The Month of June

“Green was the silence, wet was the light,

the month of June trembled like a butterfly.”

― Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets

Image:  Colias croceus - Clouded Yellow butterfly

Thoughts on a Birthday

“And that other self, who watches me from the distance of decades, 

what will she say? Will she look at me with hatred or with compassion, 

I whose choices made her what she will be?” 

(Jane Hirshfield, After)

image:  She Who Is

Fairy Tales Again

“Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”

(C.S. Lewis)

I've been reminded of this incredible artist, lost to me since childhood, and now here blooming again.  Hers is the world of fairy tales, that never goes away entirely, just goes dormant until you find your way back into it again.  That first world, that old well loved house, which poets, artists, shamans, conjurors, and all our favorite storytellers recreate.

“And now my old dog is dead, and another I had after him, and my parents are dead, and that first world, that old house, is sold and lost, and the books I gathered there lost, or sold—but more books bought, and in another place, board by board and stone by stone, like a house, a true life built, and all because I was steadfast about one or two things: loving foxes, and poems, the blank piece of paper, and my own energy—and mostly the shimmering shoulders of the world that shrug carelessly over the fate of any individual that they may, the better, keep the Niles and Amazons flowing.”

(Mary Oliver, Blue Pastures)

image:  Sulamith Wulfing, from Pigtails in Paint

For the River Is Time

You're haunted, you're hunted, wherever you roam.

Spoon River, Spoon River, is calling you home.

For the river is time, as it flows toward the sea,

and in leaving its banks you are free, you are free.

So very, very long ago (45 years!) I took those words to heart, feeling nostalgic already for having to leave the river, Santa Fe, my childhood—even before I left.  I felt a presentiment of how it would be, away, how I would always miss it and feel part of me missing, elsewhere.

I would have been in ninth grade when I read the lines in our school literary magazine, The Skirmisher.  The older kids were performing The Spoon River Anthology for the spring's play, a story about leavings, ghosts, lives and losses.  And I was heartbroken because we were all being moved away from the river—the Santa Fe River, in our case, where I had roamed so blissfully, collecting tiny water birch cones, swinging on a fat rope from a tree on the far bank the last days of the school year, learning, loving, discovering up close the world of sorrow and delight as adolescents do.  We had to leave that Eden for a new campus elsewhere in town, no longer up the deep canyon where artists lived and horses could be climbed to at lunchtime up Cerro Gordo, the "fat hill."

And now, this year, next Saturday, the school reunion will be there on the river, at that place that affected me so profoundly, that embodies all loss for me, all longing.  And I won't be able to be there—another loss that all these years later still hurts.  You can't revisit the past, no, except in heart and mind.  I know they say you shouldn't even try. But I would have loved dearly in this instance to go back to my river of time just for that single afternoon.

image:  Santa Fe River, City of Santa Fe

La Vie en Pourpre

Sitting on a slatted bench in a windfall of purple blossoms at lunchtime, my thoughts are purple, my walls old, and stone, my crates just emptied of ripe apricots, melons, my words thoughtful and slow, not racing as they sometimes do. 

Life in purple is the life to seek, a steadier sturdier way of being seeing than la vie en rose.

“Indigo has a purifying, stabilizing, cleansing effect when fear, repression, and obsessions have disturbed your mental body. Indigo food vibrations are: blackberries, blue plums, blueberries, purple brocoli, beetroot, and purple grapes.”

(Tae Yun Kim, The First Element:  Secrets to Maximizing Your Energy)

image:  Coeur de Lavande en Provence

Notes on the Need for Beauty

I am feeling fragile at the moment, drawn and quartered by impossible demands, and find myself in need of beauty.  I am inspired by this book, which I would love to tuck myself under the shabby chic coverlet to read, to draw up my own notes on that compelling, urgent need, as real as thirst or vitamin-deficiency.

And I find others' thoughts on beauty, on how it's won, often as not hard-won, from despair, clouds, windstorms—exactly those things I'm fighting.

“ . . . you can
drip with despair all afternoon and still,
on a green branch, its wings just lightly touched
by the passing foil of the water, the thrush,
puffing out its spotted breast, will sing
of the perfect, stone-hard beauty of everything.”

 (Mary Oliver, “The Poet with His Face in His Hands”)

“Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky.”  (Rabindranath Tagore, Stray Birds)

“Should you shield the canyons from the windstorms you would never see the true beauty of their carvings.”  (Elisabeth Kubler-Ross)



 

image:  Coeur de Lavande en Provence

Season to Taste

It is an in-between sort of season, summer set going (or about to be) by the Memorial Day weekend, but a distinct chill in the air, even midday.  I wear two sweaters and a robe, mostly, today long sleeves with jaunty stripes.

