Rainy Few Days

I took no walks these past few days. Rained every day! So I baked some more and read a book.

Pecan/apricot scones to take to a neighbor’s yesterday to have with our coffee and chat. It was a good visit. Also had a phone visit with someone I hadn’t seen in years. That was also nice to catch up and hear about friends we had in common.

Nothing looked so good in the dreary dampness as a lit fireplace and an easy chair.

So I started the latest book from Australian writer, Jane Harper.

Her books are very hard to put down and this morning I asked my daughter how I could get the movie made from Harper’s first book, The Dry. Then I settled my cats.

Made a bowl of popcorn, poured a glass of Aussie white, paid my $10 and got comfortable.

I had read the book so knew the story but so enjoyed getting sucked into the vast landscape of northern Victoria. The crookedy forests of Eucalyptus are the best. The weathered lined faces and shear meanness of the bad ones played against the confused kindness of the good ones. Jane Harper writes a good story and when placed in her native Australia where landscape is a main character, it is the best alternative to a super bowl ball game.

Aside from that, I was noticing a lovely old ikat-dyed briefcase I have had for years that was shoved in with books on a shelf here in the studio. When I unzipped it, it was filled with handwritten notes from books I had to read in graduate school and artist statements from exhibits, and more.

So to tidy things up a bit I pulled them all out, I opened my laptop and started a document titled, From My Notes. Now that entire stack of loose handwritten sheets is in the bin and I have several typed pages of what I was all about.

How about this beauty?

“Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for an echo.” – Don Marquis     Actually I think it is more like blowing the puffs of a dried dandelion into the wind. But that could just be the difference in our poetry…..

And I must have loved putting phrases in cursive as part of an artwork like, “so much clearer here – so still – so unbothered..”

And this: I looked it up. bereft means deprived. 

And several from James McConkey’s Anatomy of Memory  – an anthology.

“Memory is responsible for our identity; it is the faculty whereby we perceive connections between past and present, thus enabling us to make sense of our surroundings; it underlies our creative achievements.”  – Patricia Hampl, the Writer and Her Work Vol II

Several on memory and memoir…nice I took the time to write them down.

And several from this piece done for exhibition, titled, One Year Away.  A running dialog between myself and the writings of Gaston Bachelard and Anne Morrow Lindberg. It was all about home and a need to be somewhere else. I would write down something they said in my journal and then my response to that with a drawing from where I was at the time…..”Alienation has a freedom”...

And from an artist book I made many years ago titled, Is the Journey Really Better….“So is the journey really better? Is the state of longing a better condition than holding the longed for in our searching grasping hand? Is the journey really better?

Anyway, there was quite a bit in that old case. Now it holds just poetry, mine and others who sent their words on to me. I will carry it to the poetry meetings.

Then the final one that I found was this one….and have no record of who said it, but has a ring of truth to it.

“You can discuss anything with people who know.

You can discuss anything with people think they know.

But you cannot discuss anything with people who believe.”

Tomorrow is going to be a sunny day, so back to walking. For now I have found a scone recipe for ripe bananas with nuts and a maple drizzle frosting. I am going to bake them for the boys tomorrow morning….and have another wine with Jane Harper and her latest.

Til later….