Category Archives: Music

Choosing an Upward Trajectory

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Mixed mediaUncertainty of Heart

Amid most fond expressions of affection, endless love,

Devotion and determination to be stewards of

These sentiments and feelings, is that little nagging voice

That tells us it would not be so if we had any choice,

Because we are perfidious by nature, roaming, weak,

And fearful of commitment to degrees we cannot speak,

And paranoid, on top of it, that others are the same,

And so we speak our pretty vows and play our little game,

Attempting to convince ourselves as much as other folk

That our desires and adoration aren’t some flimsy joke—

The shocking Surprise Ending to this tale is that at death,

Some of us finally realize upon our final breath

That all of it was true, and that our hearts were so inclined;

Too bad we take so long, we fools, to see that we have lived as blind.

acrylic on canvasboardLaudate

In a room with bright light and bright sound

It’s as though all the birds in the wide world have set

Their hearts on singing out the highest praise

Of sun and stars and moon, of life and light and love,

And of being wingèd things up in the broad green roof

Of the springtime world–and yet this song,

Sung in truth by mortals mere, by trebles in

The spring of their own lives, can only hint

At the brilliant sweetness of having been born to sing.

Age Becomes Beauty

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photos x2Ingrained

The salt and oil of his hand

are torment and life’s-blood both

to the volutes of the instrument

and to

the curving, sinuous surfaces of that

deep-burnished ancient bass—its sigh

at the mindful, guiding touch

of the hand

steady with certainty, knowing

the way from note to note,

from phrase to

singing phrase, without

reference anymore

to intent because

the thought, the meaning, the joy

and the intensity are all

as deep as heartwood in

the ancient tree that was

the bass’s former self.

Those days,

no bird

set in the boughs of the

grandfather tree

had sweeter voice

than the breezes piping softly

through its leaves, no, even than

the tiny song

humming through

the tree’s own heart, minute

and pale yet, sub-sonically, a hint

—a whisper—in

the lyric capillary rise

of tree’s-elixir every spring

of the string-bass sound

far-off, unborn,

lying cradled

until called out

by generations, ‘til,

goaded with salt,

soothed with oil,

called

to speak again as its

nature insists,

under a musician’s hand.

photos x3
Well Worn

There is a dignity

And elegance to being worn

Beyond recognition as

The thing-that-was:

Once pretty, fully functional,

Well designed—It’s by

The fineness of this apropos

Well-suitedness for use

That things that might

Have been quite simple and

Quite plain become

The hard-used favorites

That by this aging then

As Beautiful

Become defined


Favorite Boots

Hard to imagine how much wear

It takes to soften down

The tough old boots I loved the best

And burnish their deep brown

Thick skin until it’s almost black

In places by the heel

And worn by stirrups near the shank—

But I know how they feelphotos x2
The King is Sleeping

Don’t go in—the king is sleeping;

Don’t barge in, disturb his rest—

All the bodyguards were keeping

Such good care at his behest

Up until a couple decades

Turned to several centuries

And the stalwart guardians made

A heap of dust fine as the breeze

And the palace came to crumble

And the country to decay

And the sands of time to tumble

To eternity, away—

Let the king sleep on in silence;

There’s no reason to awake

Anymore, to stir and rile and

See destruction come and take

From him all his kingdom’s treasures,

All he held and fought to own,

All his onetime loves and pleasures

Turned to silicates and stone—

Don’t go in—the king is sleeping;

History cries ‘let him sleep!’

While the passing age is creeping,

Peace is all he gets to keep

Skipping thro’ the Birchen Wood, I Thought I Spied a Whale

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acrylic on canvas

Here in the forests of my imagination . . .

What wondrous light through yonder branches gleams? Would that it were the opalescent glow of glimmering brilliance coming to infiltrate my idle brain. Or perhaps, an itinerant faerie spirit heading my way, jeweled sceptre alit with inspirational powers to be bestowed on my waiting brow with only the lightest of touches. Even the wan incandescent light that flickers in welcome warmth when someone stops by and drawls, ‘Whooooa, cool poem, dude!‘ is an apparition that I welcome in these woods.

