Nature Theater II

Kintsugi is a Japanese art that shows that broken things are whole, and whole things are broken. When repairing pottery, artists seal the cracks with lacquer laced with precious metal, creating lines of silver and gold in the piece. As the Wikipedia entry puts it, Kintsugi “treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise.”

I find the endings of flowers so rich in form, shape, color, and beauty. They sometimes make the best “headshots” because they have the most expressive faces. As with Kintsugi, these roses from the Kelleher Rose Garden, in the Fens in Boston, MA, show off golden lines inside destruction.

If you want to sing some Leonard Cohen right now, please go ahead.

If these were characters in a play, they would be profoundly alive in their quiet acceptance that loss and beauty exist together. Uncle Vanya in flower form. And that it’s all quite ordinary when we notice it.

Nature Theater I

Taking pictures on walks has become a practice to decompress after work, and to take a breath and experience the world in moments. When I sit down after a walk with coffee and look through the photos, I see my love of theater bubbling up. The images I love best are either what I call “headshots” or “scenes”: close-up pictures of plants that seem to show a character, as actor’s headshots do, or small groups of plants that seem to have a drama going on.

Sometimes I look for what I think of as “flower constellations” when I take a picture. They’re the same practice, I suppose, adding a human element to something that isn’t human, the way people put figures and stories in the night sky. What’s really interesting to me is that it wasn’t originally intentional, so I felt as if I’d seen myself from outside when I realized what I was doing.

Creativity isn’t always planned. One of my writing teachers, of blessed memory, told a story once of being praised for a repetition of imagery in one of his short stories that he no idea he’d done until he got the compliment. I never forgot his combination of creative pleasure, acceptance of the praise, and laughing self-depracation in admitting he had never seen it himself. I learned a lot in the MFA program about Creativity that day!

I’m a little wary about the whole thing because I don’t want to see only what I impose on nature and not the things themselves. I’ve been writing about that lately: it’s where creative practices and Buddhist practices have to negotiate. And I hope illuminate each other, but I know also fail each other sometimes.

So this is the first image, very simple one of a Boston Public Garden tree on a day of turbulent clouds. They seem to reflect each other. That’s either all about the Oneness of Things, or it’s King Lear on the heath, shouting his rage and grief into the storm that reflects them. Or both.

Creative Connections: I and II

I’ve been thinking a lot (I’m always…thinking a lot…it feels like effort, and it’s such a good excuse…) about what I do and don’t enjoy about having a blog. Some of that isn’t resolved, and that’s OK, but I did run into my old nemesis in there– Letting Perfect Be the Enemy of Good Enough. So, take a hike, All or Nothing Thinking. I want to enjoy my life a little more.

Before I get to the fun Connection, though, I want to write about a Serious Connection. One place different types of creative people can connect is on the picket line. I stand in support of the WGA and of SAGAFTRA. Anyone who will speak up about unhinged corporate greed with the clout to be heard, will speak for us all. Creative labor is labor, and creative product has multiple types of value. !!!!!!

The Fun Connection goes along with my Mourning post because it’s another of those moments when things raised their hands from different parts of the room. This was the initial inspiration:

Roxi H, you are fabulous. When I shared this in social media, a friend told me her young adult daughter referred to the c-veg as “sad broccoli.”

So my mind went immediately to poet John Keats. As it does, you know. A sad, pale vegetable is going to lead me to two different stanzas of “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”:

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,

       Alone and palely loitering?

The sedge has withered from the lake,

       And no birds sing.

…

I saw pale kings and princes too,

       Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;

They cried—‘La Belle Dame sans Merci

 Thee hath in thrall!’

It’s a trippy little poem about being seduced by a faery and left abandoned and possessed on the sad shore there where he is. Keats was SO good at the uncanny/gothic/nature/sex thing. Less into stir-fry veggies, but I hope he would forgive the connection. It was fun for me! I honestly think he would have given a Like to Roxi Horror, anyway.

Look, Creativity! (1)

Begin 2023
trying to see
Creativity!

Surrounded by trees, Jamaica Pond in Boston offers a lot of driftwood and branches for the creative builder. Strucrtures like this one have been popping up in area parks pretty regularly since the start of the lockdown in 2020, but this is the first one I've seen in the water. Scale is tough in this shot, but I could just about stand up straight in it were I inclined to wade in January, and I'm about 5'4".

I don't know the creators, but if anyone does, please comment!

Adding my own favorite of the photos that I took today, winterberry at the pond.

Happy New Year!

“More Space” for Poetry Month

Photo by Kristin Vogt on Pexels.com

More Space

Things palpably everywhere seem identical,
so snow is sunlight. And rain
a thousand maple leaves 
seen from underneath.
The appearance of space around,
through, within the fume of fog
or a shining glass sky outlines
the objects it obscures. Nothing
reveals more space than
space taken, when emptiness 
so visibly embodies
there being nowhere to go. 

