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Category: meditations

Music, Memory, Art(?): Where are We Now?

Last night I attended an incredibly beautiful chamber music concert, the first of the Knoxville Symphony's Concertmaster series for this year and was stunned by the skill, harmony, and emotional weight of the performance. I also allowed my mind to wander, as the minds of humans are won't to do, enjoying the music, experiencing the place, and allowing my thoughts to attempt to integrate the feelings of the now with the history that has led up to the now. It became a tangled mass of branching thoughts, which also seems to me to be a very human phenomenon. It is only when we cling too tightly to simplicity that we can be led astray.

The program consisted mostly of music of the baroque era, and mostly music of great emotional depth and weight. The exceptions are important here, as was the layout of the program, as the contrast added necessary tension, a tension that served to expand the listeners response, inspite of, or perhaps because of, the interruption in flow. This is harder to do than one might assume, this contrasting of what I will call style and substance, in a way that actually enhances all of the components, making something that felt whole out of disparate, but thematically related, pieces.

The basic format was along these lines: style, substance, style, substance.

But how did that take shape? First there was Corelli, with "La Folia for Violin, Harpsichord, and Continuo", a light vibrant piece that set the tone, a musical amuse-bouche of sorts. Corelli is important for shaping the tone of the baroque, but also because he insisted on a consistency in technique that changed the way music was performed, opening the way, perhaps, for modern orchestral performance. Corelli also, at least to this listener, seems to be incredibly balanced, lyrical, crisp, happy music, but a music of surfaces only, the depth held tightly at bay. The Corelli was followed by a longer work by Handel, the Sonata #4 in D Major for Violin and Harpsichord, which was richly resonant, imbued with an emotional sense that played harmoniously with the setting in the Knoxville museum of art. The lighter movements seeming to bounce playfully off the glass sculpture overhead, to dance through the texture of the cloud-filled sky seen just beyond the musicians, the contrast of baroque music and modern city in the moments before dusk. And then just that, dusk and the passion of the Scherzando, eternal, and yet also extremely specific to this communal experience in this time and space.

Then we began the second style-substance rotation. The Handel was followed by Martinu, by the "Promenades for Flute Violin and Harpsichord". It seems like an interesting choice on the surface, Martinu a very 20th-Century composer, a composer whose music seems perfectly in tune to his milieu between the wars that eternally changed human consciousness concerning who and what humans are and could become. Martinu was also attracted to the baroque, an interesting choice, but perhaps not surprising, an attempt to find a path forward while looking backward, looking for something in human history that softened the weight of the emotional moment. In this sense Martinu reminded me of Corelli — perhaps less formally polished and reserved, but also all style — except this was music for the jazz age, music of the 20's, music that was intentionally avoiding the inescapable emotional weight of the recent past.

I suspect that many in the audience did not love the Martinu as much as the Handel. I could say that I too might prefer to drift into Handel than Martinu, although I found it both shocking, and it is strange to say that about music that is over 80 years old, and charming in a way that had me considering Martinu differently than I had previously, probably mostly because I am only familiar with his symphonic output. But the Martinu also served to pull my thoughts together in a way that would have been different had the music not been included. I think placement was critical here, just before the intermission. If I were to maintain the food analogy, I would say it was a bit of a tart sorbet or palate cleanser, allowing our ears and minds to reset between two too-rich courses.

And the second half was rich. We were treated to two of the Brandenburg Concerti, and due to the considerations of the space, the audience and the larger group of musicians, the space itself began to feel as if we were all participating cells in a single body as the music unfolded, musicians and listeners as one. There was a very relational sense to this performance, one that is not always captured both between the musicians, and between the musicians and the audience, one where the listeners feel as if they are a part of the music surrounding them. It was a powerful and beautiful evening.

But this leads me to the other part of this performance, the places the music led my mind to wander, and my own questioning of history, experience, and humanity. These thoughts are my own, of course, and yet, much as we like to think ourselves unique, this is but a shadow truth. I am but a speck after all, and music reminds us of this, of the way we are transported into some common place even though our individual experiences of that place are different. We are all just cells in one giant living tree, twisted and overgrown perhaps, but an inexorably connected piece of the whole. It seems interesting, therefore, that though we live in a time when we prefer to think of ourselves as unique, we still thrill to music written in a time when the uniqueness of the individual was not a priority. This very dichotomy seems to connect us even more deeply. Even though we cannot experience anything in the same way as that previous cell did, its existence informs our existence.

As I listened to the Corelli, I was transported back to my 17- and 18- year old self, to the girl who loved Corelli, the girl would sit in her dorm room and lose herself in this music. I wondered what a young girl saw in Corelli and I am not surprised: the joy of it, yes, but also the harmony and cohesiveness. Perhaps it was that very lack of emotional weight that drew me in. At that age all I wanted was an escape from the burden of emotional strife, and as I listened to the music again, I reconnected with that sense last night, the was reminded of the way we yearn for peace today, yearn for escape from the sense of strife hammered into us every time we look at the news.

