Moments of Music
10
Tag Archives: peaceful
Invitations to Dance
Dancers I: Bend Sinister
Leaning back into a dire S-curve
And turning, twisting out of grace,
Finding cruel existence takes
Her to a meaner, coarser place,
She rebels against the tide
That pulls her downward, scrapes her soul,
And makes a revolutionary
Spring to leave the great Black Hole
Of wounded spirit, tortured love,
To swim back into something sweet—
This is the mandate of the dance:
To win by keeping on her feet
Dancers II: Conjuror
Under a spell of loveliness
She leans, she curls, expands;
She falls against the strong caress
Of gladness, in the hands
Of magic greater than herself,
And when the spell is done,
There is no darkness, loneliness
Or sorrow; she is one
With every boundary, with joy,
With having been set free
From all constraint; the dance has won
Her to infinity
A New Lens
My world is water-colored . . .
Having spent much of my life near the coast, both at home and abroad, I am less of a swimmer than you might expect, though most of my water time has been spent near northern shores, if that explains anything for you. But I am greatly comforted by being near water without needing to be in it. Rivers, oceans, lakes and ponds, streams and waterfalls, puddles and pools alike all have their appeal and the sight and sound of them soothes my soul like few other things can do. A walk along a riverbank or beach boardwalk, out on the mud flats or wading in the cool fringes of a foaming inbound tide–all have the power to send the complications of life fleeing, if only for a while.
Not so surprising, then, that many of my artworks play with the cool hues of water and the shadowy welcome of its associations. Whether in the impressionistic and abstract styles seen here or in images quite specific to the sea, the hold that water has on my heart must make its appearance often just to comfort me.
All the same, as a northerner by birth and years of residence, I have always been wildly fascinated too by the idea of those mythic turquoise tropical waters whose gem-like clarity would surely entice me in, offering the siren-like assurance that I must be utterly safe in them since I can see practically forever in their depths. I know that this is not entirely true, but the appeal of their warmth and seemingly pure glassy transparency has its potent pull on my imagination anyway. So it was a bit of a fait accompli that I should love it when I did at last have my chance to step into the perfectly sheer aquas and blues of the Caribbean for the first time. It was everything I’d hoped, and of course a little something more.
Swimming in Warm Water
I: Skimming along as if in flight Just under the surface of a lake, I can look up and see through its tinted lens A circular and absurdly distorted universe Of inbent trees examining me in kind, Of ship-sized cumulus zeppelin clouds whizzing by, The pillowed prows of ducks plowing past me And convoluted birds careening In zigzag traffic from shore to shore.
II: Looking down, I see dazzling curtains of kelp Dyeing mottled sunlight as it Cooks the lake like a giant kettle full of fish. Flitting, darting shapes shoot up to nip me Or casually brush by And I exult in floating a subtle touch Toward a parti-colored veil-tailed fish When it fixes me with its dully silver, Unemotional lidless eye.
Perhaps I shall always be looking for a sea change . . .
Because for all that we know and admire about its clarity and simplicity, and surely for its necessity to life, water is also still a source of great mystery and power and its depths both literally and metaphorically may never be fully plumbed.
State of Abstraction
Foiled again! Or not, if I grab the reins . . .
Yesterday’s post still stands: I am gradually renewing myself in a seasonal fashion of sorts, regaining my typical Spring-like attitudes as I begin what is for me a long and gradual process of Spring Cleaning in home and heart. I never realize I’ve been letting myself get quite so cobwebby until I’m nearly mummified. But I usually recollect my senses eventually, as now, and begin removing all of the crust and crumbs and detritus and down-dragging inhibitors I’ve been collecting over the last while. So, out with the old tinfoil (above) that is best recycled when it’s no longer leak-proof. Out with the burned out porch lights and in with the new (hurray for the companies now making those oddball shapes and sorts in LEDs). Out with my overcast persona and back to my native optimism.
This is not to say that all is perfection and clarity in my little corner of the universe, only that it’s once again slanting toward an upward trajectory as it should be. I also find, in these times of slewing back ’round to my intended direction and sweeping out the junk, that as I begin and jump in, I can get a little confused, overwhelmed or just plain distracted by the plethora of perfectly acceptable but sometimes competing directions I can take or the complexity of attempting to sort and stratify the tasks. But rather than turning into an emotional hoarder and becoming either unwilling and unable to do one single part of the heap of projects and therefore unwilling and unable to begin, let alone attempt the whole–or, worse yet, getting so bogged down in the process that I am entombed in my own attempt–I find it’s reasonably helpful to let my mind wander a bit and pick at bits and pieces. A zone of blurry, abstract thinking is quite all right with me at the moment. It’s the pseudo-zen that allows me to blandly go about picking up a stray button or used cup here and there, set them down as I pass their proper places, and along the route-to-nowhere, discover the manageable task that I can tackle for this few minutes of my time, all the while letting my brain meander until it lights on whatever else it deems necessary for the next bit of progress.
Slanted and distorted as the point of view may be for the moment, the calm in this unfocused state allows me to safely unbar the windows that had become clogged with cloudy thinking and blocked by barriers of other kinds . . .
So while it may look to anyone else as though an event of Random Nuclear Catastrophe has taken place in the house, I’m actually accomplishing a lot of tiny deeds that had stacked up both on my lists of incipient doings and in unseen corners that evaded such evaluations. I’m pulling out the one straw here or there that opens a peephole through the big haystack that has been surprisingly stealthy in building up, removing one brick of rubble from the demolition that lets a ray of daylight through. And yes, each peephole or ray reveals yet more loose straws and bricks until I feel like a Big Good Wolf about to knock down the piggish house that’s been unnecessarily but inevitably building up in secret, because all of its weaknesses have been revealed bit by bit, button by cup, task by task. All on a sort of hazy autopilot wherein I can let my mind wander, so seemingly relaxed but as it caroms around in slow-motion also more astute than large amounts of frustrated puzzling.
It may look fairly directionless and mildly crazed in mid-process, but strangely it’s quite calming to me and gives me a greater sense of purpose and direction after all. It all begins to take shape, swirling around as it does and gathering speed, and at some point, coalescing into more sensible plans. But until then, I can go along with the current of this abstract flow and while my mind is relatively free from restrictions in it, maybe come up with some surprising new reasons to be content just living in the moment and letting go of my worries.
The beauty of structure is that it can evolve out of seeming randomness quite naturally--if I let it be so . . .
Art-Colored Glasses 