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.