Summer teases us with her dramatic, exaggerated changes of mood and meaning, but if we know our own history well enough to remember it, we can be sure that her graces will always return when the time is right.
Mocking, Ever So Gently
10
Category Archives: TIme
Three Hundred Sixty-Five and Counting
Please pardon my squeals of glee; I’m just a bit of a pig, my dears.
Yay me!
I know, I know, I say such things all the time, egotist and drama queen that I am. If you were really sick of my self-aggrandizement I assume you’d have had the good sense to stop coming here by now. Thank goodness I surround myself with people who, though otherwise entirely admirable in their many stellar qualities, are just loopy enough to spend time with me ungrudgingly and continue to share their own blogging abodes and the treasures therein with me in ceaseless generosity. But I am feeling a little extra pleased with myself these days for a couple of particular reasons. I’m just ridiculously slow to get it all underway appropriately.
I guess I’m a real slowpoke by nature.
I am told that a recent post of mine was, in the tally of my benign WordPress overlords, number 365 in overall production here at the kiwsparks factory. That is, in the looser sense, a year’s worth of posts for a daily blogger. However, honesty and my personal traces of OCD move me to say that while I did indeed ‘officially’ commit only so far as one year’s worth of daily blogging, I hadn’t yet fulfilled that commitment to the letter since the one-per-day agenda began in earnest on, if I remember correctly, the 6th of July last year. Sure, who doesn’t need something to do to celebrate her wedding anniversary in a more special way than that boring old romantic stuff? So I had a second milestone of the 365 variety yet to achieve in two weeks. I did double-post a couple of times along the way when the whim emerged, but that in no way made me feel I had met the standard I set in my original plan. On the other hand, WordPress would no doubt find it arguable that I’ve posted, technically, daily, because the WP time stamp does not agree 100% with whatever time zone I’ve been in at various points along the year, so it dates my posts differently than I would, and I am happy to consider my own time zone the decisive one, even if it means typing madly until I can press Publish at the stroke (the clock’s or mine) of midnight. I’m nothing if not a control freak.
All of this being said, the rewards of committing to this year of daily blogging have been considerable and entirely worthwhile. I have gotten back into a dedicated practice of writing and creating visual as well as verbal images that is its own reward, to be sure. I am reminded of the need to Make Things on a regular basis and find pleasure in that process as well as sometimes amusing my own little silly self with the outcomes as well. Most of all, I have reconnected with a social side of myself that is sometimes less easy to access, as a more naturally introverted and even shy person who expresses her bolder and outwardly more comfortable character better in print than either in person or (quelle horreur!) on the telephone. Yes, my nearest and dearest will tell you that I am chatty (or verbose) and rather unfiltered in nature when around them, but of course many of you probably know exactly what I mean when I say that it is specific to my feeling safe and in familiar surroundings that brings out that extroverted version of me.
The biggest payoff in this blogging process is, of course, the presence of that sort of a Safe Place for me to have social interaction with a much wider range of wise and talented and fabulous and fascinating people from all over the world than previously possible. I may have had my own self-centered reasons for starting to blog, but it is you, my dear visitors, commenters and especially my blog-sharing friends, who have made it continue to be worthwhile and in ever increasingly fine ways. I have again been gifted with several blogging awards, and though the late spring-early summer schedule around here militated against my taking much time to respond properly, it is yet another reminder that my web community is generous and supportive as well as simply a fun and kindly group of people. So I must say further thanks to Dr. Dan and Susie and my delightful correspondent at veggiewhatnow for sharing their generosity of fine blogs and passing along blogging awards as well, respectively: the One Lovely Blog Award, Versatile Blogger and a recognition I’d never even heard of before, making me a Food Stories Nominee for Excellence in Storytelling. Cool! All of them, all of their blogs, and all of the kindness showered upon me.
