restingmotion

Monday Miscellaney

Today has not gone as planned.  But it is still Monday so let’s get on with it.

Finally, I finished the first of three dresses that I cut and started during my March sewing retreat.  This dress was almost finished; it simply needed a little adjustment in the lining seams and hemming.  The initial plan had been to finish it immediately, but the world shut down and there seemed no need for a new dress.  I started sewing masks.  When I finally put the dress up on the sewing table the hem looked so wonky I couldn’t believe it was right, even though I knew in my head it was.  Yes, the point is that the dress look straight and balanced and even when it is on me.  And so it does.

I wore the dress to my birthday brunch with my step-daughter’s family on Sunday.  In fact, it was comfortable throughout the day, which was hot and humid, and I was very happy. This was meant to be an “everyday” kind of summer dress, one I could wear running around town in hot humid weather and it serves that purpose well.  I did line it, although the Japanese quilting cotton is opaque enough, primarily because this allows the dress to hang more nicely and not cling, bag, or rumple excessively, problems with the original J Jill dress I copied.  The silk habotai lining is light and cool even in humid weather. 

After brunch we walked around Market Square and stopped for a chocolate fix at Coffee and Chocolate.  I had one piece, this beautiful almond praline truffle.  It is almost too beautiful to eat, but that did not stop me.

Over the weekend I also finished knitting the pieces to the summer sunset sweater.  Actually, I finished reknitting.   Initially the whole thing got tossed in my bag in a fit of pique when I realized I did not have enough yarn to finish.  I refused to think about it at all for several weeks.  When I pulled it back out I realized two things:  First that I had lost my mind and knit the two front pieces about 2 inches too long; and second, that I failed to take into account the changes I had made to the pattern due to gauge issues.  My altered pattern used about 15% more yarn.  Not surprising then that I would not have enough.

 

The pieces are finished but the sweater is on hold until the yarn arrives. Since the yarn is hand-dyed Prism linen lace-weight, I do not expect to receive it right away.

 

I cannot begin to express how happy wearing my purple dress made me yesterday. To wear a cool, comfortable dress that in a color I love, that fit perfectly, and which I made myself brings its own kind of happiness.  There is so much joy in that statement that I just want to dance.  Alas the kind of stitching that I had in mind for today is not what came to pass.

Near the end of my walk this morning, I somehow managed to trip and fall.  I actually thought I had an instant of foot drag and I stumbled over some unevenness in the pavement. Before I knew it i went down, knees, wrist, face.  My nose took the brunt of it.  Here I am after attempting to clean myself up but before going to the doctor.  I wondered if I was over-reacting and did not need to go at all. Not so.  I broke my nose and dislocated the septum.  I will see an ENT on Wednesday.  I got a series of stitches for the cuts on the top of my lip. 

 

I look worse now.  There will be other days for stitching. There is nothing quite like starting a new year of life with a bang, even if it is not the kind of bang I might have preferred.  Hopefully things can only get better from here.

Art Starved

The Knoxville Museum of Art opened to the public, by appointment only, this week.  It opened to members last week, and I was there, desperate as I was to for an art fix.  My intention had been to look at the Delaney/Baldwin exhibit, but I thought I would take a “quick whirl” through part of the permanent collection and found myself lost there, completely absorbed by the experience of what I was seeing.

It started when i walked into the Currents gallery, where I was stunned by the vibrancy of this painting by Jered Sprecher, A Plane Is A Pocket In The Corner of The Mind.  The painting had been in the gallery for some time, but its previous location, on an end wall, made a different kind of statement.  Here, with the light striking it in a way I cannot really capture in a photograph it seemed to leap out and envelop this observer, filling the mind with an overwhelming sense of both chaos and light-within-chaos or hope.  

I spent most of my time in that gallery, and I am certain that my focus was shaped by many things:  My joy at being able to return to the museum, one of my favorite calming spots in Knoxville; the general tumult and uncertainty roiling about in the greater world right now combined and contrasted with the sense of solitude shaped by sheltering-at-home; the flash that seeing the Sprecher provoked in my heart upon turning the corner into the gallery.  So many things influence what we see and how we react to what is seen.  I constantly wonder about this conversation with the soul that art, in its many forms (painting, sculpture, music, dance), provokes.  I wonder about the process, but also about the artist, what the process of creating something that can provoke reactions that one may not anticipate, or perhaps even desire, evokes.  

 

I cannot say.  I can only write about the experience of one person, one day, fully recognizing that even this viewer might find herself experiencing the same work of art in a completely different way on a different day, the new experience shaped by the previous, but also by all of the experiences that come together in that moment of time.  This painting, Green Picture In My Meadow, by Jim Dine snuck up on me.  It was not new to me, I can’t say that I saw anything on that visit that I had not seen before.  And I am not certain that any idea that struck me about that painting was new either, was anything that I had not thought before, but on that day somehow, the impact was more profound.