But left to my own devices, I am often content to play hide-and-seek with the absurd and ridiculous denizens with whom I myself people the copses and clearings. It’s hard to be bored when in the world of my imaginings I might just as well see a party of rhinoceri dining daintily on macarons and sipping mimosas as find the standard woodland chirpy-birds and curly-tailed possums. And of course I can find plenty of entertainment in the latter, should my rare white rhino friends fail to materialize on the occasion.

The who-what-when-where-why approach of old-time journalism is hardly limited, but so often is put to service in creating dull worlds that have no scintillation or silver-lined possibility of their own. Why should I merely recount the facts, if my friends and compatriots have the same at their own fingertips or floating in the ether encircling their own fevered brows? I feel much more compelled, drawn (and quartered) by the fantastical and unreal, and that doesn’t mean that I must limit my contact with the quotidian. In my view, the real world and everyday experience are both bursting with nonsense and bizarre occurrences that would challenge the sanity of anyone willing to look just slightly under the surface, a tiny bit off of the center of the frame. It’s this singing netherworld of oddity and mystery, of hilarity and not-yet-discovered realms of the heart and mind, that pulls me into its mystical swirl and mesmerizes me.

I am astounded when I hear tell of people admonishing artists and creative folk to give up their wastrel ways and do something Productive. Where these same critics expect inventions or discoveries of import, let alone life-enhancing pleasures and spiritual inspirations, to emerge if not from creative work and play I am unable to guess.

I’ve long since left it to others to describe what they tout as Fact and confirmed Truth. There are endless phalanxes of politicians and scientists and religious leaders, hover-parents and bosses, dictators and dullards, all of whom readily offer their convictions of reality whether I ask them to or not, so I learned that I’d much rather stick to my own version of reality and just see where it takes me.

Does this approach expose me to ridicule and censure? Of course it does. Anything anyone else tells you ought to be taken with an entire inland sea of salt, if it keeps you from swallowing nonsense wholesale. I certainly don’t believe everything I say!

But I did learn, when I bundled up my outsized cravings for outside affirmation in the dense wrappings of uneasy reality and flung them all out the casement, that any reality is somewhat overrated. That the lilac scented porpoises leaping in my own candy-colored seas were not only good company but sometimes took me along to actual places of learning and wholesome connection with genuine people willing to dive into alternate worlds too. And that I grew more deeply convinced that nobody is in such dire need of the strictly factual that their lives can’t be enriched, like mine, by the meandering, iridescent, depthless, deathless joys of curiosity and invention and hope.

acrylic on canvas

. . . and away I swam, bathing in the limpid phosphorescence of wonderment . . .

Highfalutin Company

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Otto von Münchow is a very nice man. But I don’t have to tell you that, if you’ve done any looking around the web. I’ve never even met him–in person–but it took very little time looking at his blog and ‘conversing’ with him in the process before I saw how much help he offered not only me with his photographic and creative-production insights but also shared with all of his other readers and correspondents. And then he went and shared a Versatile Blogger Award with me. I’m humbled, and I’m touched.

vba logoYes, there are those who would say I’m tetched. It’s how I got where I am today! And where I am is in truly rarefied company, as I’ve been learning over the last number of months here in Bloggerville. I am surrounded by deeply gifted and incredibly generous fellow bloggers, some of whom have taught me more in my short stint as a web denizen than I learned from many an arduous class project and long years of practice. (Okay, I’ll still say the years of practice made it possible to actually understand and make use of some of the good stuff I’m learning here, so no, my young friends, don’t skip that part!) I know I’m one seriously fortunate person, surrounded by, as my good friend Nia aptly identifies them, a glorious cloud of “angels and muses”.

mixed media painting

Sankt Synnøve, an appropriate patroness for adventurers!

The Irish/Norwegian saint Synnøve is one of a select group I chose to make mixed media portraits commemorating for a collaborative program with organist David Dahl a number of years ago. The fabulous Dr Dahl agreed to create a performance program with me, and despite his renown as a Bach expert, even agreed to plunge into French Romantic literature to please my whim–something he not only performed with superb fire and panache but taught me a lot about in the process. I loved the preparations: David would join me in the organ loft for a flurry of ‘howzat’ samples he played from a number of great composers in a wide variety of styles and moods and colors within the fantastic treasury of my dream realm. He told me about the background of the pieces, how and why and when they were written and by whom–and who that composer studied with–and so on. Gradually we winnowed down the possibilities as I began to talk, in return, about what sort of imagery these evocative pieces inspired. I fell in love with each and every song and movement, and with the genre yet again.

