Oh darling Friday! I love the relief you give me of work well done for the last five days, your red wine and chocolate, your promise of pajamas and fuzzy socks, your 2-hour special on Elvis so lost and broken, your twinkle lights turned on outside, your command to stop thinking about exercise missed or opportunities lost, your promise of a completely unelevating novel waiting on the bedside table, your tantalizing come-hither murmur of all the work I can get done on Saturday or Sunday but not tonight, your time out from duty and must-dos. Sweet Friday, if only there were two of you a week.
Archive for ‘love’
Bridge to the Weekend
January 8th, 2010My Heart Still Looks Like This
November 21st, 2009
On my way to have drinks tonight with a friend whose significant other left her flat, I wondered why our hearts just keep splitting open like green wood even though we’re supposedly dry tinder now. For my own part, even though I have recently had a bone density test, EKG, shingles vaccine, pneumonia shot, flu shot, colonoscopy and long-term care insurance discussions, I am still the same 16 year old girl who lay awake every night with my heart pounding over the possibility of love standing underneath my bedroom window wearing a khaki windbreaker and a scar on the side of his face. And I hope I always will be.
Things I Love
August 25th, 2009
* Sunglasses because when I wear them I feel invisible. It’s not movie-star hiding-in-plain-sight. It’s “If they can’t see my eyes, I’m a camera.” And red because it’s the antidote to my standard black.
* Uncap Hendricks Gin, and there’s a hint of herbs, sun-braised fields, cucumbers and what I think it might smell like to ride through the Polish countryside on a farm cart at dusk in the summer of 1935. In fact, “Encounter” by Czelaw Milosz is a poem in a glass…sad, nostalgic, full of longing for a lost beauty.
* Virgin of Guadalupe candles. I would love to believe, but I just don’t. But the wanting keeps me lighting her candles just in case.
* Hula glasses. I never wanted to go to Hawaii. Thought it was touristy, gimmicky, Don Ho-ish. And it is. But it’s also the smell of flowers that floor you when you get off the plane from the shrink-wrapped mainland. It’s hiking through bamboo forests. It’s the vistas of the Pacific that make your soul sough in and out with the waves. I can’t wait to return someday.
Succulent
August 17th, 2009
* CRUSH: Marlon Brando wearing Levi’s in The Wild Bunch (MasterCard using his image to shill for them, not).
* TASTE: Roasted caramelized cauliflower
* LUSH: the shower after hot yoga
* ESCAPE: Peaks Island, Maine
* EYE CANDY: Lighted globes
* LISTEN: “Wild is the Wind,” by Cat Power (sad and succulent) and “The Eternal Seduction of Eve,” by The Real Tuesday Weld. (sensual and succulent)
* MUSE: Jack Kerouac’s Rules of Spontaneous Prose, cut out of Utne Magazine (I think) years ago and carried about with me every time I’ve moved. Still hanging on my mood board. Online list found via Secret Notebooks, Wild Pages. Print it out, hang it up where your eye will catch it daily.
What Allures Me Now
June 11th, 2009
* The Frozen Thames by Helen Humphreys. The Thames has frozen 40 times in recorded history, and Humphreys has written 40 tiny stories based on events that happened each time the river iced over. It’s poetic history.
* This pin from Lochers.com is so cheeky and deceptive. It looks like something a proud mommy would wear…until you lean in a bit closer.
* The Help by Kathryn Stockett. I gulped it down in one furious read. If you belong to a bookclub, it would be a great choice.
* Spinning. I tried it a few months ago and hated it. Tried it again this week and suddenly got interested. Didn’t fall in love with it, but all of a sudden I loved that my body could do it and that I’m soaking wet and psyched when it’s over. We’ll see if I can keep it up. And going to a class first thing in the morning means exercise is OVER for the day. Hallelujah.
* This ring from Bjorg jewelry. They say they’ll have a U.S. online site soon. I’ll be there!
6 (Un)important Things That Make Me Happy
May 5th, 2009
Tina Tarnoff of Thought Patterns (love her papercuts!) tagged me, and I feel like one of the popular girls at school…even though I’m still not completely sure what being tagged means in blogworld. But the task is to make a list (one of my favorite forms of writing) of 6 (un)important things I love:
1. when dogs smile because I wonder what they’re thinking (“…can’t wait to roll in that dead bird I found behind the house. I’ll pretend to be asleep in the sun til she turns her back and then I’ll make a dash for it before she catches me.”)
2. online coupons from Barnes & Noble…so many more during this recession!