I have long been fond of Dine, finding his works simultaneously elementally simple and present but also complexly layered and enlightening.  I like the way they seem to reference the pop art movement, but without the sarcasm, almost as if they are both inside and on the fringe, looking in. I find myself constantly challenged by the use of the quotidien, by symbols, referenced in ways that make them simultaneously fading-toward-invisible, while at the same time brought forward in sometimes shocking ways.  I like the sneaky emotional resonance which is not necessarily overt, but which seems to slip in sideways, almost unnoticed.  

I suppose that is how I first approached this painting, beginning not with the whole but with the small, approaching from the side, noticing the detail as seen in the photo above, the layers of paint and straw and the way they reference a field and nature, layers of grass and soil, new and old, the dying back of old grass overtopped with new leaves, and the layers of soil and matter that make up everything.  The way the surface, what we see, is only that, a gloss on something deeper. It was only then that I stepped back and looked again at the entire painting.  Noticing the heart in the field, the many layers of meaning, from the very simple and unremarkable to that which could be deeply unearthed.

Then I noticed other smaller bits.  This bright eye, in the center of the picture above, shining out, filled with light, like the eye of the divine if one is so inclined, or light and hope, shining out.

When I stepped back, I saw that, to me at least on that day, there were two eyes, a face even, in the heart of the heart, in the center of the painting. The light eye balanced and contrasted by the dark eye, less overtly obvious perhaps but no less presence once my mind decided it was there. This eye is slanted, shaded, almost hidden, the way we hide the darkness within ourselves, but no less present. Ego, fear, darkness are always present, even in the midst of light. These things I see: A field; the earth in all its bounty; cycles of death and life hidden in the behind the initial impression of green; the heart; the soul of earth and of humanity;  the contrast of shadow-self and true-self, of ego and id, of hope and despair.

 

Poor Jim Dine might be despairing of what I think of his painting.  Hopefully not.  As I said earlier these reflections might simply be a bubbling up of all the things going on in my own inner world in this time of what feels like two pandemics, one of the body and another of the soul.  Perhaps the painting is only a trigger, but I think art is always more than that, that the artist is more than that as well. A conduit perhaps to some greater truth, and who knows how each of us may confront, or avoid, that truth.

 

Then, as I turned to leave the gallery I was struck by something else, another contrasting of images.  Next to the exuberant, world-filled outburst that is the Sprecher painting seen at the top of this post is a quiet painting of two people embracing in a room. I thought I took a photo of the plaque identifying the painting, but if so it is lost.  I do not know the name of the artist; I believe the painting was named for the pattern on the carpet.  My failure.  But what struck me then, still, was the contrast of inner and personal versus the outer and public, but also of the mental turmoil vs inner peace, of the contrasting yet simultaneous needs for creation and safety that make up the human condition.  I applaud the curatorial impulse that can layer meaning in this way.

I tried to take pictures that captured my own feelings about this pairing, but I failed.  I tried to make a collage in photoshop and instead I somehow I accidentally created this overlapped transparency.  I apologize to the artists for bastardizing their work and yet somehow this captures my own overlapping and confused feelings about the juxtaposition of the two works: Public and private existing both separately and simultaneously.  Perhaps all these random bits are just the flotsam created by the various wreckages of this unusual year.  But also perhaps, through art, we can also find our way to new pathways.

Monday Miscellany

A little bit of this and that to start the week:

I picked up three books from the local library on Sunday.  Those plus the two new books I purchased, and which both arrived last week, are shown above.  I had planned to read both Open Season and Death In Her Hands over the weekend, but did not get that far.  Open Season is turning out to be a rather wrenching read and I am, therefore, proceeding slowly.  I am also simultaneously reading Mick Herron’s London Rules, which I have on digital download from the library and which is due back this week.  Will I get through all six books this week?  Who knows. Sometimes I finish a book a day, sometimes I struggle with a book a week.

The sauerkraut is happily bubbling away, on a shelf in the basement, where the temperature is currently averaging abut 65 degrees.  I had originally packed the cabbage in the one-gallon jar shown, and it was doing nicely, but was really over-full, with cabbage almost to the top.  As fermentation progressed, and gases escaped, the jar was constantly overflowing.  So I had to drag up the large 3-gallon fermentation crock, wash and sanitize it, repack the cabbage and get it back downstairs.  That thing is heavy, and crocks don’t really seem to come with useful handles.  I figured out I could carry it up and down the stairs using the red trug tub shown.    Even so it was a bit of a struggle.

