Rough Ideas

My day was filled with so many small moments which could be bursts of photos as if a thousand blackbirds filled the sky. My camera was trained on an old onion while everyone in the house was resting.

All I want to be
is a thousand blackbirds
bursting from a tree,
seeding the sky.

–Jim Harrison, from Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry, by Jim Harrison and Ted Kooser, 2003

I feel like I have been jumping through hoops for both art and family. Our daughter, her husband and our grandson arrived this afternoon. It is a great relief that we all made it this far. Now we can relax and retreat. Our winter metamorphosis results from good meals, deep sleeps, conversations, fires and time spent shoulder to shoulder.

Plants and animals don’t fight the winter; they don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives that they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through. Winter is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximising scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight; but that’s where the transformation occurs. Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.

–-Katherine May, from Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

We drove home from New York City today. It was a rainy drive with limited visibility. We were happy to arrive back in our local landscape despite the wet, icy view. After a couch nap in the gray light I walked the dog in the icy mist. Often when I return from the city it feels like I have shifted time zones. Today it felt like a different sound-scape. Dripping branches and the beating wings of the pond’s diving ducks accompanied my damp walk. I remember years ago coming home after a New York trip and being surprised during the dark dog walk to hear the sound of a beaver chewing the bark of a tree. I think of myself as a city kid who carries the silence of the country. Today I carried the light of my city friendships in the quiet of my more rural life.

There is a Light in Me

Whether in daytime or in nighttime
I always carry inside
a light.
In the middle of noise and turmoil
I carry silence.
Always
I carry light and silence.

–Anna Swir, in Talking To My Body, co-translated by Czesław Miłosz and Leonard Nathan, Copper Canyon Press

It’s been a night in the city sleeping on a fold out couch with a baby who doesn’t feel well in the next room. The night has been interrupted by cries, a car alarm, a voice on the street. Features of the room have drifted in and out of focus as I slipped back into a deep December sleep. Flashes of of what I should have said, shadows of conversations, midnight memories unresolved all mix with my heartbeat and waves of breath. I remind myself of Thich Nhat Hanh and shift my inhale to calm and to exhale with ease. The morning comes. Our grandson is happily babbling in the kitchen while his dad makes coffee and eggs. The window sill comes into focus, the deep blue fades into dawn, edges become clear. The sunlight insists on the solid knowable facts of the day.

But it’s the sun’s light, insistent, interrogatory, that tricks us into believing in the knowable and solid. In those long nights, perspective is not skewed, but opened wider. The moon’s silver quiet light allows for these encounters with the parts of ourselves that hide in caves, the banished parts. The moon knows: we need to see.

–Nina MacLaughlin, from Long Night Moon, The Paris Review

After installing a group of pieces in the clay show at Steve Harvey Fne Art Projects in New York City Warren and I drove to Brooklyn to see our daughter and her family via the Williamsburg Bridge. It was that magical moment, when the urban lights feel warm, the blue of the sky is cool and the sunset shifts with each second. There were reflections and deep reds, the shimmery river water and the stark structures of buildings and bridges. The relationship of human-made and natural does a kind of dance shifting between grit and gorgeous.

Hymn to Time

Time says “Let there be”
every moment and instantly
there is space and the radiance
of each bright galaxy.

And eyes beholding radiance.
And the gnats’ flickering dance.
And the seas’ expanse.
And death, and chance.

Time makes room
for going and coming home
and in time’s womb
begins all ending.

Time is being and being
time, it is all one thing,
the shining, the seeing,
the dark abounding.

–Ursula K. LeGuin

This morning I took a brisk dog walk. It was chilly and the light was bright with a particular winter brilliance. The field across the road had a pale yellow tone and beyond the sky was deep gray. The contrast made me feel like I was seeing like a painter. It reminded me of a college moment when I wondered if feelings of inspiration were something that I would only feel as a child. Later, when I went to painting school in the south of France I met a tribe of people who felt that same jolt from examining how the sky meets a hill. There was a drive to paint based on what we saw, to translate vision through our hands. Seeing the moon in Virginia resurrects visions and inspirations of moon sightings in other parts of the world.

Wherever we are in the world, we see the same moon. It’s the same moon earliest humans would have seen, waxing and waning, rising and setting. Depending on where we were thousands of years ago, we would look to a full moon to mark time, to tell us when to plant corn, when to lay the rice to dry, and when to expect the ducks back. Now we look to the moon and marvel that men have traveled there in unlikely contraptions and actually set foot on its surface. It is our stepping-stone to the vast universe, and looking at a full moon can make us feel very small and very young. But it can also remind us to make the most of our time here on earth, to pop corn and throw rice and watch for ducks.