I also decided, as the good Doctor played, that the exquisite and potent Finale by César Franck was reminiscent of a solemn procession of saints, so I decided it was a good excuse to play around with a series of portraits, beginning with figuring out which ones it would most interest me to envision. My main criterion was simply that I was on the hunt for saints famous for more than martyrdom. While I recognize that being willing to die for your beliefs, whatever they are, my school of thought tends to be more impressed with how incredibly challenging it is to live for your beliefs. So I looked for people beatified and sanctified for their deeds rather than their being dead. The princess Synnøve certainly seemed to fit the bill, what with evading an oppressive forced marriage, adventuring off on the wild open sea to who-knows-where and landing in remote Norway, creating a community there, and then fending off pagan attackers. As well as a few other attributions that become even more mystical and magical. In all, a history that says this was one tough Celtic character who went to great lengths to shape her own destiny, and in so doing shaped others’ as well. Eventually she was joined in the recital processional by a number of other intriguing worthies–educators, hospitalers, rescuers of the poor and builders of bridges among them–and I found a large quantity of inspiration, not strictly artistic either.

That’s what I find in this new endeavor of mine too. A long parade of angels and muses that bring to me new knowledge of art, of self, and of life. And I am ever so grateful for the gifts!

We who are inducted into the Versatile Blogger community are tasked with telling you friends a little more about our selves and then sharing the gifts of the award with others whom we deem deserving as well. I’ve done this twice before (thank you, dear Cecilia and Nia!), so I’ll try to be succinct.

mixed media painting

Saints Valery and Finian, leaders, builders-of-things, and my birthday brothers (I was born on their feast day). (I'll take my inspirations wherever I find them.)

Versatile Blogger Award protocol:

1. Nominate 15 fellow bloggers.
2. Inform the bloggers of their nomination.
3. Share 7 random things about yourself.
4. Thank the blogger who nominated you.
5. Add the Versatile Blogger Award pic on your blog post.

So here’s that Pack of Facts about me:

1 – I’m one of those awful excuses for a human being that doesn’t like blueberries. There are a number of fruits I’m not crazy about for texture but in the juice or coulis form I’ll slurp ’em right up. Not blueberries. Don’t like the scent or the flavor any more than the texture. Yet the blueberry bush is a plant I happily put in my garden because I think the shrub is beautiful year-round, and even the berries are very pretty to look at. Go figure.

2 – Even a complete non-athlete (there are few who can begin to compare with me for lack of skills) can have a Sports Injury. My only-ever stitches are hockey related. Too bad I wasn’t making a brilliant goal play at the time, but at least I got a little scar to show for it.

3 – The dentist is my friend! I am something of a rarity, not only enjoying visits to the dentist but also hitting the 50-year mark without ever having gotten a cavity. That’s thanks to good dental care on top of a bit of good luck: my parents both have “normal” teeth, so it was clearly not straight-up genetics that gave them four caries-free kids.

4 – Besides some costume design and construction for theatrical productions, ecclesiastical vestments, and other clothing design/construction projects over the years, I’ve had a few evening gown commissions–favorites are probably the plastic-garbage-bag (Hefty Steel-Sak) gown in silver and black for a costume party (I labored over the hand-cut lace edges) and the plastic wedding gown made for an exhibition (that one had plastic doilies for its lace).

5 – No cigarette or smoking device of any kind has ever touched my lips. Wait: I did try a couple of bubble gum “cigars” in childhood (banana was my favorite of the chewing gum flavors, I think), does that count? But thankfully (for both my lungs’ and my wallet’s sake) I never had the remotest urge to experiment with smoking.

6 – I think my husband has one of the most beautiful singing voices I’ve ever heard.

7 – Many of my art projects arise from random exposure to topics, objects and ideas I encounter whilst “on the way somewhere else”. Ah, serendipity!

