Today is the birthday of my sister, Karla, an inspired photographer of the natural and built worlds. Above are just a few of the images she has made into cards and sent to me over the last few months. She graciously allowed me to share them with you today, and it makes me very happy to do so.
My poem for today, “Stalking Beauty,” draws its inspiration not only from Karla’s generous spirit and her luminous art but from these specific images. Happy Birthday, Karla! And thank you for helping me to see more clearly the beauty and love all around me.
I was introduced to the poetry of Rumi (1207 to 1273 C.E.) by my dear friend, LaNelle Olson. When she travelled to Turkey, she returned with a small Persian carpet for my doll’s house and a small jar of dirt from the base of Rumi’s tomb.
LaNelle Olson, September 2003, Carleton Arboretum
Rumi’s poetry has continued to uplift and inspire me. I am grateful to contemporary American poet and translator Coleman Barks for providing the lens through which Rumi’s words can speak to me across the centuries. More recently, my friend and neighbor, poet and teacher Susan Jaret McKinstry, taught me about the poem, “Bird Wings,” to my attention. At her suggestion, I kept it on the refrigerator door and read it at least once a day until I had it memorized.
Bird Wings
Your grief for what you've lost lifts a
mirror
up to where you are bravely working.
Expecting the worst, you look, and
instead
here's the joyful face you've been
wanting to see.
Your hand opens and closes, and opens
and closes.
If it were always a fist or always
stretched open,
you would be paralyzed.
Your deepest presence is in every small
contracting and expanding,
the two as beautifully balanced and
coordinated
as bird wings.
RUMI (translation by Coleman Barks)
I receive similar inspiration from the photographic artistry of my sister, Karla Schultz. Below is one of her recent soaring images.
Hawk Soaring (Photo by Karla Schultz)
Background on My Poem “Ice Feathers”:
Today’s poem is a small meditation on stillness and motion, ice and air, what is inside and what is outside.
North Dakota Quarterly, Volume 88 1/2 (Summer 2021)
You can find the Table of Contents for this issue (and ways to order a copy or a subscription) HERE!) And in addition to the literary art inside, you can learn the backstory about the cover design.
This long-lived journal also has made the archives of its early decades available online for download (in four batches, covering the years 1910 to 2007–incredible riches.)
Happy Reading! LESLIE
(Photograph by Karla Schultz)(Photograph by Karla Schultz)(Photograph by Karla Schultz)(Photograph by Leslie Schultz)(Photograph by Leslie Schultz)
First things first! Today is the birthday of Karla, my dear sister, and I am celebrating all day long. In a way, I have been celebrating all year long, and the theme for today’s post centers on the that. First, though, I wanted to share with all of you (and with Karla’s permission) the most recent of the incredible images she sent me as a card in the mail. (As you probably know from other posts, Karla is a gifted photographer and artist. Often, when I talk with her, I hear the birds she feeds on her sixth-floor balcony, and I am in awe of her ability to capture them so unobtrusively and clearly in her photographs.)
Cedar Waxwing (photo by Karla Schultz)
Regarding the Poem for April 13, 2021: “A Quilt for Karla”
Since I began participating in the National Poetry Month Challenge in 2016, I have a tradition of making the poem that comes each April 13–whatever other prompt may come into play–centered on the great luck of having Karla as my sister. Today’s poem is no exception: it is inspired by her presence in my life.
The poem is, I suppose, an exploration of how love helps us piece together the scraps of life–whether in a cloth quilt or in a poem–into patterns that, while part of tradition, are also unique expressions of the moment, the individual, and the particular. And pieced in with that is an awareness of the news here and elsewhere that troubles the mind and heart deeply, how we need to balance that awareness with hope, because that is what love says to us, that hope is not empty but at least as real as pain. And that change, making something new, starts with an intention that is added to, day by day, and is not perfect but is still something well meant and useful that was not there before.
As a corollary, and with Karla’s permission, I am sharing photos of my process over the past year’s in designing (with Karla’s input on pattern and color) a special quilt for her sixtieth birthday. She has told me that it arrived safely, and that it does fit her new bed, and that it is not too warm at the moment for Atlanta weather. Check! Check! Check! I am sorry that I cannot be with her to celebrate on this special day, but I am just thrilled that she woke up this morning, and could look down and see something made just for her and know how much she is cherished in this world.
All the cutting, piecing, and quilting was done by hand, but (for the first time) I used a machine (given to me by my friend, Corrine Heiberg, her beloved Elna) to sew some of the long straight seams joining the blocks so as to make it stronger and longer-lasting.
