things that I love

words:

• vetiver
• velvet
• clarinet

experiences:

• feeling rain hit the top of my hat and feeling safely enclosed
• having my head scratched
• the feeling of cashmere against soft bare skin
• smooth-shaven legs on crisp sheets 

things:

• color, line, shape, and texture
• bright, rich, almost-matte lipstick
• flowers and trees
• poetry
• music
• perfume

kinds of people:

• old women who wear dramatic clothing
• people with deep-burning fire in them

Meditations on some poems by Mary Oliver

I want to tattoo poetry down my arms and on each side of every finger. Backward and frontward on my forehead so I can read it in the mirror and others can read it on my face. I want to carve the words in pain and joy along every visible part of me so I won't forget, won't be able to forget, will be forced to remember.

For how long will you continue to listen to those dark shouters,
caution and prudence?
Fall in! Fall in!

How can I keep from forgetting the words, the phrases, the entire whole poems that pluck some string of my soul and make it sing, make it vibrate the whole length of me, make me quiver with hope and anticipation, make me know that I am, in spite of myself, alive?

Let me
    keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work,

which is mostly standing still and learning to be
    astonished.

How can I learn to remember to turn my attention at every moment to what it is that matters, to attend to life and the living of it? How can I turn the face of my heart away from the petty dim loves to which fear clings and toward the abundant brilliance that will shatter these poor eyes and melt this brittle shell I've built to enclose the weak but living root of me?

Which is mostly rejoicing, since all the ingredients are here,

which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart
    and these body-clothes,
a mouth with which to give shouts of joy

How to remember to let myself break apart, a little more each moment, until I am transformed, until I am made wholly new?

Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?

miracles

Every loaf of bread I have ever made looks to me like an absolute, not even kidding miracle. I am delighted after each rise. Pleased and still a little apprehensive when shaping the loaves. Hopeful and eager as they bake. And then, steaming and cooling on a rack on my table, I can't help but grin. Bread. There is bread and I have made it. Every loaf produces all these feelings. Every burnished loaf is like tangible, edible hope: I will eat; I can do difficult things; I can make things that are beautiful; I have not lost my capacity for delight.

Every completed loaf produces a set of feelings very like those that well up every time I listen to the opening bit of the first movement of Mozart's 7th symphony: Both can pull joy from deep within me even when I am convinced that the world and everything in it is irredeemably terrible.

amazing grace

I got lost once when I was very small. There was an Easter egg hunt in a large field near a wooded area (so far as I can recall or picture). My memories are not strong but I do remember the stories that were told to me about what happened.

I was confident, happy, and friendly in my earliest years. I made friends easily. At this Easter egg hunt, I decided to move toward the underexplored areas, away from where everyone was crowded and searching. I am sure I reasoned I would have the best chances at finding the eggs everyone else was missing. So I wandered farther and farther away from the designated hunt area. My absence was noted and then no one was searching for eggs any longer; they all were searching for me.

Finding me must have caused some irritation. There was no wailing small blond girl sitting on some tree stump, grateful to have been found. No pitiable wounded or scared child holding her arms out for rescue. Instead, there I was, pleased and happy, walking back in the direction of the hunting grounds, hand in hand with some nice stranger. I had no idea I'd done anything wrong. I'd had no idea of the danger: the trees, the train tracks I'd crossed, the stranger I met did not appear as threats or sources of worry to me.

I didn't know I'd been lost so it never occurred to me to be frightened.

shot through with crazing but will I crack?

There is a story that makes me cry, hard, every time I read it. "The 24-Hour Dog" by Jeanette Winterson. (You can find it here if you like.) The story is the same every time I read it. The words never shift or change. I know exactly what will happen even before I pull the book from the shelf: A person (I imagine the narrator as a woman but there is no need to do so) adopts a dog. She prepares her home for the arrival of the dog. When the call comes, she retrieves the puppy. There is evening, and there is morning, which are the first day and also the last day. The next evening, the narrator returns the puppy to the farmer. That is the entirety of the plot.

The narrator tells us over and over that the dog will find her out; that the dog has found her out. That everything she fiercely loves about this brand new puppy would be everything she fears about everything; all that love and vulnerability, clashing and uniting would expose her every tender spot and stream from every pin hole in her person:

I was looking into the future, thinking about what I would have to be to the dog in return for what he would be to me. It would have been much easier if he had been an easier dog, I mean, less intelligent, less sensitive, less brimful of that jouissance which should not be harmed.

At the end she says that "though I have given him away, I can't lose him, and he can't die. There he is, forever part of the pattern, the dance, and running beside me, joyful." These are the last words of the story, and they seem to be meant as a kind of consolation. She insists that she retains at least something of the dance, at least a dim shadow of the joy, at least a ghost of the pattern. But earlier she was more honest:

I knew I was moving through something that had substance. Something serious. Here was the dog, me, the sun, the sky, in a pattern, in a dance, and time was dancing with us, in the motes of light. The day was in the form of us and we were in the form of the day. Time would return it, as memory and as futurity; part of the pattern, the dance that I had refused.

Whatever dance she is dancing, it is not this dance, not this dance she refused. Yes, I know she is invoking Eliot's Four Quartets; yes, she can counter me with "that which is only living can only die" and the perfect memory of that perfect day with that perfect dog will never die until she does. There will be no physical death for a metaphysical dog. But how much reality has she relinquished in order to keep her heart intact and to preserve the fiction of impenetrable wholeness? 

drowning in sensuousness

I've just ordered a new perfume. It is called "Noble" and it is to smell of jasmine, vetiver, and incense. I am sighing and swooning just at the thought of it. If it smells half as good as it sounds, I may find myself overcome with delight.