Corelli and Martinu, Handel and Bach. Baroque music connects us to some essential yearning. But we cannot have it, not in the way we think anyway. The way we listen to this music today is shaped by the way the world has been altered over the course of the last 120 years. It is in our DNA. The music we heard last night was unique to a particular time and place. We the listeners, and the musicians playing the music, are each completely who we are, and we are products world entirely different from the one in which Handel lived. That Handel could write music that transcended time and place is art. That is something unique to us, we humans, art and awareness — not just that we are aware, but that we are aware that we are aware, and this awareness changes us throughout subsequent generations, even, and oh the injustice of it, without our being aware that we are changed.

The music by Martinu reminded me of this, of my adolescent self loving Corelli, of the way we, the collective audience, loved the Handel, and that sense of universal yearning. The Martinu struck me because it made me think about the way many audiences of classical music today struggle with this period, struggle more I think with this "modern" period that occurred between the wars, the music where one world, one social structure, had been torn asunder and yet there was no stability, where another war was going to change our very understanding of humanity. We struggle because we cannot recapture that feeling experienced by generations before us, by people who were transformed into a different kind of awareness following WWII. We are inheritors of a different kind of world, but, in a way, like Martinu, we seek a more distant history, one less imbedded in our more recent DNA. Perhaps we too attempt to integrate old with new, dreams with the reality of the world in which we live, yearnings with experience.

I don't think we think of music, or art, in this way very often, and perhaps my own meandering reflections are shaped by new understandings, or misunderstandings, from recent readings. But it seems like something worth exploring. Or not.

This perhaps is just a beginning, an incoherent beginning at that.

October 10, 2019
Flowers from My Mother’s Garden

I walked around my mother's neighborhood this morning, first out through the back yard in the early morning sunlight, then back. The sun was higher, the light different but not yet high. These photos are being shown in the order they were taken, as the sky brightens, as I leave and return.

Aside from the lushness of the flowers, the first thing I really noticed was the softness of the air, the relatively low humidity, at least as compared with Tennessee, the gentle caress of a steady soft breeze on my skin. It is unusual to go from Tennessee to Texas and find a kinder, gentler climate. And although this is not the fist time this has happened, I continue to be surprised when the world upsets my expectations.

As I walked, my senses began to experiences the differences between the neighborhood and the one I had walked a mere 24 hours earlier. Both of us live in neighborhood with manicured lawns, where homes have sprinkler systems, and yet nothing was the same. Of course the plants are different in Texas than in my Tennessee neighborhood, but there were other signs of difference as well. Garland Texas is not in the midst of a drought, and the air is rich with the smell of earth, of green leaves and continued growth. Autumn is not advancing as quickly here.

Even though I live in a neighborhood filled with sprinklers, we cannot water enough to counterbalance the continued heat and the lack of rain. Texas as well has suffered a heat wave, but the availability of water, and the plethora of more heat tolerant plants is evident. Walking in Knoxville I smell dry dusty earth, browning leaves, decay. Walking in Garland I smell flowers, freshly mowed grass that smells of new growth, wet earth. The scent of a freshly watered lawn still in the flush of growth is markedly different than a freshly watered lawn that is nonetheless struggling to survive.

I notice other things as well. The birdsong is different. I hear the sounds of the marching band coming from the nearby high school, although I would probably hear something similar if I lived near a high school in Tennessee. I am reminded that it is Friday, that there will be a pep rally, and I am carried back to my own high school days.

I think about the drive to Texas, the long ride into the extended Texas sunset, broad and wide and filling the sky with a different kind of light than I see in Tennessee, where one feels closer to the earth perhaps, and less dwarfed by the sky. I think about how I watched the motion of the grasses on the sides of the road in Arkansas, the movement of the air through the leaves, the changes in wave motion and velocity as different vehicles passed in close proximity. I wondered why I had never noticed this before. I wondered about how easy it is to pass through life without really paying attention.

Sometimes I struggle with travel, with the idea of travel on an intellectual level, not the desire for it. Sometimes I think of travel as going someplace exotic, and put visiting family in a different category, travel that is not really travel with a capital T. But that isn't really fair. All travel, all experiences outside the constraints of our normal boundaries can open our eyes, expand our horizons. I remain unconvinced that we really need to travel in order to learn to open our eyes, but perhaps we do, perhaps we need to be forced out of the boundaries of our normal habits. Perhaps it is the interruption that is as important as the location, the interruption that allows us to stop our internal monologue for just a moment, and see something a little differently.

September 27, 2019
Monday Miscellany

A few highlights, diversions and meandering thoughts from last week…

Radish Greens Soup

I had purchased radishes, as much for their beautiful greens as for the radishes themselves at the farmer's market the Saturday before I burned my hand, and since I did not want those gorgeous greens to go to waste I managed to make soup, despite the burn, although it was a more time-consuming process than I might usually expect. I was using Béatrice Peltre's recipe from My French Family Table, which I had used a year and half ago, before the book was packed away. That first time I had noted that the soup was too redolent of potato for me, and needed more onion and so this time I halved the potato and added a leek to the shallot that was called for in the recipe, mostly because I had a leek on hand. I also sweated the leek, shallot, and celery slowly over very low heat, rather than sautéing them over medium heat as directed. Although I probably did not need to, I used homemade chicken stock in the soup, and given that I tend to make a rich bone-broth-type of stock, my final soup is really more of a green chicken soup than was intended. I probably didn't need the chicken stock at all, of perhaps only one cup of stock and three cups of water. The soup was delicious though, and a good thing to have on hand.