The experience reminded me that I really like the using the water-sealed crock, although this one is too large for most of my ferments.  It was the only crock I could find locally, and generally my sauerkraut batches have been the only thing made in a large enough quantity to use it.  But, since I have now made about 6 batches of sauerkraut and even more batches of kimchi and other pickles, it is past time to start acquiring crocks in sizes more appropriate to my most common ferments. These will be my birthday gift to myself, although they will probably be acquired over a period of months. Should I need the 3 gallon crock in the future, I will pack it downstairs in the basement pantry.  Of course, if I make a gallon or more of anything, I will also need larger mixing bowls...

The art museum is reopening to the public this week.  It opened for members last week and I went once, in a timed slot.  It felt like coming home in a way, and I was both calmed and overwhelmed just by being able to see the actual art, as opposed to just an image.  I will be back in the coming week, and there will probably be a blog post, or posts. 

I have driven 196 miles in June.  Since I don’t plan on driving anywhere before Wednesday, that would be the final accounting.  I actually didn’t drive much the first three months of this slow-down either, but I didn’t note monthly totals. Given that driving is one of the biggest contributors to greenhouse gases, and Americans as a whole drive far more than anyone else, it has been one goal to cut my miles driven by at least one-third and I am well on my way, for this year at least.  But I am hoping that this little interruption in the flow of normal life will actually lead to a reset, to reconsidering of priorities that will be more lasting.  I know I will eventually drive more than I am now, but the process of questioning my underlying  assumptions seems to be high on my mind at the moment.  Who knows where the process will lead.

It looks like another partly overcast day, with more rain.  The garden is not complaining, and it is good weather for letting the new plants establish themselves.  As for me, the cloud cover means I can spend more time in the garden, so it promises to be a good day and a good beginning to the week.  What good things are you hoping for this week?

 

 

 

 

Garden Progress

The garden, microcosm of the world that it is, continues to offer lessons in joy, in patience, in fortitude, in failure, in folly, and in grace. The other morning, after I mowed my rather small patch of lawn, I picked a handful of blueberries and sat on the steps admiring my handiwork with self-satisfied contentment.

But of course all is not as it seems.  There are far more planting beds, intentionally so, that patches of lawn, and most of those areas remain filled with weeds, some of those extensive weedy patches in the front yard, the more public space of the house.  It struck me that my neighbors may not be as contented with my manicured lawn but overgrown weedy beds as am I.  Oddly enough I find myself unconcerned, marveling far more at this general state of acceptance of my own limitations, than at any concern over other people’s opinions. It has not always been so.

Despite initial intentions the planned order of work, from public to private, from street to back, exactly the opposite has occurred.  In this rocky time in the world my imperative has instead been to create sanctuary.  This too is a part of a long process, but I have created a space where I love to sit, where nothing is finished but everything is filled with potential, where I can sit and watch the birds, the bunnies, occasionally if I am very lucky a fox, or perhaps merely a cat or my grand-puppy hiding in the long grass.

Above  is the planting bed at the base of the deck, to the left in the photo above it.  It took me a good while to dig that up and plant it, but the plants have been in a couple of weeks now, and look like they are establishing themselves.  There are a few stakes where designated plants were not available. Now that the ground is ready, these have been ordered for fall planting. 

Furnishings remain unsettled and in flux.  A dining table has been ordered but has not arrived.  In the meantime I am not really holding dinner parties, and chairs remain scattered about for social-distancing.  Eventually, I would like these beds to be mostly perennials, mostly for my own ease, but it is good to stick some annuals in here and there, as spaces evolve, grow, change. 

Across the walkway is the bed designated #2.   I have dug up and planted about half that bed, as seen here in a photo actually taken through the kitchen window. You see the undug, unplanted portion of that bed in the second photo from the top, on the right.  Plants have been ordered for the rest of this bed, which means more digging is required to prep the soil for their arrival, but I am mostly done with planting until October.  There is time and as my strength has grown so has my confidence that this bed will be ready when the time comes.

Also from the deck, I am looking across the driveway to the vegetable garden, which is thriving.  There is a small planting of euphorbia nowthowlee at the end of bed 3, where the walk meets the driveway.  I misjudged that planting.  I have seven plants, 14 more are on their way which will fill that small quarter circle at the end of that bed, next to the path. I would like a similar patch on the other side of that walk, but due to availability that cannot happen this year. The delay gives me time to plan, even as I can acknowledge that plans are tenuous, at best.

The vegetable garden, though thriving, is a continuing lesson in munificence, in failure, and in hidden joys.  The spring crops are almost done, the summer crops just beginning.  There are lots of tomatoes. The eggplant have begun to set fruit.

I can probably still put some summer crops in as the first frost really won’t be until October.  Even if they don’t fully yield, this was always an experimental year, and my attentions have been scattered between various projects. The point is to take joy in what works, and simply accept the rest.  The peppers are heavily laden. I harvested my first shishito peppers yesterday and blistered them to serve alongside my eggs for breakfast.  In retrospect I should have planted more peppers.  My adventures with sauerkraut have me dreaming of condiment-making and chile-fermentation.  Next year.

