Yesterday was the last day of February. Tomorrow is the first day of 29 Butterflies in 29 days. Today is the Feast of Our Lady of Floribunda. It isn’t on the calendar, because it is a magical timezone that falls between here and there. She loves comments!
The parts all go together somehow, but you can’t always see it. Or, sometimes things fit together better when you do something with them you shouldn’t. The tension is as basic as the song that Bob used to sing on Sesame Street – “One of these things just doesn’t belong.” Often I seem to be the thing that doesn’t belong. Maybe that is why I see things from this point of view. It’s actually better if everything doesn’t quite fit. That is how life really works. Plus, if the clues are too subtle and well hidden, no one will find the treasure, and what is the point of that?
I like to think that we are both seeing the rose from the same angle, you and me. It makes me feel like we are together. I really, really like that.
Your thoughts, Rosy Reader? Tell me, what secrets is the flower whispering?
From the world of a friend whose genius is to make something with nothing.
Why do I keep thinking there is someplace better to go, when I am free as free can be to travel to this country, where paintings bloom in all manner of ways, and no matter what disappointments lurk, something magical always, always happens to me?
PS: It’s not your eyes, the blog looks different. It might look different-er tomorrow! It just depends on how much coffee I drink after 5pm…
With love from your little peony.
I’ve been trying not to write this post for a while, but I just keep writing it, so here it is.
This is quite a lonely time for me, but the problem is not the time I spend alone. Rather, the time I feel alone surrounded by others, is the loneliest. More or less every week, lately, I have come up short in my people skills, disappointing people who let me know with unexpected vehemence, or observing from the periphery as others enjoy a level of easy, casual connection which both stuns and excludes me – connections which I seem to break and ruin by my very effort to participate. I try to be a grown-up about it, but I am only human; I can’t help wondering where my blind spot is or if I have a kick-me sign taped to my back.
These concerns have been my companions as long as I can remember. (The story of me getting expelled from pre-school is true; too unruly even at 3.) It’s strange. I’m a pretty sensitive soul, much concerned with demonstrating kindness and alertness towards the feelings of others; somehow this trait has made me harder to be around rather than the life of the party. Maybe misinterpreted by some, maybe unwelcome by others – certainly I am the last person to ask what accounts for the dynamic. All I know is, just like lady cramps, it is not all in my head.
Even if I could, I don’t think I would “un-be” whatever it is that causes the grief; but I’ve lived a pretty long time without much of a survival strategy for coping with the repercussions. That gift has finally come in to my life through the lens, some thing I can do each day and see a mark, a change, a reality which needed me to be there to occur. I fully accept Steve Pressfield’s stipulation that the fruits of our labor are not ours, that credit for our work goes to the Muse. But I think it is a joint custody; she shares her pleasure at our willingness to open the door, and to listen when she whispers her strange stories and urgent secrets in our ears.
And so being actually alone becomes being present. And being present becomes filled with roses and light for a few minutes before sunset, beside the window in my room, where I can see and know whatever work today was meant for.
There is an abandoned apple orchard on the road into Verona, on the grounds of the old County Home, which was razed last fall. About a dozen trees linger there, covered in gypsy moth tents, each sprinkled with only as many blooms as serves its own inscrutable purposes; apples for apples-sake. The contractor’s mobile office is parked at the edge of the first row, overseeing the construction of someplace newer, cleaner, saner.
Up the crumbling asphalt path, a ways behind the orchard, the bird songs are plentiful and varied. Here is the edge of the prairie preserve; unquestionably the air belongs to them. If you follow this path a little further, you emerge back in civilization, at the driveway of Farm and Fleet, heralded by a distant loudspeaker calling the team roster at the softball park across 4 busy lanes.
Stranded among the bird song, beyond the fruit tree sanctuary, something was growing I had never seen before: a rosebud tree.
Imagine that.
Walking under the branches of this tree today reminded me how seldom I look up at the underneath of things, now that I am all grown up. It was so cozy and wondrous, and soothing, to see the world from below for a while, and have something taller than me taking care of all that tall people stuff.
I felt the need for some shelter today. This is where I found it.
what is beautiful remains 