I know that some of my favorite bloggers have received Versatile Blogger recognition before, and I do know that it takes a great deal of time and effort to meet the requirements of acceptance, so for the following blog-stars, I personally exempt you from any of the responsive requisites, but I want to recognize publicly how much I admire your work.

Today’s Sparks Blogroll of Honor:
The Bard on the Hill

Year-Struck

Not Quite Old

The Dassler Effect

Kreativ Kenyerek

Sweet Caroline’s Cooking

The Seven Hills Collection

Patridew’s Perfect World

Aspire. Motivate. Succeed.

cfbookchick

Nine Lives Studio

Daily Nibbles

dnobrienpoetry

The Valentine 4: Living Each Day

A Cup of Tea with this Crazy Nia

With thanks and cheers for all that you do in the blog universe, I bow to you all! Onward and upward, my friends!

Preposterous Beauty

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photo + poemIt’s a redundancy, isn’t it, ‘preposterous beauty’? What could be more unlikely, more outlandish and excessive, than beauty itself? Yet it’s the one thing we all seek, in one form or another. We long for what seems perfect, what appears flawless. We yearn after those things that, at least in our own minds, represent the ideal.

In some ways, it strikes me as puzzling that we should be anything other than repelled by beauty, if indeed it is representative of perfection: who on earth should want to be reminded of her own imperfection and inability to achieve it? I can’t imagine that there are so many people so deluded as to think themselves either perfect or deserving of association with the perfect that they would willingly submit to being even juxtaposed with any other such wonder. So why do I, of all people, so wonderfully aware at all times of my almost cartoonish capability for exemplifying the imperfect in so many aspects, find that I too am compelled to seek beauty?

Beauty is perhaps the everyman‘s Everest, so I will intone along with George Mallory and all of his philosophical heirs: “Because it’s there.” If few can deserve of a prize, that is sometimes motivation enough for all of the remaining horde to contend for it, hoping that perseverance and pure luck will combine to favor them. If something is desirable, even if merely because of its beauty, why would we not wear ourselves out in the pursuit of it?

The particular joy of Beauty is, if I may, that it is not so particular. That is, there are so many kinds of beauty possible in all of existence, and so many ways of perceiving and interpreting them, that there are almost endless sorts of beauty to be pursued. It makes a person like me, who sees herself as among the least-likely deserving recipients of the benevolence of beauty, think that perhaps there’s enough to spare for me anyway, if I show appropriate reverence for it and make an effort. It’s the only way that I can explain to myself how a person of my humble means has been so indulged with so many forms of beauty granted me in my life.

photoI think of beauty as it is understood and distilled through all of our senses: that which can be tasted, smelled, seen, heard, touched and intuited–any and all of this can be beautiful. The range of possibility is overwhelming. Imagine sitting in a peaceful room and listening to a sure, sweet voice singing a compelling melody while sunlight suffuses the space with warmth and the scent of leafy spring creeps in at the windows. Isn’t it preposterous to think all of those beauties could converge in one act? And yet they can. Imagine kneading wonderfully elastic yeasty dough with the sweetest grandmother, one who laughs softly and often, her velvety skin crinkling up around her eyes in a mischievously creased smile, and the sound of her old radio down the hall sending you Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli to accompany your kneading and chuckling together. Preposterous? Of course! But such confluences of perfection do exist.

So I keep believing and hoping and yearning. I make drawings and poems and think that, when the stars align just so, in spite of myself I may make something of beauty. Or just stumble over it and be glad. It’s so ridiculous, so impossible; true beauty is so beyond my reach it might as well be Mount Everest and I a mere speck on the earth. But it has drawn me to try the climb before, and I know it will again and again. Beauty is really preposterous that way.

photo

Foodie Tuesday: Bechamel Mucho (Songs for a Saucy Character)

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photocollage + textI love sauce. Saucing a great dish properly is a little bit like creating the right music to shape a fine piece of text: suddenly this new dimension brings out a whole range of new and beautiful textures and nuances that were lying there in wait all along but are awakened by the new partnership into something even deeper and lovelier. Words and music. Food and sauce.

Sing along with me, if you will. Bésame Mucho! Glorious things happen in the kitchen, love is brought to light, when the sauce is a-simmer. It’s enough to make a clodhopper like me sing and dance. (Sensitive readers, please avert your eyes, or you’ll end up wanting to evert them.)

