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Less than 12 hours until take off! Someone's heading off on a great Italian adventure and she's excited! The teeny suitcase is loaded up with books, art supplies, and a few pairs of underpants. I may have thrown in some lipstick, I can't remember. The camera is fully loaded with a fresh memory card.
I leave you with some final glimpses of the travel journal pages.
Here is where we're headed.
Arrivederci! See you on May 1st! Talk amongst yourselves!
Today I'm serving up a stack of freshly gessoed & painted pages made from file folders. Everything I see, hear, taste, and feel in Italy will get deposited onto these sea & sky colored pages. In the evenings I will tuck them back into the ring bound travel journal. My anticipation has reached a fever pitch! Life has turned into a long string of exclamation marks.
More American Airlines jets grounded today. Grounded schmounded! Nothing can dampen my enthusiasm!
In an effort to C A L M the inner beast I went for a walk in a public garden that worships the California Poppy. With blazing petals the color of fire, the poppies line every path,
spill out onto the sidewalks, and tumble into the streets.
Oh, there are other beauties lurking there in the festival of orange, but the poppies are what silence every last manic thought. Shush the child beast.
Have you fallen lately, drowsily, into an orange sea? If you do, you will want to drown. You will ask to drown.
And if you're lucky, like I was today, permission will be granted.
A 3 acre wonderland, in the middle of the city, on a hot day in spring, rimmed in orange.
I sat to consider my good fortune.
There was a lot to consider.
And a lot of vantage points from which to do it.
Why not sit in all and take advantage of having the entire place to myself?
And the birds.
Will you get a load of my sister's travel journal! Is it a bundle of fabulousness or what? Huh? OR WHAT? Mine should be ready to roll in a couple of days. Hopefully American Airlines will be up and rolling by then too. In between hand wringing and pole vaulting off my porch I decided that my sewing machine needed a cover.
Things started out well enough...as well as these things go without a pattern. I was feeling confident and clever as I began, but soon my mood soured. The entire project metamorphised into an ill-conceived fiasco. My original 2-dishcloth method which involved no hemming or pinning had seemed so simple. How could it be So Wrong?! I looked around for someone to blame. No one, it seems, was around. (insert string of bad words here)
It became apparent that my rogue sewing methods had sewn me up into a tight spot. WHAT ABOUT THE CORNERS? Whose idea was this?! I sat on the couch and stared at the corners for a solid hour willing them to sew themselves shut.
THEY DID NOT.
I persevered. While the inside of my sewing machine cover is a disaster bit untidy, the outside is, well, it's FINE. I'm pleased. All's well that ends well. Or some such nonsense.
Next up: No pattern skin-tight party pants made from one of Mama Moss' old leather jackets.
I like not working. I like it very much. I have a new job and it's called LOOKING. It's all I do. No errands, no to-do lists. One thing after another is calling for my attention in the garden. I wander in my pajamas from plant to plant.
The pride of madeira is screaming. Here is what she says, "blue blue blue blue blue!"
I am so glad she put on her show before I leave town on Tuesday.
An old cottage is meant to have resting places for plants nailed on its walls.
Less is not more in my back garden patio.
A tangled thicket of soft vines and purple in the iron bathtub. Something new is blooming there.
While I piddle around in the back the cat posse lounges about. Everything I know about resting I learned from them.
There is a line between real and imaginary, but I don't know what it is. Neither does storybook bird back for a drink of blue.
A frothy sea of white spills over the bluff in the back.
I am reminded of a line from a book:
The world can crush you with its beauty.
Floating upward through a confusion of dreams and memory curving like a trout through the rings of previous risings, I surface. My eyes are open. I am awake.
That from the first paragraph of my new book, Crossing To Safety by Wallace Stegner. I will carry it to Italy. I am a slow reader of novels. Too much time spent staring into space and thinking about things. Underlining passages. Reading, staring, reading.
Tomorrow I will start thinking about packing. Someone hide my camera!
I am in love with this plant that sits in my next-door neighbor's garden. This is the first I have seen it bloom in 5 years. I suspect it is in the agave or yucca family, but I don't know. What I do know is that I could pull up a chair and gaze all down the long length of each blooming branch for the next month. I am that in love. If you saw it, really saw it in realtime not blogtime, you would be too. In love, I mean. You would want to write a poem about it. It would probably come out better than mine.
dear plant
you're pretty
don't stop blooming
i love you
the end
2nd grade sentiments about plant life have influenced my style. This is why I leave the poetry in more capable hands.
It is what I was born for-
to look, to listen,
to lose myself inside this soft world-
to instruct myself
over and over
Oh, good scholar,
I say to myself,
how can you help
but grow wise
with such teachings
as these -
the untrimmable light
of the world,
the ocean's shine,
the prayers that are made
out of grass?
In between porch sitting and picture taking I'm accomplishing nothing. On today's schedule only a trip to a bookstore. More than one errand at a time feels like hurrying. Add to that list: watching the bees.
Posing cut-out birds in the garden is not exactly an errand, but I will do more of it.
ditto eating blackberries and yogurt.
I may open the visual journal and look inside.
Or maybe it will be enough to look inside of a rose.
We'll see.
Every day
I see or I hear
something
that more or less
kills me
with delight,
that leaves me
like a needle
in the haystack
of light.
from Mindful by Mary Oliver
Deep listening in the late morning. From the open window sounds of hundreds of delirous bees gently roaring around the pride of madeira nearly in full bloom now. A warm morning unlike the last few days of clouds and cool. With new neighborhood sounds to enjoy at a time I'm not usually home to listen. The sound of a leaf blower from up the street. Someone's lawn is being mowed. Yesterday it was mine. Birds trilling in the trees. The recess bell from the elementary school way down the hill.
Breakfast of champions:
I'm off to my favorite Starbucks with the extra large patio to sit in the sun with my writing journal and latte.
I feel grateful to do work that allows me several big breaks a year. No reporting in for horse breaking duty until May 12. Today is the 4th day in a row that I have not had to answer a single question. Except the one from my sister yesterday evening who wanted to know if I minded if she swam naked through the blue grotto in Capri instead of going in the rowboat with me and the guide.
I leave you to ponder my answer.
