Looking (and its variants):
A weekend in the garden, trying to wrangle the raspberry beds into shape, looking at the buds on the apple tree, watching slow queen bumblebees gathering pollen and nectar for their nests, looking up at blue sky and the chartreuse blossoms on the big-leaf maples, hummingbirds in the huckleberry bushes, and noticing the most beautiful clump of lilies under my favourite lyrically-shaped Douglas fir.
Reading:
The stack of books by my bed is teetering towards collapse but on top, so I can open it when I need to hear what it says so plainly and beautifully, is Rebecca Solnit’s The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change. We are neck-deep in the world of change and sometimes it’s overwhelming. But then on a weekend, the election results from Hungary fill the airwaves and there’s reason to hope, even if the hope is tempered with anger and sadness for the past cruelties and suppressions. I loved this observation from a recent interview with Solnit in the Guardian:
Solnit quotes the American theologian Walter Brueggemann, who said “hope arises from memory”. “You can turn that inside out to say that despair arises from forgetting. If you forget that every good thing we have came about as the result of a heroic struggle, of course you will despair. But the right for women to be treated as people and to have voices and to participate in public and civic life is the result of a heroic struggle. Racial equality, far from perfectly achieved, but to the extent which it has been, is the result of a heroic struggle. When it comes to the environment, often our victories look like nothing: the river that wasn’t dammed or is no longer polluted, the forest that wasn’t cut down, the species that didn’t go extinct. You cannot see them, but they were the result of heroic struggle, and to know that is to know we have tremendous power. These things were contingent on us actually showing up, on doing the work. We have to keep showing up and keep doing the work.
Listening:
The other night we went out to the Backeddy Pub for supper. A mild evening, with people on the outside deck (mostly because the tables inside were all occupied), and how sweet to sit with our meal (seafood chowder for me, a fancy Chinese porkbelly preperation for John, served over mashed sweet potatoes), listening to Joe Stanton play his guitar in one corner. He has a warm baritone, a grand repertoire, and maybe the best thing is when he looks over, sees us, and plays Merle Haggard’s haunting “Kern River”. When I thanked him, he said, “You’re the only one who asks for this song.” And I didn’t even need to ask. Here’s Merle singing it. (Joe’s cover is just as lovely.)
I’ll never swim Kern River again
It was there I first met her
And it was there that I lost my best friend
Now I live in the mountains
I drifted up here with the wind
And I may drown in still water
But I’ll never swim Kern River again
Enjoying:
The sporadic coyote chorus, sometimes a single voice, sometimes an entire family.
Anticipating:
The pleasure of tucking these little pea seedlings into the bed I’m preparing for them.
Loving:
The work of adding my embellishments to the keepsakes John printed to give to those who buy my The Art of Looking Back when it comes out in May. Does it sound strange to say that I am in my element sitting at our dining table, surrounded by paints, glue, an oyster shell holding tiny akoya buttons, a skein of blue sashiko thread draped over the back of an old oak chair. I am in my element, mixing paint to echo flesh, finding the right blue to suggest the vest worn by the poet in the portrait featured in the book, glueing each tiny canvas to card, and piercing the right side of the vest with a sharp needle to fix a button with a single blue stitch. I am thinking of the exchange, a book, a little card with a tiny painting, my words, your contemplation of them. (Let me know when you have my book and I’ll send you a keepsake!)
When the gift moves in a circle its motion is beyond the control of the personal ego, and so each bearer must be a part of the group and each donation is an act of social faith.
–from Lewis Hyde’s The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property
Cherishing:
After a long period of darkness, light returned to my life. It took some work. But now I have some joy again, some anticipation, and the sense that the love I’d thought was damaged, gone, is still there, resilient (in a way I never realized it could be), and I am so grateful not to have given up completely.
