If I hadn’t gone down to the studio today to try to find a bee and flowers to decorate the hors d’oeuvre plate I took to Jim’s memorial, I would have missed seeing this wonderful flower in its prime, snuggled up against the down ramp from my bedroom terrace to the lower garden and studio. I keep forgetting to go down and see what new surprises appear there daily.
See Cee’s wonderful bearded iris here: https://ceenphotography.com/2018/05/20/flower-of-the-day-may-21-2018-bearded-iris/
A fine poet and wonderful man passed away a few days ago, just a few days before the private launch party for his newest book of poetry, The Alphabet of Longing and Other Poems. Today, I attended the memorial and celebration of life for Jim Tipton that took the place of festivities meant to be his book launch. In all, there were two hours of tributes and readings from Jim’s work. For my tribute, I wrote this brief poem in which I try to wed a number of the loves of his life: bee keeping, poetry and his appreciation of women.
The Bee Keeper
A keeper of words,
he was a tender man with fine vision
and a honeyed tongue adept at sharing it.
A man who loved women,
but not a ladies man,
his heart could stretch to fit everyone.
He was the one among us who knew how to see the other side.
A champion of the beleaguered,
when most found fault, he always had a kind word to say.
Words lived with him. He set them free and always grew more.
Poetry buzzed around him like bees.
He was a man who knew both bees and how to be.
Because Jim missed this party, I wanted to include these photos of him enjoying the last party I saw him at—last September’s awards luncheon for El Ojo del Lago. As you can see, he was a man who knew how to enjoy life to its fullest. Those of us who knew him through the poetry or music world, his neighbors and his family will feel the huge space left by his exit from our lives. Fly free, lovely man.
Jim’s earlier book of poetry Letters from a Stranger (with an introduction by Isabel Allende) may be purchased here: https://www.amazon.com/Letters-Stranger-James-Tipton/dp/0965715922
His newest book, The Alphabet of Longing, will be available on Amazon in June. It is presently available at Diane Pearl’s Colecciones and Yves Restaurant in Ajijic.
Agave Marias
Two sides are battling for possession of my life. One pushes me ahead, urging, “Do, do, do, and you will be of value,” but the other twines a hand around my ankle and pulls me down to earth and whispers, “Be.” The “Proud Marys,” I have named these contrasting women who emerge one at a time from my center, but since I have lived in Mexico for seventeen years now, perhaps Maria would be a better shared name. A name is all they share, for by their own natures one is an outward person: a doer, a liver of life, a socializer. The other is inner: a reclusive watcher, dreamer, thinker, artist and writer.
Some people know how to balance these voices, but I don’t. And so I live on a little seesaw of made and canceled plans, meetings and random days of alternately reading, writing, watching movies or wandering around my house attending to my ever-lengthening “to do” list. What is life, I wonder? Is it your accomplishments? I have lists of those I seem to have less and less willpower to sit down to and finish. It’s like I have to sacrifice the satisfaction of ticking things off a list for the promise of a different kind of life.
I don’t think I’ve every really felt I had significance other than as a doer of things: artist, writer, committee chairman, decorator of houses, organizer of my friends’ lives. Yet during all of this activity, I always suspected that all around me people were leading lives that were more fun than mine, more satisfactory. If I gave more, did more, accomplished more, I thought I would attract this ideal life to me.
A tour guide once explained to me the importance of the agave plant in Mexico. For the Mexican of the past, the agave was what the buffalo was to the American plains Indian. Different parts of the agave plant were used to make rope, housing, clothing, food, dye and last but never least, mescal—the finest of tequila-like alcohol. So perhaps I should call my Marias the Agave Marias. Between them, they furnish me with all of the necessities of life. One says organize, proceed in a linear fashion. The other says, “Brainstorm. Go with the flow. Let process win over need for a perfect product.” So I let one Maria lead me through my mind and put it all down on paper, now and then letting the other Maria pop in to clean things up a bit and organize. Agave Marias, furnishing it all.
Childless, have I instead created all of the possibilities for myself within myself? In refusing to give birth, have I hoarded all of the possibilities of my genes within myself and is that what has led to this slightly schizophrenic seesaw of existence-—one day running off for an entire day of activity, the next staying home behind walls? One side wanting to be Cinderella at the ball, the other side wanting only the security of my own hearth?