Downton Abbey

It will come as no surprise that I loved Downton Abbey and am ready to see it again anytime. I loved the series after all. Perhaps my mom would like to go see it, although I've had difficulty getting her out to movies in the recent past. At the same time perhaps my affection is surprising given that, aside from British literature, I am not an anglophile and care not a flip for the hoopla over royal weddings and babies, but there you are. I am nothing if not inconsistent, and although I love the costumes, I also love the story lines, and the idea of fine acting around smaller themes, the idea that one can float ideas without blowing things up, that one can participate in a system even while knowing it is doomed. Perhaps I just grow tired of darkness and harshness. Perhaps I too just want to look at a pretty dress and smile, relish the witty asides and 15-second references to all too human foibles, perhaps even a hint of nostalgia for something I am well aware was never really the way we imagine it have been.

Garden

General planting and landscaping is delayed by the continued heat and drought, the good news being that although I am surrounded by clay and dirt, at least I am not surrounded by mud. Nonetheless I was thrilled to look outside and see the that the two remaining lace cap hydrangeas are showing signs of budding. I shall enjoy the flowers and hope that this is not an all-out last ditch attempt at replicating themselves before giving up the ghost. Perhaps it is part of my concerted effort to water the existing shrubs, running slow trickles around the few surviving specimens, for long hours, hoping that the water will be absorbed rather than running off. I wonder that even this may not be enough, wonder if my attempts at watering are actually helping or prolonging the agony, although I take comfort in the fact that the plants that once looked peaked and weary seem to have perked up a good bit. Perhaps this is all worth the call from KUB informing me that my water usage has been high… yes, I know. If I had to give up showering in order to water the plants I would do so. I am tired of losing things, not that my own feelings will affect the outcome in any way. I only hope it is enough to keep everything going while I run off to Texas. I will have contractors in the house, but I can't expect them to water the garden.

The Planets

The symphony season opened Thursday with a performance of Gustav Holst's The Planets, which was accompanied by a video presentation of images compiled and collated from NASA. Admittedly I had mixed feelings going in, but felt it worked beautifully, the powerful images mostly playing well with the music and riffing off cultural references (such as Star Wars) that probably 80% of the audience, if not more, was simultaneously running through their heads. The concert hall was almost full on Thursday, when I went, and apparently sold out on Friday, and the music was powerfully and beautifully performed.

And despite all that, perhaps as much because of the pictures as due to the fact that I know the music so well, my mind did wander a little bit. Mostly I was thinking of the music and it's cultural associations, and not just because of Star Wars, and other film and television references. Themes and ideas from the Planets show up in religious music, school songs, popular music, so many places. And of course this is not unique to Holst. I always think that there is a world of educational opportunity out there, that although we have lost a certain degree of musical literacy, much of this strong tradition exists in our cultural memory, although it may be hidden and not overtly recognized. Much the same can be said for Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, early polyphony…. but during the performance of the Holst, I was thrilling to the music and imagining the possibilities of uniting the world, the music of Holst, and Star Wars, Christian Hymns, Frank Zappa, Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath all running through my head. The music has its own weight and presence, but all experience builds on previous experience, and a performance is never just itself, but always this fusion of all that has come before it with al that is happening in the present. A fine evening.

Science in Motion

The same evening that I attended the symphony I also went to an opening reception for a new exhibit at the McClung museum of photographs by Eadweard Muybridge, Berenice Abbot and Harold Edgerton. The exhibit was lovely and well worth attending. I was already familiar with most of the work by Muybridge and Abbot, less familiar with Edgerton, although some of the images are very well known. I found myself as fascinated by reading about the techniques and processes as in viewing the images themselves, thinking about the intersection of art and science, and the radical changes that the world has seen in the past 100 to 150 years. I was also taken with the camera cookies, even though I couldn't eat a one of them.

September 23, 2019
Little bits of Life

A spice order arrived from World Spice yesterday and as I unpacked the box and then filled jars and grinders, the entire kitchen was filled with the aroma of spices. I felt like I was in some exotic spice market and the experience followed me throughout the day, the aroma of spice a part of my skin. Appropriate then that I was reading Elif Shafak's 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World, where memories often begin with recollections of evocative scents or tastes. Shafak's prose often captures an almost poetically sensory sense of place and time that can feel palpable to the reader.

I really only filled the tall salt grinder, the matching pepper grinder had already been filled as Tellicherry peppercorns were one of the very few spices I replaced before moving. In fact, I should have ordered spices earlier, and it was only as I was setting the table for a dinner party that I realized I did not have salt for the table. I managed to put out small cellars with Maldon flakes but although I am happy with fingers in bowls of salt, not everyone shares this predilection. But now the grinder is filled with chunks of Himalayan pink salt, oh I know, how trendy of me, and I concocted a blend of six peppers for the smaller funky-looking grinder.

I actually bought that grinder just so I could fill it with mixed peppers. I didn't need it but somehow its weird almost alien looks drew me in. I can't say it is beautiful and yet it is in an odd beautiful-ugly sort of way. I like that It is made of local seed pods. I actually like that its strangeness draws attention to itself. Perhaps I just like it because it is unexpected.

