Instead
Madeleine Peyroux
Instead of feeling bad, be glad you've got somewhere to go
Instead of feeling sad, be happy you're not all alone
Instead of feeling low, get high on everything you love
Instead of wasting time, feel good 'bout what you're dreaming of
Instead of trying to win something you never understood
Just play the game you know, eventually you'll love her good
It's silly to pretend you have something you don't own
Just let her be your woman and you'll be her man
Instead of feeling broke, buck up and get yourself in the black
Instead of losing hope, touch up the things that feel out of whack
Instead of being old, be young because you know you are
Instead of feeling cold, let sunshine into your heart
Instead of acting crazy, chasing things that make you mad
Keep your heart ahead, it will lead you back to what you have
With every step you're closer to the place you need to be
It's up to you to let her love you sweetly
Instead of acting crazy, chasing things that make you mad
Keep your heart ahead, it will lead you back to what you have
With every step you're closer to the place you need to be
It's up to you to let her love you sweetly
Instead of feeling bad, be glad you've got someone to love
Instead of feeling sad, be happy there's a God above
Instead of feeling low, remember you're never on your own
Instead of feeling sad, be happy that she's there at home
She's waiting for you by the phone
So be glad that she's all your own
I mentioned before that I went to a Madeleine Peyroux concert on Sunday. This was the last song she played (except for the encore) and she prefaced it by saying that she was going to end with a song about happiness, "pure happiness, the simplest emotion, and yet it's so hard. For me." And I agree with her whole-heartedly. I love this song, but I struggle with simple happiness. It's something that I only ever experience in short bursts. It was nice to know someone else was on the same page.
This is my friend Bean. She is lovely. I took this photo one day when she won a Kindle in a spelling bee at the school. I was actually taking a photo for the story that was going in the school paper, but this shot was my favourite in the end. I just love how her laugh is almost suspended in the image. I can't help but smile whenever I look at it. Bean has a hard-won ability to find the positive in things. I do not have this tendency, and she always calls me on it. I think it's good to have people like that in your life. The people who understand where you're coming from, see the mistake you are making and are willing to call you on whatever BS you are spouting. Not only does she call me out when I'm being a total pessimist, but she drags me out of my dark places to take me out for beer and karaoke, or a meal, or hat shopping, or a movie rental and inevitably makes me laugh. She literally shoves the good things in front of my face so that I can't ignore them. Yup, she's a good one.
Recovery
Jan Zwicky
And when at last grief has dried you out, nearly
weightless, like a little bone, one day,
no reason in particular, the world decides to tug:
twinge under the breastbone, the sudden thought
you might stand up, walk to the door and
keep on going ... And in the seconds following,
like the silence following the boom under the river ice, it all
seems possible, the egg-smooth clarity of the new-awakened,
rising, to stand, and walk ... But already
at the edges of the crack, sorrow
starts to ooze, the brown stain spreading
and you think: there is no end to it.
But in the breaking, something else is given - not
that glittering jumble, shrieking and churning in the blind
centre of the afternoon,
but something else - a scent,
like a door flung open, a sudden downpour
through which you can still see the sun, derelict
in the neighbour's field, the wren's bright eye in the thicket.
As though on that day in August, or even July,
when you were first thinking of autumn, you remembered also
the last day of spring, which had passed
without your noticing. Something that easy, let go
without a thought, untroubled by oblivion,
a bird, a smile.
[A truly beautiful poem. Words that mean so much to me.]
Life has been giving me a headache lately. I have way too many things on my plate. My brain is constantly spinning in these tiny obsessive circles. Whenever I am doing anything I am also thinking about (and sometimes attempting to actually do) at least three other things. It's like having a wild animal trapped in my head. He's trapped in there and getting panicky because he can't find a way out. So he just keeps throwing things around, knocking stuff over, making me panicky right along with him. I am feeling un-grounded. I am cursing the law that seems to exist right along with gravity that everything must happen at once. Things can never come at a sane, slow pace. Instead they pile up on top of each other like a bad crash on the highway. And I'm pinned in the middle of all of them.
