Doorbells and sleigh bells and schnitzel with noodles

Ah, schnitzel. Speaking of which, my feline companion is tapping my arm asking for a lap. Just a minute. OK. Heading out soon for a Cambridge grocery run. Planning to give a listen to the latest On Being episode I caught a part of last Sunday morn, an interview with "Ghanaian-British-American philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah. His parents' marriage helped inspire the movie Guess Who's Coming to Dinner," "Sidling up to difference." A highlight: "If you have that background of relationship between individuals and communities that is in that sense conversational, then when you have to talk about the things that do divide you, you have a better platform. You can begin with the assumption that you like and respect each other even though you don't agree about everything, and you can maybe build on that. And you can know that, at the end of the conversation, it's quite likely that you'll both think something pretty close to what you both thought at the start. But you might at least have a deeper appreciation for the other person's, um, point of view, and that turns out to make it easier to accept the outcome, whether it's the outcome you favor or the outcome the other person favors."

Photos again from my last day @ MOMA in January. Toward the bottom - talk about a prepared piano. The final image is Still's painting credo, the image of which was in my previous posting.

Snowflakes that stay on my nose & eyelashes

"Is not impermanence the very fragrance of our days? Song itself cannot happen without time, without the voice rising and falling away." A quotation from a Rilke poem translated by Buddhist philosopher Joanna Macy in an On Being episode first aired last summer, shortly after I got back from my WI trip. I quoted one of the translations then. Here is another that particularly caught my ear this morning:

"The Swan

This laboring of ours with all that remains undone,
as if still bound to it,
is like the lumbering gait of the swan.

And then our dying — releasing ourselves
from the very ground on which we stood —
is like the way he hesitantly lowers himself

into the water. It gently receives him,
and, gladly yielding, flows back beneath him,
as wave follows wave,
while he, now wholly serene and sure,
with regal composure,
allows himself to glide."

The transcript of the whole show is here. As are more Rilke poems from the broadcast & on the website, including Let This Darkness Be a Bell Tower:

"Quiet friend who has come so far,
feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,

what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.

In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.

And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am."

Today's painting is one of my favorite 20th century favorites, Clyfford Still. It reminded me of the poem quoted above.



May we all be the mystery at the crossroad of our senses and discover the meaning there.

Warm woolen mittens

Just bid goodbye till next time to my tooter & heading out the the post office & for a walk. Then tootling and I _have_ to get to laundry today - stitching, too, since I just got clue 5 to the mystery knit-along I'm working on, "In Dreams" inspired by Galadriel from the Lord of the Rings.

Whiskers on kittens

Alas, none in the pix today. All from MOMA if I remember correctly from 7.Jan.2011. Do I smell a four-seasons theme in the Kandinsys? Can you guess which might be which? Delaunay-Terk Description goes with the square painting after the Kandinskys that look much more leaden in the picture than they do on the wall. Don't know how to get the alignment right.











Heading out soon for acupuncture, then flailing my fingers Pops stuff, stitching & possible laundry if I have the energy after tootling.

Some of my favorite things

From my visit to MOMA the day I left NYC 7.Jan.2011. Sorry about the weird layout - it's the only way I can get the descriptions to come even close to the pictures they describe.

Now off to tootle. I did do a little vacuuming yest. but hadn't the energy for laundry - practicing pops music where everything is an encore piece, high loud & fast is exhausting. Smells but it sells.

Pictures with people

This from my last morning @ Margi & Michael's apt. 07.Jan.2011. Don't know what's up with the blurriness - maybe it's the way we felt? I imagine the penguins are no longer snow-covered.

Off soon to a Polarity treatment. Then tootling & laundry - and maybe some vacuuming if I get a round tuit. Oh, stitching, too, no doubt.

Ernesto el vampiro

Thought you might enjoy. I haven't created anything for a dragon yet. Rainy here today. Gotta run & get today's first tootle in. In the middle of a three-day food diary in preparation for the last of my nutrition study visits @ Tufts on Monday.

Grief

The recent Sunday NY Times had an article about grief that I'd like to quote in part. It was a discussion between Joyce Carol Oates & Meghan O’Rourke, both writers who have recently lost husbands and published books drawn from their experiences.

Oates: [T]he old life is gone, the old love has vanished. Grief is the most humane of emotions but it is a one-sided emotion: it is not reciprocated.

O’Rourke: It reverberates among the living, though, in our shared laments. Because the mystery of all this is that lamentation is consoling instead of just painful. Consider “The Widow’s Lament in Springtime” by William Carlos Williams:

Sorrow is my own yard
where the new grass
flames as it has flamed
often before but not
with the cold fire
that closes round me this year.

That cold fire is strangely warming, isn’t it? And so we burn through the days, passing from one person to the next the lit match of memory.

Passing a lit match to you in memory of those we've lost, which loss always seems to feel recent. Photo from MOMA taken 7.Jan.2011

Moon sliver

Times like these I wish I had a tripod - the tiniest sliver of a moon on 6.Jan.2011 on a corner of Margi & Michael's Harlem neighborhood on my way home to their apt. I love the curlicues on the lamp post.

Andy's off to work today so I'm getting in my practicing in the AM since I plan to take the afternoon off & head over to NEC for Andras Adorjan's masterclass there - I studied with him three summers in Nice & haven't seen him for many moons (speaking of which).