Hands

Remarkable hands, storied hands.
Hands, hands can build.
Hands can mold, shape, and speak.
Hands can grasp for the heavens, touch it and believe in the make believers.

(From Hands, by Bruce Alan Humphrey)

image:  Christie B. Cochrell, The Hand of Time

Conjuring

Still thinking about Prospero and what he gave up (willingly? or just with resigned self-knowledge and foresight?), and having felt the pain of an elderly friend who is mourning great losses in his abilities to move around in the world, enjoy things he used to, write masterful sentences, and be himself, I’ve been exploring this subject in the poems I’m currently writing—the magic of various sorts that is everywhere, in the simplest things (a cup of tea, a bird feather) or most elaborate (a ceremonial bush buffalo costume from an African artist), animating the world for us; and the power of words, which can—like archaeology—reclaim magic, stories, wonder, from the past, as well as performing spells of their own.

I’ve been especially conscious of the ability of words to conjure a place, a mood; to return us to people we want more than anything to be with; to show us again the color of an old light-dappled wall behind the table where we sat and talked for hours one forgotten afternoon, the road we walked one summer or earliest spring trying to find traces of the elusive Etruscans, the school which gave us our first friends and taught us other magic (reading, drama, shaping heads from clay), the white cat that vanished up the ancient stairs of a far distant town we have never seen again— until now, summoned and put down on the page.

Shared words are still more powerful, and the magic of our new technologies allows instant linking with other times, places, images, words, other attempts to bring back what is gone (this link to my ramblings in Florence and Fiesole, for instance), other ways of reclaiming what we’ve been and what we want to be.

image:  Christie B. Cochrell, Fiesole, Early February

Joies de Vivre

 

Honey shampoo.

I must confess to sometimes doing irrational things in the name of aesthetic pleasure.  I fell in love with the scent and effect of an unassuming honey shampoo at a B&B in Santa Barbara or Morro Bay last October, but when I went looking, discovered it’s not available in regular bottles for love nor money.  So I bought what I could—one hundred of the little guest-sized bottles, which should last me a good, happy year.  (And are easy to pack along on trips, I might add in my defense!)

image:  honey, Self Growth Your Way

Collective Nouns for Our Time

. a pod of iPods

. a gaggle of Googlers
. a conflagration of Kindles
. a cobbler of Blackberries
. a latte of laptops

. a falsetto of Tweets

. a bliss of blogs

. a blessing of bloggers

. a pollution of politicians

. a complacency/chutzpah/superfluity of CEOs [pick one]

. a murmur of middle managers

. a galaxy of Starbucks

. a je-ne-sais-quois of Frenchmen

image:  Christie B. Cochrell, A Drift of Swans

Ways of Being in the World

Some beautiful, thoughtful prose to start the weekend—though everyone should be out enjoying the gift of time, some good music and company, dogwalking, early fruit trees, an excursion by water, a good writers' café, a museum, a street fair or indoor market, something fun.  Time enough to read blogs later!

I look up.  The sky is shimmering.  If we could hear it, we’d know the sky is howling and its cry is spreading wide across the darkness.  I have never seen the northern lights before.  The sky is filled with them.  They are dancing, the color of roses, the green of springtime.  The lights shimmer and move around the black dome of sky.  The Anishnabe call them dancing ghosts.

Surrounding us are the trees, the shadowy world of wolves.  Magic is above us.  Underneath us, beneath these lakes and islands, is some of the oldest rock in the world, more than three billion years old.  In places, the iron is so concentrated in the underlying stone that the needle of the compass points away from magnetic north.

You could say this strange place has its own north, a pull of its own.  I feel it tugging down the bones and muscles.  There’s a fire beneath the land, farther down in the molten core, a heat at dead center, and even the dust from solar storms moves toward it.

We walk up the road.  None of us speak.  Then there is the howl.  It is soft and long.  Even the loose skin of the trees holds still.  Everything listens.  There is another slow, rising howl.  It is a man.  It’s a man speaking.  In a language he only pretends to know, he calls out to the wolves.

