watched the London-based film, “Me Without You,” tapping my toes together trying to figure what to do with myself.

Then it hit me—as my bookshelves, holding almost 300 books and counting, stared back at me, I  realized something daunting…I had never alphabetized these precious gems! I know, I know, boredom at it’s finest. But once that hit me, it was the most important thing in the world.

If you didn’t know it before, now you do: I’m a huge literary nerd.

I made some tea, crawled onto my living room floor, and started carefully removing books from the shelves one-by-one, placing them in their respective piles (alphabetized by the author’s last name…because I couldn’t get any more creative than that), all the while smiling—no lie. I loved it.

That part was fun. It gave me a chance to re-visit books that I hadn’t seen in a while. As they passed through my hands, I thought about when I first came into contact with each book, I opened a few up for a quick sighting of passages I had underlined in the past or words I had scribbled into the margins, and in some cases, I would find myself wondering why I’ve held onto that particular book for as long as I have [mostly books bought for different classes over the years].

This will sound silly to most, but I know there are a few of you who will understand this next part exactly: it was almost an emotional experience for me. It was like re-visiting old friends who had once shared with me their wise, wise words—people who had pushed me even deeper into my dream, ones who inspired me to keep writing, or maybe try a different style of writing. In any case, they pushed me, and I can never discredit them for that.

Once the initial emotion and reminiscing wore off, I started to think even more deeply about the writing process. It can be daunting to think of all of the meticulous and tiresome work that went into completing any particular book. I thought of that writer receiving critique after critique, possibly rejection after rejection over the years, and still making the choice to keep moving forward and continue writing…and that someday, it paid off. He or she wrote a book that touched someone.

There is a really important relationship that happens in the process of writing, and that relationship is between idea and skill. The way I look at it, you can be the most fanciful and idealistic person in the world, but without dipping your toes in the discipline of writing, the skill and technicality of it, all you’ll ever have are the ideas.

And contrastingly, if you spend painstaking hour after painstaking hour practicing grammatical law, learning craft and nothing else, but never entertain the wonderings of your mind, never letting yourself explore the idea world…well, your writing will be empty and flat.

It’s a frustrating balance to maintain, to say the least. But to be able to look at nearing 300 books (give or take a few) and acknowledge that these people did it right, they achieved it…well, it’s my motivation. It’s my push to keep writing until, even just for one poem or story, I do it right and I motivate someone else to keep writing, practicing, and searching for the inspiration that pushes them over the edge in the best possible way.

Theories of Light

Waves, particles, a glory, and knowing where you stand,
     or that you stand.

A spirit that hovers over water
out of reach, out of sight, and, but sometimes,
out of knowing.

We can float on our backs through the bay
like we used to, noting the sky
as it dips to deep purple and navy,
talk about our hearts, our hands,
say things like, I’ve always wanted this,
and I never asked for this.

But once we’re pulled into the sky
so deep, light can no longer cast a color, or shadow,
     or anything, really,

                         we’re lost.

How many degrees to this thing called glory,
to knowing yourself and being known,
to knowing how far they’ll let you travel into it?

To navigate the colorless vault of sky by candle light,
look toward that dark corner, and say,
I see you,

                                   well, that’s enough for now.

All Content © Jess Mansour Scherman

Love where you live

I have never lived alone. In fact, for the last five years of my life, I have moved every single year—whether it’s in & out of dorm buildings, to & from my parents’ house, into a 4 bedroom/1 bathroom house with 5 other 20-somethings, or now moving into a cozy apartment with my husband, at the end of every lease, it’s the same deal: pack up everything I so meticulously arranged and displayed over the last year, take multiple trips with multiple cars until I find myself at a new place surrounded by boxes and empty walls. Needless to say, I hate moving.

That fact in itself leaves me with an empty feeling, knowing that at the end of our current lease, we will once again be moving. To where? We have no idea. But we know we don’t want to stay here. That said, I’m a huge advocate for loving where you live. I think it’s important to feel alive in the space you spend the most of your time in. So even though there are plenty of cons to our current home, and even though we’re already six months in, I am still doing everything I can to make this place one that we love.

A few months back, I did a post on our apartment decor [you can see it here], all the while noting to myself and all of you that it was far from complete. Well, I think we’re finally getting there. We put up curtains, added some birdcages here & there, moved furniture around, and the like (some of which I’ve shown you, others of which I haven’t).

