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Ah yes, to be reminded life is indeed beautiful... I shall try...

I was at the nursing home where my father lives the other day. A warm sun was cheering up the cool November yard and there was a couple out on the patio. I am deducing they were a couple, though they were far enough away I suppose the woman might have been the man's daughter... In any case, there they sat in the sun. Both wore sunglasses and the man in the wheelchair was tucked in with a cozy blanket, and there they sat, faces tipped up to the surprising warmth, wordlessly holding hands. It was a beautiful thing to witness, their affection and their mutual enjoyment of the sun, despite physical limitations.

Pitter patter

I sit here in a family room on a cozy summer evening listening to the rain and I marvel at the magic of its sounds. The hollow tick tick on our chimney top; the pitter patter on the open window; the strangely comforting white noise of steady rain on the trees. Not to mention the wonderfully full dripdrop sound on the patio stones. Our room is quiet as my family members are lost in various books, all but for this wonderful patter of rain. And then along with the various sounds is the equally comforting knowledge of being warm and dry, and not needing to head out into the wetness any more today.

One of my favourite rain noises is on the canvas of a tent. That's the best.

Clouds

Is there such a thing as a poetic meteorologist?  If so, I'd like to meet her or him.  I'd love to make the acquaintance of someone who has a treasure trove of knowledge about the forecasting properties of clouds but can still revere their beauty.  Because clouds are amazing.  Their variety of shapes, forms, colours, location and all the rest is just enormous.  And beautiful!  What kid hasn't lain on her back on a hill turning small cumulus into pictures?  Who has not been awed by the interweaving of a cirrus into a magnificent summer sunset?  Or had serious concern for pitch-black mountains of clouds moving rapidly toward them?

Clouds are something you can go outside and just stare at almost anytime.  They are in the background for us most of the time, and therefore we ignore them, and yet they are an ever-changing book of images, a natural symbol of the truth that the only constant is change.  Beauty in the invisible.

Fire

To observe the importance of fire is to state the obvious. For unknown millenia it has been crucial to humankind as a giver of heat and light, providing a means to cook and survive, and all the well-documented rest of it. But this blog is about beauty in the commonplace, and fire is magnificent. You can take an average room or place, an average situation, add a fire in a fireplace or bonfire pit and suddenly the atmosphere changes entirely. There is a new warmth that has nothing to do with temperature, a new focal point. If the room is dark enough, the fire outlines the people around with brushstrokes of gold and red and flickers interestingly on changing facial expressions. There is a sudden unity when there is a fire, whether due to the common activity of marshmallow roasting or simply to this central presence. Fire renders the chilly bearable, the ugly mysteriously beautiful, and the commonplace magical.

The power of scent

I am always astonished by how strong the memories are that accompany certain scents.  When I was very young (we're talking very young!) my mother wore Tweed perfume whenever she went out somewhere, and to this day if I stumble upon that fragrance I can feel her bending over my bed to kiss me goodnight.  Love's Baby Soft puts me back into my early teens with jeans and shirts and does-he-like -me concerns.  Upon smelling a combination of sizzling bacon and cool air, I am in our summer holiday tent trailer with a cold nose, burying myself deeper into my cozy sleeping bag and listening to my dad cooking breakfast out at the picnic table.  The mix of diesel fumes and early spring air instantly transports me to France -- happy trip! -- to the times I accompanied students on an exchange and we spent a lot of time around buses.  (Kinda neat that a basically negative smell could have such positive connotations for me!)  The list goes on and on.  What strikes me is the force with which the memory returns; I am there, reliving that moment viscerally.

I wonder why scent has such a strong association for us -- we, who are usually such visual creatures. 

Bird brains

I spent probably forty years of my life able to complete ignore the existence of birds.  I mean, hey, we briefly had a canary when I was 7, and in Grade 3 they made me learn what birds don't migrate south, but aside from that they were one of those things in the background to which I paid absolutely no attention.

So why is it that in the last few years I notice them all the time?  New attention to bird calls I can understand:  now that we have a cottage, that is the one and only thing I can hear outside my bedroom window on a summer morning, and it's a fabulous way to wake up.  Plus how can you not stop to savour an evening loon call?  But even visually they newly occupy my interest.  I like watching what games they're up to when I take the dog for a walk; I get a kick out of the mourning dove that watches us from the fence outside our kitchen window.  (Why is there only one?  Has she/he lost its mate?  Will it find another, or is it doomed to mourning-dove loneliness??)  The hawks soaring by the escarpment make me yearn to fly -- er, soar.