One of the best things about saucing is that it doesn’t have to be complicated or difficult to have a great impact on a dish. The prime example of this, natürlich, is a simple deglaze–one additional ingredient that brings a lot of happiness to the dinner party. It’s nothing more than a way to rinse the pan with any fitting liquid that will loosen all of the good fond, or browned goodies and drippings, left in the pan in which the dish’s main ingredients were cooked. It can be kept nice and thin and loose or further reduced to thicken, either easy without adding a single other ingredient, or it can form the friendly base for yet more monkeying around. All good!

photo

Sometimes all it takes is a nice loose juice to deglaze the pan . . .

Which brings me to another great and lovable thing about sauces. There are such an enormous number of possible combinations of ingredients, proportions, and techniques that I’d bet any cook worth her salt (never mind all of the other ingredients) could cook her way through a long and delicious life without ever repeating a single sauce precisely. Almost frightening, that, but really quite exciting and encouraging in its way. A restaurant chef’s career depends on just the opposite, that she be able to reproduce to a virtually molecular level the same sauce over and over, meal by meal, dish by dish, once it’s on the menu. Patrons will rebel if given any surprises or disappointments. But the home cook, if his family is the least bit adventuresome or just plain ravenous, has the possibility of playing with his food and, if he’s lucky, discovering in the process the next world’s favorite. Or at least his wife’s.

Even the classic sauces offer incredible opportunity for invention, if you can master the basic form. Bechamel, salsa verde, Bolognese, hoisin, barbecue sauce, mole, tartar sauce. Me, I’m not such a master of basics. But I eventually figure my way around things, with enough expert guidance from my various kitchen muses in person or through recipes and other forms of fabulous foodie folklore. I try a whole bunch of different versions and variations and mess around, I read up, I lick the spoon, I experiment on all of my friends and loved ones (and I sincerely apologize for whatever culinary atrocities I may have perpetrated over the years against any undeserving parties), and I work my way around to sauces that I’m willing to try repeating, or that I even get asked for again. Sometimes it’s a long, puzzling path of kitchen adventure that leads to a complex and subtle sauce. Sometimes it’s just the joyful re-creation of a straightforward childhood favorite, and no less welcome on the plate or on the tongue.

So in closing today, I commend to you my very favorite variation on perhaps my very favorite sauce. I am mad for Hollandaise. In particular, my lifelong love is the Hollandaise version I learned from my mother, who learned it long ago from Queen Betty Crocker. It’s not an old-school French version with vinegar or white wine, it’s purely eggs, lemon juice and butter. I’m such a down-home bumpkin that I like it best made with [really top quality] butter that is <horrors!> salted. I’ve even learned that I like it quite well if I just hot up a cup of butter with two tablespoons of lemon juice until nice and sizzly, pour it into a blender, and spin it while I drop a couple of pretty whole farm fresh eggs right in, and watch it whiz while it quickly cooks the eggs just enough to thicken into a ridiculously delicious “instant” whole-egg Hollandaise that I will happily eat on fish, on pasta, on pork, on sautéed greens, on (sure!) Eggs Benedict, on sweet fresh fruit, on a shortbread, on a spoon. What can I say, I have a lemony Hollandaise <ahem!> problem. Thankfully, there’s not yet a twelve-step program to cure me, so I can keep on indulging my addiction as long as I like.

That, my friends, is sweet music to my ears.

photo

Sing along with me again . . . shall we have a little Monteverdi this time?

Wait for Me! I’ll be Right Back. Maybe

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Once upon a time, I wrote and posted a poem. It was yesterday, in fact, that I posted it, right here, along with some photos of mine, and got a number of comments from you kindly people when you read it. Ironically, perhaps, it was titled:

