the cassandra pages

Fermeture

We still haven't had a lot of frost in the city, but the community garden closes on November 1, and it's a requirement that all the plots be cleaned up before then. The sun was shining, in spite of the cold air, and I was feeling better yesterday afternoon, so I went over to the garden and worked for an hour or two, cutting back and composting all the stalks of perennials, stacking the peony rings, and taking down my trellis fence. The earth was soft and fragrant, and the dried leaves spicy underneath my feet. It did me a world of good.

When I finished my own nettoyage, I locked up the tool shed and took a last walk around the periphery of the garden. While there's a poignancy about this time of year, for sure, I also love the richness of nature coming full circle: tall grasses with lush plumes of seeds; the full-grown stands of perennials bearing their dried seed-heads; deeply-cut thistle-leaves shimmering silver above their chocolate-brown undersides. I had cut off the dried heads of species delphinium, nargilla, and digitalis and turned them upside down, crushing the pods and scattering the seeds; some would sprout in the spring. And there was still growth and bloom: tiny nodding yellow heads of clematis on newly-extended tendrils; a few sweet pea blossoms, paler than they'd been in July; a clump of anemones; some deep pink snapdragons that I cut to bring back to the warm house as a reward for their plucky vigor.

Three of the gardeners wouldn't be coming back next year. Two for unknown reasons, and one because the gardener had died at the end of the summer. She was someone I had known a little, and I walked past her garden and thought of her sweet face and soft voice; she had gone gracefully, when her time had come.

There's a tendency to go too deeply into the finality of autumn, especially for those of us who live in harsh climates -- I certainly do, sometimes -- but yesterday, in the sun, feeling my body recovering, I thought more about the sheltering quality of the earth, the way it enfolds and protects the seeds and roots and bulbs, regardless of the arctic wind whistling overhead. We flower gardeners are an odd lot, connected by our tenacious love of fragile beauty and our wonder at the miracle of each spring, wanting to be active participants in the cycle rather than mere observers. I love how each of the forty gardeners in our particular garden are uniquely themselves, expressing that passion entirely differently. I was glad I'd made some drawings of the garden during the season, and took a few pictures before I left, thinking maybe I'd do one more, trying to capture the beauty of this late October day.

A Day on the Couch

When I came back from my dad's, J. was getting a hard cold. Half my choir has been sick, too. I had a few sniffles but seemed to be avoiding it: I consumed zinc, and echinacea, and was pleased. My nose got stuffier, and one day my limbs ached, but the next day I felt fine; I went to choir rehearsal, and sang on Sunday, my voice seemingly unaffected.

But there had been several restless nights when sleep had come but wouldn't stay. I woke on Monday, turned over, groaned, and went back to sleep until 10:00 am -- unheard-of for me -- and stayed home. A day of total rest, though? No, that would have been too radical. I made carrot soup and an apple crisp; I cleaned and weeded my closet and switched the summer and winter clothes; organized the plants that had been brought in from the terrace before the frost.

Today I woke with my sinuses pounding, but took a hot shower and bundled up and came to work anyway. As the morning went on, my head hurt more and more, and although I made myself eat something, I felt sick to my stomach; the cat and I retreated to the studio couch and I fell asleep. When I woke I felt considerably better, and even hungry, and have stayed put all afternoon, drinking weak tea and eating toast and listening to Manon purr. Upstairs, the pianist played Chopsticks, and then bits of the Moonlight Sonata; his child dragged a heavy object back and forth across the floor. We worked with our far-away client via email; a problematic graphic was resolved. Swathed in an old thermal blanket, I read a poetry manuscript for the third time. The cat lay on my lap, utterly contented; I lifted the end of her tail to her face and she happily groomed while I held it, biting the end with little nips of her sharp teeth.

Fou Friday

Earlier this week, my friend La Duchesse invited me for coffee at Fous Desserts, a tiny patisserie and chocolaterie on rue Laurier, a couple of blocks east of the métro station. For some reason, I'd never gone in, in spite of passing the storefront many times on my way to the métro.