I shall certainly try to honor the spirit, and hopefully the letter, of these awards but I’d appreciate it if you cut me a little slack when it comes to sharing those Fun Facts about myself (as if I haven’t poured enough of ’em on you to nearly drown y’all already). As usual, I’m so impressed and humbled by the astounding company I’m privileged to keep that I hope every one of you will click on my three admirable friends’ names above and take a leisurely visit at each of their sites to see just what wonders await you there. You will leave far less hungry and far smarter and happier, really, I assure you. Dr. Dan is a Canadian internist and foodie-supreme who posts all sorts of succulent, sweet and savory cookery to make you dream. The wise and funny blog susartandfood is the place where Susie beautifully publishes her own marvelous food, along with superb art, fantastic writing and a good dose of wit throughout. And veggiewhatnow is a land loaded with grand vegetarian ideas, terrific photos and illustrations and a whole lot of useful information that just doesn’t show up anywhere else in such a friendly format.
My sharing of bits of brilliance about myself, well, that’ll keep coming in all of the upcoming posts just as it has in every post so far.
And here are some fellow bloggers greatly deserving of my passing along these honors, along with all of my previous nominees (please search my site via the various awards’ names found in my sidebar if you’d like to see the many other deeply deserving folk I so enjoy sharing with you):
For the Versatile Blogger Award, I happily commend to you the following standout bloggers: Mandy, filling The Complete Cookbook not only with gorgeous food and the photos thereof but also all sorts of domestic derring-do and lovely forays into the history (familial and wider-reaching) of landscape, pets, garden and more; Marie, managing a grand kitchen, a busy family, a beautiful property and gardens, and a dog who thinks she’s queen of the active crew of local wildlife, blogs at My Little Corner of Rhode Island; Claire, the travel, garden, cookery and photography (and more) blogger of Promenade Plantings; the supposedly year-stricken K, writing year-struck‘s wide-ranging, scintillating, touching and bracingly intelligent while often still hilarious tales; and Bishop, savoring through his Backyard Farm the natural approach to gardening, cooking, travel and the appreciation of fine libations both home-brewed and otherwise.
For the One Lovely Blog Award, I’m pleased to present: David, painting heart-stoppingly beautiful portraits and teaching lessons to lucky painters over at davidreidart (which my computer appropriately translates for me as ‘daredevilry’); Lindy Lee, weaving poems of the heart and telling tales that transfix, on Poetic Licensee; Nitzus, magnificent and insightful photographer spreading the admiration of memorable and remarkable people, places and creatures far and wide through his self-named site; Cyndi, bookchick extraordinaire, wending her way through collected poems, stories and essays of her own, and stellar photography in the pages of cfbookchick; and Dennis, that inimitable Bard on the Hill, whose poetry spills out of the Texas hill country in rivers shared with poems he’s selected from many other fine poets.
And for the Excellence in Storytelling recognition I enthusiastically nominate: Celi, at that magically inviting sustainable homestead, thekitchensgarden; John, who writes hymns of Italianate glory from the Bartolini kitchens; Tanya, la reina of the Spanish mountains’ bounty at chicaandaluza; Barbara, who has far more than justasmidgen of exquisiteness to share at her blog; and cookingspree‘s mistress of fabulousness at table, in the kitchen, and whatever amazing places she goes, Antoinette. All of my best to you–and theirs, too! Cheers, my friends.
A small footnote: while I am deeply honored and pleased to have been so generously given these recognitions, I am going to refrain from further award acceptance lest I spend too much of my time polishing my medals and strutting around in my tutu and tiara and too little time, well, blogging. Much ground left to cover, I’m pretty sure, even if I don’t yet know what it is. Meanwhile, you good people should busy yourselves with exploring the wealth of illumination at all of these other blogs too–so much fun ahead for everyone.
PS–while I’m cresting this wave of self-promotional adulation, I’ll just mention that today at Zazzle.com there is a one-day 50% off sale on all of their posters and wrapped canvases, and mine are all over the site and pretty dirt cheap to start with, so if you go over there and search for kiwsparks you’ll see all sorts of affordable art, much of which has been seen on this blog before, on sale. Just saying.