I Don’t Think I’m Crazy, but I’m Not Crazy about Clowns, Either

–now I’m a little unsure about the Not Craziness on my part, because the post has disappeared from my blog and only appears as an unillustrated draft in my archives at the moment. Naturally, this is precisely when my otherwise quite nice tech homies of WordPress have deemed it a fine time to take a weekend off from Support to spend fine tuning all of the neat things they can do for me. Of course, people, I already knew about my own craziness. I’m quite happy in it, for the most part, as it’s just a friendly sort of nuttiness and of being, erm, offbeat or eccentric that I’m pleased to hone to a fine art. But when it allows cracks in my little tiny universe where something I’m pretty sure I did actually do can leak out and disappear on me like this it’s just a little disconcerting. I shall have to have a little heart-to-heart with the WP techno-mavens when they–and I–both get back in our respective grooves and see if we can’t find the alternate dimension wherein my wandering words may be, perhaps parked in the wordsmiths’ Naughty Corner to think over how they dared to disrespect the dignity of the Clown race.

chair photo

I can only hope my earlier words have had a good think . . .

We’ll see if the ether-gods and I allow yesterday’s post back to the party when found. Words, as we all know, have a tendency to be incredibly unruly. In the wrong hands, nothing but trouble. Left to their own devices, heaven only knows. So we shall just see.

In the interim, I’ve got loads of other words stacking up and raring to go. You are so deeply not surprised. So I’ll keep plugging away and we’ll see what transpires right back here where there’s room for more. So I gather.

photo

We'll see how everything stacks up as we go along . . .

I am slightly tempted to take a brief commercial break because, since I brought up the whole subject of craziness and now have the best sort of it running through my pretty little head. Three words: Crazy. Patsy. Cline. I have a feeling even a clown could be saved from the purgatory of the social outcast just by listening to the inimitable Patsy’s rendition of that immortal song. Words, you know, being powerful–and when linked to music, another incredibly powerful force, possibly that much the better. I might just have to take a moment for the same therapy.

Surely ‘Tis Better to be Bombastic than Merely Bumptious

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graphite drawing

As my music teacher once told me, "if you make a mistake, be sure to make the same mistake again, and with real conviction, when you get to Verse Two."

No one will be surprised to hear that as a kid with no sense of direction, space or straightforward western left-to-right/top-to-bottom reading I never did master reading music. Apparently I was a pretty decent prevaricator and persuader, though, because I faked my way through my five years of piano lessons by conning teachers and friends into playing my assignments for me up front ‘so I could get a feel for how they worked’–so I could phony them up by playing primarily by ear when lesson time came around again. Not to say that this flim-flam actually made me a good player. I had the decency to stop taking lessons when I was old enough that the act was wearing as thin as a starlet’s underwear. My teachers deserved to work with students with a certain amount of potential, after all. But I learned lots of fun and useful things from them in spite the inevitable moments of frustration and drudgery inherent in beginner’s practice. Not least of which was that the root not just of learning, but of potential innovation and variant excellence is the Mistake.

This is not meant as license for licentiousness–free rein to make egregious errata just for the lazy-ass or mean-spirited fun of it. But there’s a great difference between tripping on the invisible banana skin and bounding around boisterously without regard to the laws of gravity just to see how much I can liven up a dull funeral service. There’s a yawning gap between plonking a wrong note in the heat of a performance and sabotaging a poor defenseless deceased composer because I don’t care enough to learn her work properly. Despite my inability to make head or tail of those dots on a score, I did earnestly try to learn the proper notes right through by however devious the means.

I can neither confirm nor deny that the keyboard biff-ery that inspired the above gem of guidance regarding consistency of form used to disguise a melodic pratfall in any way improved upon the intended character or direction of the piece. Can’t even remember what I was playing. But you can be sure that the technique offered was a face saver, if not a life-saver, many a time after. Sometimes it’s just best to own up to my impressive capacity for fallibility right off, and enjoy a good horse-laugh at my own expense along with all of the other merrymakers in the room. Sometimes, though, I would rather take a page from the Bluffer’s Guides and adopt a meant-to-do-that nonchalance. There’s only so much I can take of being the unintentional class clown. Part of me dreams of Emma Peel sang-froid, a fantasy that however insanely unreachable is yet not easily quashed.