Today's fun bird-watching was a lowly robin who, in not such a lowly fashion, was preparing a nest.  The little creature decided it wanted some of the long grass by our chainlink fence to go with the dried grasses already in its beak so it went over to get some.  Peck, peck, peck...it must have gone on for two minutes.  I couldn't help but wonder how it got new grass without losing what it already had!  And so it gathered until something made it decide it had enough, and up it flew to the top of the cedar tree and proceeded, I assume, to add the new bits to a nest.  Tis the time of year of new life, I guess.  I'll have to keep an eye on that tree to see if I can see the new building development.

At a funeral

Two days ago I drove out of town to attend the funeral of the mother of a very good friend of mine.  She was 84 and had had a stroke so it wasn't the tragic death of a young person, but she was a much beloved mother and long-time member of her community, so I was anticipating an extremely sorrowful event.  I took a deep breath to prepare myself as I entered the funeral home and joined the line of those last-minute mourners who wished to have a word with the family before the funeral.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered the atmosphere to be not subdued at all, but rather buzzing with chat and news.  I wouldn't go so far as to say it was cheerful but it wasn't melancholy at all.  I was intrigued and, incorrigible people watcher that I am, I had to listen and watch to figure out why this would be so.  It didn't take long to figure out that the reason the atmosphere was non-funereal was because these were members of a Community re-uniting, re-discovering each other and exchanging tidbits.  I use the capital "C" purposefully because the sense of community in that place was palpable.  Obviously we were all drawn together for a common reason and through common acquaintance, but it was more than that.  Most of these people knew each other through one venue or another in this small town, and the unexpectedness I felt was that bonding and communicating.  

I have to say that it was quite a lovely thing.  I also felt really good knowing that my friend and her family are going to have lots of support as they go through the grieving process.

Nesting birds

On my way to and from work, I pass a couple of small artificial islands off a bridge.  The trees on these islands are virtually leafless, presumably because of highway salt and pollution.  This doesn't, however, stop hundreds of birds from adopting these islands as home.  The tree branches are always chock full of birds and the land underneath is white from droppings.

Today as I went by I saw that it's nesting season.  Scattered throughout these dead branches are dozens of large, messy puffballs of nests, and perched on each one of these disordered creations sits one bird.  I wish I could render the image better because it's absolutely Seuss-like, trees and trees of dozens of fuzzy nests with a bird on top.  Got a good smile out of it.

Magnolias

I love to have my breath taken away and something that does that, in springtime, is magnolias.  What a wonderful tree!  Discreetly preparing its blossoms, teasing us with glimpses of pink and white -- and then it breaks into splendid bloom with its enormous yet delicate flowers completely overwhelming the landscape.  And then, far too soon, it's all over, and the tree pulls in its beauty for another year.  I cannot pass a magnolia tree without slowing down or stopping to wonder at it.  So incredibly lovely, and yet so ephemeral.

Dreams

A quickie.  (Can it really be that I've gone 8 days without finding something beautiful??  Attribute that perhaps to being sick.)

Ever have a dream that not only stays with you, it takes on an importance in your groggy first-woken mind that tells you it's significant?  In that fuzzy neverland where we know more than we think we do, we see a truth that we were either unaware of or ignoring.  I had one of those last night (and no, I don't plan to bare it).  Whether the significance I give to it is real or in my imagination, the very fact that I give it that significance means that the situation is important to me.  Which is all that counts, after all.

Gotta love it when your mind finds a roundabout way to tell you something you think you might not want to hear.

Spring

Is there, honestly, anything greater in this universe than an early spring day?  Warm, life-giving sun, fresh aromatic air, signs of new life popping up everywhere...including in people's step!  Everyone's outside, everyone's cheerful...  My question is serious.  If there is anything better out there, I would like to know what it is!

Living in the present

My father is 90 years old and has been living in a nursing home for a year.  He has a number of the issues that the elderly have, brittle bones, hesitant mobility and especially increasingly bad short-term memory.  He can tell you about toboganning on the farm when he was a kid, or what it was like to work in Vanuatu just after retirement, but he may need to ask me the same question three or four times during our visits.  It's also difficult for him to process information which is either complex or spoken quickly.

