Writer's Shelf

This small writer's shrine on a shelf in my writing room on Thendara Lane—oregano, dappled in late sun, and an alchemical sphere, both elemental in what I've written.

I spent a full quarter of 1999 in travel, and much of the rest preparing for or cleaning up after trips. Given that constant motion, I had to learn to find stillness within the rush, and to understand what the Chinese philosophers mean about there being five directions, not just four—north, south, east, and west, but center too, where all the others come together. I found this greenish glazed clay sphere that summer at an art fair, marked with the alchemical symbol for “compose”—reminding me that composure and composition come from the same place; that the ability to combine diverse experiences rests specifically in one’s own quiet core.

A phrase I found in a wonderful book by a friend of a friend (Padma Hejmadi, Room to Fly) describes so perfectly how one’s life is composed in travelling or the return home: “It is, after all, that old process which Katherine Mansfield once described as ‘going out and looking at a tree and coming back plus the tree.’” I’ve come back year after year plus so much of the world, plus a rich history. Plus Bonnard, plus Mahler and Bach, plus the frescoes on old Roman walls, the short-lived mountain flowers called settembre, the shimmer of cottonwoods and thunderheads and high aqueducts or abandoned poi and rice fields in far valleys (like the white heron in the vanished lake: remembering water).

Across the moment, aeons speak with aeons.
More than we experienced has gone by.
(Rainer Maria Rilke, The Sonnets to Orpheus, appendix, II)

I’ve come back upon my own past again and again too, in unexpected places. Taking pictures of Ranchos de Taos one recent summer, I recognized the same lines and form to it as to the whitewashed monastery I photographed on Santorini six years before. I learned that the Navajos glaze their pottery with piñon sap, as the ancient Greeks did amphoras. And at Ostia Antica, the silted-over port of Rome, there are rounded clay ovens that look just like the adobe hornos of the New Mexico pueblos.

It all comes around again, which is another lesson of the green sphere.



image: Christie B. Cochrell, Writer's Shelf