And while I am thinking about scent and sensory stimuli, I am reminded that the scent in the air changed a couple of weeks ago. It is still hot, too hot to plant in my yard, and I don't think the sprinkler system is fully in yet, or if it is, no one has told me how to use it. But the air now has a subtle scent of autumn about it, a whiff of dust and decay, most apparent in the hours around dusk and dawn. This morning also, my toes were cold. That is probably more about me than the actual weather. The house is the same temperature it has been, but somehow my body is sensing the shift, and whereas a cold floor was deliciously soothing in the summer, it is now becoming chill. I needed new slippers in the spring but delayed purchasing them until after the move. It is now time and so slipper-buying will be added to today's list.

I can't say that I am really settled yet. I still feel like I am in a somewhat transitional space although I admit that this may be primarily because the yard remains so unfinished. I don't expel it to feel finished anytime soon as I have deliberately decided to only put in certain areas or larger items now. I want the garden to evolve over time, and yet at the moment perhaps it remains a little too bare. Or perhaps it is all just in my head. I am unpacked but I feel like I am standing on an empty set.

Not a set like the set for Million Dollar Quartet, which I saw at the Clarence Brown Theater last week. It was a fabulous show and a fun evening. The actors were incredibly talented and good, but I felt the show worked better as an event, something like musical entertainment, than it worked as an actual play exploring that particular moment in the development of Sun Records. But that may just be me — I always want something to think about, I always want discovery and meaning. It is likely that my brain looks for it, refuses to take the passive, easy, way out. I felt there could have been, perhaps should have been, more of a story to be told even thought the characters themselves, the relationships between them and the music was fabulous.

Perhaps it is just a symptom of my own pensive state of mind, but this exploration of the early days of rock reminds me of the cultural shift that had started over a decade previously, a shift sparked by the horrors of WWII and the changing of the American cultural landscape that it sparked. Rock wasn't really something radically new, but merely a specific symbol of a change already well under way, even though it may not have been visible as such at that particular time.

I wonder if we are in the midst of another shift….

September 5, 2019
Meanderings

I experiences a bit of a petulant moment on Saturday as I was out shopping, whinging to myself, quietly, under my breath, about why there was only one store in Knoxville I could count on for having Belgian endive in stock (or escarole for that matter). Both are vegetables that I would consume regularly, perhaps weekly, if they were widely available. But, as is usually always the case with these small annoyances in life, the situation is as much about ourselves as it is about the situation itself. Of course my formative adult years, ie. my formative cooking years, occurred in the Hudson Valley where both escarole and Belgian endive were indeed widely available in most grocery stores. It was a different time and place, with a different population, holding different expectations. It is on me, when moving, to realize that expectations and norms are different in different spaces. I should be grateful that I can find Belgian endive, and that the store in question is on my list of preferred stores (following last spring's spreadsheet comparison). I do in fact know where to go to get the things I want, and there are in fact probably many things in the store that are considered essential in this region, things that I never buy. In the end, it seems it is all about how one looks at the world, and how willing one is to adapt. And therefore I musk ask myself: Why whinge?

(chilled tomato soup with an endive and shiitake salad, a soup I've been making for over 20 years)

Of course I live in an age that celebrates the individual, which has not been the case for most of human history. I am not always convinced that this is the best course. Not that I don't believe that all people should be treated fairly and with dignity, but because I doubt that a society can successfully survive on individuality without developing a class of winners and a class of losers, or in fact whether even a person can live life solely based on his or her own desires without hurting others in the process, even inadvertently. Then I move on from there, thinking that we are not really living self-actualized individual lives at all. That each of us is a slave in one sense or another to this vision of society and culture, and that there is no way for some people to make it to the top without forcing other people to be on the bottom.

Oh dear, this is not at all where I thought I was going with post this morning. And yet here I am.

I realize the precariousness of my position because my life, and the very things I waste energy fretting over (endive?, landscapers?), where and how I live, are all a part of this same view of society that I am currently questioning, and I am unquestioningly not on the bottom of the heap. And so it seems I must hold my own good-fortune lightly, recognizing that were it all to disappear tomorrow, both the gain and the loss would be but a blip on the course of human history, and in fact should have nothing to do with the joy and purpose to be found in human life. Perhaps even my insistence on endive is a failure to adapt, an insistence that the past, my past, was somehow superior to the present, a dogged persistence in holding the ideals of the individual over all the rest.

Oh there is the rub. But how did I even get into this reflective state of mind? Blame it on books, because a lifetime of reading has shaped me, both fiction and non-fiction. Fiction makes us more empathetic, more human (and yes people have studied this); non-fiction forces us to think about the world in new ways. And the books I have just read, both non-fiction, have put me in a questioning mood. But to blame my own inclinations solely on books is also misleading — there is truth there of course, but such a simplistic explanation is acceptable only to a fool. Of course books alone do not make the person, so do our environment and the people we encounter, both willingly and unwillingly, but books force us to perhaps look outside ourselves, to open ourselves up to greater encounters with others. Although l cannot blame books entirely for who I am and how I think, they play a role.