What an omission.

We had coffee, which was excellent, and split two sable cookies - one, a Breton, was simply crunchy, perfectly cooked sugar and butter; the other was more refined: a thin chocolate wafer with some sort of crunchy inclusions, topped with a dark chocolate glaze and a hint of raspberry. But these little delicacies weren't the discovery of the day.

That belongs to the croissants, which have been rated the best in the city. I took home two, and J. and I ate them together. Silently.  Ecstatically. And that was in the evening, half a day after the croissants had been made.

This morning, which was quite cold, we bundled up and rode our bikes along a detour from our usual studio route, in order to stop at Fous Desserts to buy two more freshly-made croissants. After purchasing them we looked around the shop at their other offerings, every one of which looks pretty much to die for.

I stayed to take a few photos while J. rode back to the studio. You'd better hurry, he said, putting the bag into his backpack.

I got there just in time.

 

These really are the best croissants I've ever eaten - in Montreal or Paris or anywhere. I wish I could share them with you -- but I guess you'll just have to come and visit!

In the meantime, if you'd like to see the master bakers of Fous Desserts in action, here's a video (there are more at the website). It's a dangerous place. You've been warned.

Touching Ms. Green Eyes

There's a great deal to be said for real-time living. I missed my husband and my cat a lot while I was away; I'm glad to be back with them. By the same token, I miss my father too and was happy to have a whole week with him, and to have some time there to catch up with family and friends.

The amount of traveling I've been doing, some of it without internet access, has meant less time online. This meant that I checked email when I could, Facebook even less frequently. A lot of the emails were entirely unnecessary and unimportant. When I did log onto FB, I'd have 25 notifications waiting for me, but I noticed that 90% of them were from the same four or five people. When I could, I'd look at Feedly to check blog updates -- something that seemed to matter to me more than the social networking. I have a Twitter list for updates from a "shortlist," mainly people I know pretty well, who post either micropoems or very thoughtful tweets or photographs. Apparently what I'm most interested in is content, not chatter.

An occasional internet "fast" seems like a good thing for me; it clarifies, and holds up a mirror on my own behavior. The reverse is also valuable: noticing how much I enjoy actually being with people in person, and how much deeper those interactions often are. When I think about how much human development has gone into our abilities to read one another's expressions, subtle qualities in the eyes, hand gestures, the inflections of our voices, our choices of how to stand or sit or move in relation to one another, it astounds me that we don't think more often about the vast array of signals we lose in communicating only through computers. Will we, in time, become more and more dis-embodied as a species? If we don't use these abilities, and don't use our senses nearly as much, whether for survivial or enjoyment, surely these highly-evolved characteristics will atrophy, and others, more useful, will be selected for. The natural world is already in desperate trouble;  I dread the time when we have ceased to notice it at all.

And what about inter-species communication? My cat and I can only communicate in person, and the range of our understanding, the way we "read" each other, seems to increase over time. To carry it even further, perhaps I can appreciate a flower or a tree or a landscape by looking at a picture, but it is nothing like the feeling that comes from actually being in nature. I don't want to live most of my life vicariously, but I wonder sometimes if ours is the last generation that will feel this way.

While in central New York, I went for a long walk down an abandoned railroad track to a favorite marsh and pond with a close friend who was also a dear friend of my mother's. Sometimes we talked, sometimes we were quiet: looking, listening to the geese and kingfishers, smelling the warm dry leaves, tasting a wintergreen leaf, touching bark and thorns and berries, feeling the cinders under our feet. We both felt very alive, and yet were also aware that people long dead walked with us on this same path. New memories were also being created, because we had chosen to do something together that was as real as we could, for the time that we had.

As Lorianne points out in her astute post, "The Fear of Missing Out ", people are already missing a great deal about the world that is open to our senses because they are so afraid of missing something on their phones! Travel and waiting in spaces like airports shows you that too: the great inability of most people to enjoy solitude and silence, let alone to find interest and fascination in what's going on around them at a particular moment. I used to love the solitude of long drives. Now, when I stop for a break, I feel that I have to make phone calls or send texts to the people on the opposite ends of the journey because they expect it and because I have a phone that will do this. Yes, it's considerate and loving, but it's also not really necessary; I'm all right, and so are they.