As you'd expect, this can make finding topics for my regular visits difficult.  I know he'd be interested in my kids' activities, for instance, but telling the story requires an attentiveness and complexity he can't muster any more.  Our conversations are summaries, delivered in easily digested sentences.  For a while I was finding it a real labour.

Until I hit on the magic trick for communicating with someone with memory problems:  stay in the actual present moment.  I can't regale him with tales of our recent weekend, but we can talk about the cloud formations in the sky; he can tell me about the numbers of planes that are visible from his large window and he loves to speculate how far up they might be (he was in the air force in World War Two.)  We walk in the garden when it's nice and look at the progress of growth of the many different plants; I can ask him some of their names and many times he can tell me:  gardening was one of his passions when he was more able.  Thus it is that our conversations, far from being a laborious task, have become a sort of mini-holiday for me.  I am preoccupied with nothing other than the details of the present moment, and communicating with my beloved dad.  I am so happy to have made this discovery.  Our times together now -- especially when it's nice out! -- remind me of some of the close conversations of our past.

If only I could be there to look at the stars with him like I did when I was a little girl.

Wrong weather

Snow is forecast, warned my husband.  I pooh-poohed the very idea:  it's a week into April, after all!  If it does snow, I blithely supposed, it will only be raindrops temporarily converted which will turn back into nothing but water once they hit the ground.

So imagine my disgruntlement when I awoke this morning to a world of white, yet again.  Not just lawns, but sidewalks, streets, rooftops...  I could hear the collective groan of consternation and disgust throughout the whole region as we all dragged back out the scarves, the hats, the boots and winter coats we had happily consigned to back basement shelves.

But.  Yes, but.  As I walked to my workplace I couldn't help but wonder at the delicate white tracings on the sides of trees, at the gently falling snow muting the morning's street noise ... and I had to admit grudgingly, yes, snow is enchanting.  Even in April. 

Colour in rain

Have you ever noticed how rainy days are so heavily grey that any other colour cries for attention?  Things that normally look quite banal become remarkable because their brightness pokes through the greyness.  The magenta ball neglected in someone's front yard.  The blue headscarf on a pedestrian.  The brilliant red umbrella.  The blue and yellow goalposts reaching into the sky at the local high school.  The bright yellow car streaming by.  The blazing red taillights.  If you get into the right mindset, the objects take on an almost surreal importance simply by the fact that they stand out in the grey -- rather like Spielberg's little girl in the red coat in "Schindler's List".  Very neat.

Old Music

I don't care what anyone says, you can't beat some of the old, mindless rock and roll for sheer energy.  (I call it housecleaning music -- or now, rowing music, downloaded to my MP3.)  My husband's reaction when I came home with my "Best of the Beach Boys" CD was "Oh, God!".  But sorry, you just can't beat bein' a middle-aged broad shooting down the highway with "Surfin USA" blaring on the CD player!!  Gotta love it!

Artistic Endeavours Part II

And then there's music, one of the world's greatest places to get lost.  I love to listen to music that speaks to me where I am at the moment, but my biggest pleasure comes from playing or singing.  Give me a good piano, some good-n-poundy Beethoven and some finger-twinkling sonatas, and an empty house, and I will work out any stress or anxiety that has weighed down my heart for weeks past.  My mother even warned my husband, as we were getting married, that he'd want to be sure we always had a piano in the house!  

I love getting lost in it.  I love sweating out a passage I knew twenty years ago but which is now rusty, until it's better.  I love pounding the heck out of the instrument to make myself feel better.  I love to sit down at the piano and just play whatever's in my heart, made up on the spot and completely irreplicable (hang on, is that a word? unable to replicate... If it isn't, it should be).  Especially that.  It astounds me to hear the sounds, the melodies that my heart is carrying come leaking out through my fingers; and it is disappointing and beautiful at the same time that I will never again play exactly the same piece.

I love, too, the fact that what music expresses defies articulation.  Much like visual art.  I relish words, but I tire of them and their canned meanings.

Synchronicity

I'm so thrilled with the small things in life....  Ever have one of those days where the clicking of your turn signal is exactly synchonized with the rhythm of a song on the radio??  I mean exactly, not pretty much, but dead on for the entire duration of a song.  It truly doesn't happen very often -- believe me, I never drive without music so I've lots of experience!  So very cool when it does, though.  It's like the planets are aligned just right for that couple of minutes.

