Winter Rain

Posted on December 10, 2012 by pacienciapaciencia

If You’re Afraid of the Dark, Remember the Night Rainbow

It is a very rainy day today in Northeast Harbor, Maine….we were supposed to get snow but got rain instead. The sky is grey, murky, no sky to be seen, really. The wind is blustery and gets underneath your clothes, no matter how much wool or rain gear you pile onto your self against it. Walking, you feel buffeted around by forces greater than yourself; pushed here, pulled there, by the invisible force that is the wind off the sea.

Apocalyptica is perfect winter rain music….

I just took care of the birds for the morning, talked to the crows and bluejays a while, watched the little chickadees and spied for my woodpeckers, the momma and poppa that I love to see each day, but they seem to be out of town. Maybe they are all cozied up in a nest somewhere? I always feel badly for the birds on days like today: their birdseed must get all mushy by the afternoon. I wonder if they know to come in and grab it while it’s fresh, when it’s raining.

Welcome Home Cowboy Boots

As I sit here, on this old Afghani rug that I have carted with me for so many years, its colors, red, blue, pink, orange, worn and loved ever so much by me and by others who have sat upon it, I stare out my window at the morning: grey light, slightly tinted with blue. The power lines outside my window divide the view into perfect thirds: horizontal black lines across the window. The wind blows, moving them slightly up, then down. The trees, leafless, move in the distance. The houses appear all shades of grey today with no sunlight upon them to distinguish colors in the clapboards that encase their skeletons. The birds are now quiet, there are few cars, only the tick of the clock that hangs on the kitchen wall, and the sound of the wind as it whips around my home.

If I hold you with my emotions,

you’ll become a wished-for companion.

If I hold you with my eyes,

you’ll grow old and die.

So I hold you where we

both mix with the infinite.

– Rumi

Frozen, and Friction-Free

Posted on December 2, 2012 by pacienciapaciencia

“Do you have skates yet?” a voice said over the phone, while I was sitting and polishing silver at my table at the craft fair.

“It’s funny you should ask that, because I was just shopping for skates the other day, and was planning on getting some this week!”, I said, smiling.

“Well. We should get you a pair. I am going to come and get you and then we are going to go skating!”, he said.

I smiled, and said, “yes!”.

I was wearing a green dress with blue and pink striped tights, a beautiful but crazy jewel-toned scarf my friend Seze made me years ago, and the requisite cowboy boots: not your typical ice-skating outfit. In fact, my friends who stood there chatting and eavesdropping on my conversation said,”you are going to go skating in that beautiful dress?” They also said, “it would be perfect! You out there on the ice, with the fabric floating around you as you skate!”

So. I called him back and asked him to go my house and pick up corduroys and a better shirt, and he told me he’d dig through his attic and find something. It is the small battle of two stubborn people, two people used to running their own show, trying to figure out how to do things together….I pull, he pulls, one of us wins. He did, and when I climbed into the truck, he informed me that we had clothes enough for five people and that I had to wear everything, all at once.

Pulling off the side of the road, at the edge of Acadia National Park, near the closest to Bar Harbor entrance to the Carriage Roads, he disappeared into the woods, through the trees to the edge of the beaver pond, frozen two inches thick with ice that been consolidating for the last week or two. A few days ago, we stopped at the same spot, and he grabbed a cordless drill from the floorboards and we went and measured the ice; then, too thin, but yesterday, perfect. I could see him, crouched at the ice’s edge, lacing up his skates as I waited for a moment when no cars came by to take off my green dress, braving the cold air with my almost naked body, naked save my tights and undies and socks, pulling an old striped wool sweater over my head and warm pants over my tights, laughing at myself as the air whipped around my body, blowing my hair all about my head as I adjusted the scarf and zipped up my jacket over my new, skate-friendly outfit.

At the ice’s edge, on a large shelf of bumpy granite, I laced up my new skates, pulling the laces as tight as I could, remembering my days as suburban roller-blade champion. I was instructed to scoot out onto the ice on my butt, and then stand up. So, I did. Not falling, I held his hand and we slowly, slowly, skated out over the ice.

Clear ice, with white bubbles frozen in its surface. Clear ice, with leaves and lily pads suspended beneath my feet. Clear ice, with trees and two beaver dams poking through it. Lightly carving curves into the surface with our skates, marking that we had been there, on that ice.

