Copses Speak
The outcome isn’t up to us. Even so, I persist in believing that moving into the moment, and away from managing it, changes everything that is going to happen: I see a left turn that wasn’t there before, a hummingbird arrives out of clear air hovering close to my cheek, a single yellow leaf floats in slow motion down to the ground. It helps to befriend boredom. Patience joins time to eternity, says our Kentucky poet, Wendell Berry.
I try to remember this when I am struggling with a painting, impatient with what I see. Who do I think I am to assume for the canvas what is next? There is even some relief in knowing the outcome is not up to me. The solace is in part due to remembering that there are prompts in the air, always there. As now, when I just stop and listen, my hand is prompted with words that unearth what is holy in every unfinished mess — all the falling piles of paper burdened with words that have lost their way. And I know, or at least my hands know, that when I find the lost words they lead me right back to you.
Pleached Hornbeam
This morning I woke up with a word, well two words I had come across in my reading: pleached hornbeam. Hornbeam struck me because I have a Hornbeam tree growing outside the kitchen window, and it sounds like a tree out of Lord of the Rings. Pleached because I didn’t know what it meant. Some of you gardeners may know that the verb pleach means to braid, to interweave — mostly with vines or branches. It can mean to make or renew by interweaving. Make an arbor, a new way through. After an unusually long time away from home I have returned to the chaos of undone things and the dust and tumble of remaking a 60’s bathroom. I find pleach to be the perfect word…How do I interweave where I have just come from — New Mexico, Chicago, Rhode Island, New York and Colorado — with home here in Kentucky? Pleach can also refer to making a fence. Oh yes, I need to braid the experience of a month long odyssey into a fence, and weave a border around my wandering mind.
As for hornbeam, the reference to horn goes back to the idea of a wind instrument. Now my imagination opens to the obvious — that this tree is an instrument of the wind. It reaches down into the earth and up into the sky, making leaf-branch music, reaching so far into the heavens that another reference to horn is one tip of the crescent moon. This tree music, now touching the moon, calls in the second word beam, as in ray of light. Horn-beam.
Coiner of Names
As far as I can tell, there is no “get out of jail free” card for the maker. There are, perhaps, skills that make imprisonment by self-doubt, stuckness, numbness, lack of imagination and failure less daunting and shorter-lived. For example, as I look forward to the next four months of being at home in my studio, my writing side is dormant, unresponsive and uninteresting. Thoughts of failure and leaving writing all together rise to the surface.
I remind myself that I can change what happens, leap from a negative state of mind, by changing my behavior. I remember my dream from what seems ages ago:
A Tattered Yearning
On this side of the world February is a quiet, introspective time, often accompanied by the yearning for spring. It can be a dark and dreary time, but this is fertile ground for making and creating. Creativity is fed by allowing darkness, boredom, loneliness and uncertainty — allowing these unwelcome things to rise and make something of themselves. I am thinking about how the seeds we plant now, in the earth or in our hearts, are the ones that blossom in spring. The spring needs our seeds.
“Perhaps / The truth depends on a walk around a lake”
Wallace Stevens, the poet (who had a day job at an insurance company), considered a seventeen-and-a-half-mile walk “a good days jaunt.” He walked in town, in the woods, and along highways. It was the walking that mattered. His poems depended on the enlivening of his senses, and the movement and observations that walking cultivated. It was in the early 1900s, when people walked more. And when they walked they did not have phones or earphones, and so were more attentive to their surroundings, noticing smell and sound and sight, even touch and taste. The mind was open to make space for new arrivals in the form of insight, phrases or words.
“Make Your Own Bible”
Make your own Bible, is followed by this suggestion:
“Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
This idea, along with Gerard Manley Hopkins’s idea of “inscape,” (which I will address later) is what is fueling the theme for my 2023 classes.
Pause at the Threshold
I decided to take to heart this idea that the gods want to know that you are serious. What you are reaching for will be supported by your undivided attention and fervor. So I packed a suitcase and some supplies, shut down my email, and found a retreat in easy driving distance….
We aren’t alone. It is a relief when I remember that there are intelligences that are non-human. Other voices are trying to reach us, to teach us, to guide us. Sometimes I need to get away from busyness and my usual routine in order to hear. All of you have had moments when the veil briefly lifts and there is a timeless moment of clear perception. This joy, this moment of belonging to everything … isn’t that what we all reach for? And what human can take credit for this?