On the Waterfront (for Susan)

 

“In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: 

it goes on.” Robert Frost 

It's been a while since I sat down to the keyboard. Funny thing. I have much more time now than I used to. But the minutes and hours and days between pressing work have been unsettling. I now can catch my breath, but have had to completely stop to recover my words.

Retirement is not relaxation. It is a process that is hard work. So much of who we are revolves around what we do. When that stops, it leaves an anxious, vacuous, ghostly quiet, full of questions I could no longer answer easily, and lists from down deeper that needed making. So I've been letting those waves catch up to me; wash over me; push and pull me along as I find my footing. 

I missed the plants. 

I was sure the plants missed me.

I had learned to read time in the 

tips of buds, 

swelling from one day to the next,

in the phases of the moon across the weeks and months,  

in the changes of light and colors across the seasons.

Lucky for me I landed at the water.

"For whatever we lose (like a you or a me), 

it's always our self we find in the sea."

- E.E. Cummings

Slowly I am finding my way back.  It's all here to be rediscovered and reincorporated. Moments are measured by the swell and ebb of the waves, or an unbroken shell on the beach. Hours are metered by the building clouds, lowering sky, that final shaft of sunlight, the cool calm colors of clearing. 

  

The moon is still here waxing and waning across the days and weeks. The sun still calculates the angles and degrees of the seasons.  

The natural world holds me captive, and continually captivated by the details.

The questions are all inside. The answers are there, too. My lifeline has always been my sweet, ocean going fisherman of a husband, who is ecstatic with our relocation.  I have found buoyancy in the smiles of my grandchildren. They, too, help me refocus on the horizon, with changes, small, smaller, and huge.  

 

While I float a bit to find my bearings, I am right where I need to be. Stroke, breathe, stroke. I'm almost there.

“The best way out is always through.”
― Robert Frost

Another Step on the Road to Damascus

Epiphany. Bombshell. Lightening Bolt. Flash. Revelation. Eye-Opener. Whatever you want to call it, I was struck yesterday. I had worked hard, enjoyed a bit of warm winter sun, tired myself out, and thought I would take a few pictures in the last light before I headed inside for the evening. I showered, changed, and headed back to my computer to download the photos. That's where it happened.

Quince Bud

 I looked at my photos and realized that I really don't see anything the way I used to. I've had these flashes before and remember realizing the difference as I learned about love, as I studied plants, as I raised my children. All that has been a cumulative endeavor, and I am aware of it as it gains momentum in my head.

Chaffin- Bluets in gravel

Yesterday was different. When I looked at the photos I had taken, it was as if I were seeing with

Moss Wash

Susan Cofer's eyes as the pictures came out of my camera.
 (http://www.high.org/Art/Exhibitions/Susan-Cofer.aspx)
 

" I've always been fascinated by the tiniest of things......'

Cofer- Levavi Oculos

Chaffin- Foggy Morning

Astonished, I looked again. Then I started thinking about what I had been doing. In some real sense, I had just been cataloging the day, the plants that were "saying" something; just keeping up the record.

Cofer-  Approaching Eternal

Chaffin- pine wood block

 But I was also looking at them in an abstract way, as a part of the natural world, as universal shapes, figures, motions. Now don't get me wrong. I am NOT saying I have discovered the secret to life, the treasure of Pandora's box, or any other such maxim. Nor am I giving any specific definition to anyone else's artwork.


 I have realized in a quick look at a few pictures how art has trained my eye and sharpened my view of the world. Or maybe how  the natural world is more and more now my art.

Cofer- Fall Decomposition

Chaffin-  Camellia  'Sawada's Mahoghany'

It is not quite that simple, of course. And is not a new idea, I know. I have always been captivated by Ansel Adams' dramatic photography of natural wonders, and seduced by the rich, raw, romantic, rhythmic paintings of Georgia O'Keefe .

But I have always held the artwork out as an exercise in mental expansion, without realizing that the vision of the artists would seep into the new open spaces in my mind.

Chaffin- table and benches

Cofer- Untitled Red Driftwood

This prompted me to look thru some Georgia O'Keefe pictures as I was thinking about this coincidence. I found this quote:



"When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it's your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else."
            Georgia O'Keefe

O'Keefe- The White Flower

Chaffin -White Camellia

More than anything else these days, I find that I want to share the wonder of plants with someone else. It is the best gift I can muster

And, as Ansel Adams said 

"My last word is that it all depends on what you visualize"