I suppose now we should walk around toward the front.  

This small bed at the base of the circle is doing well: geranium max frei, and Siberian iris.  A few of the iris died before the sprinkler system got connected, and there was a long period where I wondered if any would survive.  That bed was rocky and the clay more packed than I would have hoped, I had trouble digging it up last fall when I planted it, but I am stronger now. It seems worth the possibility of redigging and replanting it when the bulbs come in during the fall. But that decision does not need to be made now.

The Japanese maple and the small bed around it that were not destroyed are doing well, although there a few plants that need moving, and as you see, an area to be dug and planted. 

Much of the front remains a place in waiting. These shrubs are doing well, although the blueberries (center of the photo) were spaced far too widely and need to be dug and repositioned.  Given the amount of rock and difficulty I had digging and filling in a gap in the boxwood border, this may be a rather time-consuming task.  I had been waiting until the blueberries finished fruiting, the season began in early June and the late blueberries are just ripening now, but am now thinking I should just wait until fall, until shrubs are dormant and the weather is kinder to both plant and gardener.  In this case I should just weed and mulch to make the bed look neater and forget about it.  Laziness prevented me from doing this earlier; I was loath to put energy into mulching a bed I was about to dig up. Surprisingly enough, mulching is harder on my back than actual digging.  

Across the driveway you see little lime hydrangeas starting to come into bloom.  They too are in the wrong place, and will have to be moved, another tedious fall task, after which I can finally start designing the front beds and hopefully finish planting them in 2021.

I hope the hardscaping implies the intentionality of it all.  But I am not really bothered by the mix of manicured lawn and unruly weeds.  The speck of orange flowers in the photo above is a daylily, the one seen at the top of this post.  It is in temporary housing in a pot, and will be planted just outside the fence, near the post, once it has finished blooming.  No point in moving it now, I will just lose the remaining blooms.  

I don’t expect to see further visible progress in the garden this year.  I will continue to dig beds so that they are ready to plant when the time comes.  Aside from what those euphorbia and a few transplants here and there, fall bulbs and a few perennials, nothing else will be purchased or ordered until its home is ready and waiting, which means planting will, in all likelihood, be put off until 2021.  But gardens, like lives, are things that evolve over time.  

I hope you have enjoyed this visit to my work in progress.  Some of these photos have appeared on my instagram feed, a site that feels somehow more suited to my current state of contentment with the slow, the small, the quotidian, a flower here and there.  But the odd photo will appear here as well, depending on how things evolve, although perhaps not another garden tour for some time.

Happy In the Kitchen

It seems I have been a little too much in my head of late, and so I am going to concentrate on the more quotidian side of things for a bit.  Today I am in the kitchen.

Sunday I did a lot of work in the garden, Monday I mostly read and puttered.  I had a potato, two leftover roasted beets, and the end of the last corned beef, so I made red flannel hash.  I also had a couple of fennel bulbs so I roasted those and made fennel pesto with the feathery green leaves.  I had a dollop of the pesto for breakfast with my eggs and hash.

 

This was the second corned beef, the one I dry-brined, and my opinion is softening over time.  See my initial comparison here. As I mentioned in that post, I liked that second corned beef thinly sliced and browned in a skillet, much like a corned-beef version of bacon, but I did not like it as much on its own.  It kept reminding me of pastrami, and I thought I would reserve that technique for the next time I made pastrami.  Now I am not quite so sure.  The dry-brined corned beef definitely makes a better hash, and my initial complaints may have been more about the cooking, not the brining itself. Corned beef hash continues to be my favorite use for corned beef.

Yesterday I finally started the sauerkraut.  I did something a little different than the way I have done it in the past.  I sliced the cabbage into ribbons rather than shredding it.  I have found that I like the toothsomeness of pieces of cabbage in kimchi, and I occasionally get annoyed with the fine threads of shredded cabbage in a traditional sauerkraut.   So I decided to try slicing rather than shredding the cabbage.

 

Sauerkraut and kimchi are in many ways simply variations on a theme.  Sandro Katz uses the term “kraut-chi” for the ferments he makes, a hybrid between the two versions.   I like the idea of this term because it feels less constraining to me, and in the end, all ferments, like all cooks, are unique.  I may simplify the term in my own mind to simply “chi”, and in this case I am making a simple cabbage chi, in the manner of sauerkraut.  I am not flavoring this chi with caraway, or peppers or in any of the many ways sauerkraut can be flavored, just simple fermented cabbage in its own glory.

