open the door. you don’t know what you might find.
Author Archives: Whatisbeautifulremains
skeletons
Winter is all about tree trunks here – veins reaching out of the earth, gulping life from the sky every instant the pounding heartbeat of xylem and phloem ebbs and flows, with a panic of leaves securing a great, greedy supply for the season’s larder. And all this for what? To stand in wait of resuscitation based not on instinct of muscle, but temperature and time. Summer’s sap green thickets appear one dimensional blurring past the traveling window, but in winter the depths of the groves that spread unattended between fields and ponds and beige vinyl homes, is revealed. Brazenly, they bare their potency in countless webs of twigs and branches and rising arteries, whose power together to move toward what is wanted, what is needed, is of one mind.
a sunny day
Winter has a way of seeming to oversimplify things. Summer’s confusion of greens and roofs and earths is reduced to a few obvious ciphers – white and blue crisply dividing on sunny days, melting together into gray when the light retreats, leaving black trees to point their stark, accusing fingers heaven ward, waiting for an answer that will surely come. But things are not so simple, and not merely because there is life under the surface, burgeoning even as it seems to sleep. Undisguised by the distractions of leaves or the humming heat, sunlight makes the library’s awning glow like heaven, transmutes the red barked shrubs in the median into a ruby tangle which begs you to get out of the car and reach forward towards its center. You know there is nothing here to be grasped or even remembered, yet something, something is revealing itself in the eloquence of light which pours out both cold and warm.
Necessary but Not Sufficient
taken on my phone, anniversary of marv's death
Necessary but not sufficient. I think we all understand the condition this logic describes, especially after a dose of the existential elixir, Vino. Nonetheless, checking my premise with Wikipedia was the bloggerly thing to do, lest I splash out too far in my claims of philosophical insight. By doing so, I can now confirm I have officially reached an age when concepts which are too smart for me, make my vision swim, and send me looking for a knitting book with lots of pictures.
An elegant model to calculate how many leaves are expendable before a tree starves surely exists, yet it seems obvious that nature’s strategy is to cover that deficit and then some…each leaf is necessary, though not sufficient to ensure continued life. I think. As I have learned this year, I am just a little leaf, but I do think the tree needs me. The whispers of all the other leaves, brushing against the wind and bearing much of the storm, sheltering and protecting me, have reassured me again and again that together, we are sufficient and each of us necessary to the other. Amidst kindnesses too many to number, shared so generously by all my family and friends, I join my own modest whisper to yours, and send it out into the mystery…”Thank You.”
Let the Sequins Commence
It happened this way. An 80 pound yellow dog came to live with us, and once he had recovered from his depression (oh yes, they can so be depressed), his waggy tail, bony hard as a whip, signaled the end of Christmas trees decorated with ever-so charming, vintage glass ornaments. As in all things Christmas, I was prepared with a plan B. (Isn’t it nice that Yellow Dog was often known as Mr. B? I love a pun.)
My dear sister had, a few years earlier, made an innocuous seeming request that I supply her with “a few of those beaded ornaments we used to have on the tree. I think Mom might have made them?” Oh Pammy, you are so very innocent. A few. Snort.
I found them, alright, in people’s driveways and basements, in bags at church sales, and received more than a few from indulgent friends who knew that no more expensive gift could, in my eyes, hold a candle to a quarter’s worth of styrofoam and sequins. Having divied the booty up even steven, as twins are wont to do, I sent Pammy her pile and of course, kept right on accumulating floss covered orbs erupting with sequins and ribbons and beads like some sort of Christmas acne. Immoderate in all things priced under $1 and Christmas related, my approach was as always, ‘the More, the Merrier.”
Until Yellow Dog joined our family, however, these bejooled and beribboned spheres had never seen the Twinkly Light of Christmas. Craig wrinkled his nose in skeptical distaste at their crafty kitsch. But, Bumper mattered more, so the Glass from the Past was passed over, in favor of what seemed, even to me, an unpromising substitute. We hauled the boxes into the living room, and with only the lights of the Christmas tree, commenced to decorate.
Does it over state things to say a mesmerized silence descended? That we were humbled? For there, surrounded by pinpoints of light and depths of shadow, the sequins and beads transformed into shining jewels, and the flossy surface glowed like embers. These church bazaar rejects had conjured an unexpected magic. “They look beautiful,” Craig observed, and they truly did.
As it turned out, Bumper wasn’t the least bit interested in the tree. Investigating it would have meant getting up from the couch, and What Was The Point in That? Our glass ornaments were permanently retired that night, never to be hung again. It was our most beautiful Christmas tree ever, restoring enchantment and surprise to a holiday that had, for me, grown threadbare and routine. And it all happened because of you, Yellow Dog. May your days forever be merry, and bright.
Universe, Calling….May I Help You?
