I received this poem in the mail on Friday from my best friend from college. I love getting real mail from a real friend.

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

-Mary Oliver

I planted broccoli, tomato, basil, brussels sprouts and cayenne peppers in the middle of March. I knocked over a couple of the tomato pots pre-sprout and my cat knocked over some of the basil. Despite being knocked around a bit, some of the seeds have achieved sprout status.

This morning I pried apart wooden pallets and this afternoon, with help, reassembled them into a raised vegetable garden bed.

Last week I checked out the Girl Culture photography exhibit at the Gallery in Trinity Commons. I recommend the exhibit to anyone who has the time to check it out, but I confess that I left Trinity feeling a little disturbed.

The photographs were selected from some of Lauren Greenfield's books and are photo-journalistic in style. Greenfield collected images of females at fat camps, at inpatient eating disorder clinics, at charm schools, playing dress-up, backstage at strip clubs and other uncomfortable and disordered female situations.

Had I looked at just one or two of the photographs, my reaction would have been, "well, it is too bad for those poor women and boy don't they have problems." However, the pervasiveness of society's unreasonable expectations for women is undeniable when the photos are viewed as a group and I admit my place on that neurotic continuum even though I try to rise above it.

Girl Culture is at the Gallery at Trinity Commons until April 28, 2007.
Exhibit Hours:
Tuesday: 10-6 Friday: 10-6
Wednesday: 1-8 Saturday: 10-3
Thursday: 10-6 Sunday: 10-3
Closed Monday

Spring has arrived in Cleveland. I went to the Rocky River Reservation this afternoon to practice using my new camera. I am not an accomplished photographer, but I did my best to document the beginning of the season.

It’s usually a lie to color the sky blue with your crayons if you live in Cleveland. Typically the sky is some shade of gray. I have come to appreciate the subtleties of the color gray and check the sky daily to see which hue the day brings. There is the gray that is almost white (like today), but I can tell it’s not white only because the gulls contrast it. Sometimes the sky is steel gray and factory smoke looks white against it. There is the gray that makes the day look dusky and everyone’s automatic headlights come on. My favorite gray sky is when there is a broad wash of palest gray that is gets pushed aside by invading almost-black clouds as they are blown rapidly across the lake; this gray comes complete with a wind soundscape.

Yesterday there was a fire in my neighborhood. Someone told me that the house that burned was vacant. The damage is not good, but I met many of my neighbors for the first time as we watched it burn.

I just started reading the novel, The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread. This novel is by former Cleveland Press writer Don Robertson. I first read about this book from the Cleveland History Blog. I checked it out from the library and just finished the first chapter. It's a page-turner already.

i love you much(most beautiful darling)

i love you much(most beautiful darling)

more than anyone on the earth and i
like you better than everything in the sky

-sunlight and singing welcome your coming

although winter may be everywhere
with such a silence and such a darkness
noone can quite begin to guess

(except my life)the true time of year-

and if what calls itself a world should have
the luck to hear such singing(or glimpse such
sunlight as will leap higher than high
through gayer than gayest someone's heart at your each

nearness)everyone certainly would(my
most beautiful darling)believe in nothing but love

e.e. cummings



If Cleveland is going to heal, we have got to love it.