Perhaps this is why books are so often banned? Thinking truly can be subversive, the ability to look outside of one's self and one's circumstances revolutionary. Or madness…… Or adulthood. Who was it that said the difference between looking at the world as a child and as an adult is the ability to step outside of one's milieu and self and look upon the self as if an outsider? But that too is revolutionary because the path of self-actualization of seeing the self as it truly is also means letting go of the idea that the world can revolve around one's own needs. The life of self-gratification is the life of a child.

Admittedly one of the books I have been reading, Debt, by David Graeber has perhaps provoked some of my more radical questionings, but I do not think radical questioning of one's basic assumptions is such a bad thing. Debt, has, in fact, been one of the most intellectually stimulating, enjoyable, and thought-provoking books I have read in a long time. It is not so much an economics text as it is a study of the history of debt as in idea, both economic and moral or cultural, and Graeber is best when he looks at the historical and anthropological record and pulls big themes and ideas together. He gets a lot right, but he is also sometimes a little loose with the details. I am not convinced that is important here as the aim seems to be to provoke and challenge the reader to think and perhaps stand up on his or her own opinions. I certainly don't agree with everything, but I do agree with some of what Graeber says and he has made me think and reconsider many a treasured bias, which proves useful even if I return full-circle to my previous position, now more fully informed. I think it is a book everyone should read, but which most people won't read, as it is too full of philosophy, history, and just plain old challenging and upsetting ideas.

The other book is in many ways less challenging but still thought provoking. It is not so much a book about nutrition as a book about the way corporations and the drive to constantly increase corporate profits have reshaped the way we eat and even the way we think about and crave food. This is not necessarily to our benefit, or to the earth's although Moss doesn't go into that in detail. He does talk about how sugar specifically, and the combination of sugar, salt and fat are used to create desire, and to change the nature of what and how we eat, of the very way we experience and think about food, and this is sobering. And he discusses how a drive to increase corporate profits has lead to the way we eat today, across all fields, not just prepared food although that is increasingly the bulk of what we eat, but also dairy and even meat production. He doesn't really go into the implications, or the way the corporatization of food has altered the environment in ways that we, willing sheep that we appear to be, have allowed because we assume that this is the way things are and must be.

I suppose I am channelling a bit of Graeber here but also my own natural inclination to question everything even if I don't find answers right away. Graeber tells us that we aren't asking the right questions. Moss as well, although not as explicitly. He shows us a problem and leaves it up to us to decided if we want to ask those tough questions or not. As for me, as I stated I have long thought that our ability to question is one of our greatest strengths. I also tend to think there our choices are rarely binary. If we see the world as black or white, yes or no, this or that, or even this is the way it has always been and anything else is chaos…… then, I've long been with Graeber — we are asking the wrong questions.

September 3, 2019
Slow Fruits

In many ways this has been a week in which pent-up frustrations (previously hidden, at least to myself) become increasingly manifest. And yet it was also a week of steady progress, of good times, and continued new beginnings. Like a puff of smoke, those frustrations were freed, apparently only beholden to my own unwillingness to let them go. For that I can thank the power of the spoken word, of naming problems rather shoving them back into the hidden drawers of my psyche, where they had no choice but to fester.

And yet I must also thank the power of handwork, even slow and at times tedious handwork that was not always meditative. I wound skeins of yarn into balls. I did it manually, by draping the yarn around the chair pictured and cannot pretend that I was always happy with the slow process of winding five skeins, five skeins each containing 580 yards of lace-weight linen. I should have done it weeks ago — I could have been knitting, but my darker frustrations were too busy nibbling away at my energy. Of course, now that the yarn has been wound, it is possible that I may move into the studio next week, and that ball winder may be unpacked. It is only a month after move-in, after all. But promises have been made before, and the ability to knit, to knit something I am actually eager to wear, is both a gift and a therapeutic balm.

The yarn is Prism's Euroflaxx Laceweight Linen Layers and it will be used to make Laura Bryant's boxy linen tee from the summer Vogue Knitting magazine, pretty much exactly in the color as shown. I don't subscribe to Vogue Knitting anymore, after being a devoted subscriber since they began publishing again in the 1980s. I have enough knitting patterns, and it is rare that enough appeals to me to keep the magazine. Summer sweaters are difficult given that I live in a place that is both hot and humid in the summer and I prefer neither. But I can wear most "summer" sweaters in the winter here, and perhaps this one even in the warmer transitional months of early summer and fall. Perhaps this is all just an indulgence in wishful thinking. Perhaps I need to travel someplace cold and drafty for the winters so I can wrap myself in wool.

The winding itself was slow. I admit to being spoiled. I miss my yarn winder, and in the missing began to fret about all the unpacked things that I miss, almost all of them are tools for handcraft. The missing fed the sense of tedium and frustration, reminding me of the fragility of our perception of the world, that the difference between tedium and mediation is purely state of mind. Once I was willing to let go of my own perceptions of the self-importance of my time, it became evident that this yarn was probably best being hand-wound. The linen tends to grab onto itself; I myself tend to push myself, and inner demon crying "harder" and "faster" — the combination could have quickly spiraled into a massive tangle. The quickest skein took me a little over an hour, the slowest, most grabby and somewhat tangled skein, took two.