 

 

After slicing the cabbage, I began brining process, which basically involves  using salt to pull the liquid out of the cabbage and begin the ferment.  You slice or shred the cabbage, add salt, I used 2% by weight, and then massage or pound the salt into the cabbage.  I had too much cabbage to fit in one bowl, 2.7 kg, so I needed two bowls.  The work of massaging the cabbage was harder with thicker pieces, and my arthritis acted up.  Since I started the sauerkraut in the evening, after dinner, I covered the bowls and left them on the counter overnight.

 

I wasn’t certain that I had massaged the cabbage forcefully enough.  I had brine, but it felt like I needed to massage the cabbage a bit more, so I did.  The contents of the two bowls now fit into one bowl, which is the top picture you see.  The cabbage will sit in its brine for a total of 24 hours before I pack into a crock or jars for fermentation.

 

Once the bowls are free, I can start the kimchi. For this batch I am using David Chang’s version from Momofuku.  This was my second-favorite version overall from my initial kimchi exploration in 2016.  Chang writes that this is a kimchi best eaten when it is young, when it is still in its “prickly, sparkly” stage, and I agree.  Chang specifies that the kimchi is fermented in the refrigerator, to extend its youth. This may be my favorite young kimchi, but it does not age well.  It is markedly different from my favorite kimchi, the red cabbage kimchi I wrote about making here, from Aki Kamozawa and Alexander Talbot’s cookbook, Ideas in Food.  That kimchi is good young, when it is funky and spicy; it grows increasingly layered in flavor through middle age, and at 2 years it has a soft, yet still complex roundness that reminds me of a fine old wine.  I haven’t yet created a napa cabbage chi that hits all those markers, but I will continue to work on it.  In the meantime, I love Chang’s version and consider it essential.  Once I have it in house, I can once again start pursuing the idea of the perfect napa cabbage chi.

 

 

 

Fermentation Time

 

It is cabbage season in East Tennessee.

I did not plant cabbage.  Cabbages are space hogs. Cabbage is readily available from local farmers.  The goal was never self-sufficiency.

 

The green cabbage was a planned farmer’s market purchase.  Napa was a surprise, and a pleasant one at that.  Sauerkraut and kimchi are the order of the week.

 

I made my own kimchi before I ever made sauerkraut.  Initially, I made my own kimchi because much commercially available kimchi contains either soy sauce, or other gluten-containing ingredients and if I wanted kimchi I had no alternative.  I first wrote about making kimchi in this post, in 2016.  I ended up loving kimchi more than I imagined, ended up loving the process of fermentation, and eventually decided to try my own sauerkraut as well.

 

So in a way the garden was about having something I wanted and needing to make it myself, it was never about self-sufficiency. Nor really is it about independence, but rather about dependence, about connecting my life to the world beneath my feet and the air I breathe.  The plan was to grow some things, but also to depend on local farmers for some things.  It is about interdependence, about relationship. Fermentation too has reminded me that life depends on relationship, relationship to each other, relationship to the earth, relationship to the seasons, and processes and nourishment that this earth provides us, and also then about the cycle of life and the relationship between life and decay.  

 

There is a myth in this country, in this society, that we are independent and self-determinant, that we can pull ourselves “up by our bootstraps” and make it on our own.  But of course we can’t.  We may be privileged beneficiaries of a system that allows us to perpetuate this belief.  We may have invented many wonderful things that have allowed us to believe that our fate is not tied to the fate of this earth and its own cycle of life. We may think we can reduce life and food and even success to simple formulae, but in the end all of these schemes miss the essential transformation of community, of the community of elements, and minerals, and life that make up our bodies, our environments, our societies and ultimately that feed our soul.

 

Perhaps this time-out the world has been going through has only strengthened my already burgeoning understanding that we are really not separate from the cycles of this planet which gives us life, despite our repeated determination to prove ourselves masters of our own fate.  Perhaps, for me at least, it started with kimchi.  Fermentation,  a process of slow transformation, renewed my connection to earth, to food, to life, to death, and to community.  Perhaps kimchi, and sauerkraut, remind me also of the way we are connected to each other, and that our relationships, and our need for them, are not instant things that can be manufactured, that they are a process of slow evolution.  Perhaps social distancing has reminded me of these same slow processes, reminded me that we need community, but not shallow community.  We need the deeper community of connection, the community that transforms and makes something bigger than the sum of its parts. Perhaps it reminded me that control is an illusion, and a drug.  The problem with control is that someone always pulls the strings, and everyone else buys into the illusion and is controlled.

 

This week, perhaps I will simply take my chances with cabbage, with sauerkraut and kimchi. I can control my own actions, but I cannot control the outcome. With luck, and there is always an element of luck no matter how we tell ourselves otherwise, I will end up with something wonderful.  Or I will start again.

 

 

Musings and Mutterings

I really wanted to write a quiet post this morning.  I wanted to write a post about food, about quotidian domesticity.  And yet here I am, again, all caught up in the emotional unrest of the world and unable to settle my words.