Monday mornings usually go like this: Tony wakes up around 6:30, quietly leaves the bedroom, and gets ready for his work day. See, instead of the usual Saturday/Sunday weekend, mine is Sunday/Monday. So around 7:30, he’ll come in to say a quick goodbye, give me a kiss, and leave for work. This morning, he woke up at 6:30 as usual, but I never got my goodbye kiss. I rolled over, the clock read “8:22,” and then Tony came through the door exclaiming with a smile that he didn’t have to go in to work! Surprises like that are always the best.

He made me coffee, we played Mario Kart on Wii (obviously), and then deep-cleaned the whole apartment. After going to lunch and running some errands, we found ourselves with an open afternoon to complete some projects we started in the past, but never completed. The first is one I just posted about last week: the window wall decor. I finished the piece itself, but we never found time to run to the hardware store to get some hooks & wire to hang it. Well, that we did.

[still pardon the shabby cell phone photos]

We hung it in the corner of our living room, perpendicular from a triad of antique book-page prints.

I’m extremely happy with it. It’s not slap-you-in-the-face girly, but it does add a hint of femininity. And for anyone who has their doubts, we have the token junior-sized football placed appropriately on the rocking chair in the foreground.

The second project we were able to complete has always been an intended focal point for our bedroom. Until now, we’ve had a huge slab of empty wall above our bed. But today, we happily filled it with a creation of mirrors and an old tree branch.

On top of being lovely and nature-inspired, it was super easy to make. We used yarn tied in knots over the branch to hang the mirrors at altering lengths.

The last addition to our place is an ever-so-lovely vintage typewriter.

Here it is, in all it’s glory. And next to it, my wedding bouquet, and a beautiful photograph of my mother when she was in her early twenties. We’ve got all of this set up next to our semi-new hi-fi phonograph console.

I have been called eclectic by many. I have a deep love for things that are vintage, unique, and have a certain charm to them that I can never quite name. This, in tandem with my affinity for frequenting antique & thrift shops, leaves me with more gems than I know what to do with. Tony has assured me that someday we’ll have a house with enough space for everything, but for now, there is not a square yard of this place that is not occupied by one (or a dozen) of these charms. And for now, we love it.

Window Wall Decor

A couple days ago, I went perusing through antique shops with my mom. We had some specific things in mind that we were looking for, but that didn’t stop us from letting our eyes and minds wander through the corners and possibilities of each shop. We did end up finding what we set out to find, but in addition, I walked away with a vintage Smith & Corona typewriter and an old, chipping window frame.

I was so excited about my finds. When my husband got home that evening, he instantly loved the typewriter, affirming the charm it brought to our space. He then looked at the window frame absently (namely at the cracked pane of glass in the bottom right corner) and said in his most supportive [but not supportive] voice, “This is cool.”

Once I described my plans for the window, however, he started to come around, but was happy to leave it entirely in my hands. The first thing I did was sit in front of the dirty wood for 45 minutes with a toothbrush and some bleach, spiffing it up a bit. It may seem silly, but I really do think it made a difference—erased the dirt, but maintained the antique charm with the chipping, faded white paint. You can see the [albeit] slight transformation from left to right below.

[This is a good time to note that the battery for my camera has died, and it's charger is nowhere to be found. Thus, we are left with the photographic wonder of my cell phone. No, it's not an iphone. It's not even a smart phone. So we'll just have to make do.]

I then selected three of our engagement photos to be printed into glossy 8×10 portraits. Soon after, I ransacked my closet for old patterned skirts that I’d be willing to part with for the sake of a charming wall hanging. Finding myself torn between the options, I lined them up and stared at them, eventually adding the frame & photos atop to try to cure my indecision.

I decided to go with the muted florals, hoping my husband wouldn’t later scold me for making it too girly. But I figure, if I can willfully hang his Beastie Boys poster in our dining room, he can make do with some muted florals in the living room.

Now, the construction is about as classy as it can get. Tony has always been a firm believer in duct tape, even going so far as using it to patch holes in his favorite old comforter. He swears by it and always will. It was no surprise, then, that as I searched our apartment for some sort of adhesive with a bit more eloquence than duct tape, I was left empty-handed…duct tape would have to do. And it did! (Besides, no one sees the back of the frame, anyway!) I’m sure there are a dozen different ways to do this, so if you opt for something a little more high-class, I won’t stop you.

I did it square-by-square—it seemed easier to secure the photos that way. All it took was a quick measure, a few snips here and there, some abrasive rips of duct tape, and voila!

Soon it will be hanging on our wall next to the living room door, but I’ll wait to let Tony do that in hopes of avoiding shattered glass coating our shabby wood floor.

But there you have it: super easy, inexpensive, and charming.