And so it seems that despite my initial petulance, the bitter muttering and grumbling, by the end, the act of winding itself had become something that offered time for quiet and reflection. For all that I say, and do believe, that it is the slow work of our hands, of sustenance and existence, of slow moments with friends that bring meaning, I am also a product of my time. I want instant gratification, easy access, more and more and more. Time and again I have to slow myself and give in to the process itself. Time and again, I must relinquish and be relinquished from the bonds of rushing.

Is in this, the process of living, of doing, of making, that peace is found, in our connection with this place that is actually home, this earth. Perhaps we have fallen too much under the spell of "life is brutish and short" mentality about labor, about the slow physical acts of feeding and clothing ourselves. Joy is in those moments with friends, in the actual labor of our hands, in the making, both of things and connections, not in the consuming. And yes, in this world, consuming isn't just about things, but also about busyness and experiences, about being more and more and more, when what our souls really want is less and even less.

Every day I drive under this crape myrtle, into the construction site that is my backyard. The construction site is filled with busyness, and often ugliness, but also promise. The crape myrtle simply hangs there, and is.

July 12, 2019
Who Am I? Writer? Artist?…Maybe. Does it even Matter?

A few months back someone referred to me as an artist. I paused, perhaps a little surprised. But I did not object. It was, in fact, an idea I had been toying with for quite some time. But as is typical for me, nothing is ever simple. Increasingly I think and dream about creating daily. Increasingly I think about art, about craft, about living, and about the way, the act of living itself can be about art, can be art itself.

But, me? An artist?

I am not asking for affirmation, or denial here. I am simply exploring an idea. We all have a say in how we define ourselves, and at least partially in how the wold defines us. I love math but I am not a mathematician. I do not think like a scientist. I never have and I never will. I have been a businessperson, and I have strong organization and managerial skills, but they are only a small part of how I define myself. I struggled with this when I was younger, but not so much anymore. I suppose I could say I am a writer. At one point I did, but the idea didn't mesh well in my mind. I do write, although I've never published a book, in fact I've never had the desire. But there are tons of writers of all stripes. And yet, I have been blogging consistently for 14 years. I've published nearly 2300 blog posts, and although I've never tried to build an audience, to stick to a theme, or even particularly cared about how many people read what I write, those assorted mutterings have garnered over a million page views. Tiny. Really tiny. But still there, a statistic, in a world that is obsessed with measurements and statistics. But I write because it is a part of how I see the world, it is part, but only a part of the act of creation.

When I was in California a few weeks ago, one of the places the group went was the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art. I was entranced with this small space, particularly taken with the work of a couple of the artists but one of the things that has really remained in my head, and my dreams, was the art produced by local schoolchildren. There were truly amazing things there, and I don't believe I was the only one who felt this way. But what particularly struck me is that I think that art, the need to create, the need to compress and express something about life that is intangible in a tangible way is part of human nature. Art. Music. Creation. The yearning for meaning. These are the things that make us human. They are a part of all of us, although that is not to say we are all musicians, artists, philosophers, etc. But perhaps also, we don't allow ourselves to flourish.

Mark Rothko said "A painting is not a picture of an experience. It is an experience." I love this statement because it gets right at the heart of something elemental and essential. It also reminds me that although we classify and judge, it is the experience itself, the experience felt, that makes art important. We can judge. But experience itself is true. An artist translates something ephemeral into something tangible. We humans are complex beings, and we all express and experience and feel in different ways. Each and every experience is true. Just because something speaks to you, and speaks deeply, does not mean that it will speak to me. We like to judge things, even art. And I am not saying there are not geniuses, people who create things that speak to millions and generations. Rothko was one of those geniuses. But art isn't about being Mark Rothko, or even about selling or publishing or whatever. It is a way of looking at the world, of experiencing it, and a compulsion to start that conversation and share that experience

But back to my own question. The person who called me an artist was one of the contractors I am working with. This person has never seen anything I have made, at least not knowingly. I've worn clothing I've made but more about that later. My initial assumption was that I was being called an artist because I am creating a "studio" or a glorified sewing room, although I intend to do far more than sew, knit, and weave in that space. But I think it was more than that. I think that person sees my choices in redoing the house as something creative. And I am of the mind that life itself can be art, that the act of living can be a kind of creative dialog with time and space and the people we choose to share that time and space with. Can one be a artist of one's space? Of one's life? I don't know.

Artist. If I tell people I am an artist they assume I paint. Well, I actually dream about painting, although I have no training and no skill. Occasionally I modify that by saying I am a fiber artist. Which may be partially true, but to me it feels the same way saying I am a writer feels. It describes something I do but not who I am. I may be an artist who works with fiber. I may also simply be a craftsperson. I struggle with the lines between things. I always have. Lines are so arbitrary and I always want to merge them, to cross over and outside, to look at things differently.

On this subject, this quote, from Jean-Claude Ellena's The Diary of a Nose, resonates particularly strongly with my own thoughts:

Craftsman, artist: I have never managed to settle for one or other of these definitions for myself. I feel like a craftsman when I am completely wrapped up in making a perfume; I feel like an artist when I imagine the perfume I need to make. In fact, I constantly juggle with the two standpoints. If perfume is first and foremost a creation of the mind, it cannot actually be created without the mastery of true skill.