The Song Rises above All Else
When the night is long and the day after it dawns dark and grim, sing.
When winter is colder than the inmost heart of death and is finally supplanted by the least promising spring, empty of graces and starved for new, green life, sing again and sing out loudly as you can.
When age and infirmity and dangers of every kind are buffeting all the lovely youth and strength they can find in this sad world into terrible dust-devils of desiccated sorrow, sing with all your heart and soul and make the most tuneful, joyful, glorious prettiness that you can float into the air, and know that your song, no matter how wholly alone it may float up, is powerful enough to rise above it all. This is the only way that any of us will rise above it all. And that we will, so long as we sing.
Walk a Mile in My Baby Shoes
I’ve been thinking about childhood. The freshness and innocence, the naiveté and helplessness, the curiosity and amazement at every new thing–and everything is new–and of the naturally self-centered universe one forms because self is all one knows. I’ve been thinking about how all of these qualities, so clear and natural in childhood, repeat throughout our lives in cycles. Varied by age and circumstance, and certainly by our own personalities as they develop, but there and recurrent all the same.
I’ve been thinking about how little we are all aware of these cycles and patterns in ourselves over time. We humans, though we congratulate ourselves as Homo sapiens, intelligent beings, are poignantly–sometimes poisonously–unwilling and even unable to truly see ourselves all that clearly. It’s not terribly hard to be self-aware, to know the good and bad of one’s personality and character and style, but it’s amazingly uncommon that we choose to acknowledge it, let alone are able and willing to do anything useful to control or change what we can or should. Most of us are rather childlike, if not infantile, in that respect. We want forever to be loved and be the center of the universe in that way we sensed we were as small children, before knocking up against whatever form of reality dented that illusion for the first time.
For the very fortunate (like me) it’s easy to look with a critical eye on those who are in the midst of childlike neediness because of their poverty, ill-health, lack of education or resources, old age or difference from the popular norms. Easy to forget that I don’t have the same obvious petulance or beggarly qualities only because I am so fortunate, so well off and well fed and loved and young and-and-and. I am the lucky center of my universe for now. It’s simple to be placid when I’m so rich.
I can only hope that this good life not only continues to keep me content, but that it affords me the leisure and good grace to look a little less harshly on the struggles of others. To be more patient and understanding when someone else is in that childlike state of need, whether for the starkest, plainest of dignities–sheer life not being at imminent risk–or for food and shelter, for health and wholeness, for peace and hope. If I can’t be an agent of change, bringing those gifts to those who need them, at least I must try to remember what it is to be in that fragile state and know how much I depend upon the rest of the world myself for being, by contrast, not in my childhood of utter need.
Things from the Dept. of Things (and Some Other Things)
Here we are, back in Denton, Texas, county seat and home of the lovely old Denton County Courthouse and bold blue skies and ridiculously high temperatures . . .
Yes, we are (sing with me, now:) Back in the Saddle Again. The world does not stand still while one is away from her ‘normal’ realities, nor does the stack of Stuff to Do cease to pile up in its mountainous heaps of glory. Plants continue to grow (and/or die, given the return of NTX to triple digit temps), mail to back up into its magnificent conglomeration of surreal junk plus business to be addressed plus about two pieces of personal mail per month; dust settles in its accustomed murky corners and masks the presence, temporarily, of new dainty cobwebs, and meetings and get-togethers that have been held in abeyance until the return home are now on the immediate horizon, lest they get missed altogether.
In short, life goes on, and we need to trot at speed to catch up with it again.
So in the great tradition, I spent much of today doing laundry, unpacking everything I didn’t unpack on arrival yesterday, sorting through some of the mail that my husband had kindly presorted to remove the things that were only his to deal with, and beginning to schedule the numerous activities that need to happen in short shrift. There’s the clearing of drawers, cabinets and rooms that I need to do tomorrow and Friday to prepare for our bathroom reno, the lunch meeting Friday with my weekly lunch-partner, the skylight installer who is now set to come on Saturday afternoon, the retired friends who will come for dinner Saturday before they move to Pennsylvania, the Sunday schedule at the church and then coming home to finish whatever prep I need to finish before the reno crew’s arrival, and Monday those dears will show up to wreak short-term havoc on house and home and (ultimately) make our lives better.
