Author: Catherine White

Last night in my dreams I wandered the garden and up the driveway in search of the right words. In real life, before bedtime, one of us walks up the driveway in the dark with the puppy, noticing the sky, the breeze, the feeling of the hills; listening to the geese or sometimes the coyotes or perhaps, just silence. I think of the vases in the image as landscape vases. They hold a flower against the mass of a hill and model the line between land and sky.

“The future tugs on us, as the moon does, come what may. In a face, in a shadow, in the overflow of dream life into real life, in all the indistinct places, come what may, come what may, we wander the night gardens of our minds in search of something we can understand. Let’s speak of what we know, and then we’ll see what we hear in the silence.”

–Nina MacLaughlin, from Flower Moon, Link: The Paris Review

This is the first of the series until June 21st of what I hope to be 21 images, a few recollections and some poems. After so many months of the pandemic I can take aim at this series but feel more uncertain than usual at the start.

This week on our walks, as we circle around the pond or up the road and back, we have discussed choices and paths not taken. Tonight’s loop took us past the shed we fondly call the poetry hut that Warren built for Zoe when she was 11 and wanted a space of her own. It now stores our packing materials. Warren talked about his first impressions of this piece of land after a chance sighting of an ad in the Washington Post. I reflected on how this year of staying home during the pandemic with daily local walks has more firmly rooted me in Virginia. We noted the paths we walk and the paths we didn’t take in chance encounters, job offers, education or romance. The quiet grey of sky, still pond, and green burgeoning of honeysuckle is like the inhale before the rush of spring growth.

“Chance … has a distinct meaning for me. I do not know where I might have been led by the paths that, as I look back, I think I might have taken but that in fact I did not take. What is certain is that I am satisfied with my fate and that I should not want it changed in any way at all. So I look upon these factors that helped me to fulfill it as so many fortunate strokes of chance.”
— Simone de Beauvoir, All Said and Done
[Thanks to brainpickings.org]

I read my Mom’s journals and am impressed by how full they are with quotes, sketches, scribbles, and beginnings of poems, leavened by only occasional moments of doubt about her work or her school choices for us children. Her poems, at times, may be too concerned with rhyme for my taste, but her inspiration from NYC entering into spring as each tree on her block begins to bud is infectious.

She was driven to express the simplicity and the variety of growth in flowers, bushes and trees. She was dedicated to finding joy in the everyday and spreading that joy and hope. Each day she sought to be more organized, to have her worktable ready to go though frequently that was a loosing battle. She wanted to work on nice paper but so often was afraid to use it so instead used small postcards and printed on the backs of envelopes. She felt strongly about choosing a path that was very human, aiming to show her true self. At one point in her journal she asks herself, what is it about sunrise and sunset that moves her to take so many photos, to make so many drawings? She answers, sunrises and sunsets are the treasure; they remind her of the essence of life right here and now.

I don’t worry about rhyme. Two trees,
One next to the other, are rarely identical.
I think and write the way flowers have color,
But how I express myself is less perfect,
For I lack the divine simplicity
Of being only my outer self.
I look and I am moved,
I am moved by the way water flows when the
ground slopes,
And my poetry is natural like the stirring of the
wind …

Alberto Caeiro, from “XIV” in The Keeper of Sheep; A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems of Fernando Pessoa, ed. & transl. Richard Zenith, Penguin Classics, 2006

When I went to Wollam Gardens in search of flowers I was hunting for those blossoms that were hinting at Spring for a much needed dose of hope.

As if the purpose
Of beauty
Was to hurt me more alive.

Gregory Orr, from “Certain poems offer me … ,” The Last Love Poem I Will Ever Write (W. W. Norton & Co., 2019)

Under blue skies we put a few broccoli and spinach seedlings in the dirt today while listening to the dog, the crow, and the peepers .

the god of dirt

The god of dirt
came up to me many times and said
so many wise and delectable things;
I lay on the grass listening to
his dog voice,
crow voice,
frog voice;
now he said,
and now,
and never once mentioned forever.