–Sophie Blackall

My pots are packed for New York City and were loaded into the car before the sunset. The low sun back lit the ornamental grasses in the front garden. The dusk swaddled the cattle across the street while Warren walked Luna along the road and around the pond. The night is a gift. I can sit down now that all the pots are wrapped.

December

The year dwindles and glows
to December’s red jewel,
my birth month.

The sky blushes,
and lays its cheek
on the sparkling fields.

Then dusk swaddles the cattle,
their silhouettes
simple as faith.

These nights are gifts,
our hands unwrapping the darkness
to see what we have.

The train rushes, ecstatic,
to where you are,
my bright star.

— Carol-Ann Duffy

A year ago today we celebrated the life of Mikio Shinagawa. About ten years ago Mikio, Warren and I put together an exhibit of plates to commemorate our friendship and the many years of making pottery for Omen Azen in New York City. Mikio pushed Warren and I to give poetic names to our work. He wanted us to think of them relative to resonances, perhaps thunderstorms or ice, rather than being solely descriptive about the materials and process used. He wanted us to think of our pots like constellations–allusions with stories. Mikio’s most fervent wish for himself and others was to think of providing for the next generation.

Dead Stars

Out here, there’s a bowing even the trees are doing.
                 Winter’s icy hand at the back of all of us.
Black bark, slick yellow leaves, a kind of stillness that feels
so mute it’s almost in another year.

I am a hearth of spiders these days: a nest of trying.

We point out the stars that make Orion as we take out 
      the trash, the rolling containers a song of suburban thunder.

It’s almost romantic as we adjust the waxy blue
      recycling bin until you say, Man, we should really learn
some new constellations.

And it’s true. We keep forgetting about Antlia, Centaurus,
       Draco, Lacerta, Hydra, Lyra, Lynx.

But mostly we’re forgetting we’re dead stars too, my mouth is full
       of dust and I wish to reclaim the rising—

to lean in the spotlight of streetlight with you, toward
       what’s larger within us, toward how we were born.

Look, we are not unspectacular things.
       We’ve come this far, survived this much. What

would happen if we decided to survive more? To love harder?

What if we stood up with our synapses and flesh and said, No.
     No, to the rising tides.

Stood for the many mute mouths of the sea, of the land?

What would happen if we used our bodies to bargain

for the safety of others, for earth,
                 if we declared a clean night, if we stopped being terrified,

if we launched our demands into the sky, made ourselves so big
people could point to us with the arrows they make in their minds,

rolling their trash bins out, after all of this is over?

–Ada Limón, From The Carrying (Milkweed Editions, 2018)

My mother loved any kind of light and struggled in the the depth of the winter. She lived for sunsets and candlelight. She made a big effort with Christmas especially for the quality of light and for a generosity of spirit. She even loved the red lights of our car as we left after the holiday. Buying a tree in New York City involved a lot of schlepping and energy so my Dad often grumbled. He also really hated putting up the lights, so much so that when it became my job I was surprised by how easy it was.

Books were always a big part of our holiday. Before I was born Mom and Dad made a series of children’s books. My Mom wrote and illustrated and my Dad made the woodcuts, printed, and then bound the books. Those images are part of my December vocabulary.

I have been cleaning house and rearranging things so we can welcome Larkin–who is one and newly walking–safely and happily into our house. These cleaning and holiday efforts have me thinking about my Mom. She loved making the holidays special and she loved having it all seem like it was full of light and sparkle. However she also got stressed and exhausted. She had to read all the books she was giving away before they were wrapped. ( No small task.) She tried valiantly to clean up the house before her four children returned home.

I remember one year sitting down to dinner on Christmas Eve when we were all young adults. The tree was lit and decorated, candles were on the table and and before we dug into our meal she announced there is good news and bad news— we all got quiet and listened carefully. First the good news, “We have croissants for breakfast Christmas morning!” Then the bad news, “I dyed everyone’s underwear pink.”

Spending the evening in candlelight, and maybe by the fire – with no TV – talking, telling stories, letting the lit-up world go by without us, expands the hours, and alters the thoughts and conversations we have.

I have noticed that when all the lights are on, people tend to talk about what they are doing – their outer lives. Sitting round in candlelight or firelight, people start to talk about how they are feeling – their inner lives. They speak subjectively, they argue less, there are longer pauses.

–Jeanette Winterson, Why I Adore the Night, October 29, The Guardian