I am trying to keep the Big Picture in mind as I plow on into and through all of the things that need to be tackled, but you know me, I am always prone to be sidetracked by every interesting little thing that comes my way, catches the periphery of my view, or beckons me to take off on the next tantalizing tangent. Which, of course, is in turn additionally tiring and requires more frequent and longer naps and whenever possible, and a nice piece of chocolate to nourish me upon awakening. Okay, that last pair of doings will have to wait until I’ve at least crossed a few necessities off the long and ever-growing lists, or I’ll never get finished.
Meanwhile, you never know what will show up directly in my path as I do my duties . . .
When a Boy Grows Up and Becomes a . . . a Much Older Boy
Happy Father’s Day, Dad! I know there was a time when you might’ve wished you’d had actual children and got us instead, but since you never left childhood entirely behind yourself, I think we can call it even. And just think, your offspring are following blithely in your footsteps to keep our own youthful high spirits intact via non-emergence into full adult behavior, so between us we’re all waving the old family flag pretty handily indeed. We’re only so good at it, of course, because we’ve had such an outstanding and irrepressible example in front of us all along.
I’m grateful for the training in reckless enthusiasm, Teflon ego-building, rampant silliness, and all of the other life skills you have generously shared with us by guidance and example all along the way. I like to think I’m getting fairly good at all of that myself, but will never tire of knowing that it’s shared and that I perform my junior jollities in the shadow of a true master. A good father gives his offspring a happy childhood; a great father carries it on with his children so they never have to give up its joys completely. Thanks to your showing me the way, I can’t imagine ever losing my delight in the mystery and adventure and simple goofiness that life can bring, and that is a fantastic gift anyone less happy would have to envy. I hope you know how deeply–and yes, seriously–it’s appreciated, not just on Father’s Day but every day I can celebrate an untainted sense of the grandest laughing love of life. Thanks for that.
And as with mothers, I am doubly blessed, as I realized pretty much the instant I met the man who would become my other Dad, my husband’s father. It took no time to see that there was a kindheartedness and a very merry twinkle in the eye with which I felt utterly at home, familiar and safe, and these last sixteen-plus years have continued to prove my first assessment correct. To have two fathers who keep the days filled with generosity and warmth and love and my face always turned toward the smiling sun is truly a treasure that will never, ever grow old.
Bottom of the Morning to You!
Sweet, blessed sleep! Yea verily, I got to sleep until the morning was almost gone today, and ohhhhh, how lovely it was indeed. Now this is vacation. A true holiday. Never mind the fun things we do, the glorious people we see, the magnificent scenery, it’s the sleep, Baby!
I don’t feel especially guilty about it, as you can tell. We once lived next door to a rooster, one of that breed who are supposed to be known as the royal emissaries of the dawn, but who deigned it his personal form of rule to choose when he would actually crow, preferably sometime in the early afternoon or perhaps around, no pun intended, the cocktail hour. I really admired him. I think that if I couldn’t choose when to be sleeping and when to be awake (even, astonishingly, productive at rare times) I would be a truly miserable character.
Instead, I get this great opportunity and I nab it gladly. I will go with my husband and complete an important business transaction with partners today; we’ll run errands, we’ll have dinner with longtime friends, we’ll come back to spend the night with my sister and her fur-bearing ‘family’. Seems like a useful enough day to me, especially if it culminates in a long night’s sleep before the next day. Hurray! Hurray!
The Departure Gate is Always Closer to Arrivals than You Think
The end of one thing is almost invariably the beginning of another. Nothing reminds me of this more pointedly than time spent at the airport. People are jammed into this microcosm of hurry-up-and-wait, playing out every aspect of plodding patience and spiky urgency, of rabid determination and aimless uncertainty, on the spectrum ranging from action to stasis.
