Gaze into this crystal ball, and the deepest wish of your heart – to be happy and joyful – gathers form and becomes real. It gave me a butterfly blossom. What will reveal your heart’s wish to you?
Tag Archives: therapeutic photography
An Emergence of Butterflies – Butterfly Reader
The rustle of butterflies, the flutter of pages…is there any difference? Words and wings, all captured in the net of memory, wafting great distances of the slightest puff of a breeze.
As you read, does a tiny butterfly rise up, freed from its slumber by your imagination? Or is it your imagination that slumbers, not quite ready to emerge?
If you whisper to the butterfly, something is sure to begin….
Ok, Baby, Sleep Tight
It’s past my bedtime; here is a song from Daddy to help you sleep. I’ll write you more tomorrow!
Down by the station, early in the morning,
See the little pufferbillies standing in a row.
See the station master turn the little handle –
Puff! Puff! Choo! Choo!
Off they go!
A Guitar is a Responsiblity
(This guitarron belonged to a friend; it wasn’t Marv’s.)
The latches snap back, click, click. The lid hinges open, and the bouquet of rosewood, mahogany, steel and silk escapes the velvet lined crypt. There she is, sleeping. Not time for music yet, but there are other sounds: a shrill, clattering twang like no other sound on earth, as old wire strings are removed and new ones replace them; the wooden body percusses dully as it slides around the bed, rests on the knees of black trousers, is handled in any way necessary, like something precious but intimate.
In a few minutes, other latches will snap open, and the smell of lard will fill the air as scrub, scrub, scrub soft bristles buff black leather boots to a perfect shine. But now, it is time to tune the guitar and let the strings know who will be in charge of them tonight. UP the pitch slides, and then DOWN, to just the place where it must be, just as it has almost every night of your life, since before you were 14 and “musician” was already your way through.
Slip the tortoise shell pick, translucent and impervious, between the thumb and index finger. And then suddenly bursts out – so much sound.
Gypsy Eye
Until Marv’s death, I had only ever seen one picture of Raphael and Brunya, his parents – an image of a dapper, elegant Gatsby man seated in tall grass beside his round faced, curly haired lady with deep, expressive eyes. Marv never made any comparisons between Pammy and I, and his family – no sentiments such as “You’ve got your grandmother’s eyes,” and so on. It almost seemed like a superstition with him to avoid discussing what they had been like, as if knowing about them might make some negative quality or powerful flaw contagious. During our last week together, though, Dad found me dressed to go out in my striped corduroy pants and medallion print shirt. “My mother always wore prints together like a gypsy,” he said with amusement and, I think, some pride. “I never knew that,” I said. “Oh, she was a gypsy, a real gypsy at heart!”
Rudyard
Other kids thought the Jungle Book was a Disney movie with goofy songs; I thought it was part of my father’s wardrobe, since for several years of my life, he was rarely seen without one volume or another of Kipling’s fables of animals who behave like humans, or a little bit better. Kipling imbued his monkeys, the Bandar Log, with our callow, smug, self-satisfaction, reflected in their motto: We are great. We are free. We are wonderful. We are the most wonderful people in all the jungle! We all say so, and so it must be true.
Here is an excerpt from the Road Song of the Bandar Log:
Here we sit in a branchy row,
Thinking of beautiful things we know;
Dreaming of deeds that we mean to do,
All complete, in a minute or two–
Something noble and wise and good,
Done by merely wishing we could.
We’ve forgotten, but–never mind,
Brother, thy tail hangs down behind!
Neighborhood Girls
My friend Lois grew up in the thick of Logan Square, one of Marv’s old neighborhoods, and he likely would have known exactly the building where her family had their sheet metal shop and apartment. If he had visited her Madison home, Marv would certainly have recognized the tiny 1920s kitchen of his youth where, amidst original cabinets and lights, Lois serves me tea, selected from the Wall of Tea Tins.
Marv cultivated friends who, like Lois, could find joy in the beauty of cheap (free) things that others overlooked. I can easily imagine his reaction to the variety and number of tea tins crowding shelves clear up to the ceiling. Right away, the distinctive red treasure chest, a battered old Zvetouchny tin, would have caught his attention. “Oh my, oh my…,” he would have chanted, as astonished as if magician had just pulled a gold coin from behind his very own ear, perhaps punctuating this phrase with a little chuckle. “That’s an old one, a really old one.”
We would have had tea, playing Guess That Corner, as displaced Chicagoans are wont to do, and maybe he would have told Lois why Zvetouchny (“The Aristocrat of Teas”) was so special to him, a story which, sadly, I do not know. In the quiet kitchen, surrounded by nothing more than a breeze through the open windows, and neighborhood friendship, Marv would have feasted on two pleasures he prized above almost anything else – laughter, and plenty of hot, black tea.
No Gods, No Masters
As far as I know, Marv did not believe in God. He had little tolerance for any form of psychic comfort that involved what he considered to be self-delusion, setting a curiously high standard for a man who led a double life until his 60’s. (It seems pretty common for us human beings to cherish beliefs that reveal our blind spots and shadows, and Marv was no exception.)
But he did believe in Pooh, and in the urgency of being in this life, as it is now. And if I have ever shown any courage, it has come out of trusting that in this belief, he really did know what he was talking about.
Glyph
As touching as it is to see Marv’s picture, it is his handwriting which goes straight to my heart. He commented occasionally that he meant to try writing in script again; and once or twice mentioned that he printed everything because he felt his script writing was very poor. Though a few other mementos equal it, nothing I own is more precious to me than this note, which he sent with a housewarming gift for my first days alone again, as a gallant woman.
87 Years Ago
While this picture may seem to be about a bowl of watermelon, it was actually an excuse to record Marv’s hands, and to remember the times I wondered why they were so much larger than mine, the times I watched mesmerized as they whisked a flaming torch over metal, turning it into liquid, or flew effortlessly along the guitar, turning it into music. I want to remember, too, how small he was, 87 years ago tonight, maybe feeling hungry for the first time in his life, and to wonder at how tiny his hands were then.
what is beautiful remains 