As I got my bearings, my ice-legs if you will, he let go of my hand and I skated on my own, slowly at first, but then picking up speed as I felt more comfortable, feeling myself fly over the ice, smooth as silk under my skates. I found that if you barely turn your foot, you can spin in delicious circles and not fall. If you bend your knees, you get more power to push forward, and you can lean quite far over without the fear of falling. You can move your legs out or together and control your motion; you can skate over bumpy patches and pretend you are on a bike, cycling over gravel, using the motion of your body to absorb shock and keep going.

We skated to the edge of the pond and I saw flat granite pieces going down into the ice; this place must have been a quarry years ago, before the Park gained the land and absorbed it. The granite, flat as a blade, covered with lichen and mosses, its smoothness broken only by a small fir tree growing at the ice’s edge. I was struck, again, by the beauty of this place and inspired to make more beautiful things based on the beauty that I was witnessing.

We then skated to the opposite edge of the pond, where the darkness of late afternoon had begun to creep through the trees, casting black shadows out onto the smooth surface. There was a half moon of clear, black ice near the water’s edge, and then a cast of ice so different. It was clear that the water had refrozen there, over a bit of time, for under the surface were cross-hatched rectangles of white ice crystals, frozen under and over each other, like a basket woven of ice. Creeping together and out over one small section of the pond, looking like tiny tiles laying on top of each other, turned this way and that, out into the center of the pond. Here and there dotted with trees or grasses poking out, the white cast of ice spread before you like a road to follow, albeit bumpily, with your skates. I came back over and over to skate on that section of the pond, just to appreciate the amazing processes of nature that can happen as temperatures warm and dip at the beginning of winter.

After a while of skating in huge circles and small circles, of watching someone much better at skating than I do cross-overs and figure eights, of remembering that scene in Fantasia when the faeries turn the landscape to winter, of attempting to balance on right foot and then left, of realizing I didn’t know how to stop, he said, “five minutes?”

I said, “seven!” and then he taught me how to stop.

When we were finished, and sitting on that same granite ledge again, taking skates off and putting shoes on, the dusk was imminent and pensive, shrouding the trees and the pond in an almost tangible cloudiness of early winter: looking out at the trees, their colour changed from the pure green of daytime to a rusty, bronze green as the darkness imbued everything. Looking up, the sky was a blanket of silvery grey clouds, deep and close. The trees’ reflection shimmered on the frozen surface of the pond: all you could discern was a shape of a mass of trees, not the individual trees that you can see on a still day in summer. We walked back to the truck as night fell, darkness coming down from the sky to the earth as another day came to an end.

We finished the day by driving along Somes Sound, gazing out at the lights of houses dotting the waters’ edge on the other side, looking at the toothed silhouettes of the two mountains that line the southern edge of the Sound, watching the trees disappear into the blackness of night.

Deep blue mountains, black water, grey sky: winter.

In The Dark

Posted on November 13, 2012 by pacienciapaciencia

“When things fall apart, consider the possibility that life knocked it down on purpose. Not to bully you, or to punish you, but to prompt you to build something that better suits your personality and your purpose. Sometimes things fall apart so better things can fall together.”

-Sandra King

Mid-tide at Clifton Dock, Northeast Harbor

There is a quiet in the air here, a solace of a sort. A feeling in the wind, especially at night, that soothes the soul after another day. The air is close but comforting, cold as it wraps around your face and body as you walk home. The stars, glimmering above, ever slightly changing with each passing day, twinkle down on a bewildered face each night as I stroll.

Seven Moons Passing – Susan Seddon-Boulet

When I first moved here, all three weeks ago, the quiet was an intimidating force. There was a huge part of me who, having spent my whole adult life in cities, was used to the white noise hum of cars passing by, of planes flying over, of doors closing and opening, of people talking and yelling to each other. I was used to the comforting noises of a city: the noises that let you know that the city is humming along to itself, the subway running beneath your feet as buses stop at bus stops, people getting off and on.

The first night I was here I noticed the quiet, and I noticed it even more as each day passed. During the first two weeks that I lived here, I suffered the feelings of loneliness and isolation quite intensely. Not knowing what to do, I took walks and made phone calls, sat in my house and knit shawls and gloves. I sat here, and wrote my thoughts down on digital paper. I looked out the windows at the quiet street, at the glowing windows of neighbors’ houses, and wondered….

Could I do this? Or shall I turn back?

A week ago at night, I left the studio when it had just become dark and walked to my favorite perch: Clifton Dock. I sat on the gang plank and watched tiny snowflakes fall around my face, the first of the year. The tiniest flakes, so soft in air so warm that they melted before they hit the ground, but yet, were there, swirling around my face tilted up toward the sky.

