Storm and Oak Tree

A great black oak tree on the hill; the storm in flight around it, summoning new forces for tomorrow’s fresh assault The moon, before its time, keeping a bright eye out. The sky is dark with temper, bruising, not with night. It is a kind of witching scene, fitful and fateful as Macbeth— the play whose name is not to be uttered, for fear of ill luck.

But the smell of tandoori spices is in the house; my charm against the storm, the night, the owl calling unseen in the trees somewhere nearby, the forces gathering up in the hills with the oak tree.

image: Bare Oak Tree. Portland, Oregon, Copyright Free Photos

Sand Rock Farm

Why can't we have another holiday, and linger over breakfast at our favorite Sand Rock Farm—watching finches feeding on thistle seed at the birdfeeder while we're eating our own goat cheese souffle? Even with the gardens not yet in full bloom it is enchanted there, as perfect in spring as it is in fall.


image: Christie B. Cochrell, Sand Rock Farm

Rainy February Day

I go out in the rain to cut fresh marjoram for a tomato salad, and find the wild arugula I’ve forgotten is growing there, between the patio and the green café table where I find a rare patch of shade for writing in the summer. The salad is welcome, with Greek herbs and crumbled feta and pepper, lemon-scented olive oil. Even the tomatoes aren’t bad, out of season—imperfections disguised.

image: Christie B. Cochrell, Arugula

Saturday Morning in the Hills

I’m cooking green French lentils with bay leaves to go into a salad with fresh mint, red onion, and goat cheese.

The world is coming into bloom. Fruit trees as well as acacia and mustard weed now; in another week or two my lime tree. Everyone is out—with dogs, with horses, bicycling, walking in straw gardening hats, digging up clumps of long grasses from the rain-soaked, black soil, observing the Sabbath at the synagogue next door.

image: Vincent Van Gogh, Blossoming Almond Tree, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam; photo by xanne from the Netherlands

Everyday Sacred

Writing about the quest of my art class for red clay has reminded me about one of my favorite books—Sue Bender's Everyday Sacred, which describes a similar sort of spiritual quest. Her journey began with the mental image of the begging bowl, an empty bowl which monks carry each day with them into the countryside, accepting whatever is placed in it as their nourishment of the day. She realized she too was a receptacle waiting to be filled. And then, with clay, she began making tangible bowls, and writing about their making and about what each day offered. The daily sacrament. It is a wise and wonderful journey. I must read it again.

image: Enamelled ceramic bowl with Design of Melons in Black Ground, late 17th century, by MOKUBEI (ACE1767-1833), Kyoto, Japan; Photo: YAMATO-BUNKAKAN

Clafoutis

What better activity for a February afternoon than taking down the Christmas tree and listening to Oliver Mtukudze, while ruminating on the brevity of things? I’m also looking for a recipe for cherry clafoutis tart as I cook brown rice for supper. Multi-tasking of the best sort.

image: Clafoutis, Rotem Danzig

Nor Glyphs

I have joined the ranks of Roman emperors and Maya kings, though neither in cuneiform nor glyphs. My Mother has just paid $18.65 to have my name put on the wall at St. Vincent's, the hospital in Santa Fe where I was born, the event now marked almost in stone for all time—or until the building is torn down. What will archaeologists make of me? And what would I like most to leave as monument, record of achievement, paean to my having lived and loved? Like at Phaestos, the traces of the vanished Minoan colors, sooty blacks and blood-oranges; the intriguing mark of a flower in the stone? Like Hadrian, a mausoleum that becomes the stage set for a grand, tragic opera? Like Sappho, a few fragments of poems that will tantalize for the millennia? For now, the name will do—an amusing (and affordable) marker.

image: Trento (Italy): Latin inscription cum aquarum perpetuo cursu on the Fountain of Neptune in Piazza del Duomo. The inscription is probably related to the requirements that Francesco Antonio Giongo (architect of the fountain) had to satisfy for an extra reward: after building the fountain in 1768, he was asked also to build an aqueduct to bring water to it (a "continuous flow of water"), after earlier attempts miserabily failed. Photo by Matteo Ianeselli

Quests

One of the memories I keep going back to is that day in late winter (January, February, now) in ninth grade when my art class walked up the river deeper into the canyon where our school was to find red clay under a crust of old snow. A treasure of color, of pliant earth, that could later be shaped into a bowl, a face, an animal—whatever our hands made of it.

Everything was thawing, spring was flirting with our adolescent hearts. We ducked under unravelled strands of barbed wire, tossed teasing snowballs, hyper-aware of every motion of our own and others as if it were fixed on film, in time, in the red clay that took our impression before being fired forever. It was an unbearably bright day after the months of gray and gloom, scented with sun-touched juniper, piñon, moldering leaves.

That journey of an hour has become for me a kind of touchstone of promise and quest—the archetype of going out into a strange, alluring world to discover what might be. One of my first journeys to self.

And even farther back, in first or second grade at Blythe, on the same Santa Fe River, a few miles lower down and later in the spring, another class of mine walked up along the gentle banks looking for pussywillows, the soft gray buds beginning to open on their upright branches.

These exploratory lessons were more lasting and important than the ones I learned indoors.

The epidermis is only in the most superficial way an indication of where an organism ends and its environment begins. There are things inside the body that are foreign to it, and there are things outside of it that belong to it de jure, if not de facto; that must, that is, be taken possession of if life is to continue.
(John Dewey, Art as Experience)

image: Cyclamen coum in melting snow, Meneerke bloem

February

Our name for February comes from the Latin februum, meanining purification—because of the purification ritual Februa held on February 15 in the old Roman calendar.

In Anglo Saxon, February was Solmonath (mud month) and Kale-monath (cabbage month). In Finnish, more poetically, it is helmikuu, meaning "month of the pearl"—when snow melts on tree branches, it forms droplets, and as these freeze again, they are like pearls of ice. (Thanks to Wikipedia for all that.)

image: Les Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry, Février - the Musée Condé, Chantilly