It’s easy to forget, when one is in the Infinite Queue that always precedes ticket purchase, baggage checking or security examinations, never mind plane boarding, that even the most extreme globe-spanning flights comprise in reality a very small portion of one’s entire life span (one hopes). Even easier to become so focused on the specific trip being taken at the moment that one will be leaving many places yet to journey to others, long after the current sojourn is a distant memory. Every one of the departures and arrivals may have its own significance, indeed, but each is only a passing event in a longer timeline.
Perspective is difficult to achieve and even harder to maintain. To go toward one loved person or place demands that we leave another behind. This is how we will always be, one foot planted and reluctant to move from where we have been and the other striving to move us toward the new, our hearts and minds leaning forward or back but seldom willing to hold still right where we are. And it isn’t such a bad thing, at that. It’s how we grow and change and find new loves, none of which can happen without taking the occasional flying leap, whether it’s on an aircraft or strictly metaphorical. Time flies, but so can we.
The Large and the Small of It
The depths of Space carry miraculous sparks of inspiration at a seeming infinity of levels.
A couple of years ago my husband was conducting a concert of choral works all, in one way or another, exploring the idea of Space, and he asked me to provide projected images that would act as a visual companion to the music. Since the centerpiece of the concert was to be a selection of movements from Estonian composer/astronomer Urmas Sisask’s ‘Gloria Patri‘–wonderfully meditative, somewhat minimalistic yet still quite melodic music which was to be accompanied by photographs taken through the Hubble telescope, I was given a clear starting point for the collection of visual images. The good people of NASA willingly agreed to let us use any Hubble images we liked, without any constraints and at no charge, so my task was to find the images I thought best suited the music at all points, edit them (some extensively, some less so) in order to fit the format of the projections, and collate all of it into a pre-arranged program that I could manually ‘play’ as the concert was performed. Looking for, and then through, hundreds of Hubble images was a bit of a project in itself; reformatting and resizing, digitally ‘cleaning’ and grouping and ordering them proved to be a little more weighty. But it was a pleasurable and energizing project all the same, staring at the stars and constellations in all of their miraculously varied glory. ‘Gloria Patri’ indeed!
Going forward to work out images for the rest of the pieces on the docket for this program, I was moved by both the enormity of the Hubble’s scope and our own galaxy’s tininess within the vastness of space to think that it would be wonderful to explore those strange dissonances and harmonies that occur in the known world, microscopic to massive, blurred by our limited vision and knowledge and delicately detailed by our constant finding of new facts and ideas in all of it. So for the other pieces in the concert’s repertoire, I sought out images that would complement each other yet emphasize the astounding range of contrasts in our spatial existence, from the granular to the grand. Pollen and planets might in fact have more in common than we can imagine, if we stretch our thinking just a little. Snowflakes and stars might be merely opposite ends of a spectrum that transcends dimensions, scale and vision.
I was reminded throughout this process not only of my minuteness in the great spectacle of existence, but also of how fantastically treasure-filled that existence is, from the level of the subatomic to things and thoughts so massive that the Hubble telescope and all of its exponentially larger generations of offspring may never quite be able to encompass the enormity of it all. If I ever think I’m running out of ideas, I only need to remember this one exercise in humility and happiness, and I should be able to break out of my stasis as a flood of newly sparked inspirations stream like comets out of me.
Maybe not Captain of My Own Destiny, but at Least I’m on the Crew
When I was a young artist-in-the-making, it irritated me to no end that people who saw my interest in art and knew of my Norwegian roots often instantly assumed that I was a big fan if not acolyte of Edvard Munch, Norway’s best known artist. Besides that my knowledge of Munch’s work was pretty nearly limited to ‘Skrik‘ (‘The Scream’) and what little else I’d seen even in passing was not at all to my taste, I took it as an insult and a frightfully narrow-minded view of my potential. And that, my friends, was the capper, because it implied that I was not in charge of my own future but predestined by my ancestry to be a pale imitation of somebody I wasn’t particularly fond of or impressed by in the first place. I was jolly well going to go my own way and choose my own muses and inspirations and, most of all, I was absolutely not going to be told what to do and when and how to do it by some ghostly abstract borne in my bloodstream.