So, as my life begins to get out of control it was nice to come home on Monday to two new perfumes. Something so simple, but it was like taking a deep breath of air. I can't use alcohol-based fragrances because they give me major headaches, but I found MCMC Fragrances and fell in love with their organic oil-based roll-on perfumes. They are exquisite. The one on the right in this picture, Maine, is my go-to perfume. It's salty and subtly grassy. It smells like sea and dried beach scrub. It makes me think of being in a seaside cabin. I adore it. I just got Hunter and Kept, but I'm already madly in love with them. Hunter is woodsy and outdoorsy. It's masculine (a quality that all of my perfumes must have) and, as the website describes it, is "best if worn with a flannel shirt" - and I seriously love flannel shirts. Kept is a little bit girlier than the other two since it's red rose based. But this is balanced out beautifully by black tea, leather, clove and amber and it ends up being this really rock and roll, tough but sweet girl kind of fragrance. Perfume is a small thing, but it is beautiful. I like looking at it, I like smelling it, I like how it makes me feel special and beautiful when I wear it. I'm big on surrounding myself with beauty and in the midst of my swirling vortex of craziness, I was glad to find something beautiful to hold onto.
I've been reading a lot of what would be considered 'young adult' fiction lately. This rather arbitrary division of fiction bothers me a little bit, but that's not what I want to write about right now. I want to write a little bit about why I've been loving these books. Now, I should take a moment here to note that yes, there is a lot of garbage out there in the world of YA fiction; however, this problem is not unique to YA fiction, it is a fault of fiction in general. I mean, seriously, look in any fiction section and you are bound to find garbage. Goodness knows I've had to read some of it. So, I'm not saying that this is applicable to all YA literature any more than my praise of other books is applicable to all books that fall in that category.
My particular reason for loving these books lately can be summed up in one word: rawness. I was having a conversation with Sally the other week about YA fiction and I told her that one of the reasons that books in this category are often so wonderful is that they don't shy away from that sensation that you have when you're a teenager that everything is so important. Every moment, every experience, every inconsequential detail is freighted with significance. At least, I know that's how it felt when I was a teenager. Reading back through some of my journals can be downright painful and leave me wondering how anyone managed to put up with me during those years. Everything is intense when you are a teenager and emotions run close to the surface. As a teen this was what drew me to books. It made me feel less alone.
At some point I tried to stop having my emotions so near the surface. Intensity began to scare me. So I tried to stop. For a long time I made a concerted effort to just not feel much of anything. (This, by the way, is not healthy.) But lately I've been wondering why as adults we shy away from this kind of rawness. What is it that makes us think that it is better to stop feeling deeply? Why do we stop letting little things matter? I'm not saying everything should be as intense as it is as a teenager (remember, my journals from then do make me cringe now), but maybe rawness is not a bad thing. In fact, maybe we should embrace it a bit more. I've been thinking about this and realized that this is exactly the quality that draws me to my favourite authors. Yes, I have books I love because they are beautiful or interesting works of art. Yes, there are authors I love because they simply tell a good story. But the ones that I return to over and over again are characterized by the same rawness I'm finding in the YA books I've been reading lately. Finding significance in things. Allowing your heart to be open. This is dangerous, I've been discovering, but it is also where the potential for beauty lies. Fully experiencing life: this is what I find in Sylvia Plath and Anne Michaels, John Steffler and Michael Ondaatje, Stuart McLean and Alexander MacLeod. It's also what I find in Ann Brashares and Stephen Chbosky, Sarah Dessen and Meg Cabot. And this, I'm discovering, is the best way to live.
By the way, if you are ever wondering what I'm reading, you can check out my relatively new tumblog (a word I despise by the way) At the gates of a new city. This is where I'm chronicling the passages that strike me in the books I'm reading at any given moment. It's more for my own personal record than anything, but you're welcome to check it out for inspiration or to build a reading list for yourself.
from What the Light Teaches
Anne Michaels
10
For years I've driven towards you in spring rain,
storm sky of green marble,
slow traffic a caravan of swinging lanterns,
windshield wipers like clock hands.
Poems by Tsvetaeva on the seat beside me,
flowers in wet paper.
As the hours pass, the hard seeds in my heart
soften and swell as I think of your kitchen
with its stone floor
like a summerhouse in Peredelkino,
and of Mandelstam, exiled to Yelabuga on the Kama:
"if you must leave the city,
it's best to live near a river."
You fly out of the darkness at me,
twisting open the tin sky.
The thunderstorm becomes other storms:
darkness steeping like tea above Burnside Drive,
with its slippery crease of rusted leaves;
or the night on High Street, rain
streaming like milk down the windshield
the moment the streetlights clicked on.
I think of young Akhmatova,
under a black umbrella with Modigliani,
reading Verlaine in the Luxembourg.
