Look, Creativity! (2)

That is the side of a building, that I’m sure has a name, at Jamaica Pond in Boston. It’s pavilion-like and used for music, events, and sitting quietly. The art installation, made of moss, is one of a series: an earlier quotation was by, and celebrated the 200th birthday in 2022 of, Frederick Law Olmsted, famed landscape architect. His art was my refuge during the Covid lockdown, as some of us in Boston had the privilege (white, geographical?) of freedom and spirit-sustenance in his parks.

The line above is by Ralph Waldo Emerson, another of our New England Nature bigwigs, another person whose work has mattered in my life. The installation artist is being elusive online, but it may be Heidi Schork and Jerome Jones, who created the earlier one(s). Schork directs the Mayor’s Mural Crew in Boston, and I love my city just a little more because this group exists.

There’s a lot of art coming together in this spot, is what I am saying. The moss itself included.

I’m enjoying the book Olmsted Trees right now. Greenberg’s photos focus on the massive trunks of FLO’s park trees throughout the country. Honestly, if you haven’t seen it, your coffee table has not yet begun to live.

Below is another photo from this first week of the year, another work of Boston artistry in another work-of-art park. It was a foggy, chilly evening, and damp underfoot. Being able both to feel and see the air in that weather opened up a sense of airspace and spaciousness that surprised me in the best way.

Untitled Poem

Working Poetry Month, another work in progress, responses welcome

Untitled

The silence circles its fingertip
on the rim of a glass, and the tone
comes, strung ice-water tight.

The afternoon looks out the window.
An old chair offers the body
ease, and neither speaks.

Senses float, here and there
exclaiming their hunger like gulls
that slice across the view outside.

The willow’s winter straws cross
and twist. How can these knotted strings be
eternal, simple, yellow since

before and after your words? 
How can this tree not
know you, when it flows as you breathe?

Photo by me, Fens Victory Gardens, Boston, MA

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.
 

Sticks and Stones: Sticks, Part II

Finished semester grading blahblahblah had about a week to get read for first fully remote class blahblahblah gig economy juggling blahblahblah

Hello. As much as I have things to say about Stones that have been wanting to burst out of me for weeks, I want to revisit Sticks. The stick building in the park, featured in the first part of Sticks and Stones, continues to grow longer and more complex. It has many more doors and skylights now. Of course, it, um, always had skylights, obviously, but these seem to be intentional. There are wonderful patterns and clever weaving from end to end. I’ve been in it, and it’s fun. Creative fun!

 

Sticks and Stones, Part I: Sticks

For many years I thought I enjoyed and was thankful for Boston’s chain of green spaces, called the Emerald Necklace. I had no real idea what those emotions were. Now those spaces are where I spend the two hours out of 24 that I’m not in my studio apartment. And they have water and woods and birds and turtles and flowers and sky. Yeah.

The parks are Creative acts themselves, mostly by Frederick Law Olmsted, my personal superhero these days. They also contain other people’s Creativity. The Fens, for example, where I took these photos, have small stone buildings by the architect H.H. Richardson, a formal rose garden, a 17th-century Japanese temple bell found by WWII soldiers in a dump and later gifted by Japan to Boston, and the huge community gardens full of veggies, gnomes, goldfish, flowers, trees, pinwheels, etc.

Even in the awfulness of now, the parks folks are clearing brush and keeping things together, as they always do. The Fens has a comfortable, shabby quality: if it were an old stuffed animal, you would call it “well-loved”. It is that, and it is beautiful just as it is, and more so since some recent landscape renovations. It is also carefully tended and refreshed by people whose work I appreciate even more right now. Piles of sticks and branches, especially after storms, bear witness to their work.

Some visitors, and I’ve said Hello to a couple of them at work along the way, are using those piles for this Creativity, a growing structure under one of Olmsted’s great trees. It began as a much smaller hut and has stretched since, with more doorways, longer halls, and extra skylights. I mean, obviously, a lot of skylights! It’s to smile at, crawl into, add to, play with. And the tree that shelters it will soon have its leaves, and those leaves will catch the pinks and yellows of the sunrise, as I feel sure Olmsted knew they eventually would. And we walk on.

Be safe and well. Be kind.