The archaeology has started already on Crete, and I remember the year I was there, this week and on past my birthday—staying on the north coast in the Venetian harbor town, eating Greek yogurt with honey and walnuts for breakfast in the pink café next to the Turkish bathhouse where Zorba’s Bouboulina worked (or cheese or wild green pies from the market shaped like a staurolite), prowling the Minoan ruins, eating fresh trout at night on Mt. Ida after negotiating impassible roads—no more than goat tracks, all of rocks and climb—given directions by revenant shepherds who vanished completely afterwards, elusive as the villages imagined by the mapmakers beyond the little beehive tholos tomb.

And June, which is it nearly, but not yet, and yet again years past, in Santa Fe meant roses.  Peace, Tiffany, Garden Party—all the old-fashioned names; and doors open at last after the months of snow and tumbleweeds and dreariness, with only screens between us and the sound of sprinklers, birds; long idle summer mornings out of school, reading, collecting rocks (quartz crystals, amethyst, chalcedony, maybe a bit of glassy black obsidian, or moss agate), and then, soon, horseback riding on long shady trails at Bishop’s Lodge, hilly trail rides on my favorite Dusty, the palomino.  In junior high, pining for all the boys I madly loved and wouldn’t see again until August.  Mock orange in fragrant bloom outside my bedroom there, those childhood summer nights and days—and now, this year, I have a bush against the side fence here, but not as heavenly somehow.  The buds reluctant, and the odor faint, like brittle faded flowers pressed in books for remembrance.

The wind unsettles me; I can’t lose myself either in the present or the past, or find myself, either; my writing stalls.  I make indifferent tarts that should have been better; the evenings disappear much sooner than they ought; I’m in some sort of fugue state, bumbling my way to what?

I’ll make a summer reading list, and finish the story I’m writing.  I’ll decorate a tart with edible flowers, copying another’s inspiration.  I’ll make bread with sunflower seeds, tagine with apricots.  I’ll study something new (Estonian, or the bassoon), travel to England, walk along the shore with Oliver Mtukudze on my iPod, watching the impossibly white herons conjugating water, articulating grace.

I’ll season things to taste—chili from Santa Fe, wild sage from those hillsides in Crete, mint from my planter box with blue glass balls that add distilled color and light.  And in that season just ahead will be picnics and garden parties strung with Japanese lanterns; Peruvian coffee cupped in cold hands beside a mountain creek running with snow-melt underneath long sandstone Anasazi caves.

Stirring with wooden spoons all afternoon— tweaking the recipe—adding a pinch of cinnamon—soon it will taste exactly right.

image:  Yinova Center

Keeping Things Well in Hand

The past makes me much happier than the future, because it’s not nearly as scary.  What happened there, horrific as it might have been, has already happened.  Though a new light may be shed on things long past and in our minds decided (new Minoan palaces dug out from a thyme-scented hillside in the west of Crete; lost plays by Shakespeare uncovered under floorboards; a love child of some virgin queen traced through a line of DNA—or letters—or a cryptic record in a parish church), it mostly can’t hurt us, can’t send us toppling into a dizzying unknown.

It’s in the yet uncharted seas of what might be coming at us, beyond our least control, that monsters swarm.

I’m perfectly content to linger in the deepest caves of Lascaux, El Castillo, Sulawesi, Argentina, marveling at the mystery of the painted animals there in the dark, bringing the rocks to life; the mystery after all familiar and as true to me as my hand print.

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image:  Cueva de los Manos

Morning Miscellany

Some things that come to mind or eye or hand today—

. the favorite picture of us sitting on the fountain’s edge at Mission San Luis Obispo, with the stone bear fishing with big gentle paws in the water behind us

. a book of daily meditations for women “who do too much”:  a gift from a high school friend I haven’t seen since having dinner with our families on the Kona Coast one Chinese New Year, at a long table under the palms with sea turtles nearby and paper dragon

. Stendhal’s Promenades dans Rome

. the black pottery rabbit from San Ildefonso Pueblo given to me by the English Brigadier General who taught us Latin

. Lost Songs of the Silk Road

. a mango

. my mother’s toucan socks

. Santa Fe clouds

. this window at the old pottery shop at Allied Arts, one of my first forays into photography

image:  Christie B. Cochrell, Pottery Shop