Time to Break Out
March 27, 2017
“Jailbreak”
by Maya Spector
It’s time to break out —
Jailbreak time.
Time to punch our way out of
the dark winter prison.
Lilacs are doing it
in sudden explosions of soft purple,
And the jasmine vines, and ranunculus, too.
There is no jailer powerful enough
to hold Spring contained.
Let that be a lesson.
Stop holding back the blossoming!
Quit shutting eyes and gritting teeth,
curling fingers into fists, hunching shoulders.
Lose your determination to remain unchanged.
All the forces of nature
want you to open,
Their gentle nudge carries behind it
the force of a flash flood.
Why make a cell your home
when the door is unlocked
and the garden is waiting for you?
Here in Seattle, it’s too soon for lilacs. But with our lat spring, we await the blossoming of the cherry and plum trees. Any day now!
I Would Rather Be a Blossom
April 17, 2016
“‘T would ease — a Butterfly —
Elate — a Bee —
Thou ‘rt neither —
Neither — thy capacity —
But, Blossom, were I,
I would rather be
Thy moment
Than a Bee’s Eternity —
Content of fading
Is enough for me —
Fade I into Divinity —
And Dying. Lifetime —
Ample as the Eye —
Her least attention raise on me –”
— Emily Dickinson
Experiencing the Particular
April 20, 2014
National Poetry Month. 20
” . . . a poet is a poet for such a very tiny bit of his life; for the rest, he is a human being, one of whose responsibilities is to know and feel, as much as he can, all that is moving around him, so that his poetry, when he comes to write it, can be his attempt at an expression of the summit of man’s experience on this very peculiar and, in 1949, this apparently hell-bent earth.”
— Dylan Thomas, “On Poetry,” from Quite Early One Morning
Home as Shelter for the Spirit
April 16, 2014
“It is a great relief when, for a few moments in the day, we can retire to our chamber and be completely true to ourselves. It leavens the rest of our hours.”
— Henry David Thoreau, Walden
” . . . [The home is a] microcosm in which man can search and unfold his personality, unobstructed by his demanding fellow man.”
— Heinrich Engel, The Japanese House: A Tradition for Contemporary Architecture
“Sorry the man, to my mind, who has not in his own home, a place to be all by himself, to pay his court privately to himself, to hide!”
— Michel Montaigne
“Home is where the heart is . . . A house can be a simple shelter, but home is the carapace of one’s inner life.”
— Diane Ackerman, Dawn Light: Dancing with Cranes and Other Ways to Start the Day
Seeing from the Corner of Your Eye
April 11, 2014
National Poetry Month. 11
“Poetry is the kind of thing you have to see from the corner of your eye. You can be too well prepared for poetry. A conscientious interest in it is worse than no interest at all. If you analyze it away, it’s gone. It would be like boiling a watch to find out what makes it tick.”
— William Stafford, from Sound of the Ax: Aphorisms and Poems by William Stafford, ed. Vincent Wixon and Paul Merchant
“Let the Sky Rain Potatoes”
July 22, 2013
“Let the sky rain potatoes.”
— William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor
I love road trips for their unexpected, accidental findings, such as this field of purple in the Skagit Valley. Now, I’ve gone many times to the Skagit Valley to see daffodils and tulips in bloom, but those fields of color are April splendors, not mid-summer spectacles. So what was this purple field that stopped me in my tracks?
Potatoes! How fortunate to be passing by when the potato fields were in blossom. This field was one of 2000 acres one farming operation put into Skagit Valley potatoes this year.
I leave you with one poet’s ode to the versatile potato:
A New Potato
by Ted Kooser
This is just one of the leathery eggs
the scuffed-up, dirty turtle of the moon
buried early in spring, her eyes like stars
fixed on the future, and, inside its red skin,
whiteness, like all of the moons to come,
and marvelous, buttered with light.
Okay, One Last Post as I Head Out the Door
April 2, 2013
I carried my camera with me as I ran some last-minute errands this morning. I wasn’t planning on doing another post today, but I want to show you what I am leaving behind for one month. (Am I crazy for taking a vacation in April when it is so beautiful here??) I’m consoling myself, knowing I can look back at this blog post from the road whenever I feel homesick.
Star Magnolia
March 28, 2013
Blooming Magnolia
March 26, 2013
“Nature is infinitely patient, one thing lives after another has given way; the magnolia’s blossoms die just as the cherry’s come to life.”
— Teju Cole, Open City
The artist Ellsworth Kelly has captured the essence of the magnolia blossom in just a few clear lines. The simplicity of his drawing is beguiling.
I was also inspired to try my hand at painting magnolia blossoms after seeing some botanical prints in Treasures of Botanical Art by Shirley Sherwood and Martyn Rix.