I have decided that, having not done so well planning my life, it’s time to let Synchronicity drive, even if it means seeming to be in agreement with Sting about something (visibly shudders with revulsion). If you learn anything in a year where you lose two of the most important people you love, it is that you are not in charge anyway, so what the hell? (I learned nothing this year to change my opinion of Sting.)
So, there I was, Monday morning, in my rocking chair at the cafe, pencilling away (we can’t call it writing) on the question of which of my imagined pathways to world domination to put on the back burner and which to bring to a furious boil. My phone rings. It is Deb, my number 1 muse.
“Deb,” I say, immediately preventing her from getting a word in edgewise, “thank you so much for commenting on the blog and liking my pictures. It makes me feel so good!”
“Well,” says Deb, “I just called to tell you MORE PICTURES on the blog. I want more pictures. More pictures. You should get some beautiful things together today and take pictures of them.”
And so I did. Cha-CHING. (If you ever need to reach the Universe direct, just let me know. I’ll give you Deb’s number.)
Thank Goodness
Thank goodness I found this nest today.
Thank goodness my friend told me to turn my clock back tonight. No, I really didn’t know.
Thank goodness there are 7 years of archived radio episodes of To the Best of Our Knowledge.
Thank goodness my hamburger came with a huge pile of the most delicious bacon I’ve ever eaten.
Thank goodness I bought my camera.
Thank goodness there’s good coffee, every morning, just a flight of stairs away.
Thank goodness I like eggs for dinner.
Thank goodness I am good at finding vintage fabric.
Thank goodness on this chilly night, everyone I love is cozy and warm.
Brevity.
“When you’re my age, all you have is your life.” – Louise Nevelson, age 84.
petal caught in spider web, brenna hopkins, age 46.
any questions?
Mysterious Toad Formations
How did you find your way onto my second story porch, mysterious toad? Were you uncomfortable, squished between the bottom of the plastic pot and the soil, or did you mean to hole up there?
I found you, impersonating a wet kleenex; I poked you, and unlike a wet kleenex, you recoiled. Then you were still as a stone (or a wet kleenex), unblinking. I suspected the worst, but thought it only fair to give you a chance, since it was me who destroyed your little house. The pot went back over your home, this time bottom up, so that if you were just cold, you could escape when you recovered.
Today, you are gone! Bye-bye, mysterious toad!
The Hungry, Hungry Knitapillar
My appetite for knitting is currently ravenous. You can have the Ben & Jerry’s, but I swear I will bite your finger off if you try to take away the seemingly infinite $1 cone of yarn I found at St Vinnie’s a few years ago. Good yarn is expensive, and next to my jar of instant coffee from Trader Joe’s, the several thousand yards on this cone are the biggest bargain in my house. You don’t want this yarn anyway, believe me. It is skinny, skinny yarn, that takes forever to knit up. But when you need to knit a lot, on a budget, there is nothing wrong with yarn that takes a long time to go anywhere.
Recently someone sympathetically suggested that, given the year I have had, research proving knitting and meditation use the same parts of the brain, could explain my need – and it is a need – to knit an hour or more every day. Google reveals lots of variations on this possibility in popular media. Surrounded daily by a boisterous and irreverent cast of knitting characters in the building where I live, I have an alternate theory.
The real volume knitters I know talk while they knit, an activity usually considered incompatible with meditation practice, even Tantric (oh, baby, say my name, say my name). Granted, even for experts, talking and knitting don’t mix when counting long sequences that change unpredictably; but this is virtuoso stuff. The history of knitting includes more socializing and multi-tasking than contemplation and solitude. The more you knit, the less you need to attend to what your hands are doing. Illuminating manuscripts, it ain’t.
For my money, knitting is less like focusing on the breath, and more like chewing gum – basically unproductive, but it feels good. Knitting takes fidgeting and transmutes it into a scarf, the way a hamster wheel could make enough electricity to charge your cell phone if only we had the technology. I knit to knit, and the fact that the needles spit out something I can wear or give away is nearly coincidental. Plenty of knitters might argue, but how else do you explain knitting and re-knitting the same project to correct a mistake only you know is there, when you could just as easily be, you know, napping?
The possibility that knitting is good for people with ADD or even ADHD does ring true to me. Although learning to knit is tedious, once it clicks, you can literally knit forever without frustrating yourself (unless you choose to), or paying much attention. Knitting and talking also provide a rare instance where it is both acceptable and possible to simultaneously ignore and pay attention to the people you are with. This combination of parallel activities is like heaven for the easily distracted – a blissful union where everything can happen all at once, and no one will yell at me.
So, if you want to make me really, really happy for Christmas, you can give me a reason to knit you something and the budget for doing it. But I get to pick the yarn. And the project. Fine. I’ll just stick with my bottomless cone. I hope you like aqua.
what is beautiful remains 