Places I Would Rather Be

The last two days have been spent trying to decide where to go, while my little patio is overrun with house painters.  I've hung out at the public library, looking out on the apricot orchard; at the Stanford golf course, under a sprawling oak, with Maya hot chocolate and notebooks; in the art store, picking out textured rice paper and a chocolate brown brush pen; driving through campus tempted by art museum and café and the sun-dappled arcades of the quad; and at a shaded sidewalk table at the Anatolian Kitchen, meeting with a friend over spiced lamb kebabs and a confetti salad bright with purple cabbage and red radish.  I've been discombobulated and am ready to settle, though maybe all of these should be in my routine, like bits of colored glass in a mosaic—the ancient millefiori.




image:  Joaquín Mir Trinxet, aka Joaquín Mir (Spanish Catalan, 1873–1940): Orange Trees in Majorca (Paisaje Mallorquín con Naranjos), I Require Art

Back to School

It is the time for going back to school, and everywhere are scared and hopeful young faces, new satchels full of pencils and notebooks [that surely dates me!], and anxious parents hovering, encouraging, ready to say goodbye.

I feel as if I, too, am going back to school.  Ready to learn new things, this new phase of my life.  Laid off.  Retired.  Words to add to my vocabulary, sounding the syllables, testing the meaning, feeling the weight.

I, too, have my arms full of books.  I've bought new colored pens for drawing.  Emerald green.  Peacock blue.  Santa Fe turquoise.  Green Gulch pine.  I've pulled out my lovely Nuremberg diptych, with its wind rose and sundial, telling both Italian and Babylonian hours.  (I like to think that I am entering that time, the time of Italian and Babylonian hours, instead of the usual 8 to 5.)

I am scared as I begin this journey, but excited too—full of the love of learning that has drawn me ever since I was one of those young children dropped off in my first classroom with hinged wooden desks.  And now my classroom is the world, my heart, a clean slate of blackboard I must write my future on.

What will I learn?  Will my teachers be kind, and wise, and patient as I stumble over everything that's unfamiliar, hard to grasp, impossible to understand?

I wonder.  I am full of wonder.  As my friends' card said of me, quoting Henry James, "She had an immense curiosity about life, and was constantly staring and wondering."  Something happily to be going on with.

image:  Lili Butler reading at the Butler house, Giverny, 1908.

Theodore Earl Butler, (1861–1936) -American Impressionist.  Seven Arts Friends

Listing Ever So Slightly

My little horse fetish has come home from the office, where it kept watch on my working days, and now sits on my long table laden with collage bits, edited pages, Italian mug, luminous blue-green stone, and "fragile" stickers.  (The Zunis say the horse posesses healing powers, swiftness, strength.  I love its calm demeanor and its wabi-sabi texture.)

Today, instead of working, I am listing—and listing toward—the following:

. drinking Blue Bottle New Orleans iced coffee

. thinking impulsively about buying a telescope

. watching a baby jackrabbit cavorting with the quails

. revisiting a lot of favorite 70s music

. wanting to cultivate a sort of Noel Coward persona, with cigarette holders and satin dressing gowns

. returning to my sheep ("revenons aux moutons")

image:  Christie B. Cochrell, Horse Fetish

Some Thoughts on Being Let Go

"Dreaming escape from all the days without a soul," I wrote, returned from soulful weeks in England to my writing room with Saint Bernard (whose lessons on ascent I had forgotten), Saint Cecilia with her wooden mandolin, and San Pasquale in his kitchen with bread oven and big-bellied smile.  And finally tired of my plaint, they released me.

Instead of careful order now, finches every which way.

Instead of dread, dismay, that wobbly airborne feeling of a child first on a bicycle—the concrete all too obviously there lying in wait, but for the moment the glee of not having met it even midway.

Instead of complaints unjustified and unanswerable, the description of an old Normandy wheelbarrow.  No longer useable, but charming in its garden repose.

I will re-pose, regroup, wobbly or no.

Music, cooking, climbing, birds.  I write backwards on notebook pages, last to next-to-last, and look ahead.  What am I now?   All of these things and more, the Serene Highness I have been becoming all these years while seeming least serene, while driven to a lapse (or two) in my serenity.

Puccini, Frederick, and a calico chicken—all gathered on the big old Random House, the "Mr. House" my father consulted for words (if randomly) over the years, the words that mostly haven't failed me.  All of the words I'll ever need.

And now the Friday songs are coming from the synagogue next door, and light pours through my little Tiffany window, and I am whole—wholly myself, despite (to spite) no longer having the work that seemed to define me or delimit me, acting as training wheels on that child's bike so long.

The one afraid of letting go, let go.  And going, like those yellow-feathered finches, in precarious exaltation, every which way.

image:  She Who Is

Places I Would Rather Be

In one of those lounge chairs, reading Proust or Jean Giono.




image:  Une France lumineuse et artistique