All the languages they spoke -
Russian, Italian, French -
and still, their lovemaking was with roses!
Language is not enough
for what they had to tell each other.
Never to lose this joy,
driving to one who awaits my arrival.
Soon I will be standing on your porch, dripping
with new memory, a thin dress soaked with May rain.
Rain that helps one past grow out of another.
Yes, Anne Michaels two days in a row. What can I say? I adore her writing. And the opening stanza of this poem is so well-suited to the weather lately.
Into Arrival
Anne Michaels
It will be in a station
with a glass roof
grimy with the soot
of every train and
they will embrace for every mile
of arrival. They will not
let go, not all the long way,
his arm in the curve
of her longing. Walking in a city
neither knows too well,
watching women with satchels
give coins to a priest for the war veterans;
finding the keyhole view of the church
from an old wall across the city, the dome
filling the keyhole precisely,
like an eye. In the home
of winter, under an earth
of blankets, he warms her skin
as she climbs in from the air.
There is a way our bodies
are not our own, and when he finds her
there is room at last
for everyone they love,
the place he finds,
she finds, each word of skin
a decision.
There is earth
that never leaves your hands,
rain that never leaves
your bones. Words so old they are broken
from us, because they can only be
broken. They will not
let go. Because some love
is broken from love,
like stones
from stone,
rain from rain,
like the sea
from the sea.
This poem is exceptionally beautiful. The sweetest love. The deepest connection to each other, to history, to our own personal worlds. I'm basking in this piece. Luxuriating.
Also, the kind of greeting described in the first stanza is something I hope to experience one day. Whether in a train station or airport, I've always wanted that. "They will embrace for every mile." Lovely.
I went to the gym tonight for the first time in way too long (unless you count several aborted attempts to start working out at home). It felt so good to be back. I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with working out. While I'm doing it I typically think to myself, "Why am I doing this? This is awful." But by the time I have changed I feel awesome. On top of the world. It's a feeling I've missed for a long time. And I can't wait to start to feel good about myself again. Watch out world, I'm starting a comeback.
PS - My dear friend is super athletic and these were her wedding shoes. How great is that?
Sleep
Eric Whitacre
The evening hangs beneath the moon,
A silver thread on darkened dune.
With closing eyes and resting head
I know that sleep is coming soon.
Upon my pillow, safe in bed,
A thousand pictures fill my head.
I cannot sleep my mind's aflight
And yet my limbs seem made of lead.
If there are noises in the night
A frightening shadow, flickering light,
Then I surrender unto sleep,
Where clouds of dream give second sight.
What dreams may come both dark and deep,
Of flying wings and soaring leap,
As I surrender unto sleep
As I surrender unto sleep
As I surrender unto sleep
Sleep.
A friend posted a link to this TED talk on facebook today. My dad had told me about it a few months ago, but I didn't realize until today that the conductor/composer he was talking about was Eric Whitacre. Watch the video. He is amazing. (Plus, as my father points out, he looks like a movie star.) And then go and watch the virtual choir singing "Sleep." I adore Whitacre's pieces. We sang a couple of them in choir and they were absolutely arresting. They are the kinds of songs that one must be intimate with as a singer. They wrap themselves around you. They tug at my soul, cause my heart to leap into my throat and tears to sting my eyes. They are profoundly beautiful works. If you are at all someone who enjoys choral music, please do yourself the favour of listening to some of his work. I cannot say enough good things about it
The Trouble with Poetry
Billy Collins
The trouble with poetry, I realized
as I walked along a beach one night -
cold Florida sand under my bare feet,
a show of stars in the sky -
the trouble with poetry is
that it encourages the writing of more poetry,
more guppies crowding the fish tank,
more baby rabbits
hopping out of their mothers into the dewy grass.
And how will it ever end?
unless the day finally arrives
when we have compared everything in the world
to everything else in the world,
and there is nothing left to do
but quietly close our notebooks
and sit with our hands folded on our desks.
Poetry fills me with joy
and I rise like a feather in the wind.
Poetry fills me with sorrow
and I sink like a chain flung from a bridge.
But mostly poetry fills me
with the urge to write poetry,
to sit in the dark and wait for a little flame
to appear at the tip of my pencil.
And along with that, the longing to steal,
to break into the poems of others
with a flashlight and a ski mask.