— Mary Oliver, from “One or Two Things”

Welcome to Spring 2021. Here in Virginia it feels like the ground swell of spring is moving. The fields have a hint of green, the red maples have a tone of deep red, the daffodils have begun to open and each tiny shift is so welcome in this year of the pandemic.

I have done so little
For you,
And you have done so little
For me,
That we have good reason
Never to agree.

I, however,
Have such meager
Power,
Clutching at a
Moment,
While you control
An hour.

But your hour is
A stone.

My moment is
A flower.

Poet to Bigot
— Langston Hughes

THE FINALE

At this time of year my Mom was always really busy. She loved to give books as gifts but she couldn’t give them away unless she had read them. Partly, they were good books she wanted to ingest. But she also wanted to make sure the content was appropriate for her sister, daughter, or granddaughter. When the book The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold came out Zoë was a young teen. My Mom had bought the book to give to both of us. But after reading it she decided a story beginning with the rape and murder of a teenage girl was inappropriate. When I read it a few years later I agreed it was a brutal setup, but it clearly was an incredible work of fiction. For a teenager yet to go to high school heaven seemed to be high school and the novel examined that imagined place.

Around that time one Christmas eve after dinner, after the dishes were done, and the stress of Christmas presents being wrapped was behind me I declared it was time for a round-the-block dog walk. It had begun to snow and so my aging mother decided to join us. We headed out to the New York streets hushed by both the holiday quiet and the accumulating snow flakes. We walked along Prince Street, up MacDougal, and back along Houston. It was beautiful but I got frustrated by my Mom’s slow shuffling steps as I kept getting ahead of her. Finally, as we got to Houston Street I took her by the elbow so that I slowed down. Then together we could appreciate the beauty and the pace of the walk.

In my dreams I often return to that walk. That stretch of street is not particularly beautiful, but we are almost home and somehow I have many memories of deep conversations on that stretch of pavement. In my dreams the moment I take my Mom’s arm hoping for the next chapter in the conversation I wake up and the magic vanishes until the next dream.

Take my hand.
We will walk.
We will only walk.
We will enjoy our walk
without thinking of arriving anywhere.

— Thich Nhat Hanh, from Walking Meditation, in “Call me by My True Names: Collected Poems of Thich Nhat Hanh,” Parallax Press, 2005

[sign up for email notices when I post to Rough Ideas]

After my Dad died we had to clean out his loft. He had lived there for over forty years. It was a giant emotional task to sort through not only the books, clothes, and art supplies, but the art work both my parents had made. My three brothers and I sorted, sifted, argued, and assigned homes for each object. I would come home to Virginia to teach my classes at the Corcoran, regroup with Warren and then head back for another round of sorting. When I would return to NYC my brother who was local would have unpacked another group of sculptural figures that he had found in the dark and dank basement storage space. It felt as if I was looking at the Qin terracotta warriors arising from an excavation.

It was a struggle to pursue my own studio practice through all this. I found myself looking at Chinese and Japanese tomb ware. I kept thinking there was something to burying all your earthly possessions (or even freshly made accoutrements) at the end of one life in preparation for the next. I began to make what I call Shield Vases. I was not only inspired by Japanese Haniwa figures but the need to shield myself from the emotional process of grief and clearing out two lives worth of artwork. As I write these stories I touch the moments and the history which helps to bring it all back to life. My dreams have been intense. This morning I dreamed that my parents walked through the trees that separates our property from our neighbors. They waved saying, “please, wait for us. We want to go for a dog walk with you.”

…how
could I have known, that by pressing 
this pen to paper, I was touching us
back from extinction?

— Ocean Vuong, tiny excerpt from “Cu Chi, Vietnam” in Night Sky with Exit Wounds, Copper Canyon Press, 2016

[sign up for email notices when I post to Rough Ideas]