Places I Would Rather Be

In Venice, eating fish and readying for a Vivaldi concert —  




Image:  Christie B. Cochrell, Goldola, Blue

Tacos

Today I'm making tacos—

* California Pork Tacos with marjoram and citrus juices

* Slow-cooker Chicken Tacos

* White Bean Tacos with Caramelized Onions and Goat Cheese

* Swiss Chard Tacos

* Mushroom, Arugula, and Fontina Tacos

Happily I'm not making eight dozen tortillas!




image:  Tacos de carnitas as served at King Taco in East Los Angeles, Jess Lander

Aimless Love

And as an antidote to feeling (as I have been) grumbly and irritated by everything around—here's a poem of grace by Billy Collins.

Aimless Love

This morning as I walked along the lakeshore,
I fell in love with a wren
and later in the day with a mouse
the cat had dropped under the dining room table.
In the shadows of an autumn evening,
I fell for a seamstress
still at her machine in the tailor’s window,
and later for a bowl of broth,
steam rising like smoke from a naval battle.
This is the best kind of love, I thought,
without recompense, without gifts,
or unkind words, without suspicion,
or silence on the telephone.
The love of the chestnut,
the jazz cap and one hand on the wheel.
No lust, no slam of the door –
the love of the miniature orange tree,
the clean white shirt, the hot evening shower,
the highway that cuts across Florida.
No waiting, no huffiness, or rancor –
just a twinge every now and then
for the wren who had built her nest
on a low branch overhanging the water
and for the dead mouse,
still dressed in its light brown suit.
But my heart is always propped up
in a field on its tripod,
ready for the next arrow.
After I carried the mouse by the tail
to a pile of leaves in the woods,
I found myself standing at the bathroom sink
gazing down affectionately at the soap,
so patient and soluble,
so at home in its pale green soap dish.
I could feel myself falling again
as I felt its turning in my wet hands
and caught the scent of lavender and stone.

Billy Collins

 image:  Christie B. Cochrell, Stone Hand, Villa Montalvo

Windows

A mysterious window, I forget where.

Having to listen far too constantly to the aggravating boorish talk in the workspace around me, I am pleased to see a new work by Michel Serres, just out today, which proposes something I have felt but not examined:

He warns that while we can measure what he calls "hard pollution"—the poisoning of the Earth—we ignore at our peril the disastrous impact of the "soft pollution" created by sound and images on our psyches.

I escape the noise pollution for the moment in my favorite music of Boccherini, his String Quintet in C, Opus 25/4, by the wonderful Fabio Biondi.

image:  Christie B. Cochrell, Green Window

November Sunday

I'm being cheered this morning by Slow Girl Foods steel-cut oatmeal, "handmade with quinoa, agave nectar, and local fruits & nuts," and by Venezuelan coffee in my cafetière.

I'm on my way to the farmers' market in search of Blenheim apricots and good ollalieberry jam, honey crisp apples (a new invention this year?) and chard to go in Israeli couscous with cumin and saffron.

Then what?  Perhaps working on my Mallorcan mystery, happily immersed in that extraordinary island's culture, while ignoring the chores that clamor for my time and energy.  Weekends should be enjoyed!


image:  Christie B. Cochrell, Tiles

Windows

Pottery Shop, Allied Arts, Menlo Park, Christie B. Cochrell

Windows

Wherever I am, I like to coax out quiet revelations, luminous and lovely—the play of light, the journeyings of time, things ephemeral and ancient.  I'm especially fascinated by the liminal space of windows, by the ambiguities of outside and in, substance and reflection, glass and what's printed on it or held within it.
 
Joyful things; joie de vivre.

 “The reality of any joy in the world is indescribable; only in joy does creation take place . . .  Joy is a marvelous increasing of what exists, a pure addition out of nothingness. . . .  Joy is a moment, unobligated, timeless from the beginning, not to be held but also not to be truly lost again, since under its impact our being is changed chemically, so to speak, and does not only, as may be the case with happiness, savor and enjoy itself in a new mixture."

     —Rainer Maria Rilke, January 1914

image:  Christie B. Cochrell, Ducks, Sonoma

Going On

Pelicans, Half Moon Bay

This poem by Mary Oliver is more hopeful than my bittersweet post on leavetaking yesterday.

Lines Written in the Days of Growing Darkness

Every year we have been
witness to it: how the
world descends
into a rich mash, in order that
it may resume.
And therefore
who would cry out

to the petals on the ground
to stay,
knowing, as we must,
how the vivacity of what was is married

to the vitality of what will be?
I don’t say
it’s easy, but
what else will do

if the love one claims to have for the world
be true?
So let us go on

though the sun be swinging east,
and the ponds be cold and black,
and the sweets of the year be doomed.

— MARY OLIVER

image:  Christie B. Cochrell

Leavetakings

It is the time of leaves, of leaving, leaf- and leave-taking.

From a poem of the same name, by Louise Bogan—

I do not know how we can bear

The river struck by the gold plummet of the moon

And nor do I know how we can bear this conflagration of the trees, leaving them stripped and sere, with nothing left.


Every year again, this fundamental loss.

image:  Christie B. Cochrell, Red Leaves 

Carefully Uncovered Art

One of the wall-paintings of Thera, the Minoan city buried in the ash of the eruption of the volcano (thousands of times more violent than Mt. St. Helens, and six times Krakatoa), which caused sherds of ash in the icecaps of Greenland, a permanent disturbance in the tree rings of California’s bristlecone pines, crop failures in China, the legendary plagues of Egypt.  Which rewrote geography—left an enormous hole in Santorini and the bottom of the sea, drowned and reconfigured harbors along Crete’s north coast, cut promontories off into islands, and threw great waves thirty miles inland into Turkey, carving channels almost to Mount Ararat.  
     (from Reading the Stones)


image:  Wall-painting with a depiction of lilies from the "House of the Lilies" at Amnisos, 1500 BC, Heraklion Archaeological Museum