Nature Theater III

A dear friend of mine once said, “There are two types of people in the world: those who don’t think cars have faces, and the rest of us who just don’t understand them.” So there that is. I know where I belong.

The dramatic scene that instantly came to mind, and this is as weird to me as to you, is the execution of Anne Boleyn in the wonderful series Wolf Hall, based on the late Hilary Mantel’s historical fiction. I know, I said it was weird, but to me this is an emotional crowd scene. Watch an excerpted version of this scene. Then watch it with the sound off: do you see what I mean?

If you don’t, I then refer you to the wise artist and writer Miriam Schulman. “To be an artist is to identify connections in the world and help people see the world in a different way. That’s what art does….learn to embrace your inner weirdo…”

I love the way the scene focuses on just a few consistent faces, all of which express a different experience of the event. And around them, the suggestion of expressions we almost see or can’t see: one featured actor behind them even covers his face with his hands. Nice. In the center of it all, the remarkable faces of Sir Mark Rylance and Claire Foy (Girlfriend’s going to be a Dame. You know it and I know it.)

Also flowers. Just flowers, exactly what they are. Meaning nothing but themselves. I’m not the first writer to feel that succeeding at what Schulman says means pretty much failing at this other important experience of life. No one said “Both things are true” was going to be easy. Excuse me now, I have to go sit meditation. For real.

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.

Look, Creativity! (4)

It takes “cherry pickers” going up and down and a lot of hours. They do a beautiful job for the winter season. During sunset, it’s otherworldy. In the evening twilight and the blue hour, all glow. In the darkness, pretty fierce. Blocks of creativity.

Photo by me.

Look: Creativity (3)

Winter highlights one of the Boston Public Garden’s fabulous trees, within the creativity of landscape designer Frederick Law Olmsted. And I don’t take a bad picture when I concentrate. (Or when I absolutely don’t, but there’s no halfway.)

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!

Because Blizzard

Because when there is a blizzard and you have to style your plants, there is a blizzard and you have to style your plants.

Because when a Buddha postcard, books, and an old panda are creatively involved, they are creatively involved.

The two tomatoes grew from market produce. The snake plant was adopted from family. The palm was left in the building basement. All other plants are the children of two cuttings I happened to get from a volunteer gig in the early 90s. Shells from Peabody’s Beach, Middletown, RI. The goldfish is a wind-up toy.

Creativity can be just to please yourself.

Blogging for a Fuller Life

“Generally speaking, writing doesn’t improve from writers’ indefinitely putting off the moment when they set words to paper. On the contrary, it depends on writers’ being venturesome– like the vast plant and animal world, with its myriad false starts.”

“In my view, no one still up to the task of uttering a brand-new sentence is not also capable of growing more whole daily. May that livening experience– and true gladness for the chance of it, as well– be my reader’s fate.”

My brand-new sentences:

Here I have quoted Lawrence Weinstein from Grammar for a Full Life: How the Ways We Shape a Sentence Can Limit or Enlarge Us, and I will try to let it inspire me daily. Sitting down and doing the work is up to me, but not to the overloaded, stamina-wielding me. Rather, it’s up to a more spacious me who is learning to say No to overload without fruit or meaning.

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.