 

More deaths.  More anger.  More protests.  Frankly I am all for anger and protests and even for the toppling of symbols of control, symbols of repression.  As much as I abhor violence, I believe anger and revolt is a necessary step toward change.  I am all for these things even though I myself am not a direct participant in the current wave of marches and rallies. Admittedly, I have been to a rally here and there in recent years, although not at this particular moment.  When I was young I marched; some of my friends were gassed and others were arrested, but I realized early on that this is not where my gifts lie.  

 

I suppose this is the nature of my true strugglee: an internal struggle with the value of my words; the relevance of of the intention and purposes of this blog; of what is said and what is not said.  With blogs, as with everything in life, what is revealed is only part of the story.  What is discussed on this blog is reflective of my own internal struggles, as to whether writing about gardens and dinner and internal musings are even relevant to the world, even as I increasingly think that as our industriousness has managed to distance us from hands-on involvement in meeting the physical needs of life, of having our hands in the earth, of preparing to nourish ourselves,  we have made our lives easier but also more fragile. As we become increasingly disconnected we find it easier to disconnect from each other, harming ourselves and others without intent really, but out of blindness.   

 

And so the question returns.  Should I write about the frivolous? And who is to determine what is frivolous?  I often refer to this blog as a frivolous thing, not because I believe it is true, but because of my own struggles between the importance of the small, the intimate, the quotidian and some culturally imposed belief that the only good work is work toward the greater good. I am part of a generation of women taught to turn our backs on the domestic.  And yet I know that whatever other things I do in the world, it is this that brings focus, calmness, and even strength to carry on.  These things inform my ability to do more, to give more, to be more. So then, why do I struggle so?

 

I haven’t yet read Ibram X. Kendi’s How to be an Antiracist, and I therefore do not know how the author defines anti-racism.  But I do know this: I know it is not enough to claim to not be racist, because all of us, every one of us that lives in this society is shaped and touched by racism; I know that every decision we make or fail to make matters; I know that for all we take pride in how the human race has evolved, how can we say we have evolved at all if we cannot address our recurrent inability to treat each other inhumanely?  This all means that we all have much to learn, both about others but also about ourselves. It means we need to make active choices to do our part.  It also means that each of us has a different part to play, and it does not further anything to judge one part as more important or effective than another.  We are notoriously bad at judging the impact and repercussions of our own actions, and judging people by their gifts is not much less superficial and specious than judging people by the color of their skin.  Our only strength is our humanity.

 

I don’t know where are all these mutterings are leading.  I will probably write about something contentedly small in the next few days.  I may yet struggle.  These are not easy times.  Thank you for attending to my mutterings.

The morning after...

I hosted book club last night on the patio with social distancing...

Eight chairs.  I managed to scrounge up 8 small tables, although a few had to be dragged outside from the house — those have to go back inside at some point, preferably today, but at the moment I am stiff and my back is still a bit too sore to carry them up the stairs.  Never mind.  They can always reside in the garage a day or two if necessary.

This morning I am in no rush, instead settled into that contentedly contemplative zone, the morning-after-a-party zone, reflecting back on conversations and community.  Every good party deserves a follow-up morning of happy repose.  The furniture must be put back in place, the dishwashers emptied, the linens washed, but there is really no reason to rush. The morning after a party is almost as important as the party itself.  

Not unusually, my back is a bit sore.  Too much standing in the kitchen I suppose, plus carrying tables outside.  Would I do anything differently?  No.  Not really.  Cooking, even the simple preparation of salads, is both labor-intensive and meditative.  And I seem to have needed this time to be reminded that the important things in life are not the fast things, not the busy things, but the slow and connected things, like sitting and talking for a few hours with friends, discussing a book, but also discussing the world and our lives and then coming back around to the book, the way reading is a conversation, and a conversation about reading also sparks other conversations, about the complicated web of human interaction.

 

Not a lot of dinner came from my garden.  The fava beans that are in the rice salad.  I pulled out the fava beans this week as the temperatures had gotten too hot and the plants were dying.  Admittedly, I knew I had planted them a bit too late, but was happy to have about 2 cups of shelled and de-skinned beans, enough to share in a group of 8 only as part of a salad.  Also an opportunity for contemplative anticipation as the beans were shelled, par-boiled, iced, skins removed, and only then allowed to finish cooking.  This labor-intensive part of food preparation is something our ancestors knew as part of the inescapable rhythmic of life, not even that long ago even.  I don’t expect the world to change, or anyone to agree with me even.  But I wonder what we have lost and what we have sacrificed for convenience.  

