Cassoulet

Today’s sensual treat will be a nice enheartening cassoulet.  Not the complicated sort that took Julia Child four days to make, involving lamb shoulder, sawed into stewing chunks; rendered goose fat, and five pounds preserved goose plus cracklings; salt pork (rind optional); and plump pork sausages . . . but a quicker, more sedate version with turkey kielbasa, baby carrots, chicken, fresh thyme, and a bay leaf.  

Canned beans, of course, cannellini, because I always burn mine, however carefully I watch them.  (Or don't—one summer day a while ago gone hiking in my favorite park and standing hours later at the summit of a distant hill remembering I'd left a kettle of beans simmering . . .)  Burned, though, they do acquire an interesting smoky flavor!


image:  FrenchDuck UK

Wintering Through

There are twenty-two days until the winter solstice, the (re)turning of the light.  Those lines of Rilke's from one of the Sonnets to Orpheus come back to me—

For among these winters there is one so endlessly winter
that only by wintering through it all will your heart survive.

We must go on, to get through.  We will be gladder, stronger, better, after.

To count those wintering hours off I'm going to give my heart one present every day, something to brighten one or another of the senses.

Today's is a joy to the ears—Mozart's Ave Verum Corpus sung by the Welsh baritone Bryn Terfel.






And I am always happy to reread the whole poem by the light-gathering Rilke, first given to me by a friend at a time of sorrow—

The Sonnets To Orpheus: Book 2: XIII

Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were
behind you, like the winter that has just gone by.
For among these winters there is one so endlessly winter
that only by wintering through it all will your heart survive.

Be forever dead in Eurydice-more gladly arise
into the seamless life proclaimed in your song.
Here, in the realm of decline, among momentary days,
be the crystal cup that shattered even as it rang.

Be-and yet know the great void where all things begin,
the infinite source of your own most intense vibration,
so that, this once, you may give it your perfect assent.

To all that is used-up, and to all the muffled and dumb
creatures in the world's full reserve, the unsayable sums,
joyfully add yourself, and cancel the count.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Translated by Stephen Mitchell

image:  Christie B. Cochrell, Candle2

embers

The end of another -ember month, nearly; the darkness closing in.  And everywhere, these moments of flame-like energy, this intense gathering of light into a few, fine mortal objects that carry it on into the darkest month and out again.  There is that certainty, that hope.

I'm reminded of the last image in T.H. White's The Once and Future King, in the last book, The Candle in the Wind—the lowly page sent by the embattled king on the morning of battle to carry remembrance of the glory that has been into the unseen reaches of the future, to keep the dwindled, flickering dream alive.

image:  Christie B. Cochrell, Tins

Things I Am Grateful For

Quiet grace.

Swallows, Akrotiri Fresco

Cloister, Durham

Santa Fe pot

And blessed remembered light.

images:  Christie B. Cochrell

Things I Am Grateful For

Colors, again—and again.

Lemons in John's bowl

Purple door in Durham

Harbor, Crete

I can only believe that colors are good for the heart, as water has been said to be.

"I am thirsty, too. Let us look for a well . . ."

I made a gesture of weariness. It is absurd to look for a well, at random, in the immensity of the desert. But nevertheless we started walking.

When we had trudged along for several hours, in silence, the darkness fell, and the stars began to come out. Thirst had made me a little feverish, and I looked at them as if I were in a dream. The little prince's last words came reeling back into my memory:

"Then you are thirsty, too?" I demanded.

But he did not reply to my question. He merely said to me:

"Water may also be good for the heart . . ." 

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

images:  Christie B. Cochrell, Lemons, Purple Door, Boat

Things I Am Grateful For

Beauty in far places—

Beauty, near—

Beauty of the spirit.

So as the Navajos, ever in beauty may we walk.

images:  Christie B. Cochrell, Lake Como Watering Can, Pear in Christie's bowl, Rancho de Chimayo

Things I Am Grateful For

 Thanksgiving Day—oh day of thanks!

Pierre Bonnard, always, and this particular table of lovely desserts—

Sencha Quince Green Tea—Beautiful to look at with its "spear-like distinguished grass green leaves combined with exquisite violet, malve and cornflower blossoms."  (Quince, native to the island of Crete, is a fruit that has been loved for centuries for its intoxicating flavor and mythological associations.)  Once available from Tealuxe in Boston, like heaven after tramping the Commons in snow.

The chance to sit in an afternoon patch of late November sun and eat duck dumplings!

Billy Collins, always too.  This is perhaps my favorite of his poems of gratitude—

As If to Demonstrate an Eclipse

I pick an orange from a wicker basket
and place it on the table
to represent the sun.
Then down at the other end
a blue and white marble
becomes the earth
and nearby I lay the little moon of an aspirin.

I get a glass from a cabinet,
open a bottle of wine,
then I sit in a ladder-back chair,
a benevolent god presiding
over a miniature creation myth,

and I begin to sing
a homemade canticle of thanks
for this perfect little arrangement,
for not making the earth too hot or cold
not making it spin too fast or slow

so that the grove of orange trees
and the owl become possible,
not to mention the rolling wave,
the play of clouds, geese in flight,
and the Z of lightning on a dark lake.

Then I fill my glass again
and give thanks for the trout,
the oak, and the yellow feather,

singing the room full of shadows,
as sun and earth and moon
circle one another in their impeccable orbits
and I get more and more cockeyed with gratitude.

Things I Am Grateful For

apricots and dappled leaves (this tree at Tassajara; another, remembered, and ancient now, in our Santa Fe back yard)

sun-warmed olives, fragrant and tart, set on a sea-blue Greek table

images:  Christie B. Cochrell, Apricots; Olives, lost link

Things I Am Grateful For

Some heartfelt gratitude during this Thanksgiving week, for little things and big that make all the difference.

pungent herbs—

stunning colors—

amiable sheep—

—to name but two or three, today.

All images from Crete (links lost).

Some Thoughts on Rain

image:  Christie B. Cochrell, At Hadrian's Wall

Instead of grumbling about this rainy Saturday, I'll think about and smile about the following—

I have never coasted down a hill of frozen rain.
(Duke Kahanamoku)

I don't consider myself a pessimist. I think of a pessimist as someone who is waiting for it to rain. And I feel soaked to the skin.
(Leonard Cohen)

I think it's really important to use your hands and get close to materials. To be up close to real things like rain and mud; to have contact with nature.
(Robin Day)

I wanted to be a journalist, I thought it was glamorous and that I'd meet beautiful women in the rain.
(Bill Nighy)

A crown is merely a hat that lets the rain in.
(Frederick The Great)

For me, a page of good prose is where one hears the rain and the noise of battle. It has the power to give grief or universality that lends it a youthful beauty.
(John Cheever)

He was so benevolent, so merciful a man that, in his mistaken passion, he would have held an umbrella over a duck in a shower of rain.
(Douglas William Jerrold)

I am a being of Heaven and Earth, of thunder and lightning, of rain and wind, of the galaxies.
(Eden Ahbez)

It always rains on tents. Rainstorms will travel thousands of miles, against prevailing winds for the opportunity to rain on a tent.
(Dave Barry)

My sorrow, when she's here with me, thinks these dark days of autumn rain are beautiful as days can be; she loves the bare, the withered tree; she walks the sodden pasture lane.
(Robert Frost)

Rain is grace; rain is the sky descending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.
(John Updike)

You should not see the desert simply as some faraway place of little rain. There are many forms of thirst.
(William Langewiesche)

And finally—

I like rain, actually.
(Bill Rodgers)

All those from Brainy Quote.

And then there is my own piece, 9 Rules for a Rainy Saturday.