For all the differences between my brother and me, there are deep similarities that can take people a while to recognize. We’ve both lived away from home for much of our adult lives, we’ve lost the family members who made the bridges between us obvious. Now, at this stage of life, we are losing those who knew us when, those who totally understood how we are connected.
City mouse, country mouse, we understand each other far better than people would expect. One of our family traits is information gathering. We go about it differently, but we are both persistent in our pursuit. I don’t know what he takes from my researching, but I listen to him and tuck things away in my brain and/or heart to pull out when I’m writing. Something will prompt me to recollect what he has discovered about this or that and it suddenly has relevance to my work.
At some point, Tom became interested in a book on ponds. We grew up in a small town, on the outskirts of which were a fair number of ponds. With family and friends, we spent many a summer afternoon hopping off docks into their refreshing waters and cool slimy bottoms and many a winter day skating. My bad ankles and worse balance have caused me to relinquish skating — yet if there aren’t snapping turtles, I’m still hopping off the dock.
Here’s the interesting tidbit from his recounting of his reading that has lingered in my imagination. People built by ponds, or they built on ponds, because ponds contained all the life and beauty they needed. Fish swam in the water and edible plants grew in it. Ponds supplied water for all their needs… drinking, cooking, bathing, etc. And if the pond was big enough, people could pull up the docks that connected them to the land and remain protected from incursion from outside. My brother and I were both caught in that romance, yet it manifested so differently in us.
Tom first built two and then a third pond on the mountain property that was his wife’s legacy. The first was an experiment with the concept of a pond; the third is a waterhole for wandering animals. Wait, you wonder what about the second? Well, the second is the great work, stocked with fish who will thrive there. Native Pennsylvania plants and wildflowers grow around its edges and in its waters. He built a cottage with a great view overlooking the pond. Many a family dinner has been shared under the overhang with everyone vying for the best view of both the water and the fire pit, which was built between the pond and the porch. Needless to say, it is this pond that has a great dock from which hopping is encouraged.
Bear with me as I switch gears. The information I tucked away on ponds, their purposes and the pleasure they offer, has lingered with me. Love of water is part of our family’s inheritance. Tom makes a place for it, my father Sam, worked with the municipal works to keep our water drinkable and to process the sewage so it wouldn’t damage our watershed. My mother Betty painted it, my sister Deb and I have floated, skinny-dipped, raced, canoed and flat out enjoyed it whenever we could. Now there’s only Tom and me and we’re both holding tightly to our water responsibilities! This is family tradition I both honor and utterly delight in.
At the moment, I am working on poems on my Peacemaker Tarot Cards. As I was rereading the first poem in my collection, something there stopped me. In writing these cards, I shaped them. Now, in using them, they are shaping me. I move with them in the vessel that holds both the beliefs that underlay the cards and the ways that by calling those beliefs by name, I am being transformed. That first poem also helped me understand how deeply my thinking has been influenced by the image I chose for the back of my cards. Subsequent poems have only confirmed this.
On the back of each card is a dual image of one of my mother’s paintings of the Catawissa Water Gap. It is an image that holds both my heart and my childhood memories. This painting was done at the town park where we picnicked and played. The town pool (a beloved chlorinated pond) is less than a quarter mile from where my mother would have stood to capture the river’s strength and beauty. When searching for the appropriate image for the card backs, it dawned on me that if I made mirror images of the paintings and joined them together, it created something interesting, beautiful, and just right. The reverse images matched perfectly and created a pond. A life container. A life giver. A life reminder. I had succeeded in seeding those cards with wisdom that would grow within that sacred vessel. Now those various pieces of knowledge are changing me. The poems are a way to offer that deepening insight to the world.
Those seeds continue to grow in me as I review and rework the cards. With each reading and each reworking of text, they become richer, more fruitful. I am only now beginning to understand that when we begin to change how we see some small piece of ourselves, that transformation can radically change both us and what we created. It’s really quite a miraculous thing if we let it happen.
This Möbius of poetry contains one direction of gathering my knowledge to write and one direction allowing my reading of the poem to inform, shape, and stretch my understanding of these cards. And all of that — the seeds and the growth — are held in the great sacredness of a fantasy lake, or more rightly said, a pond filled with the waters of the mighty Susquehanna River.
That river has welcomed me back to Pennsylvania and held my prayers since I returned from California. Reflecting upon my mother’s representation of the river led me to re-imagine my Tarot cards. As my Wisdom deepens, so does my recognition walk — swim? — a Möbius of Painting and Writing about Water. Understanding that, I can help others work through the elements that call to them. These cards are meant to help us all re-imagine ourselves and the world and reconsider the way we think about our work and responsibilities — from a place of deep Peace and the reflection of the Earth’s Beauty.
This re-imagining offers us yet another way to make Peace together.
How ready are you to re-imagine Peace and how we can be Peacemakers together? I think we can do amazing things together.
Salaam, Shalom, Peace, and Blessed Be!