I feel like an artist when I imagine: I feel like an artist when I imagine making something, imagine creating an experience, a space to be experienced. I feel like an artist when I see that the way what we see as known or fixed really isn't fixed at all, it is just the framework we have designated for ourselves. I feel like an artist because I want to translate that feeling into an experience. I feel like a craftsman when I am making something. For a long time, most of my sewing or knitting was purely about need or want, about copying something I wanted and making it. It was mildly creative, perhaps. It was craft. Increasingly what I make starts with an idea in my head, or a material, or something I see on the street, and that somehow gets translated into something else, something I want to create: a taste, a garment, an embroidery, a picture. It is never about the thing itself but about the experience the thing helps create. But all of that also requires skill, and skill is craft. All artists are craftsmen. They have to be in order to become good at their art, to to create that dialogue that translates an idea into something that can be experienced by others. The trick is in being able to create the bridge from imagination to experience. One needs vision plus craft. Perhaps I am just an artist-in-training, an apprentice who has yet to learn what might suit me.

When I was in California with my museum group these questions of art and conversations and design were floating around, almost as if they were in the air we breathed. Or maybe that was the wine. One of the conversations was about the first piece in a room that drew you in, and whether or not that was the piece, if you were going to buy, that you would buy. For me, that is not the case. The first thing that captures my attention in a room draws me in yes. But that first thing is rarely the thing that sticks with me, the thing I am drawn into conversation with. Donald Hess, of the Hess Collection in Napa, buys art that speaks to him, that keeps him up at night. That is what has always drawn me….that sense of conversation. That is what I see as important, things not merely as things, but as a conversation, and meaning. I can't buy all or even most of the art that haunts my dreams. The pieces shown in this post are a few of those items though. All are my photos, from the Napa trip and my favorite museum in San Antonio, the McNay.

April 18, 2019
Can Construction Be A Metaphor For Life?

I've been back from Texas for two weeks and it somehow feels like I am just beginning to get my bearings again. I do feel like this has been a particularly hard "landing" although I can't really say why. Perhaps it was just that I felt stressed and a bit frazzled when I left, and returned to some kind of sense of too muchness. Perhaps I've over-filled my dance-card, with multiple parties and social events every week. Perhaps it is just that everything seems to be suddenly moving forward quickly on the house, and there are all kinds of changes and decisions. After a long period of waiting, it feels like I've tripped over some kind of ledge, and although I don't actually feel particularly stressed, there is a bit of a lull in any creative energy.

Last week Frances wrote about being "swallowed up" by normal life upon reentry from a trip, and I very definitely felt swallowed, swallowed by a great big whale. I keep hoping to integrate the various aspects of my life but I also realize that my efforts will continue to prove inadequate as long as I continue to let myself be swallowed, I need to be firmer in defining the boundaries of my own space and of saying, to myself, "this is enough". Saying no to others is proving to be easier than saying no to my own greedy impulses, my natural tendency toward too-muchness. But even then perhaps the issue is not so much about defining my boundaries but about accepting them, about thinking of my experience, and what I chose to do or not do, not as a a tug of war, me against the demands of the world, but of a piece. Perhaps instead I should be thinking what do I want the fabric of my life to look like? What will make that fabric whole? And then accepting that my fabric is my own.

Well, all of this is a bit too vague, but then I am feeling a little on the vague side as well.

At least the house is shaping up. A mock-up of the kitchen cabinetry was put in place this week, with some temporary framing and some foam board. This is helping as we refine choices for cabinetry and layout. Already, walking around in the space, as opposed to looking at it on paper, a few seemingly minor, but I suspect important, modifications have already taken place.

Although the cabinetry mock-up is temporary, the space increasingly feels like it is becoming something. Friday I could stand in the corner looking out the window, imagining where my expresso machine would be, imagining making a cup of espresso, as I watched workers digging the footings for the new deck. By the time I actually make that espresso the deck will be in place, but the boundaries of the space have been defined. Increasingly, I can see what it will become.

I suppose that is actually what is happening here as well, in my life. I have not been swallowed, I am just building the foundations, the substructure, and eventually the fabric will take its own shape. We start on a path, with a goal of course, but the path itself can often be confusing and not well marked. We start with intentions but don't really know where we are going until after we have arrived. I can't be what I want to be until I have built my own framework, and there are bound to be modifications along the way, but just as each house has its own character, shaped by its physical space and the lives that share it, so do we humans have our own fabric, shaped by our experiences and the people who touch our lives. We can't control the world we live in, but we can control what we hold close.

December 14, 2018
Rainy Day Walk

It is raining. It has been raining all week although at the moment I am not really perturbed by the rain; by the mud perhaps, but not the rain. In fact I had forgotten how nice it can be to walk in the rain. When I was a girl, in my teens and twenties, I loved walking in the rain. I was perhaps silly and naive, perhaps a bit of a romantic, although I'm not sure I allowed many to see that side of myself, even then. Then life became busy, filled with family and career, and I became stressed and perhaps occasionally bitter, or if not bitter, at least cynical. But cynicism always hides an edge of bitterness. I began to perhaps resent the rain, and long for sunshine, to associate sunshine with happy days and happy activities. But that grumbling wasn't really about the weather it was about my own inner unhappiness, even though I wouldn't have said I was unhappy. Stressed perhaps; I would have admitted to stress. So much easier to blame the rain, to find a scapegoat, rather than to look inward, seeking inner fissures, seeking to heal oneself. And then of course loss and grief got in the way and forced me to peer into those cracks before they consumed me. I'm sure you are tired of hearing about that by now, but it continues to surprise me how fine the line is between death and life, between grief and joy. I continue to marvel about the way growth and healing isn't so much about finding a new path but about rediscovering an old path than had become neglected and overgrown.

