the scent of water

A hearty yes.

I took the title from a quote by Joseph Campbell, one I used in my latest MixTape article (go here right this minute and order a copy - Justine has grown this magazine to total awesomeness); the full version goes like this:

"the big question is whether you are going to be able to say a hearty yes to your adventure".

Whatever that adventure might be.  Climbing Everest, opening an art studio, learning to play chopsticks on the piano with the big toe of your right foot - if it makes you feel strong, you should do it. 

Now's good.

God, protect your joyful ones.

 

I believe in life, and I believe in the joy of human existence, but these things cannot be experienced except as we also face the despair, also face the anxiety that every human being has to face if he lives with any creativity at all.  ~ Rollo May

What she said.

 

I wish that all of nature's magnificence, the emotion of the land, the living energy of place could be photographed. ~ Annie Leibovitz

I love photos. I love these photos. They bring me joy and inspiration and satisfy me on a visceral level in ways I can't adequately explain, not even to myself.  It's enough that they exist, or more importantly that the women behind them do.

1. a halfway moment..., 2. red currants, 3. mireio s&p 02, 4. 151/365: unfurling

Small solitudes.

 

"There is a time for departure even when there's no certain place to go.”   ~ Tennessee Williams

In a journal he kept of his Greenlandic expeditions, Knud Rasmussen quoted an Inuit shaman as saying that all true wisdom is only to be found far from the dwellings of man, in the great solitudes. The romantic in me fancies this to be true, the pragmatist laughs and thinks that three years roaming around the edges of Greenland isn't going to get anyone's washing done.  And you can find, Mr. Shaman, a surprising amount of wisdom in washing.

Still.  Sometimes my yearning for that kind of silence grows so strong it becomes painful.   I am no more likely to leave my family than Knud was likely to stay home with his, so where are the places, I wonder, for people like me?  

The only kind of answer I have found so far is inside the small solitudes.  The books, the journals, the wanderings of the imagination.  A solo meal.  Time with my camera.  Whether these things will remain enough, I have my doubts, but they are, at the very least, a great point for departure.

Some things that are only mildly related to some other things.

  

Art is contagious.  ~ Brenda Ueland

I like the idea of art as a virus, infecting first the DNA of its creator and then rapidly spreading to whoever else is fortunate enough to cross its path.  There are some days when I wonder if there is any kind of point to art, and then there are days when I wonder if there is any kind of point without it?

There was a man who walked into the front garden of the house in my early morning dream and picked a bouquet of blue hydrangeas growing there.  He brought them inside as a present for our table, and to offer a warning of the danger waiting outside our front gate. Then he disappeared. Cheeky sod, I thought when I woke up, and decided that he must have come from my dream book.  His name is Luca and I am not quite sure whether anyone really knows if his heart is good or bad.

I am buying Sara Maitland's A Book of Silence as a birthday present for myself next month, partly because I love that title, and partly because in one of the lives I will almost certainly never live I hang out by myself in an isolated cabin in the Scottish Highlands.  If I can't have that particular dream then surely the next best thing is to be infected by the work of someone who can.

Here comes the rain again.

 

When you have only two pennies left in the world, buy a loaf of bread with one, and a lily with the other.  ~ Chinese proverb.

No food pictures today but never fear, we are still eating.  Cookies mostly.  Instead, I've been trying to take some semi-attractive photos of a couple of books that make good cold weather reading (This Cold Heaven, and Winter's Bone, if you're interested), but the light has not been co-operating and so I am stealing these few slices of summer from my northern friends instead.  It's been a cold, hard winter.

(I dreamed a few nights ago that I was writing a book called A Strange Row of Trees, which my unconscious self thought was the most genius title ever.  Lord knows what it was about.  I also dreamed I was narrowly escaping burning meteors and aliens in tiny spaceships, so, you know.  Maybe not.)

1. a little cheer, 2. yarrow, 3. Peonies and lilacs, 4. wild things: gratitude 241.365

Tea break.

"I turned my head, only for a moment, and that moment became my life."    ~Anon.

The last few nights I've been lying awake until the early hours with a racing heart and no real idea precisely what it is my body is panicking about.  It started with watching the movie Easy Virtue, a supposed romantic comedy which had me sobbing most of the way through.  Though I am not blonde, gorgeous, from Detroit, particularly witty, married to an English gentleman, nor a great fan of any kind of motorsport (and I have never,  not even once, sat on anybody's Chihuahua), I was still ripped apart by the heroine's valiant attempts to stand up for her life in a situation where those she wanted to please the most cared the least, where all her good intents were met with  hostility, and where being true to herself meant the destruction of a future she had thought was hers.  That Noel Coward.  Who knew?

I took another road to the lovely Larita.  Laid low, kept the peace, harmony at all cost.  I thought it was loving and honorable, but it wasn't, not truly, and least of all to myself.  Wiped me out, in all senses of the word.  When I was racing to hospital a couple of months ago after coughing up copious amounts of blood, I thought the chances were pretty high that I was dying.  And I was too tired to care.

I quoted MacBeth to Nathan recently, the "I am in blood, stepped in so far" speech, and explained to him that MacBeth, given an opportunity to stop the killing and perhaps gain a measure of redemption, decided that returning across the river of blood he had created was just as 'tedious' as carrying on through it, so he might as well just keep on keeping on.  It didn't matter to him anymore, he had long since fallen from hope.  Too tired to care.

Nathan was perturbed by this attitude, as all 11 year olds should be (show me one who understands despair and I will show you angels weeping);  he thought MacBeth should try at least.

I don't know about MacBeth, but I know that I am not ready to give up, tempting though it seems some days.  It's not a matter of pulling my socks up and trudging through another day any longer, but of taking a tea break from life's relentless forward march and seeking out those parts of myself I left behind, back in the day.  I'm sure they will still be waiting there, if I look hard enough.  If I even did leave them behind.

Dreaming

 

A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world. ~ Oscar Wilde

1. they were so lovely., 2. Pickled, 3. layers., 4. cupcakes, 5. flower blur., 6. little red shoes, 7. hello, again, 8. Produce bags from Betz White's book Sewing Green, 9. * *

Winter.

I saw one of these in Mrs. Parlane's class at the children's school.   She said it was a little like having a baby, the fun of waiting for it to erupt into full hyacinth blossom.  I went out and got one for myself a few days later.

It's a season for waiting in my life right now, literally and metaphorically. I'm not very good at it.  I pace a lot.  Eat a lot.  Grumble a lot.  What to do until it's time for Spring again?  Clear the leaves, prune the branches, feed the soil.  Maybe even sow some seeds. Maybe.

I can feel something good ahead, almost see it sometimes, like a shadow of promise out the corner of my eye.  I don't know the shape of it yet, or anything much other than for sure it's on its way.  So I'm getting ready.  Removing the clutter, the habits, the activities and even, painfully, brutally, the relationships that my heart says will smother (not always for bad reasons, but smother nonetheless) any chance this unformed thing would have of growing strong and bearing fruit.  It feels necessary, compelling.  Also cold and barren.

What was it I read just a few days ago?  Oh,  yes, this quote from Cesare Pavese: 

To cover the houses and the

stones with green – so the

sky would make sense – you

have to push down black

roots into the dark.

 

Exactly.  That.

A reminder to myself on a bland day.

 

Play keeps us vital and alive.  It gives us an enthusiasm for life that is irreplaceable.  Without it, life just doesn't taste good.    ~ Lucia Capocchione