The herbs and micro greens were also from my garden.  Chervil, oregano, parsley, cilantro, beet thinnings, fenugreek thinnings, mint.  Well the mint was actually from a neighbor’s garden, but I dug some up to plant here as well. I’ve been using a lot of chervil this summer and wonder now how I lived without it.  And the herb garden isn’t what I want it to be yet.  The thyme is still too small; so too the sage.  I haven’t even planted lovage yet:  I intended to go to an herb nursery and buy plants, but I should have just bought seeds.  Celery leaf would be good.  So much potential.  So much gratification to be found in pulling dinner out of the earth.

The fava beans were not the only plants pulled out of the garden this week.  The sugar snaps as well. Hidden peas were harvested.  I think I picked 2 cups or so of peas every day for 2 - 3 weeks, but I found another 6 or 8 cups of peas hiding in the vines, a few a little larger than ideal but still better than anything in any store.  Peas were steamed and frozen.  A dinner of stir-fried shrimp and peas materialized when I realized I had forgotten to pick bok choy before dark and was too tired to go back out in the garden.

The last peas became a salad with chervil, bok choy blossoms, and fennel pollen, shared with friends.  You can see the yellow bok choy blossoms at the back of the photo of the herb and salad garden above.  The scattered leaves of the bok choy are still edible, but those too will have to be pulled soon.  In the meantime the sense of discovery remains.  Before this year I never even thought about bok choy blossoms.

This morning I have been out in the garden watering.  Three zones on the sprinkler system are not working so I must water by hand, which is not such a bad thing.  I saw the first of the Costuloto Genovese tomatoes on the vine, a photo I also shared to Instagram.   I admired the tuscan kale, which I have been eating two or three times a week for over a month now, and which looks almost like some kind of pre-historic artifact.  It is all that remains in the bed that contained peas and faves, and will next hold cucumbers, bitter melon, and my first ever crop of belgian endive.  I am wondering if I can plant endive beneath its tall structures, or if I should perhaps plant some other smaller, cutting green between its leaves. As usual there are no answers, only questions and opportunities for conversations and growth.  This is as true with each other as it is with the earth.  Life is an ongoing experiment its seems, here in the garden, with friends, in our societies and interactions.  And there is no doubt that mine is a fortunate life, something not to be taken for granted.

 

 

We Choose.....

Sometimes I wonder if the biggest lesson to be learned from history is that we never learn the lessons of history.....

 

I have been settled here in the silences.  This is not because I don’t care. I do care, care deeply.  I honestly do not want to live in a world where something as meaningless as the color of one’s skin makes one a target.  I do not want to live in a world where fear and hate rule the day.  Honestly, I don’t believe anyone wants to live in such a world.  I think we all simply want to love and be loved and to find something meaningful to do with our time on this earth.

 

And yet here I am. Here we are.

 

I watch in horror.  I watch in hope.  I watch beautifully outraged noise.  I see violence:  violence stemming from hatred; violence stemming from fear; violence stemming from the safety of power; violence stemming from oppression; violence stemming from despair.  Violence is not only physical;  violence arises out of our words, our thoughts, our refusal to show compassion.

 

But I also see hope.  I see and hear voices of refusal, of non-acceptance.  I see people feeding others.  I see people arm in arm, masked out of compassion not fear — people standing for love. I see people standing together in shared outrage against oppression.  

 

Violence and hope. Hope and violence.  It seems there has been a lot of both of these in the world right now.

 

I don’t want to live in a world filled with riots, with protests, with strife, a world of fear and hatred and denial.  And yet these are only the symptoms of a greater disease, a greater evil, one that most of us never think about, never asked for.   I never wanted to live in a police state.  I cannot bear to watch the news.  History shows us that most people never ask to live in oppression, never ask for dictatorships, or police states. But I also see that, much as I never asked for this world, I have also been remiss in challenging the assumptions that created it. I am angry, saddened, appalled. 

 

There is no neutrality in a life of humanity.  Apathy is and of itself a form of violence, and a deceptive one at that.  Apathy puts of a false front of calmness, but it actually does more than that, it colludes and allows hate, fear, oppression and violence to grow unfettered.

 

We are a cautious species, but also a daring one.   I cannot deny that humans are driven by conflicting web of complex emotions: by fear, by a need for security,  by creativity, by faith, by love.  None of these things are passive.  We choose.  WE CHOOSE.    

 

A song from South Pacific has been making the rounds, a bit of a resurgence of optimism, “You’ve Got To Be Carefully Taught”.  It reminds us that fear, hatred, racism are drummed into us, often in subtle ways.  But I can’t help but wonder if it is also only part of the story.  We also have to be carefully taught to love, to care, to nurture.  Yes, it comes naturally, but so does fear. We also have to be guided, “To Be Carefully Taught” how to overcome our own fears, how to vanquish selfishness and darkness, how caring is actually the stronger choice.  We have to be taught that strength, true strength, is not about beating others down, either physically, financially, or emotionally.  Strength is not about bullying. Strength is not about having more but about being more compassionate and caring.