I hadn't planned on taking such a thoughtful turn this morning. But my thoughts after a morning walk wend their way along their own path, purling through the undergrowth of my life.

I've taken my morning walk in my home neighborhood every morning the past week. So much nicer than the apartment complex, even in the rain. Even for 2 1/2 miles in the rain. Monday it rained steadily for my entire walk, and yet I couldn't stop smiling, looking at the soft colors of the leaves, smelling the wet earth and the slightly musty smell of damp and decay mixed with another scent I can really only call clean. I couldn't stop smiling despite a few inner grumbles brought on by my own misunderstanding of the layers needed for the cold and damp. First I grew too hot, then, as I divested myself of a poorly chosen layer, I got a little wet and grew cold. Still the smiles returned, unbidden. Tuesday I was also dressed for rain, the forecast 100% chance of rain, so I once again had my raincoat, my water repellent pants over my leggings, and my trusty blunnies, but smarter layering choices underneath. However the rain kindly held off during the time of my walk, starting up again just as I was returning to my car. Tuesday I was able to take a few pictures.

I love the peacefulness of early morning walks, especially mornings after a rain. The wet earth holds a different kind of silence than drier days, the bird calls, always present, are less exuberant perhaps, but there is still that early morning sense of everything being new all over again, now with the magic of droplets clinging to the tips of flowers. I love the way the leaves gently shimmer and shake when a bird alights on a delicate branch, or the shower of droplets scattering through the air when they take flight.

I love the cool air, the way the chill hits my face, or my fingers when I pull them out of my pockets. I love the leaves, bright and colorful on the trees, a blaze of glory proclaiming a life well-lived. But I also love the fallen leaves, the carpet they make on the ground, and those solitary hangers-on, still clinging tenaciously to their branches, torn, ravaged with blight and age, under siege, determined.

I suppose it is easy to love Spring with all the new blossoms, or Summer with its warmth and exuberance, but still I love Autumn, and walking in the rain. I love the knowledge that this rain, cold and dreary as it may be refreshes and replenishes the earth beneath my feet. I walk occasionally melancholy, yet also filled with hope, secure in the knowledge that because it rains in November, there are sure to be flowers again in March. I wander on, occasionally grumbling yes, but also secure in the knowledge, or is it faith tinged with knowledge, that joy and happiness and love are always there, in the very soil of our lives. Sometimes cold and wet, oozy and uncomfortable, at other times hard and unyielding, but always full of promise. Waiting.

November 14, 2018
Entwined

The other day I went to the Ivan Racheff Gardens, a delightful oasis next to the Gerdau Knoxville Steel Mill, formerly Knoxville Iron Works. This lovely garden is near where I used to live but I did not even know it existed. Racheff created three acres of gardens from what was once an unsightly slag heap and it was a lovely and peaceful spot to wander with friends, a pocket of calm beauty in the midst of industry and highway construction. I shall return.

It is this tree with its mammoth wisteria that has lodged itself firmly in my memory however. I should have had a friend pose next to the tree for scale. It is the stuff of childhood dreams and imagination. I can imagine the wonder of it, the games I would play, the magical realms. And yet, as an adult it is something we could easily walk by.

Wisterias are strong, heavy vines. They can pull down a structure, can pull down a weak or damaged tree, and yet this tree looks very healthy. This tree and this vine seem to be cooperating, supporting each other, working together in relationship and there is magic in this as well, perhaps even a bit of heaven. For each, wisteria and tree (and no I do know know what kind of tree) are entirely themselves, each living out their essential tree-ness or wisteria-ness, and yet, they must live together. They must simultaneously yield to the other and fortify themselves in order to assist in upholding the other. Through this process they remain fully themselves and yet also something else, uniting in relationship.

We humans tend to not think about other living creatures in terms of relationship, or even in terms of "selves". We like to think we are unique, but we also struggle with our sense of uniqueness. A tree can be a tree, a fox a fox, yet we rarely allow ourself such simplicity of truth. We build complex societies, structures that shape the way we see our essential selves, then, in our fight against our own self-imposed structures, we search for our "true" voice, and seek to stake out our individuality. We lean away but we do not lean in.

Every year we watch the cycle of the seasons, the cycle of life. We see birth and death. We see growth, and strength, weakness and damage. We also see care, blossom, and beauty. You cannot have strength without fragility, life without death. We try to convince ourselves that we can overcome nature, overcome our own essential beings. But to soar, we need to lean together, strengthen ourselves with, not against, allow ourselves to risk failure, for only then can we also find true support. Our strength is relationship, for we cannot live alone, but relationship only thrives in shared vulnerability, and yet fear of vulnerability is our downfall, our weakness.

And so it seems it is our weakness that makes us strong. Only by leaning in, in opening ourselves to vulnerability, can we can find strength. Only then can we find true support. Only then can our blossoms fill the high heavens.

September 21, 2018