We wait.  We are waiting for the wolves to answer.  We want a healing, I think, a cure for anguish, a remedy that will heal the wound between us and the world that contains our broken histories.  If we could only hear them, the stars themselves are howling, but there is just the man’s voice, crying out, lonely.  Not even those of us standing behind him answer.  It is a silence we rarely feel, a vast and inner silence that goes deep, descends to the empty spaces between our cells.  The dancing ghosts still linger above us.  I know this woeful song.  I have heard it before.  I have heard women wail this way in grief, heard the wild, lonely song rage up a rising scale of sorrow.

We have followed the wolves and are trying to speak across the boundaries of ourselves.  We are here, and if no wolf ever answers, or even if no wolves remained, we’d believe they are out there.  And they are.

—Linda Hogan, Dwellings:  A Spiritual History of the Living World

image:  Fish-eye lens view of the northern lights taken mid July 2004. (The Big Dipper in the constellation Ursa Major is on the left and on the right is Queen Cassiopeia in the constellation Cassiopeia. Between them in the middle, is the Little Dipper in the constellation Ursa Minor. The end of the Little Dipper’s handle is Polaris, known as the North Star.)  Observatoire Mont Cosmos, Quebec, Canada

 

Color of the Day

Mauve.

I'm afraid I worship mauve!

—Tom Stoppard, Indian Ink

image:  Mauve Hyacinth Blooms, Lamppost Pictures photoblog 

Dydd Gŵyl Dewi

Happy March; happy St. David’s Day!  (The feast day of the patron saint of Wales, a Celtic monk from the sixth century.)

I don’t see anybody here wearing a leek or daffodil, or even listening to Bryn Terfel.  I did braise leeks on Tuesday night, by chance, and am tempted to try this recipe for Cawl or maybe Monmouth Pudding.

Since it’s the day of daffodils, I offer this snatch of yellow from one of the poems in the recently published notebook from T.S. Eliot’s twenties, the appropriately named Inventions of the March Hare.

Daffodils

Long yellow sunlight fills

The cool secluded room

Swept and set in order—

Smelling of earth and rain.

And from the March Hare himself, a quote I like exceedingly:

Good answer.  Wrong.  But good.

image: Field of Daffodils with an old barn in the background, Forest Wander from Cross Lanes, USA

That Sort of Evening

It’s the sort of evening that requires an historic stone inn with good walking trails around, a lazily flaming apple log in the fireplace, a spaniel on the heather-and-earthen-tone hearth rug, Lucia di Lammermoor on the iPod, a little peaty Islay single-malt in an etched Georgian tumbler near to hand, a classic detective story in a nice cloth binding open on my lap, and an amiable old raconteur ready to interrupt.

But failing that, warm socks and a BBC rerun will have to do.

image:  a fire in a fireplace, Fastily 

Thought for the Day

I adore adverbs; they are the only qualifications I really much respect. 

—Henry James

image:  Wordle

Places I Would Rather Be

Today I would love to be in the Rome of Rilke’s letter—winning myself back, as he puts it.

Waters infinitely full of life move along the ancient aqueducts into the great city and dance in the many city squares over white basins of stone and spread out in large, spacious pools and murmur by day and lift up their murmuring to the night, which is vast here and starry and soft with winds.  And there are gardens here, unforgettable boulevards, and staircases designed by Michelangelo, staircases constructed on the pattern of downward-gliding waters and, as they descend, widely giving birth to step out of step as if it were wave out of wave.  Through such impressions one gathers oneself, wins oneself back from the exacting multiplicity, which speaks and chatters there (and how talkative it is!), and one slowly learns to recognize the very few Things in which something eternal endures that one can love and something solitary that one can gently take part in.

—Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, Rome, October 29, 1903 (translated by Stephen Mitchell)

image: Lungotevere dei Pierleoni, Roma, Italy, Fazen