Moved to tears

I haven't been so moved by a real-life event in a long time.

Yesterday my family and I were returning from an afternoon outing about a half hour from our home.  As we drove along the highway we noticed, on one of the overpasses, a large number of people and several fire engines.  A number of people were hanging Canadian flags over the side of the bridge, and everyone was looking down the highway underneath apparently waiting for someone.

Ordinarily not that remarkable a deal, except that we saw the same thing on every single overpass bridge we passed on the way back home.  Hundreds and hundreds of people had come, parked their cars along the sides of any road they could, and were standing facing the oncoming traffic below.  In every case a number of people were either waving Canadian flags or hanging them over the side.  Fire trucks were there, in one case with a ladder raised and also waving a Canadian flag.  It turns out that the crowds were there through police and fire departments, local Legions and general public, to show their support as the procession carrying a soldier killed in Afghanistan made its way through to his hometown.  It was a tragic occasion, but there was something inexpressibly beautiful in the sheer numbers of those out to show their respect for this man -- for what he was, and what he had been trying to do for his country.

I could only imagine the reactions of his family as they were greeted, bridge after bridge, by hundreds and hundreds of people honouring the family member they had just lost.

Yes, human beings as a species can be mean-spirited, egocentric and even truly evil.  But people can also be almost unbearably beautiful.

Bless those who came out.  And may all those working at truly thankless tasks in order to try to make this world a better place know how profoundly and how widely they are appreciated.

Amazing sunrise

Yesterday I was lying in bed listening to the clock radio when the local host mentioned what an beautiful sunrise it was.  Well!  At that, I had to bolt out of bed and dash to the window, and was I ever glad I did.  I cannot do justice to its beauty with my meager words; there are those who have rhapsodized far more articulately than I concerning the stunning colours and cloud formations of a truly rip-snorting sunrise or sunset.  (I did think the host's use of "blue cotton candy" was pretty apt, however.)  So of course I had to race outside with my camera -- sorry if you live near me and were startled by an apparition in a fuzzy red bathrobe in the street before 7 a.m.!  And of course I next had to race upstairs and wake my two children to see it.

Life's wonders are worth getting up early for.  What a great way to start a day.

Artistic endeavours - Part I

One of life's biggest marvels is those activities in which one can completely and utterly lose oneself.  Not know what time it is, not be aware that four hours have passed, not have anything at all as a preoccupation except that present activity.  The activities which make you whole.  All part of dwelling entirely in the present, I guess.

There are many of these and they're different for everyone.  I know people who come alive when they play hockey, or who have a new perspective on life when they horseback ride.  I have friends who lose themselves in the wonder of taking a perfect photograph, or creating a watercolour.  For me almost all the separate activities which accomplish this for me fall under one banner:  the arts.

I hate even using that title because it almost needs politicized capital letters:  The Arts.  It smacks of subsidies bestowed or witheld, of hoity-toity sections in urban newspapers.  However it is simply the category into which my most absorbing activities fall.  Not all arts, mind you.  Not being a terribly physical person I have to exclude dance (regretfully), for instance.  But when I think of the hobbies which have the potential to transform me -- not including yoga -- they are mainly arts based.

Ah, where to begin?  This is Part I, after all.  Let's begin with the visual arts.  I am not a talented visual artist -- ask anyone! -- but I had a lengthy period in my youth where I absolutely loved to sketch, mainly in soft pencil.  Roses, leaves, the stock picture of Jesus, you name it.  I relished looking for the details, the wrinkles around someone's mouth, the tiny twist at the very end of the leaf.  It was the first time I had a taste of how time can be suspended simply by virtue of what you're involved in.  Three hours would pass in the blink of an eye and absolutely nothing else existed in that time.

As I have no real artistic talent, I never ventured outside sketching, and it largely got neglected when I got into busy adulthood.  But in the last few years, for reasons unclear to me, the urgency to draw still seizes me from time to time.  I spent hours over a couple of summers capturing the curls and flaws of the birch tree on the corner of our cottage deck.  Getting lost in trying to get the shading of one piece of errant bark was bliss.  It's almost like getting lost in the tiny corners of a poem one's writing...but that's a topic for another time.

