My Daughter Asleep
Carrying a child,
I carry a bundle of sleeping
future appearances.
I carry my daughter
adrift on my shoulder,
dreaming her slender dreams
and I carry her beneath the window,
watching her moon lit palm open and close
like a tiny folded map,
each line a path that leads where I can’t go,
so that I read her palm not knowing what I read
and
walk with her in moon light on the landing,
not knowing with whom I walk,
making invisible prayers to go on with her where
I can’t go,
conversing with so many unknowns that must know her more
intimately than I do.
And so to these unspoken shadows and this broad night
I make a quiet request to the great parental darkness
to hold her when I cannot, to comfort her when I am gone,
to help her learn to love the unknown for itself,
to take it gladly like a lantern for the way before her,
to help her see where ordinary light will not help her,
where happiness has fled, where faith will not reach.
My prayer tonight for the great and hidden symmetries of life
to reward this faith I have and twin her passages of loneliness with friendship,
her exiles with home coming, her first awkward steps with promised onward leaps.
May she find in all this, day or night, the beautiful centrality of pure opposites,
may she discover before she grows old, not to choose so easily between past and present,
may she find in one or the other her gifts acknowledged.
And so as I helped to name her, I help to name these powers,
I bring to life what is needed, I invoke the help she’ll want
following those moonlit lines into a future uncradled by me but parented by all I call.
As she grows away from me, may these life lines grow with her, keep her safe,
so
with my open palm whose lines have run before her to make a safer way,
I hold her smooth cheek and bless her this night into all these other unknown
nights to come.
-David Whyte
I have posted this poem before… and I’m sure I will again. We dropped Izze off at cam[ but before we did we stopped by the museum at Bethel, N.Y.
Izze and Vanessa look at the Woodstock signboard
Foto by Jorma Kaukonen
‘You might find this interesting,’ I say. In my mind, ‘Perhaps not.’ We walk through the gates and buy tickets.
Wasn't that a time?
Foto by Jorma Kaukonen
The Woodstock memory is so interesting to me almost fifty years down the road… in many ways like a dream! The kids don’t seem to see kids, just strange people from another time.
a girl surrounded by another world...
Foto by Jorma Kaukonen
We walk about… surrounded by the past.
Through a glass darkly
Foto by Jorma Kaukonen
She marks time, diligently waiting for the Woodstock experience to fade into arrival at camp.
What was it all about anyway?
Foto by Jorma Kaukonen
And then it was time to drop her for… for the next month. All this and she turned 12 today.
And then I was home…
Meanwhile, back at the Ranch...
Drone shot by Jorma Kaukonen
I miss that girl…
