The creative act begins with planting one seed.
There’s a song sparrow that taps at our window every morning at dawn. Our window looks out over a ravine and gives the feeling of being in a tree house. The sparrow stands on the sill with his striped body tap-tapping at his own reflection — a would-be intruder in his territory and threat to his nest. I am struck by his diligence, as for over a month he has been tapping with his stout gray bill, going to all the windows on the north and west side of our house, facing an enemy in each one. I watch from the window as he flies away, wondering if he will reveal the hiding place for his nest, somewhere in the ravine.
Then I wonder how often we humans, with great diligence and sincerity, tap at imaginary dangers, fearing would-be enemies and what could happen next? How can we be ready for what comes, both the bad and the good, if we are tapping at our own reflection? It seems that many of us are still recovering from the isolation of Covid, from the despair of the world. And yet we know that tragedy, danger, and adversity are best met with a mind restored to clarity, to a condition of ease in spite of circumstance, and against all reason, a mind willing to welcome what comes.
Nulato: “The place we are tied together.” —Koyukon Indian
Stitching the books always reminds me of the place we are tied together. Some part of each person is woven into each book, as a part of each of us was woven together. Being in a beautiful place for a week in a workspace without screens was compelling, it deepened the work, and what you see here is testimony to the budding ability and exuberance of this creative collaboration.
“Hone and spread your spirit till you yourself are a sail.” — Annie Dillard
A storm came to our town yesterday, and many of us have no power. It is only the fourth day, and it brings to mind all the people in Ukraine, the winter and war, their many weeks of no power, and our good fortune. I am up early, it is still dark.
….Still, before we lost power, I was thinking about writing to you on the subject of “happiness”.
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.
“After the final no there comes a yes”
After the final no there comes a yes; And on that yes the future world depends.
— Wallace Stevens, Well-Dressed Man With a Beard
I am writing on the winter solstice, the darkest night. I have just awoke to the first snow and below freezing temperatures here in Kentucky. The bird feeder has been blown down with gusts of wind. The whole country is in this storm. It is time to plant seeds inside, to plant prayers for the coming light, for the new year.
It is time to do the thing you are afraid to do. It is time to do the thing I am afraid to do: send my book out to publishers. I am imagining that saying this aloud to you will give me courage.
Writing peels away layers, forms questions, what do I want for my readers? I see what is probably obvious, that all my writing turns toward what Robert Johnson called the numinous “slender threads” — fate, destiny, synchronicity, faith in what cannot be told, faith in the transforming ability to make a bridge between the visible and invisible world with your hands. Give your hands something to devote themselves to. Dream while you are awake. With this devotion and attention, work naturally becomes prayer. Every kind of mending is made possible.
“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.
“Let everything happen to you.” — Rilke
I am back from my month long European adventure. Thank you, and welcome, to all of you who signed up for A Silver Fraction while I was away.
In these weeks across the sea I fell into a wonder-filled world of time, history, collaboration and surprise. I am returning with a sense of renewal, and something more — a kind of recognition that can only happen when you become a stranger. Others see you as if you are new, and the world holds up a different mirror. The reflection I was offered was both familiar and strangely new. The remembrance comes with the blossoming of what has been lying in wait within. It occurs to me now as I write, that the feeling of belonging, this recognition, perhaps only comes after the willingness to be lost, not knowing who I am, being a receiver, a stranger.
I am bursting with creative ideas for the time to come. . .
To see more images click below:
The world is still big.
I was lying on my back in the woods, watching the clouds. After some time the realization, simple as it is, hit me: the world is still big. This moment vanquished my anxiety and returned me to something I know and forget: There is something beneath and above all this noise. The world is not only this cacophony of chaos and disaster and busyness. How many days go by when there is just too much to consider, too much to take care of, too many dishes, too many emails, too much loss? The sky, when pondered long enough, brings back another order of immensity that puts all this too-muchness in perspective. When I stay in stillness, I feel myself a part of something much bigger. This is what can happen when I am working in my sacred space too — the sense of other intelligences, presences; other hands in the work — and the relief, the comfort, that I am not the center of whatever this is.
There is this saying: the path is already laid beneath your feet. I don’t mean pre-determination, or that it doesn’t matter which choices you make, but that the-something-you-came-into-the-world-with is still with you, waiting to open. There is something in you that cannot be taken.
Happy Being Small
This morning I looked out my window at the very small garden, well garden is still an imagined thing — but the new soil has just been added, and the string to determine what is level. I had no idea that this patch of bare dirt and string would be a playground for the baby birds! A fluffy fledgling Carolina wren is turning somersaults in the dust and then hopping up on the string as if it is her very own tightrope. When I sat down I was in a melancholy mood, but after watching this display, it is a very different sort of day.
Later I went to see Frankie York, the owner of New Editions Gallery. I told her stories of talking with other artists about how lucky we are to work with her. The privilege of having someone in charge of our work who cares about both the work and the artist who made it. Someone whose gift is creating the exhibit by transforming the atmosphere in the room until the space itself is also part of the art. Someone who is interested in each person that walks in the door. What Frankie said in response to my admiration was not what I was expecting…. “I think we are all tied together”, she said, “because we are happy being small.” This touched me, that phrase happy being small, and I have been thinking about it ever since.