A Patchwork by Steven L. Peck

She rests on her grandmother’s quilt,
the Spring air cool, but sun warming €”healing
Winter’s darkness.
She, face turned to the sun,
is thinking back on the line of mothers
who gave her being and body . . .   She thinks about
an Eve, way back . . .

Out of some Cambrian longing
her distant grandmother emerged
hard shelled, many limbed,
singular in purpose, only a
crustacean of sorts, but a
crustacean on its way somewhere.
What a piece of work, this creature.

There would be many cuts,
restitchings, corrections, additions,
before her story appeared leaping
onto this wet fabric, around this sun, in this
neighborhood of stars,
in this galaxy,  in this cluster, in this universe,
in this multiverse, in this embedding,

in this quilt.

She is a small thing compared to a star,
attached to eternity
by only a pineal of complexity €”maybe
netting consciousness from some other
place. Is she some eternal piecework or
does she arise like her
arthropod grandmother
new and shining from lesser things?

On this day, she notices that
a far more distant
relation has shed an apple
leaf, which spirals
downward with grace.

She, saturated in connections, turning
over, leans off the quilt
and breaths in the scent of fragrant
Spring grass,
face first, she smells existence
in the loam, and feels some of
Schopenhauer’s Will
wrapping its arms around her and whispering
sentences that that grandmother knew and
passed on to this mammal woman,
her child’s child and so on.
Mothers running backwards, for eons.

This patchwork on which she lies
is of certain origins, and
she can wrap herself in its squares
and enjoy its warmth and the mercy of
the long chain of its history and
its intent.

__________________________________________________________________

Steve Peck is an ecologist at Brigham Young University. He has a novel soon to be published, The Scholar of Moab, by Torrey House Press. Other creative works include a novel:  The Gift of the King’s Jeweler (2003 Covenant Communications); a self-published novella  A Short Stay in Hell (reviewed  here and  here), a short science fiction story:  The Flaw in the Lord Harrington Scenario, published in  HMS Beagle (online journal by Elsevier); poetry in  Dialogue,  Bellowing Ark,  BYU Studies,  Irreantum, Red Rock Review,  Glyphs III,  Pedestal Magazine, Tales of the Talisman (nominated for the Rhysling Award), Victorian Violet, and a chapbook of poetry published by the American Tolkien Society called  Flyfishing in Middle Earth.  Steve blogs at bycommonconsent.com and has a faith/science blog called The Mormon Organon.

For more of Steve’s writing published on WIZ, go here, here, here, here, and here.

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Feeling the life week on WIZ

If you’re doing the human being thing with any gusto, you’ve more than likely experienced moments of awakening, of not only feeling more alive yourself but of feeling the lives of others around touching your life, dancing through, affecting and changing who you are, entwining into your being (you can read about some of my awakenings here).   In my opinion, you can’t wind too deeply into life.   And no matter how deeply you do ravel, greater depths and more intricate braiding patterns remain.   If you learn them, they  weave you into a lively tapestry that changes nearly every breath you take.

This week on WIZ we’re celebrating that heady condition of feeling the life that you are and the life of others around, be they strangers or loved ones.   We’re singing songs of  relishing being alive  and of maturing through levels and stages of life.   Have fun, and readers, please feel free to raise in the comments your own thoughts about what it means to feel alive or to face the challenges that  circumstances have presented to your feeling as alive as you desire.

Let’s see what we can make of this third week of August 2009.