Friday Color

It’s odd, but the right bright colors feel more calming to me than many dull, tedious colors— which distress me psychologically and thus stress me.  So the colors of this Matisse make me happy and calm.

Definitions of calm are “undisturbed,” “not agitated.”  And “composed,” like my thoughts here.

Here’s a calm poem for today, though I think Google may have mistaken calm for “clam.”  What more calm than a clam, after all?

Messenger

My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird —
equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.

Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect? Let me
keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work,

which is mostly standing still and learning to be
astonished.
The phoebe, the delphinium.
The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.
Which is mostly rejoicing, since all ingredients are here,

which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart
and these body-clothes,
a mouth with which to give shouts of joy
to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam,
telling them all, over and over, how it is
that we live forever.
 
~ Mary Oliver ~

image:  Henri Matisse (French, 1869-1954): The Peonies (Les Pivoines), 1907. Painted in Collioure. Oil on canvas. Photo: Christie's Images Ltd 2012.

Time and Rain

Time has been escaping me this week—faster than ever.  It’s Thursday already, and nearly the end of April.  It feels almost as if there’s been some kind of time warp.  Our weather has transported us forward into summer, and even the rain we had last night felt like a summer rain as I came out of poetry class into the quad, warm and nurturing, like walking in a kind of balm.

I remember a similar rain one August in childhood, snug inside the cavernous wooden interior of Yellowstone Lodge, when my father taught me to play ping-pong.  Rain this time of year in Santa Fe just before school was out for the summer, riding bicycles with a new friend past Gormley’s Grocery on Canyon Road (long gone) and all the artists’ studios up to the school in the canyon.  Rain at Hadrian’s Wall two years ago, the “edges of empire,” with sheep calling on all sides, amiable spirits, and a swath of green below.  Rain in Kona, one later Thanksgiving or Christmas, sitting in a favorite sweater and old pair of jeans in my room at the hotel across the harbor from the birthplace of the stillborn king, watching a single kayak riding in at dusk.

Rain allows crops, and crops of memories as well.  The resurgence of times past, in lush profusion, even when time present is so scant.

And it encourages the drinking of tea, in a smooth lipped cup from St.-Martin-in-the-Fields, and the concoction of a tagine with chicken and eggplant for today’s supper, after Pilates, after another fleeting April day.

I will end with a sun-summoning thought from a book of Cherokee meditations I’ve just found again on my shelves,

Very soon, we will sit together in the sun a whole day and just be happy that we can sit together in the sun all day and just be happy.

That, like the rain, offers a sense of great abundance.

image:  Drops of rain (1903), Clarence H. White

Joies de Vivre

Chèvre with fire roasted green chili!  The best of my childhood flavors in combination with those of my assumed homeland (my heartland), the Mediterranean.

My new breakfast, on whole-grain bread.

image:  chèvre frais du hameau des Anglars, L'Hospitaler (04), Véronique Pagnier

Spring Murmurings

 

Moon, plum blossoms,
this, that,
and the day goes.

—Issa 

image:  Henri Le Sidaner, Spring Evening

Places I Would Rather Be

In Santa Fe, helping with the annual cleaning of the Acequia Madre.  The ancient ritual of care and clearing the important irrigation ditch.

image:  Historic Santa Fe Foundation

Friday Calm: Reading

He would sit on a wooden bench leaning against a decrepit trellis and look at the stars through the irregular outlines of his fruit trees.  This quarter of an acre of ground, so sparingly planted, so cluttered with shed and ruins, was dear to him and satisfied him.  What more was needed by this old man, who divided the leisure hours of his life, where he had so little leisure, between gardening in the daytime and contemplation at night?  Was this narrow enclosure with the sky for a background not space enough for him to adore God in his most beautiful, sublime works?  Indeed, is that not everything?  What more do you need?  A little garden to walk in, and immensity to reflect on.  At his feet something to cultivate and gather; above his head something to study and meditate on; a few flowers on earth and all the stars in heaven.

—Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

image: a tree at night, experiment, helix84

Inner Gardens

The books open on my writing table lead me into quiet inner gardens beyond the keyhole through which we all enviously peer, wanting to be allowed past the wall, through the gate with its rusted latch, hard to open, resisting even the most urgent push.

I need to sit, settle, feel the orderly words around me like familiar blooming plants and chuckling birds, soothing and sooth-saying.

Connection with gardens, even small ones, even potted plants, can become windows to the inner life.  The simple act of stopping and looking at the beauty around us can be prayer.
—Patricia R. Barrett, The Sacred Garden, 2001

 






image:  Christie B. Cochrell, On My Desk

In Parentheses

Just as I'm inordinately fond of slipping peripherally related (or wildly farfetched) things in parentheses into humdrum old sentences, to add curious vignettes to the main narrative; I like similarly to take pictures of things unexpectedly glimpsed through/framed by/in relationship with other things, like these distant grand old buildings nestled between the crumbling stones of a castle wall in Scarborough—or other such juxtapositions that open out the view (or mental landscape) in interesting ways.

This also reminds me of a geode, outwardly one of those dull, prosaic rocks which you wouldn't look at twice, which discloses when opened a treasure of crystals—hidden delights like luscious pomegranate seeds bursting out of an unassuming coarse-skinned globe.

Always peek between the cracks . . .

image:  Christie B. Cochrell, Scarborough, August 2010

Thought for the Day

“I want to live other lives. I've never quite believed that one chance is all I get. Writing is my way of making other chances.”

—Anne Tyler

image: The Maya People, Quintana Roo, Mexico, Jimmy Baikovicius 

Friday Calm

I have never been so utterly at peace and in my element as I was on the terraces outside the caseta where this perfect rustic table gave on a view of the distant sea—a writer’s table, an artist’s table, the table of a person who loves beauty for its own sake and loves the simple, elemental things that make life rich and satisfying without a lot of obvious effort.

Looking out, looking inward, both were inspirational there on that quiet hilltop in Mallorca.  I wrote as well as I ever have, during my time there, a week’s retreat after each writers’ workshop two years apart.

Oddly, much though I love Lake Como, I was not especially peaceful there during the last week I spent in wondrous Bellagio.  I felt restless, removed from my real being, an outsider who had come too far from home and what I was at best.  Disconcerting, since I should have been perfectly at peace there.  It shook me, finding I felt that way.  (Crete, on the other hand, was wonderful but strange, with never any expectation on my part of feeling at home there—though it appealed to me hugely, to the adventurer of my Gemini twins.)

What is it in certain foreign places that calls us by name?  Why do some feel familiar as our own birthplace, or even more so?  And why do others have nothing of importance to say to us?

image:  Christie B. Cochrell, Table on Lower Terrace, The Writing Mills, Mallorca