Found, Day 11

Every year we get a container bulb garden from my parents for Valentine's Day. Every year we watch for signs of life blossoming.  For two weeks we have watched green shoots stretching out, carrying bits of soil with them into the air. And today was the day Middle hollered Pink!!! from the dining room.  Here it is, pink!, just opening up:

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Found, Day 10

If, instead of calling ahead for the pizza the person who picks it up orders it when she gets to the restaurant, and if she brings a book and keeps her phone in her jacket pocket and the kids are not fighting at home about what movie they will watch, she may find a space that is near-sacred. This sequence of events may or may not have something to do with the fact that she hates making phone calls (still), even to pizza places. She may or may not call this planning ahead. 

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Found, Day 9

It is ice-cold today (11°, sky-blue, bare,)

but I have found a patch of sunlight

to cover and warm my legs while I practice.

The heat stays with me when I get up—

while I light a candle

(tangerine and bergamot, mandarin and thyme)

partly just because

partly in honor of the moment,

in honor of being awake,

in honor of the chance to tease out

the meaning of what’s in front of me.

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Found, Day 8

Youngest showed me this patch of chipped paint on her wall. She stares at it every night while falling asleep. It is a bat. In real life she does not have a good relationship with bats. But this one, she tells me, is a comfort, helps her fall asleep.

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Found, Day 7

Mornings these days—I don’t know what to tell you. They’re faulty. Tired, grumpy, too often marked by lingering (or the beginnings of new) sickness. And you can’t tell by looking, but I have three times now deleted a bunch of complaining about recent mornings. Maybe I'll just let you imagine.

Every morning though, we get one of these:

and it's always a little different, and mostly we see, and sometimes we share. 

Sometimes the sun will pick a single ice blossom and take the time to light it up.

It always matters. 

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Found, Day 6

My attempt at found poetry. Except I misread a word, fell in love with the misreading, and could not make a different poem happen.




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Found, Day 5

Tonight, this ("The Beatitudes", Vladimir Martynov.) Kronos Quartet has a version that is equally beautiful. 

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Found, Day 4

Light, playing:

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Found, Day 3

Heard suddenly while walking: the softest rattle of leaves in the wind (oak leaves, clinging to their tree in spite of every kind of wind.) Not what I expected in this bareness of winter. The neighboring tree was an evergreen, whirring. This is the first time I've ever considered, maybe, that different trees might have different voices. I will need to listen more carefully.

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Found, Day 2

(Some mornings, for no reason at all, a glass of water will transform itself into a jewel in your hands.)

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Found, Day 1

The last three years I “gave up” words here for Lent, posting pictures only. This year I want to try something a little different. The pictures were about watching and seeing and I want to continue in that vein, but with more freedom. So this time around I’m reserving the right to use words, pictures, links, whatever. The plan is to keep things simple: I’ll look, and I’ll share what I find.

This has been on the floor of my office for several weeks. It's a reject from a child's Valentine-making project and I don't know how, exactly, it got where it got. Now that it's in my space, though, it feels personal, and I'm leaving it in its found form for now. The fact that the holiday is over doesn't bother me. My Valentine's roses are still on the dining room table. The meaning remains. Happy day to you (love is gorgeous humble, slightly crumpled, not-shiny.)

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What You End Up With

I have next to no expertise with a camera. I am in awe of what people who have skill can do with their cameras, and I’m frequently frustrated by what I can’t do. But I’m also fascinated by what I can capture, even in my ignorance and lack of skill. In the car with Husband a few nights ago, appreciating again the colors of winter in my adopted state, and setting sun, and gentle rolls of fields, I took as many pictures as I could. I liked so much of what I ended up with, even while I didn’t capture exactly what I saw out the passenger seat window. Expectations aside, I ended up with something beautiful. I was still participating in some form of seeing.

That play of expectations and my response and what I end up with in the end—it can make me crazy, but it also makes life something of a holy kaleidoscope. And I like that. A lot.

It struck me a few months ago, while walking an unruly bunch of young violinists back from the bathroom and wondering at the crazy swinging we do every day between off-the-wall-tired and brilliant-short jags of learning: what if one of our primary responsibilities while we wade through this life—this chaos—is to dip our hands into it as it flows past and make something of it? Sometimes it requires great skill to form something (smooth, perfect, compact maybe, or maybe towering and grand.) Sometimes all that is needed is to reach into the torrent and hold up, shining and raw, what I get hold of. Either way I am on a treasure hunt. Either way the best thing next to the find is showing it to you.

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Medley, 2/2/15

1. That run you get after a long long stretch of runs fueled mostly by the belief that you can feel strong again—that run that actually feels strong—is worth waiting for. It is better, probably, than those past runs fueled by strength you hadn’t known you could have. Those were good for their newness and wonder, this run is good for its being hard-won, and an answer to hope you'd almost forgotten about.

2. That book you are reading right now, the one that is moving so very slowly but is also so very beautifully written—you have not failed it. You keep coming back, finding the pace and wondering at it. (And how many things in life, anyway, have slid into magic focus when you just found the right tempo, the right rhythm?)

3. That snow that finally came, that stopped time and dampened sound and draped your whole city in heavy clean beauty—some part of you must have been holding its breath waiting for it. You started breathing differently when it came.

You find yourself taking these things personally—the run, the book, the snow. Not that they are exclusively for you, just the fact that they were there, tucked into the edges and seams of a weekend, to be seen and held close—it would be wrong not to accept them as gifts. You imagine, sometimes (often,) that much of Ordinariness is really wonder upon wonder, waiting only for you to notice, to accept it as a declaration of love. 

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