After all, it has served as the inspiration, time and time again, for all sorts of larger than life ideas, stories, poems, artworks and practical on-the-spot excuses, and who among us does not need those! Dogs, however voracious, can’t be expected to digest every available hunk of homework; traffic cannot account for the vagaries of my inspired life behind the wheel at every moment; and certainly the good taste and etiquette handbook, no matter how comprehensive, simply doesn’t have the capacity to cover my every gaffe and blunder in thought, word and dork-dyed deed. So thanking my lucky stars, and my long-ago mistress of pianistic peregrinations, I will continue on my hapless yet happy way, pretending to know what I’m doing in life while covering my blunders with bluster and the best imitation I can give of correctness. Whatever that is.

graphite drawing

What I MEANT to say was . . .

Friends Well Met in Cyberspace

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We have constant reminders of the dangers lurking around the dark corners of the webiverse, and indeed we would do well to heed all such warnings. But I have seen that the obverse of that coin is equally impressive and far more enlightening and cheering: cyberspace is full of fantastic people and inspirations, and I don’t have to go far to find them. The kindness of strangers is quickly transformed into wonderful streams of affinity and even deep friendships when we have the ability to find so much common ground despite the physical, cultural or temporal distances between us.

Case in point: ceciliag, author of the exquisitely artful and personal blog The Kitchens Garden. I saw, without surprise, that today she had received a much-deserved blogging award for her marvelous work, and was delighted, because in the short time I’ve followed her blog I have come to see her as an inspiration, a mentor and even a friend. That’s the beauty of this concentrated contact we can develop with wonderful people whose shared insights and arts move us to do more than merely hang about the fringes basking in their gifts, and actually get to work on our own, howsoever we can! What I saw with surprise, and gratitude, was that C had generously passed along the award to other bloggers, and included me. I will of course try to narrow the field of my admired cohorts enough to pay the gift forward, because others besides ceciliag have strengthened, entertained and inspired me as well. She must know that I would gladly have included her in my own list had she not been the one ‘tagging’ me!

award tag

The purpose of the award is clearly to reinforce the ties between us in this remarkably friendly and creative world of blogging, and also to introduce us to more new connexions that we haven’t yet known to enjoy. Along with the fine mandate to share with you some links to other blogs I know you’ll find delightful, I am tasked with telling you 7 things you don’t know about me. Finding 15 bloggers whose work I admire and think deserves recognition is easy (though keeping it to only 15 mightn’t be)–but since I’m so boldly non-secretive a person, I may have to fish around a little to think of any things everybody doesn’t already know about me. So first, a blogroll of other worthy persons whose blogging efforts I hope you’ll support and find as delightful, provocative, educational, witty, touching, and/or flat-out gorgeous as I do.

Ad Alta Voce

Cherry Tea Cakes

Claudia Finseth

Closet Cooking

Draw Stanley

In Search of My Moveable Feasts

Just a Smidgen

Little Brown Pen

My Little Norway

My Open Source Life

Plate Fodder

Roost: A Simple Life

Sustainable Garden

The Last Classic

Tinkerbelle

And now, as if my dear readers haven’t already heard enough blather about me, here are seven things you might not have known.

1  I consider ginger root the Universal Donor. I can think of hardly anything that can’t benefit from the addition of ginger in one of its many forms.

2   I have something a little like the earworms people get when a pop song (or, among people I know, a movement from some classical piece) gets stuck in their head for a day or week–but mine is a permanent repetitive tune. My personal theme song, I guess. At least it plays in variations sometimes, thank goodness, or I’d go batty. Or have I already?

3   Once, long ago, I got to make a commissioned artwork to be presented as a gift to the Bishop of El Salvador.

4   The shelves on my desk have a miniature found-science collection of bones, bugs, bird nests, rusted hardware and seed pods.

5   I have a horror of telephones. Yes, it has a good latin phobia name too. But what do we phobics do to get over it–call each other???

6   My ability to raise one (either) eyebrow sardonically once garnered me the nickname “GP” for reminding my teacher of Gregory Peck’s expressions. I don’t think she meant it as a compliment, ‘specially if she had any idea that my sense of irony was mostly aimed at what I thought was the absurdity of her teaching style. Mea culpa.

7  At various points in my life I thought I’d study to be a pastor (that was clearly before I started developing into such a heathen); a marine biologist (all that scientific knowledge started to get in my way); an architect (oh, yeah–a dyslexic who can barely do grade-school math). Turns out I wasn’t really cut out for any sort of well-defined path.