3. Turning the sprinkler on my plants and watching the birds that come to take a shower and dart in and out of the spray.
4. a plethora of pillows on my bed
5. the perfect shape and subtle scent of Crabtree & Evelyn avocado soap– I stockpile it in case they discontinue it.
6. getting home just before a thunderstorm breaks and feeling safe and snug in the midst of the sturm und drang.
The Spirit of the Place
February 13th, 2009
My guardian Buddha has lost his nose as the result of being knocked over by winds or maybe the neighbor’s cat. I like him better this way–as if his spirit had been tested and tried. As if he had ended up in this raggedy, weedy garden bed and was making the best of it. As if he’d been around the block and had a hundred stories he could tell about what he’d seen. This is no pretty boy Buddha but one that has withstood a few freezing nights and too many unbearable southern August noons. A Buddha for someone who has been broke but not broken, someone’s who’s often lonely but not giving up on love, someone who has a hundred stories about what she’s seen.
“the unregarded river of our life”
February 3rd, 2009
But often, in the world’s most crowded streets,
But often, in the din of strife,
There rises an unspeakable desire
After the knowledge of our buried life;
A thirst to spend our fire and restless force
In tracking out our true, original course;
A longing to inquire
Into the mystery of this heart which beats
So wild, so deep in us–to know
Whence our lives come and where they go.
[from The Buried Life]
When I was walking across the drawbridge to the barrier island near my house, I stopped to take a photo of the marsh and Intracoastal Waterway and the scene suddenly made me think of “The Buried Life” by Matthew Arnold. How strange to have words from a Victorian poet time travel into such a setting, but somehow it seemed perfectly fitting, absolutely right. When I first read his poem in an English Lit class years ago, I felt an immediate recognition, as if someone had a key to my heart, and I could feel the tumblers clicking into place. I wasn’t alone in being overcome by some “nameless sadness” when I was with a lover; someone else had wondered if one’s deepest self could ever be fully known, even by those we love the most. It seemed a wholly modern poem, remarkable for its insight into the human psyche, the hidden self we all long to reveal, to share with another. Reading it again recently, it seems as fresh and moving as it did the first time I discovered it. We all have that longing to be known, to be recognized for who we really are, not what we seem–the constant hunger for it can drive us to God, sex or celibacy, work, food or drink, NASCAR, politics or piling up money–the substitutes are endless. Lucky Matthew Arnold, that it drove him to poetry.
Where is Your Green Light?
December 15th, 2008
Gatsby’s green light at the end of the dock conjures up a longing for what was lost, what can never be, fulfillment that is always just out of reach, a longing that doesn’t even have a name. When I was taking an after-work walk in the dark recently, I saw this light at the end of a dock on the creek near my house, and I was unexpectedly suffused with nostalgia for dreams I can’t even remember, with sadness for people who have disappeared from my life, with a yearning for transcendence that is a constant rumbling hunger. I imagine everyone I know is overcome by this now and then, but we never really talk about it to each other. Maybe we allude to it, come at it sideways, but mostly it’s the dailiness of our lives that makes up our conversations. And time passes and we never get around to baring the lonely thoughts that visit in the middle of the night, or the rare, blinding flashes of awareness when we sense in an instant the oneness with everything that lives, or the sensation that ghosts of our past selves live on in places we’ve left behind. I suppose that’s why we’re always searching for a soul mate, our lost half, the one who won’t laugh, but will listen and say, “I know exactly what you mean.”
Little Heavens
September 24th, 2008
One of my favorite books is Wind in the Willows, and even though I’m a nonswimmer who fears water, like Rat and Mole, I love messing about in a little boat. Yesterday after work, a friend and I launched kayaks into a tidal creek that runs behind her house and paddled out to the Intracoastal Waterway as the sun was going down. Being at eye level with the marsh grass, gliding across the silky surface, was meditation on the move. Coming back in against a strong muscular tide with the sunset leaving a neon red trail on the water behind us engaged every part of my body and mind. Almost home, I rested my paddle and rocked gently on the wavelets like a baby Moses adrift among the reeds. For a whole hour, I’d settled into my place in the physical world, surrendered to it, been cradled by it. For a whole hour, I wasn’t just a big giant head thinking my way through the day. When we pulled the kayaks up on the bank, my friend pointed out a small brass plaque fixed to a nearby rock. It was in honor of a longtime resident of the island, placed there by his family after his death. It was engraved with his name and the line, “Because he loved this creek.” I thought how blessed it would be to have your ashes scattered near your home, near all you cherished about being alive, leaving behind a simple, almost secret, love letter to the world.
