After a Hiatus

. . . I can be found sitting on our deck in Santa Cruz with a wellspring of pink roses beside the pinecone lantern, and a squirrel coming inquiring. 

By the time I've finished that sentence the squirrel is gone, and only I am left to inquire.  How did I come here, during that hiatus?  Will the several small squirrels or the one big squirrel eat the herbs I planted yesterday along the fence where they get in, the earth crumbled away below it in a kind of hiatus too?   One tests the chamomile leaves.  What are they so busy with here in this yard?  A towhee hops across the stones I've brought in from that other yard, that other county and climate and time, piled together next to the herbs.  Where is she going, so intent, in the way of her kind?

Birds and words.  I'm back among those small (and great) enchantments, changed but not.

I look for quotes for "hiatus," and am led to "break."  But mostly in the verb tense, active breaking not the absence of action which I have had.  And Jane Hirshfield writes about what binds us—binding and breaking opposite.  Breaking is a letting go, which I have done, yet again not.  I'm in a new place now, with many of the things I'm bound to still with me.  (Bound to stay on.)

I find myself still in possession of the little dish with the Egyptian ducks, or whatever species they are, from a visit to the Legion of Honor.  This dish has spanned the break with me, bound for the coast.  And now it sits on the generous windowsill in my bathroom, the pure white of the paint having invited the deep blue, the near-monastic calm the unanticipated whimsy.

And other things besides the deck and sill are foreign too.  The Monterey Pine full of wind, where there has not before been pine tree, gnarly branches, cones.  Sometimes it shakes out bush-tits, or the pygmy nuthatch, sometimes upside down.  But this afternoon just wind, as if from inside out, the way the ancient Greeks thought it was winds within the earth that caused earthquakes.

Hiatus, the pause or catch in the breath between vowels (the [hiatus] ear, la [hiatus] interrupción).  Japanese aoi:  'blue/green,' Swahili eua:  'to purify,' and Hawaiian aea:  'to rise up.'  Hiatus itself contains a hiatus.

That's all it's been, really, my relocation here where I am now—continuing after a breath with the next syllable, where I left off.

image:  Christie B. Cochrell, Egyptian Dish

Black-eyed Peas

Appropriately for New Year's Eve eve, I'm drinking rising sun tea (soleil levant, from Lupicia, purveyors of my usual Happiness blend).

Black-eyed peas—blackeye beans—from Idaho's Snake River Canyon are soaking for soup with collard greens, for New Year's luck (augmented by charms against the evil eye and the gift of guardian bells, twice as effective if given away).

The beans from Idaho summon the memory of my father, also from Idaho, (and a family friend from Texas with her copper samovars and vista of blue Santa Fe mountains, who taught my mother that they need to be prepared each year again to eat on New Year's day); and I have added smoked Spanish paprika and a pinch of Aleppo pepper to the soup to remind me that Aleppo badly needs our help, needs luck in a desperate way. 

All life is there in the simplest ingredients.  All that I am gives flavor to each repast, and I understand that in repast is past relived, tasted again.

image:  Christie B. Cochrell, Bowl

Apologia

At one time in my life I remember thinking that there was just no point in writing at all if I couldn't be the best writer who ever lived—that uppity upstart Shakespeare included.

Now, I think, I hesitate to write if I can't be as good as myself at my best.  I've started finding what I write derivative, repetitive, and uncooperative, before I've even given it a chance to live and breath.  I know I'm just being a writer's blockhead, as they say, and every day I put it off the words get shyer and harder to capture (like crickets in jars, summer and nightsong caught in glass, the last days back in Santa Fe before college, the so-elusive trail of memory leading through Chinese poetry and translations by Kenneth Rexroth in the slender paperback with the black-and-white cover I read first I don't know when).  The few I do manage to get into their paper cage seem poor imitations of the things they're trying to tell, for which I'm also sad.

So I've been off wool-gathering or sheep-unravelling without yet getting to the sheep!  (And can only say, with Sandra Boynton, "baaaaa humbug.")

image:  gathered wool, 
earlycountryantiques.com

Serif and Seraphim

I've been writing in Goudy Old Style this week, writing about a woman (Argenta, probably, or maybe Amyntas—like Gide's evocative North African journals, or Tamaya, from the Quechua) who has a letterpress, or borrows one.  The old style, old ways, old words ever call me.  The extra strokes of the serif letters make me feel less hurried, safe from being jostled, sitting in a stripy dress in stripy palm shade like one of Matisse's tranquil lady letter-writers, drinking minty tea with sugar cubes dropped into a tall glass with a pair of exquisite etched sugar tongs.

And serifs make me think of seraphim, as well.  The highest order of angels, the winged letters that carry messages of true moment; angels with three sets of wings, the serif letters with the extra lift and reach into the furthest breathy realm of words.

I can't find my Amyntas, which leaves me discombobulated, since this is the second copy I have lost.  So my mullings go—sending me off (tumbling out of my virtual hammock) in search of lost books, half-remembered art, quotes that might fit in my valise for the next leg of my leisurely progression from one shady spot to the next.

And though I was looking for a passage that would transport us to some exotic clime, maybe Tunisia or Algiers, I'm delighted with this from Rose Macauley, traveler extraordinaire, on the subject I began with (or shortly thereafter stumbled upon):

“Words, those precious gems of queer shape and gay colours, sharp angles and soft contours, shades of meaning laid one over the other down history, so that for those far back one must delve among the lost and lovely litter that strews the centuries. They arrange themselves in the most elegant odd patterns; the sound the strangest sweet euphonious notes; they flute and sing and taber, and disappear, like apparitions, with a curious perfume and a most melodious twang.”

—Rose Macauley, Personal Pleasures

(One of her most famous quotes, I notice, mentions the empyrean, which I almost touched upon just now, as I was flying up with angel's wings, but chose another word instead, only by chance.)

image:  Henri Matisse, Still Life with Sleeping Woman

To What End?

The end is drawing nigh (an adverb from Old English, esp. West Saxon and Anglian).  April, early spring, the season of renewal, the week before I revisit the Big Island, with memories everywhere in its fabric.  Of times there with my parents and with family friends; of my retreat to find some kind of peace again in the weeks after 9/11. 

I'll be taking my mother's ashes, which will be another end—but to the place of second chances, new beginnings, that place I've written about endlessly, Pu'uhonua o Honaunau, the Place of Refuge of the ancient Hawaiians.  (See the very end of this collection of remembered places.)

"In my end is my beginning," wrote T.S. Eliot in Four Quartets.  And also,

“time past and time future

what might have been and what has been

point to one end, which is always present.”

And to end with (and at the same time begin with), this from David Whyte's "Santiago."

and turning the corner at what you thought was the end

of the road, you found just a simple reflection,

and a clear revelation beneath the face looking back

and beneath it another invitation, all in one glimpse:

like a person and a place you had sought forever,

like a broad field of freedom that beckoned you beyond;

like another life, and the road still stretching on.

image:  Suspension Bridge, Super Beautiful Photos& Art