I've just acquired a new book, and, though I haven't yet inhaled the new-paper scent of its pages or run my fingers along the crisp smoothness of its cover; and though, from my position on the couch, even the muted, beach-light colors of that cover are invisible to me, I am already enjoying the physical delight of the book that awaits me as a reward for writing (at least) one paragraph of my current chapter.

Earlier today, on my way to pick up some coffee beans of my own, I passed by a man carrying a cup of black coffee and the smell of it nearly arrested me. Had ever any coffee smelled so heavenly? It hardly seems possible. That I will again one day smell coffee as or more delicious is an assurance of breathtaking beauty.

The tulips and the daffodils strained today against the cool gray sky and the biting air and it seemed that no one, anywhere or ever, had ever been so vibrantly alive.

things that annoy me unreasonably

Words:

• sheeple
• armpit

Usage:

• needless invocation/incorrect use of "politically correct" 
• "of the female persuasion" and its ilk
• "being as"; "being that"
• "taunt" when "taut" is meant
• "pour over" when "pore over" is meant

Experiences:

• when the shower curtain billows in and clings to wet skin
• feeling rain on top of my head 
• fingers rubbing hard together, as when one attempts to snap one's fingers
• when someone else squeezes the bones of my fingers and rubs them as above
• the sound of a clock ticking in the night
• pulling off rubber gloves that are just a smidge too tight
• evidence of ungenerous reading
• while washing dishes: when the utensils fall to the left instead of to the right

Items:

• flip flops worn in public
• toes, generally

the truth comes out

I am not, strictly speaking, a striped spinster: I tend strongly to avoid patterned clothing. I prefer simple lines and solid colors. I love neutrals best, but there are a few rich and bright colors mixed in.

Whence the title, then? Last year I got to visit the "Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity" exhibit when it came to the Art Institute of Chicago. The whole thing was glorious, but I was particularly tickled by Jean-Frédéric Bazille's Family Reunion.

Note the woman in the background, sitting erect on that low wall, wearing the very striped dress and dark apron. Note, especially, if you can, the look on her face. So bold! So unconcerned with appearing pleasant! So challenging! I adored her immediately and promised then that, should I start a new blog, I would call it the stripéd spinster (I like it as a four-syllable name).

things for which I am waiting

- for lilacs and lilies of the valley to bloom
- for the CSO performance of Shostakovich's "Leningrad" Symphony
- for the farmers' markets to open
- for dental insurance
- for rhubarb
- for patience
- for myself

a joy attack

My physical immune system is, I have to say, fairly magnificent. I rarely fall sick. Others around me suffer from colds, flu, allergies, and from still worse ailments. I enjoy excellent health nearly all of the time. Indeed, my health is so constant, I tend to behave as though it were a moral achievement of mine.

Emotionally, things are quite different. Though I try for constancy there, too, I do fall prey to bouts of despondency and apathy. While the emotional malady is acute, I try to treat myself gently, as one who were really a little unwell. Much more difficult to endure, however, are the attacks of cheerfulness. Sometimes I feel so pleased, so cheerful, so enticed by the possibilities of living, that I feel I simply cannot bear it. As soon as the warning signs appear, worry creeps in among the overwhelming sense of delight: What is wrong with me? Something terrible is about to happen! It's no good to Pollyanna one's way through life--life is a vale of tears, and nothing good comes from forgetting it!

I currently suffering an attack of joy. All the signs are there: cheerfulness, anticipatory delight, a bounce in my step, an impulse to behave with generous kindness toward others. This could be serious. I am trying a new treatment. As I have not yet died of any experience of emotional intensity, and as my habitual responses have not cured me of them, I am going to experiment with enduring them until I become inured to them. Instead of medicating myself with doses of distracting media, excessive napping, preemptive shopping, or with quantities of wine or tea, I will inoculate myself with joy.

lessons from the household

Perhaps it all started when I decided to let my plant live. Poor straggler. My grammy gave it to my mother to give to me quite a few years ago. She'd heard that I had just lost my oldest spider plant to the bulimic snacking tendencies of my cat and offered up the plant in question as a hardy thing that should be nearly impossible to kill. She was right. It has been neglected and snacked on and it still has not died.

About a month ago, I came very close to tossing it in the dumpster out back. The plant was too far gone, I decided. It will never be healthy again; too much of it has died. I don't even know how to care for it properly--should it get more sun? Should I have it on a shelf so the running shoots can spread? Does it need a bigger pot? I am no gardener, and I don't know much about plants.

It felt wrong, though, to throw away a not-yet dead plant given to me by my late and loved grandmother. So I watered it, just to see. And green leaves showed up just a day or two later. Every few days I gave it a little bit of water and more leaves kept coming.

Just today I finally cleared away as much of the dead material as I could. It was a lot. And the plant is so strangely shaped now. And weak. And fragile. I'll have to find new ways of keeping the cat away from it. Soon I'll have to talk to someone who understands plants and who can walk me through the process of re-potting it. It needs more soil. Possibly a larger pot. But new leaves are still growing, and I may be able to hope for a healthy plant by summer.