Real Men Wear Cravats

True?  False?  Should be true even if it isn't?

image:  Acorn Online

A Covenant of Quails

The quails have just paraded through the patio with this summer’s crop of babies, who look as if they’ve had at least a couple of weeks to mature already.  We hadn’t seen any of them for weeks.  It’s funny how they go and come, according to mysterious quail patterns.  More often than not they prefer to flow along the edge of the tennis court in the next yard, though never across the playing space.  Sometimes they scatter all across our driveway, all two or three dozen of them.  Sometimes a lone two sit on the patio fence, contemplating, clucking.  They only seem to call when they are keeping watch for the others.  I love their ebb and flow, the elegant and comical ways they move, their logarythmic rhythms, their grace.  I'm never sure what collective noun to choose for them, or why I chose the one I did today.  (What is it quails have agreed to refrain from?)  A contemplation of quails would be apt, as well.

[Oddly, after I chose "covenant" this morning, the Writer's Almanac poem of the day turned out to be a poem (unexpected) by Tennessee Williams called "Covenant"!]

image:  California Quail, Stanford University

Music from a Farther Room

The sound of a summer garden party in a neighboring yard makes me remember all of those we had in Santa Fe while I was growing up, with family friends, cottonwood shade, my Mom’s barbeque brisket and rolls, the strawberry cake I used to bake, fireworks on the Fourth of July, moths coming to the porchlight, the abundance that all of that represented—a kind of gladness in the heart.

And I think too of the garden parties in Sabrina, the chauffeur’s daughter looking on from her lonely, dreamy perch in the tree, wanting to join the dancing but not having been invited.

I loved to sit up in our cottonwood tree, too, eye-level with the moon, and imagine fairytales of love and laughter that might come to pass on some balmy midsummer’s night.

The sounds of merriment from up the hill that reach me as I write, tables set out under the oaks with the last of this Sunday’s sun in them, friends gathered for a celebration of something that has nothing to do with me, reminds me of the wistful line from Prufrock, “beneath the music from a farther room.”  Parties that go on without us are tinged with nostalgia for the parties we have dreamed, behind us or ahead of us, luring our hearts to join in.

image: Garden Party, Toast

With Rock at My Back

A picture of a sheer white monastery in a face of rock—stunning.  I think of living there, of who and what I would be, regarded always by the sea.  I have stayed before at bedrock, in the Pennine Alps, and think that psychologically I am disturbed there not to be able to dig deeper, beneath, within.  To know that no concealment is possible.  No burrowing, burying, even borrowing.

In a white monastery, I would be stripped to my essential elements.  I would live simply; be wise, chastened, strong as copper wire.  I would write ghazals, perhaps.  Learn Portuguese or ancient Greek.  I would drink sage tea, eat eggplant curries, buy an antique telescope, paint my few pieces of furniture deep blue, make friends with a painter of icons in the nearest village.  Be grateful through and through.

image:  Patmos Monastery, Seven Art Friends

The Garden Within

"For me the appropriate metaphor for the inner spiritual centre is a garden, a place of potential peace and tranquility.  This garden is a place where the Spirit of God comes to make self-disclosure, to share wisdom, to give affirmation or rebuke, to provide encouragement, and to give direction and guidance.  When this garden is in proper order, it is a quiet place, and there is an absence of busyness, of defiling noise, of confusion.  The inner garden is a delicate place, and if not properly maintained it will be quickly overrun by intrusive undergrowth.  God does not often walk in disordered gardens.  And that is why inner gardens that are ignored are said to be empty."
—Gordon MacDonald, Cultivating Our Spiritual Garden

image:  Claude Monet,  Monet's garden at Vétheuil, 1880

Far Gardens, and Near

"Dirty hands, iced tea, garden fragrances thick in the air and a blanket of color before me, who could ask for more?"
—Bev Adams, Mountain Gardening

images: Gertrude Jekyll Garden, Lindisfarne, Christie B. Cochrell; Flower garden of the Chateau de Bouges, SiefkenDR; Monet's Garden at Giverny, Eure, France, Selena N.B.H.