Which brings me right here! And I can definitely say I couldn’t be more pleased with having landed among you. It challenges more different aspects of my personality and self-image than pursuing any of the aforementioned would have done in my case. And it lets me keep up the hunt for my vocation, if I have one, with a dandy support community that often drives me down previously unknown and unexpected paths of fun-filled mystery. So thanks, and here’s to all of you, not just those on today’s list!

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Bouquets to all!

Perhaps this will Ring a Bell

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Perhaps if you've stood near the cathedral in Uppsala . . .

Yesterday I spent the whole day at church. No, I’m not nearly that dedicatedly religious–I’ll leave that to the clergy and others far more willing and capable–but since my husband conducts choirs at that church and they sang (a lot) at three services between 9 a.m. and 7 p.m. yesterday and I like to hear his choirs when I can, not to mention keeping a hard-working guy company through a long day . . . well, we both spent the whole day at church. Except for a lunch break, I mean.

There were reasons besides the music that it was a worthwhile day to be at church all the day long. I’m sure some would say my everlasting soul is in dire need of such a thing, since I’m admittedly not so very pious by nature. But as I’m not conducting or singing or working like the rest of the people who attend multiple services, there is also welcome space in the forms of a mass for me to meditate and maybe refresh my strength for a bit.

The benefits of a church marathon yesterday certainly included being among people that took the solemnity and significance of 9-11’s tenth anniversary to heart and really did spend a day of remembrance and service in honor of those lost and those others who have continued to pay the price for ten years. More importantly in my book, I think many of those people with whom I ended up spending the day understand equally that the significance of the date is only validated and saluted properly by finding the most positive ways to move forward and renew all things touched by wounds of the day’s history. So amid the seriousness, there was a great deal of kindness and generosity and joy.

Certainly didn’t hurt for us to have a visit from a truly dear longtime friend who stayed after the second service and took us to lunch!

The other happy peculiarity of being in church all day was the reminder of how much I love the sound of church bells. While they were rung on this occasion for some less-than-ecstatic reasons along with the usual markings of time and ceremony, their very presence in the air, softly change-ringing through the nave and tolling across the neighborhood, was a benison I find particularly sweet. It brings not only consciousness of the best of the words and acts in hand but also of all kinds of good associative thoughts.

The bells do always bring with them reminders for me of their tolling for various loved ones who have died over the years: grandparents and close friends, other relatives, deeply connected neighbors and colleagues and cohorts of many kinds. Though I never cease to mourn the loss of those dearest to me, the bells generally bring up more welcome and cheering memories of them, perhaps because something comforting and pleasing in the sound of a well-tuned bell makes it hard for me to hear it as ominous or depressing.

The most distinct aspect of the beauty of bells’ ringing for me, though, is more strictly secular: all of the memories evoked of places I have loved to be, journeys taken, cities visited, hidden jewels of towns in obscure corners of lyrical countryside singing with the ringing of chime-like carillons and roaring urban canyons clanging with bold abandon. In part this is because of the those very connections made with memories of other loved family and friends, many in this case (happily) still living. I’m suddenly drawn back to a wintry day of walking through falling snow in the sharp cold of Basel with my sister and our cousin as the cathedral bells shout above us, echoing from corner to corner, we three stopping only to buy roasted chestnuts from a street vendor purely to heat our hands in our pockets. Then I’m in the outlandishly plush green hills of Oberstaufen in Bavaria, meandering the summer trails near town with my husband and finding one tiny chapel after another, almost like farmstands in their numbers and miniature simplicity but each exquisite in its own well-loved way, amid a sort of soft chattering of bells as one calls to another–all interwoven with the very different bells tinkling on the necks of “guest cows” equally enjoying the spa town as they roam their summer pastures.

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Ring for me, sing for me . . .

I think I can fairly say that I caught the gist of the bishop’s thoughtful homily yesterday, the lilt and import of the liturgy and readings and ceremony, after attending three fairly elaborate services. I know that I bathed in the sounds of the choirs and the sonority of the organ very gladly. And soaring over it all, or undergirding it, was the recurring theme of the ringing of the bells. That was a particular grace-note on this very particular day.