Of course, my world has enlarged enormously because of computers and the internet, and I'm grateful every day for these relationships and this ability to share our lives. I'm especially grateful that I can continue to keep in touch with people like the ones I'm mentioning here when we're not able to see one another. But my online world is not everything, and sometimes I'm glad to be reminded of that.

Flow Experience...and a reworked version.

This is why it's worth it to buy high-quality watercolor paper. This surface was scrubbed and scraped and dried it with a steam iron, and it held up. And now it's time to move on...

As I said to Andrea and Jean in the comments on the previous post, I seem to need to do a realistic version of a subject before I can start exploring more abstractly. But I also just like the act of painting; it's absorbing, challenging, and fun; the hours go by and I hardly notice them.

What do you like to do that's absorbing in that way? I read an article recently called "12 Things Happy People Do Differently" -- a rather annoying title, since we all do some of these things some of the time -- but most of what it said rang true. Engaging often in "Flow Experiences"-- those activities that really absorb us and take us out of ourselves and our small, worried minds --  was one of the twelve points. For me, art, music, cooking, and gardening can all be like that; skiing used to be too; writing is sometimes, but tends to feel more like work. What are yours?

Here's the list from the article. I'd add another one: "Don't try to change other people."

1. Express gratitude.
2. Cultivate optimism.
3. Avoid over-thinking and social comparison.
4. Practice acts of kindness.
5. Nurture social relationships.
6. Develop strategies for coping.
7. Learn to forgive.
8. Increase flow experiences.
9. Savor life's joys.
10. Commit to your goals.
11. Practice spirituality.
12. Take care of your body.

 

 

Mont Saint-Hilaire, revisited

Mont St-Hilaire, Quebec. Watercolor on Arches cold press, 21" x 14."

We went hiking on Mont Saint-Hilaire about a month ago, and I was struck with its iconic shape against the fields of the flat St. Lawrence floodplain. This painting was started before I went away, and finished up during the past two days. I learned quite a bit in the process. It's larger than most of the watercolors I've done lately, and that was good: it helped me splash the color on with big brushes and work more freely. The foreground was especially fun to paint. This scene would also work well as an oil painting, but I enjoyed trying to approach it using watercolor. It's also a good precursor to some of the paintings of fields and hills that I want to do from my trip to central New York.

Here are a couple of details, approximately life-size, and an earlier stage of the painting.

 

 

At the National Cathedral

While in D.C., we went to the Washington National Cathedral on Sunday afternoon. I hadn't been there since singing with my choir from St. Thomas Episcopal Church in Hanover, NH, at the bishop's invitation, on New Hampshire Day at least ten years ago -- and a memorable experience that was!

This time we arrived at about 3:30 p.m., before the 4:00 service of Evensong. And just as happens in the Montreal cathedral where I now sing, the choir of Men and Trebles (boys, in this case) was finishing their rehearsal as we walked up the long aisle of the nave.

While my friends looked around, I went up into the side chapel where the choir members were putting on their white surplices and waiting until it was time to begin the processional. I went up to one friendly-looking fellow and asked some questions about their schedule, and very soon we were deep into a happy conversation about lifelong choir singing, liturgical repertoire, Benjamin Britten, and the differences and similarities between the musical life of our two cathedrals.

Then I saw my friends starting to come up the chancel steps into the choir loft and realized we were going to be able to sit in the stalls: a treat that sometimes happens in big cathedrals. As it turned out, I ended up right next to the choir, facing the conductor, and across from the organ, so I could hear the performance and watch the director almost as if I were singing myself. Some of the young boys had absolutely beautiful, clear voices, and the men were professional and supportive, singing the tenor and bass parts. It was extremely interesting to watch and listen to another top-flight choir in action -- and, if I can be permitted a little bit of self-praise, it made me realize how very good our choir and our director really are.