 

I choose kindness and beauty.  I don’t know where that choice will take me, where your choices will take you.  But I hope for the future.  I hope the next generations can overcome the selfishness and apathy of my own generation.  I hope we can find the strength of caring, the care that is implicit in the word humanity.

 

Delaney and Baldwin, Redux

This morning I awoke to find my brain filled with images of this painting by Beauford Delaney:

Portrait of Ella Fitzgerald, 1968.  Delaney had never met Fitzgerald, explaining that he “just painted something I saw in my mind” and that, exactly, is the beauty of this painting, one of a few paintings that has jostled about in my thoughts since I last saw the Delaney Exhibit in the Knoxville Museum of Art in February.  I always thought I would go back and see more of that exhibit, felt that I only had only managed to just begin to plumb the depths, when everything shut down.  I wrote about those first impressions in a blog post on February 22nd, over three months ago now.  And then the world changed.  I didn’t forget, but somehow in this whole slowing down, this worldwide introversion, my thoughts have meandered only slowly back into place.

 

As I wrote in February, one of the aspects of Delaney’s portraits was his abstraction and modernism, and his use of light and color to explore something deeper than just the image of a person.  Delaney’s portraits of Baldwin’s for example explore human relationship and each painting feels simultaneously like a complete conversation but also a part of an ongoing and open-ended relationship.  This is also what I see captured in this portrait of Fitzgerald, although it is admittedly difficult to get the sense of the painting itself from a photographic image.

At the time, I experimented with attempting to take pictures of the physicality of the paint, the brushstrokes, the layers, the addition and subtraction of color.  I am not convinced that it was successful, but the images remind me of the sense of rhythm that seemed to emanate from the painting, as if Delaney had managed to visually render something essential about music.  Yes, one sees Fitzgerald’s face in the center, but not clearly, more of a memory of the person as it is interwoven with her music.  I heard the music as soon as I saw the painting, felt its harmonic vibration, felt Fitzgerald even before I knew the subject matter — a visual representation of Jazz and Blues, melody and harmony, tragedy and joy.  This is the thing we cannot capture, cannot explain, and the reason art is so elemental, universal, and necessary to human experience.  It has always been so.

Admittedly. I don’t exactly get that sense from these photos. They serve as reminders, visual cues that my brain can link to specific experiences.  But that is much the way memory and experience work. The more literate we are, the more we experience art, music, literature, philosophy, science, the more we explore the complex emotional and physical makeup of humanity, the more we are able to see and experience the world with depth and consideration and even conscience. Literacy is more than book-learning. The more we know, the more we experience, the more we can see that the seeming contradictions that define our human experiences aren’t always so much oppositional as they are representative of our inability to express complexity in a straightforward manner.  These things all speak to very real aspects of our lives and our beings; they speak to expereiences and feelings that we cannot easily put into words, but which are no less valid, if not more so, than that which is easily explained away. 

 

Delaney has also resurfaced in my thoughts this week because Marble City Opera is hosting a watch party tomorrow night, Friday May 29th, at 7PM on Facebook live where they are showing Shadowlight, an opera by Larry Delinger and Emily Anderson about Beauford Delaney, which premiered here in February.  Above is a preview, and I hope you will be enchanted and encouraged to watch with me.

 

I saw the opening night performance of Shadowlight, and it was one of the most beautiful and emotionally powerful opera experiences I can currently recall. Everything seemed to come together:  Anderson’s poetic libretto, Delinger’s score, alternating between dissonance and soothing jazz riffs, the exploration of art and madness as Delaney, confined to St. Anne’s Hospital in Paris, sings of longing, of light, but also of lifelong struggles with internal demons and schizophrenia.  Delaney’s random, sometimes erratic and jerked movements, sometimes alternating between softness and turmoil are offset by the sparely geometric and angular movements of the chorus, a spareness that is often emphasized by the angles created by images of paintings projected onto the set, highlighting and obscuring facial features. Order, erraticism, tragedy and love, yes, love, in James Baldwin’s words as he delivers the eulogy for his friend. The magic of this piece was how it captured and transmitted emotion, of love, of art, even of madness, in a way that made it all palpably real. One left stunned, perhaps transformed.  I never reviewed this piece, feeling emotionally overwhelmed until well after my thoughts had settled into other grooves.

 

The actual experience of this performance felt like audience and artists were all of a piece, much the same way I feel that Delaney’s art vibrates, blurring the lines between music, art, literature, and experience.  I do not think I was the only person in that audience who felt emotionally pulled into the vortex of that experience.  I also do not believe the experience of the video will carry that same sense of envelopment, but I do believe it will still be a powerful experience, and I am highly looking forward to it.  I hope you will join me.,