Trees

Mostly I like to look at trees, and walk or sit under trees, and feel the healing and vitality they offer.  But it's also satisfying to hear what people have to say about trees.

There is always Music amongst the trees in the Garden, but our hearts must be very quiet to hear it. —Minnie Aumonier

Happiness is sharing a bowl of cherries and a book of poetry with a shade tree.  He doesn't eat much and doesn't read much, but listens well and is a most gracious host.    —Astrid Alauda (who also said "if I had time for only two exercises, I would choose yoga and skipping")

There are many quotes about trees — and even a whimsical book about living one's whole life above the world, in the leafy branches, Italo Calvino's The Baron in the Trees .




image:  Christie B. Cochrell, Maple5

Cargo

A return yesterday after thirty years to One Market Plaza, where I spent two years on the 30th floor happily working on claims for a steamship company.  Nicely tangible things like spilled coffee beans and rotted onions, and one December huge cans of tinned shrimp that had perhaps gone bad—which we all cautiously risked eating and I made into remoulade, served to daring friends, an uneasy dinner party or two.  I remember furtive phone calls to a private investigator we used, to set him on the trail of seamen who were thought to be taking new jobs while claiming disability from us; trips to the docks at Hunters Point where our three ships came in and unloaded—the Austral Rainbow, Austral Moon, and another that doesn’t come back to me—Star?  Lightning?  Lightning, I think.

It was so long ago.  That first job in the city.  My days on the edge of the sea . . . sorting through the flotsam of others’ far journeys.

Looking for others' thoughts on cargo, I find these words from Richard Wilbur, beginning his poem The Writer—

In her room at the prow of the house
Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,
My daughter is writing a story.

I pause in the stairwell, hearing
From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys
Like a chain hauled over a gunwale.

Young as she is, the stuff
Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:
I wish her a lucky passage.

image:  Vessel seen from below, Tropenmann

Quince

I've always loved Japanese Quince, one of the first flowers of spring, most years gone by.

And I love this quiet poem for an April Friday—

What We Need Is Here

Geese appear high over us,
pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,
as in love or sleep, holds
them to their way, clear
in the ancient faith: what we need
is here. And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye,
clear. What we need is here. 

—Wendell Berry

image:  Christie B. Cochrell, Quince

Japanese Maple

Exquisite lightness and grace, floating on light.

I love these colors, too.

image:  Christie B. Cochrell, Maple

The Play of Light

This lovely mossy brick and waterspout, freckled with sun, reminds me of my stated approach to life and to photography—self-confessed lover of the play of light, the journeyings of time, heartbreaking things ephemeral and ancient and impossible to hold.




image:  Christie B. Cochrell, Water Basin

Grace Notes

No wonder grace was considered a garden...

image:  Christie B. Cochrell, Gamble Garden

Garden Notes

Begonias in an old clay pot in a little dapple of sunlight, at the always restorative Gamble Garden.

Letting begonias be begonias...



image:  Christie B. Cochrell, Begonias

Thought for the Day

The three muses.

image:  Christie B. Cochrell, Three Red Tulips

On Dictionaries

Houses and castles (both random), part of the all-inclusive realm of dictionaries.

Here, to begin, in honor of Poetry Month, is W.S. Merwin's poem on the larger subject—

Inheritance

At my elbow on the table
it lies open as it has done
for a good part of these thirty
years ever since my father died
and it passed into my hands
this Webster's New International
Dictionary of the English
Language of 1922
on India paper which I
was always forbidden to touch
for fear I would tear or somehow
damage its delicate pages
heavy in their binding
this color of wet sand
on which thin waves hover
when it was printed he was twenty-six
they had not been married four years
he was a country preacher
in a one-store town and I suppose
a man came to the door one day
peddling this new dictionary
on fine paper like the Bible
at an unrepeatable price
and it seemed it would represent
a distinction just to own it
confirming something about him
that he could not even name
now its cover is worn as though
it had been carried on journeys
across the mountains and deserts
of the earth but it has been here
beside me the whole time
what has frayed it like that
loosening it gnawing at it
all through these years
I know I must have used it
much more than he did but always
with care and indeed affection
turning the pages patiently
in search of meanings


—W.S. Merwin

Ever since my own father died I have had his dictionary too, not Webster but Random House.  He used to keep it laid open on the blue cupboard in his den, to consult while typing letters or a page or two of his novel on weekend mornings (coffee cup sometimes knocked off the typewriter stand by the carriage return, unloosing a great flurry of cussing), or wandering in with Scotch and cigarette and double crostic book in hand during some summer evening, barefoot, in one of his fish- or ship-printed shirts bought on the Kona Coast.  For years I kept that dictionary in my tiny kitchen in the apartment on Parma Way, under the window with the cheery painted Mexican parrot hung there to overlook whatever I was cooking.  Laid open too, always, the words left free to roam around (at random) and mingle with the childhood aromas of frying meat, oregano.

I, too, ever in search of meanings.


And for thoughts on that other book of words, see here.

image:  Illustration of a castle from Webster’s Dictionary, 1855

Poetry Month

Welcome to a gentler month, we hope!

With the recent inclement weather in mind, this quote from Jerome K. Jerome (if not a poet, then just about every other kind of writer) is apt:

Nothing is more beautiful than the love that has weathered the storms of life.

Tulips absolutely included.

image:  Christie B. Cochrell, Pink Tulip