There was netting above us throughout the space; we learned that this was a precautionary measureto catch any loose mortar, as restoration work proceeds on the damage caused by the magnitude 5.8 earthquake that struck the Washington area on August 23, 2011. The cathedral sustained quite a bit of damage but has been declared structurally sound.

After the service, which filled me with happiness and peace after a very busy weekend (that's what can happen when you aren't performing!) I visited some of the other side chapels, and took some photographs of favorite windows. Aren't they gorgeous?

 

 

All the windows in the cathedral are modern, and they are just as beautiful to me as the stained glass of Chartres or Notre Dame. The cathedral "is a privately-owned and operated non-profit organization that receives no federal or national church funding," and while it is staffed by Episcopal Church clergy and follows Episcopal/Anglican liturgical tradition, it is ecumenical in spirit. They try hard to make everyone feel welcome, and the architecture, carvings, windows, ironwork, art, and gardens -- many of which commemorate history and people from our own times -- are all well worth seeing.

Earlier that same day, in honor of St. Francis of Assisi, there had been a Blessing of the Animals. In this press photo, Rev. Baylor blesses a pet mouse:

The vision statement of the cathedral is this:

The National Cathedral will be a catalyst for spiritual harmony in our nation, renewal in the churches, reconciliation among faiths, and compassion in our world.

Happy Thanksgiving

After returning from Washington and spending one night at home, I spent the last week with my father and his girlfriend, after my father had a hip replacement. He's recovering well but it's a pretty big deal at his age; probably at any age.

Blogging and online activity came to a halt, as I had no access to the internet except at a fast food restaurant at the other end of town, and at the town library, where I couldn't make phone calls. I'm still feeling the inner quietness of a week spent mostly offline: an involuntary fast that I now feel almost reluctant to break. Coming back, although I missed reading your blogs and corresponding by email with a number of people, I realize that a slower pace feels much better to me, and much more supportive of who I am and what I want to do creatively. It's too easy to get speedy and reactive, in this noise- and word-filled space; pretty soon you don't even notice it. I don't want that to happen again.

In that rural, hilly part of New York State, the landscape speaks to me at a great depth, and something within me responds. I feel drawn into silence, wonder, and calmness the same way I was as a child. The air is fresh and filled with the songs and flight of birds; clouds build up and blow across the skies; the crops ripen; the seasons progress. You feel connected to the earth, from the sun on your head to the texture of grass, or glacial gravel, or plowed land under your feet; the smell of the earth fills your nostrils.

When I had a chance, as I did errands or had brief visits with old friends, I took the back roads and looked at the landscape, finding myself remade in the odd, rich compost of memories and current self-awareness. The socio-economic climate in Chenango and Madison County is depressed, though some businesses -- such as Chobani yogurt -- are growing. I was sad at a lot of what I saw, and sad about current politics that have left so many people feeling abandoned, helpless, lost, and despairing. I was stunned by stories I heard about domestic violence and horrific car accidents; I clutched at every bit of good news and opportunity. But nature itself -- so glorious in the late autumn -- still gave its gifts to me. I came home with ideas for new artwork, and gratitude that seems fitting on this day when Canada thanks the earth for its abundance and beauty.

Scaffolds and Bars

National Gallery of Art, facing Pennsylvania Avenue.

 

Washington Monument and guard, across from the White House

 

As close as you can get. (The White House has been closed to visitors by executive order since March, in another fight with the Republicans.)

Emerging into Empire

Arrival. US Airways terminal, National Airport, Washington, D.C.

 

 

Metro tunnel, Dupont Circle, Washington, D.C.

 

Metro Tunnel Entrance/Exit, Dupont Circle

 

Thus in silence in dreams’ projections,
Returning, resuming, I thread my way through the hospitals,
The hurt and wounded I pacify with soothing hand,
I sit by the restless all the dark night, some are so young,
Some suffer so much, I recall the experience sweet and sad.

Walt Whitman, "The Wound Dresser:"