I was married for fourteen years and before that lived with another man for three years, I’ve also had female roommates, but most of my life has been lived alone. There is some part of me that only exists in solitude and when I’m too long away from her, I miss her. Without her I feel superficial. It is from this side of my Agave Maria that I draw all of my real nourishment—my creativity, my soul. The other Maria is my reward—the finished product, the publication party or the book tour.
All of the seed I hoarded has given birth to these different entities within myself. Failing to produce offspring, I have become my own offspring. These children, my Marias, journey out from me but always return to the wellspring. I go to the party but come home to snuggle into bed for the entire next day, venturing out only for popcorn and a different CD. Or I sit on the side of the tub for two hours with my laptop on my lap, writing a story which takes me into a wonderful world of my own creation.
It is Christmas, and in the background, a chorus sings what to my ears becomes, “Agave Mar-eee-e-e-e-aaaah,” and the beautiful notes convince me, for a short time, that I am the mother of creation, the one Maria that all of Mexico celebrates, tattoos upon their chests, dyes into their T-shirts, puts on decals and bumper stickers, commemorates in stone or plaster or clay or wood in every house. She is the spirit of duality in all women and in all men: flesh and spirit, of this world as well as heaven, of the utilitarian and the creative, human and divine.
All of us are Agave Marias, learning to collect ourselves and pull all sides of ourselves in to ourselves to appreciate them. We are our own mothers as well as our sisters and daughters and friends. Within all of us are these Agave Marias, like sisters absolutely indispensable to each other who are nonetheless competing for our attention.
“Honor them by listening to each,” Mother Maria says to me and suddenly I realize that there are more than two Agave Marias within me. This third motherly Maria seeks to reconcile the others and whispers, “Look deeper. There is always one more. All welcome. All part of life.”
The daily prompt was Narcissism. Since I had already written on this topic in April, I chose a slightly different slant on this prompt, concentrating on the different sides of myself in a slightly nacissistic manner. My original Narcissism poem, published in April for NaPoWriMo is HERE.
These glorious trees are still blooming all over town. I want to stop and photograph every one I see, but usually resist.
For Becca’s Sunday Trees prompt.
This sunny visitor was the single bloom on its bush today. With a beauty like this, one is enough.
The Advantages of Complication
We need not suffer tremulation
over each new complication.
Problems can be an education
giving you a short vacation
from life’s boring replication
and furnishing a daily ration
of a brand new excitation.
Even outright consternation
can lead us to boredom’s cessation,
leading us to the elation
of a full heart’s palpitation
that leads to life’s renovation.
The prompt word today is complication.
Don’t let them in!!!!
I almost missed these little beauties on this volunteer guava tree in my front garden.
Enlarge all photos by clicking on any one.
Highchair Fashionista
Her mania for haute couture
came a little premature
when she first crawled across the floor,
wanting to see Grandma’s Dior.
When she took her first steps and fell,
it was reaching for Auntie’s Chanel.
The words she learned at Mama’s knee
were Calvin Klein and Givenchy.
Her alphabet from A to V
(from Armani up to Versace)
she learned in closets of her kin
dreaming of how she’d look in
Louis Vitton, Laurent, Bill Blass.
She’d be the best-dressed in her class
of other girls in cut-off jeans
and dresses made by mere machines.
Thus are fashionistas made.
As other children sell lemonade
or waste their days in hide-and-seek,
they are fingering La Fabrique
and looking at the fold and drape
of a model’s evening cape.
To each their own, we’re given to say,
and yet I’m prone to saying “Nay,
childhood might be better spent
in pastimes of another bent.”
I’d hope that kids from zero to twelve
might be more encouraged to delve
into comics or games or nature
with no stylish nomenclature.
Let kids be freakish, free and nerdy.
Let their clothes get torn and dirty.
Time enough for fashion cults
later, when they’re grown adults.
The prompt today was premature.
I’ve been resisting posting this photo, which actually isn’t a flower, but the end result of a flower: green papayas and the cut off stems. Still waiting for them to ripen and end up on my breakfast table.
For: Cee’s flower prompt
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 