Library Spotlight:
Among the great gifts of my time in the M.F.A. program in poetry at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana was honing my craft as a poet and taking my first hesitant stitches toward becoming a quilter. I had been enamored of quilting for several years when I arrived. No one in my family made quilts–though they sewed and knitted. I still wanted to learn, but, frankly, I had been going about it all wrong. Yes, timid bibliophile that I am, I had bought two books on the subject and read them, along with dozens of photograph-packed issues of Country Living Magazine. I suppose, I thought, that the skill might be absorbed through some from of ink-to-cloth osmosis? I wrote a poem (“The Book of Quilts”) inspired by an illustrated oral history that I have featured in another post, but I didn’t know how to take the first step toward making my own.
That didn’t happen. What did happen was that I mentioned my yearning to a classmate, Tom Ray. He said, “Oh, I can teach you how to quilt.” And he did, in one afternoon. That little kindly one-on-one lesson was all I needed to begin. I was off and running before the week was over, cutting out shapes for my first pieced project, a red and white “Drunkard’s Path.”
Also during my years at McNeese, when I worked at the Library’s circulation desk, I first learned of the compendium of Quilts in America by Patsy and Myron Orlofsky (Abbeville Publishers, 1974.) I checked this scholarly treasure trove out as many times as I could. A few years later, (when I had an income!) I learned it was out of print, but I located a used copy in great shape. (Trust me, this was a bit of a safari before access to the Internet.) I still refer to it, and am grateful for its existence.
Of the many books on quilting that I treasure, consult, and enjoy, this one is at the top of the list. The Quilts of Gee’s Bend (Tinwood Books, 2002) is the exhibition catalog for a dazzling collection of quilts that Karla took me to see almost twenty years ago at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta where she lives. If you don’t know about the Gee’s Bend, Alabama quilt artists, please take a few minutes to savor their artistry, history, resilience, and living tradition of women supporting each other, learning from each other, and delighting in inventing ways to bring beauty into the practical world of daily life.
On that visit with Karla, I was bowled over by what I saw, and no less so when my generous sister then made a gift to me of this magnificent volume.
Earth Day Flag (Designed by Peace Activist John McConnell)
Vantage Point April 22, 2020—50th Anniversary of Earth Day for Beth
There is a little climb ahead. It is worth it. I promise.
Yes. These prairie grasses are tall, already, in April. It is hard to see the trail today. But it is there, made by feet before us.
Look! A pleated gentian, blue as the sea. And a pink wild rose, sister to the apple and strawberry. Here’s the flick and bob of the prairie warbler, olive gold with a voice like silver bells. And over there, past the orb-weaving spider in her web, can it be a small stand of cacti, sheltering against a wall of white sand?
Yes. I see some char, some broken glass. I guess that is natural, too.
There is a compass plant, something to steer by, almost as tall as a tree. And there is the lone cedar, shaped by the wind, reaching, reaching…
Sure. Take a moment to catch your breath under this immense blue. It is true, there are a few storm clouds on the horizon infused with the colors of abalone, holding the rattle of thunder. Let us hope for some streaks of Promethean fire.
Tonight, the new moon offers new beginnings: Tomorrow and all the tomorrows ahead.
Leslie Schultz
I have been thinking a lot this spring about how the first Earth Day, back in 1970, arose from the catalyst of photographic vision–both scientific and poetic–from NASA’s first images of Earth from the vantage point of the Moon. We saw in a flash, it seemed, that this is a single if intricate whole that all of us share. We saw the beauty and the fragility, and that we are in this together–not just humanity but all of the forms life takes. That profound insight help to shape progressive legislation and a shared vision. I believe we are all experiencing something like that now, in this pandemic that knows no borders. My hope is that going forward we will be able to act on this insight so as to enlarge our sense of compassion and belonging, our confidence in the effectiveness of individual and collective actions to make a positive difference.
I think today’s poem might be a pencil sketch for a longer, more complicated poem that looks at the lives and works of John Muir, Rachel Carson, Aldo Leopold, and Gaylord Nelson. Perhaps others, too. On April 22, 2017, I published this villanelle, “Motif for Ansel Adams”, inspired by his own words. (I included there a link to a six-minute documentary–“Ansel Adams: Photography with Intention”.) I would like to do something similar for these other environmentalists, but I see I will need more than one day to think all that through.
When I was in high school, I received a writing award from the National Council of Teachers of English, and afterwards a signed letter from Senator Gaylord Nelson congratulating me. I wish I had known then of his stellar environmental record and of his own (much more influential) literary accomplishments. Now on my wish list? His last book, published in 2002:Beyond Earth Day: Fulfilling the Promise. I see there is also a new edition of Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac with an introduction by Barbara Kingsolver. At the urging of our friends, the Clarys, we have already ordered a copy of the documentary, Tomorrow. I hope it comes today.
Meanwhile, I shall just take it one step, one breath, at a time. Perhaps today will be the day for a trip to the McKnight Prairie Remnant near our home. If conditions are right. The vantage point there is unparalleled.
Happy Earth Day! LESLIE
Julia and Tim at the Aldo Leopold Home Site in Sand County, WI (Photo: Karla Schultz)Compass Point, Winona Street Labyrinth, Winter