Independence Day

Happy Independence Day.  Promise yourself to do something daring and defiant, wholly your own!  Write your name with a sparkler across the summer dark; send bottle rockets off into the western sea after the fleeing sun, declaring victory against every kind of oppression and belittlement.  Escape the Chîteau d’If with breathtaking swordplay.  Let nothing but the wind catch you—in play, in cameraderie.  Grill some sausages and peppers, and drink draft rootbeer.  Spit watermelon seeds wherever you jolly well want.  Dream of a crop of green stripes.  Or do none of this, if you don’t choose to.    

“And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.”

—Thomas Jefferson

“Degrees of ability vary, but the basic principle remains the same: the degree of a man's independence, initiative and personal love for his work determines his talent as a worker and his worth as a man. Independence is the only gauge of human virtue and value. What a man is and makes of himself; not what he has or hasn't done for others. There is no substitute for personal dignity. There is no standard of personal dignity except independence.”

—Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“People have only as much liberty as they have the intelligence to want and the courage to take.”

—Emma Goldman

“No man is great enough or wise enough for any of us to surrender our destiny to. The only way in which anyone can lead us is to restore to us the belief in our own guidance.”

—Henry Miller

“I will not be ‘famous,’ ‘great.’ I will go on adventuring, changing, opening my mind and my eyes, refusing to be stamped and stereotyped. The thing is to free one's self: to let it find its dimensions, not be impeded.”

—Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary

“Where we choose to be, where we choose to be--we have the power to determine that in our lives. We cannot reel time backward or forward, but we can take ourselves to the place that defines our being.”

—Sena Jeter Naslund, Ahab’s Wife, or The Star-Gazer

“Maybe your country is only a place you make up in your own mind. Something you dream about and sing about. Maybe it's not a place on the map at all, but just a story full of people you meet and places you visit, full of books and films you've been to. I'm not afraid of being homesick and having no language to live in. I don't have to be like anyone else. I'm walking on the wall and nobody can stop me.”

—Hugo Hamilton, The Speckled People:  A Memoir of a Half-Irish Childhood

“Independence is a complex word in a foreign tongue. To resist occupation, whether you're a nation or merely a woman, you must understand the language of your enemy. Conquest and liberation and democracy and divorce are words that mean squat, basically, when you have hungry children and clothes to get out on the line and it looks like rain.”

—Barbara Kingsolver

“By today’s standards King George III was a very mild tyrant indeed. He taxed his American colonists at a rate of only pennies per annum. His actual impact on their personal lives was trivial. He had arbitrary power over them in law and in principle but in fact it was seldom exercised. If you compare his rule with that of today’s U.S. Government you have to wonder why we celebrate our independence.”

—Joseph Sobran

image:  James Macneill Whistler, Night in Black and Gold, The Falling Rocket

The Music of Wild Grass

 

"I walk without flinching through the burning cathedral of the summer.  My bank of wild grass is majestic and full of music.  It is a fire that solitude presses against my lips."
—Violette Leduc, Mad in Pursuit

image:  The Path to Maywood Farm A small patch of nettles and wild grasses sits by the side of the path.  David Lally

The Two Most Beautiful Words

"Summer afternoon - summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language." 

—Henry James

 

  

images:  Christie B. Cochrell, Pink Roses, Thendara; Rosescape, Helmsley; Pierre Bonnard, Summer in Normandy, and Siesta

An Armchair Pilgrimage to Lindisfarne

On this overcast first-of-July morning, which reminds me of northern England in July minus the greenery and lovely sheep, I’ve been thinking about visiting Lindisfarne, Holy Island, two summers ago.  About walking from the priory to the castle, past the picturesque harbor with lobster pots and boats.  About the perfect Gertrude Jekyll garden enclosed in stone walls below the famous castle hill.
  

I’d love to go back some day for a long retreat, writing and taking pictures everywhere and staying in the white inn.

images:  Christie B. Cochrell

Lindisfarne