Winter lends itself, more than any other time of year I think, to the welcome sort of solitude and melancholy that fills me up with meditative calm. It can feel bleak and beautiful at the same time, as long as I’m not in a particularly dark place emotionally. The kind of cold and emptiness that sear the lungs and sting the eyes can sometimes set the soul on fire with inspiration and, concomitantly, a sort of scraped-clean elation.
It takes strength to maintain the goodwill and generosity that creates true bonds between people—individually and corporately. But through that steadfastness is the best path to peace and wholeness, a consummation devoutly to be wished.
River of Stars
A river made of silver stars with sapphire deeps below,
The sweet compassion of the heart is ceaseless in its flow—
A font of healing, kindness, care; a waterfall of grace;
A draught to slake the deepest thirst; and with it, keeping pace,
Persistent hope, watered withal, along its banks to grow,
To bloom as peace, compassion’s flow’r, where starry rivers flow.
The pace of our usual life, the sense that we’re always Doing Important Stuff (or at least called to be doing so) sometimes makes me think we’ve all forgotten how to just take a little aimless stroll. Perhaps it does feel like a forbidden pleasure when I know a project’s been lying there waiting for my attention. All the better, then, for its seeming truancy.
I’m happy to take the medical advice against sedentary death as a validation of my going for regular meanders off the normal path, if it takes me away from my current tasks, however directionless my saunters may appear. The mere physical reset is practically guaranteed to get my brain working a little better, and that alone is never a bad thing. The bits and bytes of information that slip into my mind both consciously and subconsciously act to refresh me for the work in hand and to remind me of other things I might have missed or laid aside.
I shan’t dissemble about it, though: when I get up and move, it’s mostly because I can feed my infatuation with observation. I’m just another, albeit less smooth, flâneur slouching about the avenue in search of stories to be filed under Little Adventures. No matter if they’re mine or—more likely—entirely imagined scenarios built around the lives happening all around me, to restock this collection is to refuel myself and find purpose again in both my work and my play. Then I can stroll on back to the real task at hand, and if the street has quieted or the hall emptied by then, I’ve populated my imaginings with enough enlivening Important Stuff to keep me going until my next outing.
…not really. Just to warmth and contentment. But, given my adoration of nearly all things egg-centric (see what I did there?), it’s no surprise that when I got both thirsty and chilly this week my thoughts turned once again to eggnog, but this time warmed, not cold. If I thought I could procure some fresh ostrich eggs for the purpose, I might well experiment with ostrich eggnog, because every time I make that drink it mysteriously disappears in a trice, and cracking and separating so many eggs at a time does get a little tedious.
Never mind that, eggnog is worth it.
So this time, I varied it again with both the heat treatment and the flavors, just to please my palate with a little change from the most recent batches. One part cream, two parts whole milk, a splash of vanilla bean paste, a pinch of salt, a hefty sprinkling of ground cardamom (one of my very favorite spices, as you know, and very holiday-friendly too) and a squirt of honey. I steeped traditional Earl Grey tea in the mix while bringing it all to a steaming scald and then, having separated eggs and put the yolks into the blender at medium speed to fluff ’em up for a while, I poured the hot-hot milk mix in a thin stream into the machine and let it cook up the eggs whilst whipping the whole into nearly as enthusiastic a froth as I was building up in anticipation of drinking it.
I did let it cool enough to not scald me as well, and it was worth the wait. It’s even worth the wait I put you through by forgetting to put up a Foodie Tuesday post this week. Oops. The nog was warming and comforting, as hoped, and with a dash of yolks for protein that made it a great way to stave off any hints of hunger until dinnertime. At dinner I ate a bit of chicken, but I think I can safely say that though I’ve nothing against trying ostrich meat, which I hear is delicious, the likelihood of my finding any of it handily nearby to fix for my dinner in north Texas is about as high as that of my getting its eggs for my eggnog, so I’m sticking with the chicken-and-egg approach for now, and can assure you that at least on this particular day, the egg came first. But I win. Now you know.
It’s wonderfully simple. Physics. Science. Gravity pulls us down. It’s a force that draws everything to it. Living creatures, all of us on the planet, are pulled toward the dense center of the earth just as we go along through our lives toward the time when we will reach the end, die, and be buried in the earth, drawn at last more fully toward its heart.
But along the way, it’s possible to pull against gravity, too. What happens if we choose to resist for a bit in life? How high can we rise? Any one of us rises to our highest point of all, I’ll be bound, when we choose to raise up someone else. It’s in elevating others that we ourselves are best elevated.
What if my eyesight should fail? Could I ever have enough insight to compensate for eyesight? Others do it all the time, both those blind from birth and those who lose their eyesight. I’m visually oriented, if not obsessed. Does that mean that as a visually impaired or blind person I’d be lost? Ruined? Hopeless? Other people manage to navigate a rich, full world without ever seeing it, and to have a deep, powerful sensory life without relying on eyesight.
One of the real questions here is how I live with change. Do I roll with it, or roll over and capitulate? The other underlying query is, from what do I derive my sense of self? Is it dependent on what I can see, and what I can do with it, or does my inner vision determine much more usefully who I am and what I value, and perhaps even what of value I can still bring to the rest of the world? If others have so beautifully managed to see the great and good whether they had functional eyes or not, I like to think—I hope—that I too will successfully adjust and adapt no matter what my life brings. May it be so. May it always be so.
So, we’re driving along a local stretch of highway and I see clouds gathering in the wide blue stretch of the sky. But as we get closer, the clouds move oddly; they ebb and flow like rivers, collect tightly into spotty black pools, move around in magnetically collected groups from one hayfield to another, and expand again into writhing, twisting masses that make accordion-like progress from the highway shoulder to the grassy median. Birds. Masses of starlings having a communal day-trip in search of dinner.
I know that they do this because of instinct and hunger and, perhaps, seasonal urges. I’ve read a little about the scientific studies indicating that a murmuration of birds flying and flocking this way has something to do with an only partially understood sensory operation or mechanism that allows the movement of one bird to affect up to six or seven concentric layers of proximal birds, and the resultant ripple effect to make the wonderfully flexible yet ultimately collective movement of such groups possible without the birds’ all exploding from the general formation into random isolation. All of this, indeed, is based on consistent and controlled observation by far more educated ornithological experts than I will ever be.
But it has a certain charm, for me, to simply keep imagining the birds peppering the sky as clouds, as mobile lakes, as little pieces of sky-high impossibility. Delight finds me, even on the highway under billowing masses of winged wonder. I’m quite happy to imagine that the whole purpose of such behavior on the starlings’ part is to amuse and please and amaze me, just me, specifically. Until a scientist can prove to my satisfaction that the truth is otherwise, I’ll stick to that. No need to spoil such a good thing with too much reality.
Art-Colored Glasses 