ADVISE? I perhaps think one or two more concrete images might be wanted. If this brought any images to your mind, will you please comment and share them?  Thank you! (Yes, thanks for asking, it IS a big deal for a recovering perfectionist to post Work in Progress and admit it. I'm pretty pleased with me right now.)

Poetry Month First Course

Let’s have champagne first: Here are some spring Haiku, small poetic bubbles that they are.

A half-circle of melon dawn
disappeared. March snow.


Between small hills, dawn
stays blue. The bare tree is still
its shadow.


Storm wind trickles in somewhere.
The prism fidgets, glints
green-gold.

Burn

There are books I read every few years. Do you have such books? I circle slowly back around to them like the orbit of Neptune because I’ve noticed interesting change between the first and second, and subsequent, readings.

Some books, read again, reflected back a new (older) reader with different responses. That helped me know my mind and sense of language better, as well as opening the vista a good piece of Art is.

Sometimes I return to writing of my own with the changed perspective of time. I understand them differently. Even the way I want specific words to communicate has changed

This poem started with a round burn on my hand got not long after noticing a small, dark rose in falling snow; it bloomed late, into a tight knot of petals, ready to face winter. The poem slid around on those two images, sort of a narrative about my own observations.

Buddhism likes to say…well, Buddha said….the world is burning. Our senses are burning. This simple, complex statement has to do with the nature of the world and our attachments to things. It’s a wake-up call about how easily we make ourselves suffer. It’s also now a new layer of the word “burn” for me, and there it is.

So what happens when I go back to this poem? The actual hand burn once got lifted into something higher through the image of the rose. Now my hand provides the poem with the metaphorical Buddhist burning the real rose can’t escape. Once the burn “bloomed” like the rose, and now the rose is burning. (If I’m not careful, I will justify the false impression that exists in the world that Buddhism is a real downer.)

The poem before was imagining connections, and I feel as if now it’s reporting a real connection I finally paid attention to. I have another “thinky” poem that is struggling to go in exactly the opposite direction and soak its reporting in imagination, to revel in imagined connections. My smile at this knowledge of my own tangled Creativity is both wry and satisfied.

 
 Burn
  
 The stove’s sharp blue heat
 invaded the pot handle
 you grasped without attention.
  
 The burn asserts itself
 like the red fist of a rose
 opened late, defying snowfall.
  
 Take note. The earth insists.
 The undulation of your palm
 has always resembled a drift,
  
 snow crept upon by claws
 of sunset, bloody hue under bare branches.
 There have always been things on fire.
  
 The body burns to say it. So
 your same grasping hand sets
 it down, sears white paper darker.
  
  
   

Hello, October

POND WALK
 

Pond blinks,
red-rimmed
under October
cloud-glare,
as landscape begins
to change. Or that
is just eyes
grown used
to gritty air.
 
But here,
freely, widely 
do the encircling,
while water
shines or clears
of sun-leaves,
ripples, swans’ feet.
 
Pass a wine-stained,
blood-stained,
love-stained vine
winding a tree,
a melancholy,
a potion. Yes
 
and no. Leaves
know only
their going,
not the pacing
of minds. Sit
on a stone
embedded
by water. Pick up
driftwood birch
with its dark
inscriptions, but
look elsewhere.
Hear the greens
crackle behind
you. Pond wind
fans bright,
cold coming fire.
 

Creative Nature: Shape and Color I

Nuances of shape and color when the summer pinks fade are just as beautiful as the variations of  autumn colors arriving. Flow out, flow in. Nature offers changing Creative gifts, and we offer our attention in return.

Photos by Me.

With sincere thanks to the gardeners of Pond Street in Jamaica Plain, MA for the artistry of their abundant gardens and their wish that passersby have pleasure.

Bird and Fish

After a six-day heat wave, any thoughts for an essay-like post are bobbing around my head like semi-cooked pasta. But the poetry is enough of a practice to have things to share.

I think these are two parents and their two fledgling cormorants at Jamaica Pond (Boston), and I’m always thankful to have them in my day. This poem was inspired by a beautiful online-gathering talk “at” the Greater Boston Zen Center.

 

Bird and Fish

for Julie

 

The cormorant intent, curved,

sharp, sewing surfaces:

diving that stitches the city

edges, the open spaces, my faithful

circling of water.

It sometimes arises with

a sliver of fish,

silver arc of gasp that cannot

live, but eaten, still shines

in the wide net of bird.

 

One day one dive,

one sudden reappearance, with

this, long body of a trout, caught

with unrealized skill, but now, what, so wildly

not to be swallowed. A fish unaware

it lived in water, too blinded now,

too bitten, too big not to pull

both of them under again. Cormorant

then bathes and flutters back

to quiet floating. Fish will be fish

below, being one of those

too much to enter

the gate of bird. Cormorant will eat

later, even later stand with wet wings

offered open to the air. Fish may

remember when water was something

that could be left behind, that would

release. But it may not.