Young Woman

Alyssa Nevala, a second-generation “woman unbound” with a B.A. in Global Studies from the University of Washington. Her mother is a software engineer.

She walks proud and confident

to the university a mile away

and a life much farther

from the thousands of years

that once shackled

and diminished her,

used her womb and its entrance,

and cast the rest aside.

So many ghostly grandmothers

stand watching behind her,

this woman they could never be,

their sufferings and labor quiet

now, as then.

I watch, too; I am a man, after all.

But my admiration is not just visual.

It is also for the unrestrained poise,

the casual steps of feet set free.

She bears a pack full of books.

Not the child of sex feared or forced,

nor a load of wood and water,

nor the silken yoke of helplessness.

Jasmine Beishline, another second-generation “woman unbound.”

She is a woman: young, learning, capable.

A fellow human with her place to be.

She will vote, write, and decide,

perhaps even fight in a war for me.

And yet, I notice, smiling,

she still has chosen,

this woman unbound,

to let the scent of flowers linger in her wake.

—First posted on Facebook, 10/18/12.

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Thanks to Alyssa and Jasmine for permission to use their Facebook profile pics, and congratulations to their mothers for setting great examples. They’re brilliant women, all of them.

Live, and Be Alive

Do you have two legs at your command? Walk through forests and neighborhoods, leap and run for joy. Climb stairs with loads of laundry as some climb mountains with backpacks and dreams.

Arms and fingers that bend and move to your wishes? Feel what they touch, note the textures of the world around you. Caress and sense, support, sustain. Is this intricate mechanism of muscle and tendons, bone and joints best purposed for a clenched fist or an outstretched hand of friendship?

Do your eyes convey the light and vision of what’s around you? Look, then, and see. Find the beauty in every scene and face. Know that billions of neurons are locked in complex arrays of interconnection to interpret what your eyes have chosen to look upon. Make it worthy.

Do you have an ear—perhaps two—to hear what life has to say? Listen to the voices soft and loud, to the whispers of the wind, to the music in all its forms. A quiet place reveals rustles and creaks of life’s underside; all need not be loud and overbearing.

Think of the delicate hairs inside your ear, swaying in time to their own sections of the received symphony of sound–some slowly to discern low hums and groaning strings, others quivering fast to bring you alarms and put sharp edges on the music. Your brain performs wonders of spectral analysis to perceive the ambiance of nature and expressions of art and love. Yet it will strain with equal diligence to bring rants of hate and ignorance into your mind, should you choose to hear them instead. So choose wisely.

Catching Rays  [Flickr page]

Countless wonders are being enacted within to bring each day of life to you. The food you’ve just eaten has finished giving your tastes a savory reward for bothering to have a meal. Now it’s grinding into mash within your stomach, in readiness for its true molecular payload—to enrich your blood. Hidden red rivers carry tiny cargo-loads of oxygen and nourishment to the farthest reaches of your toes and brain, returning darkened and ready for the next run, in an endless cycle.

All the while, nerves blaze with impulses electrical, then chemical, then electrical again. The consciousness that you call yourself perceives only the tiniest fraction, the gurgles and pangs of hunger, the racing pulse of a new love or race run well. But it is there, all of it, just beneath the surface, for you.

You do not have a life; you are a life. The blueprint of your every cell carries the wisdom of eons. You are the final cut, the compilation of research done by untold painful experiments in life and death of long-departed faceless ancestors and many more others not so lucky as to be your ancestors.

You are a life finally able to contemplate itself. In that you are privileged beyond all other creatures, with a wisdom beyond measure. Live, then, and be alive.

—First posted on extoots and Facebook, 9/11/12

Reflections

Peaceful Lake  [Flickr page]

Today I have seen water lilies in still waters, and lichens pebbling the surface of dry rocks nearby. I watched the flurry of infant butterflies, and the running footsteps of my children. I sat in the shade of trees a century old and smelled their sap mixed with the snuffy spice of a fresh-growing meadow. A centipede crossed a patch of dirt, and a little boy warned me not to touch it. Then he ran to chase grazing cows, heedless of their size.

Fir Branch with a View  [Flickr page]

Warmth enfolded me from all sides. Retreating from the grandeur of the evergreens, I lay on the meadow-grass, yet found nature scaled down to meet me there. Endless forms most beautiful, as Darwin said, even in the varied tufts of foreground green. All struggling to grow and bud and then die in a single summer’s sun, while patient giants above us worked quietly for another season’s needles, sap, and cones.

Down in the Meadow  [Flickr page]

Reflecting, now, I feel the earth cool and the scents fade into the recesses of the night. The Milky Way traces its arc above the silhouettes of trees that stand expectant for the life-driving light of tomorrow’s sun. I watch meteor trails, and wonder at the beauty of this day, of this one life among so much, so many. All blazing, brief sensations that then pass into memory.

Ponderosa Pine Trunks and Rock  [Flickr page]

In the ghostly glow of thousand-year old starlight photons, I finally walk home. Now, without my witness, the earth will continue hurtling through a comet’s wake, spinning, until it turns my land again towards the sun. The universe will spark and strain and glow without me, until I awaken, and dance with it once again.

—First posted on Facebook, 8/12/12

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Click on individual images to enlarge, or check out the full album of photos on Flickr. All are Copyright © 2013-14 Edwin A. Suominen. You may freely use them for non-commercial purposes, with attribution, under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.