Walking through these quiet streets, especially at night, when I am alone and left to my own devices, has become a source of incredible, almost indescribable joy to me. When I walk up South Shore Road from Clifton Dock and pass all the beautiful, old summer houses that remind me of the houses in “The Great Gatsby” or “Sabrina”, and I look at their darkened windows and wonder where their owners are and what they are doing, I can dance, skip and spin down their road and no one can see me but the birds, the houses, and the trees.

I have never felt this sense of peace before in my life: my sense of self has always been full of many stressful emotions, at least as long as I can remember, anyway. I feel things very deeply, hence the large tattoo of an anatomical heart on my left arm declares to the world that I am one delicate, sensitive soul.

But once the loneliness faded, which it did, sometime last week, the sense of peace swooped in and took over. I spoke with a friend last night who is, hopefully, embarking on the next phase of her life in another, very different part of our country from where we grew from girls into the women we are now, and she made me laugh because she realized that her new town only has one coffee shop. I laughed because my town has no coffee shop, even though sometimes I wish that we did. Sometimes I wish we had a diner here, just a place to have food if you felt like going, a place like The Brick in Northern Exposure. But I digress….

One of my favorite teachers, who taught me my first skills in jewelry making, all those years ago, in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, when I was fresh out of university and freshly married, twenty three years old and knew nothing, told me once that “perfection is a glorious accident”, so this morning, when I read the quote above, I realized, of course, that he was right.

Is this place perfect? No, of course not, but it is so close. Granted, I have no car right now, so that is a challenge. Granted, the winter has not really started and I have no idea what is heading toward me. Granted, I have been here for only three weeks, and your feelings on a place ebb and flow just like the tides that come in and out down at the dock. But…..

Lately, I have been surrounding myself with nature and with art. Without my daily walks, my days feel strangely off, as if something is missing. During these daily walks, I look at things and take photographs. Yesterday, I took this one…

Inspiration comes from the strangest places…..

Last night, I was working on earrings that were inspired by my walk down Sargent Drive the other day: one is inspired by lichen on rocks and the other by grasses growing along granite boulders. Today I will go in and start making some bracelets inspired by the shapes of the pilings in the photograph above. I have my first show in two weeks and am aiming to be ready….it is difficult to look forward and realize that this is what I want to do with my time, all the time, that there is nothing that has made me happier than the process of finding a voice in metals that has come over the last few weeks, in the dark, in the solitary time.

Northeast Harbor Fleet in Autumn

What Trees Teach Us About Belonging And Life

Posted on September 24, 2012 by pacienciapaciencia

Seal Harbor Beach

“For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfill themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.

Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.

A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.

A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.

When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. . . . Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.

A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one’s suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.

So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.”

– Herman Hesse – Trees: Reflections and Poems, 1984

I miss Maine. If any of you out there reading are my neighbors, say hello to the trees, the air, the water, the rocks and the wind. Walk a while for me. Watch the birds and say good morning to the days. I will be home soon.

Photodiary — The American Museum of Natural History

Posted on September 20, 2012 by pacienciapaciencia

There are very few things in life that fill me with greater joy than a visit to a museum in good company. This museum in particular transforms me from a 31 year old woman into a very excitable girl. Walk with me…

Leaves Turning in Fall Sun – Upper East Side of Manhattan

Stone Bridge around 77th Street – Central Park

Tree Roots in Central Park

Fish Guts Treated with Photo-reactive Colours

Scorpion Carapaces

Tiny Spiders in Alcohol

Red Spider in the Spiders Alive! Exhibit

Spiders Alive! was a good exhibit, but didn’t have too much new or exciting information about the creepy crawlies that I didn’t already know, for the most part. However, there were many tanks of the amazing arachnids and many pretty pictures.

Peacock Spider – my favorite

Wolf Spider

Orb Spider

Orange Spider whose name I have forgotten

Ladybird Spider

Diorama of a Chipmunk Nest – don’t you love dioramas?

Hall of Biodiversity

The Hall of Biodiversity is my favorite part of the museum. When I walk into this darkly lit room, I transform into a giddy little girl, so excited to see pressed flowers in frames, fish swimming through the air, acorns on a string, blown glass jellyfish and cast brass bacterium. Nowhere else can you take a turn around one room and walk through the Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus and Species of most creatures on Earth. In my dreams, I would have a house that looks like the Hall of Biodiversity…a seemingly living, breathing account of life on Earth, how it relates and how it has changed.