"Coincidences"

One of life's little cosmic thrills.

Stuff going on mentally, questioning, less-than-good stuff...  I go to church early for a rehearsal and so have some time to kill before the service, and wander down to the library.  Outside is always a "Free books" table of those books that have been culled -- and didn't I find a book there, by one of my friends' favourite writing authors, that seems to exactly address the issues I'm dealing with.  Weird weird weird.  Moments like that are eerie to me, and wonder-full.

And I will say once again:  I don't think I believe in coincidences.

Other whispers of spring

...and on top of the scrinchy roadways and snowdrops, we now are blessed with pokings of daffodils and busy robins.  Tiny patches of grass beginning to shade to green.  Dots on trees:  incipient buds?

As for me, I'm waiting for that incomparable smell that lets you know it's spring.

Joy of a good book

I pity -- and fail to comprehend -- those who don't like to read. I truly don't believe there can be any greater joy than curling up in a favourite spot with a transformative book. You know the kind I mean: the ones where you slow down while reading the last hundred pages because you don't want the sadness of having finished it. The ones where the world stands still for a while after you close it and ponder what it had to say. The ones where you've been able to see into an entirely different world and you feel transformed by it. The ones that have somehow turned you into a better person.

I've just finished one like that. When a couple of people asked me what it's about (why is plot the only thing by which we commonly define books??), I have to say, well, nothing, really. My cynical side defines it as an author's ill-disguised attempts to put forth her own philosophies on life and literature and call it fiction. But oh, it's done so charmingly! Not to mention wisely. And beautifully. sigh

Yes, one of those books that enters the fibres of your being and mysteriously improves you. Hard to move on to another book after reading like that, don't you agree?

Harbingers of Spring

We're in that mucky time of year where you can go from plus 18 degrees Celsius to minus 4 in 24 hours, when everything has gone from being boring brown to being boring grey.  But!  There are two things about this time of year that can't be duplicated.  One is the wonderful scratchy scrunch sound your shoes (shoes!  no boots!) make on all that tiny gravel that has somehow made its way to roadsides.  I love that sound; for some reason it makes me think of childhood, of playing marbles and sketching out hopscotch boxes for the first time in years.  Wonderful noise.

The second thing is in one word:  snowdrops.  What a beautiful, vulnerable creation.

Iced boulders

Took the dog for a walk at a local conservation area the other day; we're lucky enough to live near a Great Lake.  Despite the season, there was no snow on the ground in the fields, but you should have seen the sight near the water!  There are water breaks of enormous boulders which have been snowed upon and splashed and frozen, and they looked like enormous candies covered with shiny white icing.  An amazing sight.  Then over near some docks there were snow/ice formations that held your eye for ages because the shapes were so varied.  It was like clouds:  how many different things can you see in it?  Very cool.

Walking in glitter

One day not long ago I was striding through the parking lot of my workplace on my way in to work.  A banal moment, non?  A landscape of metal and rubber and concrete, a mindset of preparation for the day.  But it was snowing, one of those light little snowfalls where the cloud hasn't really made up its mind whether it wants to let it all loose or not.  There was also a bit of sun, and the beams were catching these few, gradually drifting snowflakes in just such a way that they sparkled brilliant silver as they floated down.  It was magical.  I stopped dead and just wondered at the beauty of it, certain that if I looked up I would see a giant young child gleefully letting down little bits of glitter at a time on its play world.

What a way to magic up a grey moment.

Why?

There have been many times in my life, when upon commenting on one friend or another's tendency to dwell on the negative side of life, I have received the response, "Well, life is full of deceit, unhappiness, unfairness and pain.  That's what life's all about."  As if that's all there is to it.

I find this unspeakably tragic.  How can people so easily swallow the media-induced belief that life is nothing but these negatives?  How can so many completely ignore the fact that love, beauty, kindness, courtesy are also "what life is about"?  I am not closing my eyes to the sad truths of human existence, but I believe there is another side to the coin.  Thus the purpose of this blog.  I plan to write of my encounters with life's small, everyday beauties, with dual hopes.  One is that doing so will stir the positive energies in my own little world and remind me of its constant magic.  The second is that maybe, just maybe, if people stumble upon this blog it may send ripples out into the world that are also positive.  If you do so, feel free to join me.