As a very fortunate young pilgrim, I did manage to get to the Old Country and spend a little time rooting around my ancestral stomping grounds during my undergraduate studies. I got to meet and spend time with my great-aunts and various other relations and visit the house my grandfather helped build for his elder sister, our Tante Anna, and the family farms–the sylvan Ovidsland property with its tidy white house and taller red barn set in among the slender birches, and the more remote summer pastures of Eitland, a smaller and more rustic place on land with a sweet little lake for fishing up dinner. I was able to see the headstones of relatives long-gone, outside the little church where many of the family had attended services for many an age, and walk paths and travel roads where many of them had trod and ridden for ages before that.
Eitland, painted by an unknown family member or friend in the early 20th century.
It was a rich and rare opportunity to both visit the places of my family’s past and to live among my Norwegian family in their current places and way of life, something that few people get the chance to do and that I will treasure for as long as I live. Because it did change me, and change my point of view. It may seem strange, but some of the greatest change happened in completely unexpected ways; I was not especially surprised, though quite pleased, that getting to know family I had not known before and see the world from which my grandfather in particular emerged to live in the States (my other three grandparents‘ ancestors all came from other parts of Norway, where we had less constant and present contact). But I never imagined that simply setting foot in the country of my ancestors would move me as it did. I could never have begun to imagine that I would be so struck, feel such a palpable and somehow heart-wrenching connectedness on standing in front of the amazing Oseberg ship in the Viking Ship Museum of Oslo–but I was; I did.
And I was truly astounded to discover, when I–a little reluctantly, perhaps–went with my sister to visit the Munch Museum that I not only found Edvard Munch’s work much more technically impressive and more profound, his life story and the stories that gave life to and were expressed in his work more impressive and thought-provoking than I had ever dreamed I would allow, but indeed, there was a lot more that I found simply compelling and even, startlingly, appealing. First of all, the guy could draw. He could paint, make prints, tell stories. He was, dammit, gifted and actually worthy of the attention. How very annoying of him, really. Because then I had to come back and re-think what I was doing a little bit. Was it so terrible to reflect something of our however-peripherally-common ancestry in my own work?
I had, if anything, a new appreciation for how much I didn’t wish to emulate his life, with the illness and suffering that marked life for and around him. But to take, as he did, what life presented and put it through the same filters of self and vision and thoughtfulness and surrealist whimsy and passion–that might be precisely what could make me more, dare I say it, myself as an artist. Who knew.
So by the time I set about making the collection of artworks for my master’s degree exhibition, it was an amusing ‘closing of the loop’ to find quite a number of people observing the works in preparation and in the finally installed show coming back to that same old observation that had used to frustrate me so. ‘Has anybody ever mentioned how much your work is reminiscent of Munch’s?’ It was even amusing to me to realize that, though the subjects might stray from his, though the media were sometimes decidedly different and the techniques concomitantly skewed to fit them, and though most of these viewers had no inkling of my ancestry, apparently there was a little something making its way up from my roots to the surface of my art.
Somewhere along the way I had also started to grow up a bit and begun to figure out that we all, inevitably, have less control over our own destinies than we fancy we do, and that that’s not inherently a bad thing–that life will always surprise us and challenge our grand plans and hopeful dreams and carefully charted paths. That the very things we can’t predict or control help to guide and shape us into things we might never have imagined we could plan or wish to do or to be. I guess I just took a longer and more convoluted route to letting my little commonalities with my fellow Norwegian artist Edvard show through; being dead, he could spare the time to wait for me to catch up. And once I got comfortable with the idea of seeing a hint of him in the mirror, I didn’t feel like screaming anymore either.
Art-Colored Glasses 