And what an unmerry band of thieves we are,
cut-purses, common shoplifters,
I thought to myself
as a cold wave swirled around my feet
and the lighthouse moved its megaphone over the sea,
which is an image I stole directly
from Lawrence Ferlinghetti -
to be perfectly honest for a moment -
the bicycling poet of San Francisco
whose little amusement park of a book
I carried in a side pocket of my uniform
up and down the treacherous halls of high school.
I know I have been inundating you all with poetic posts lately, but I think that another part of the trouble with poetry is that reading really good stuff makes you want to read more. Actually, that's kind of the problem with literature in general for me. I read something incredible and am struck with this momentary feeling that I should never pick anything else up again, but then I am like an addict who just needs a fix. I break into others' poems on a regular basis. And the more I do it, the more I want to do it. Poetry begets poetry, whether writing or reading it.
My new perfume? Bug spray and sunscreen. I smell like summer!
Just got back from a picnic and hang out session with the girls. So excellent. And fortunately, bug spray and sunscreen smells are not as pervasive as campfire, so once I shower no one will know the difference.
On Turning Ten
Billy Collins
The whole idea of it makes me feel
like I'm coming down with something,
something worse than any stomach ache
or the headaches I get from reading in bad light -
a kind of measles of the spirit,
a mumps of the psyche,
a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul.
You tell me it is too early to be looking back,
but that is because you have forgotten
the perfect simplicity of being one
and the beautiful complexity introduced by two.
But I can lie on my bed and remember every digit.
At four I was an Arabian wizard.
I could make myself invisible
by drinking a glass of milk a certain way.
At seven I was a soldier, at nine a prince.
But now I am mostly at the window
watching the late afternoon light.
Back then it never fell so solemnly
against the side of my tree house,
and my bicycle never leaned against the garage
as it does today,
all the dark blue speed drained out of it.
This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself,
as I walk through the universe in my sneakers.
It is time to say good-bye to my imaginary friends,
time to turn the first big number.
It seems only yesterday I used to believe
there was nothing under my skin but light.
If you cut me I would shine.
But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life,
I skin my knees. I bleed.
I have been acutely aware of growing up lately. Sometimes this is sad and terrifying. Sometimes it's exciting. Sometimes it simply is. Regardless of what I'm feeling about it at any given moment though, it has been looming large in my thoughts lately.
from "A Tale of Two Gardens"
Octavio Paz
A house, a garden,
are not places:
they spin, they come and go.
Their apparations open
another space
in space,
another time in time.
Their eclipses
are not abdications:
the vivacity of one of those moments
would burn us
if it lasted a moment more.
We are condemned
to kill time:
so we die,
little by little.
A garden is not a place.
Down a path of reddish sand,
we enter a drop of water,
drink green clarities from its center,
we climb
the spiral of hours
to the tip of the day,
descend
to the last burning of its ember.
Mumbling river,
the garden flows through the night.
I mark the changing of the seasons by these trees, but my absolute favourite time is when the bloom in the spring. The flowers never last very long because the first good gust of wind blows the petals off the trees and creates what my mom likes to call an impromptu wedding in our backyard. The other morning, a couple of days after I took this picture, I actually looked out the window and thought it was snowing because all of the petals were raining down. The weather is a bit gloomy right now, so I thought that sharing something simple and beautiful and summery was a good idea.
I love the opening of this poem. Octavio Paz writes truly stunning poems. The idea of gardens being loci for nostalgia is wonderful and enchanting. They are no longer places but time itself in some way. They capture moments and feelings and then unleash them on you when you return. I think any place is like that, imprinted by the past, imbued with memory. Objects, places hold history within themselves. Not just our personal memories either. I always feel as if locations and objects hold historical memories. Perhaps this is why old buildings or vintage objects are so fascinating. They hold countless stories. And perhaps this is also why sometimes it is nice to have something brand new, something that is blank, that has the room for you to create your own memories without becoming mixed up in those that came before you. I've never had a garden like that, but I can imagine one. It's really lovely to think about.
Mornings and I do not get along. So much so that when my alarm goes off my first coherent thoughts are usually something like "NO! I hate mornings. Eugh." Consequently I can be a bit of a bear in the mornings. Especially before I'm showered and dressed. People really shouldn't talk to me before this happens. After that I am usually slightly more pleasant, but cannot guarantee my coherence or actual presence in a conversation. This general morning grouchiness has really been called to my attention this week because I've started a couple new jobs and they require me to be up really early. The other unfortunate side effect is that by 2 in the afternoon I am yawning like mad. Exhaustion is only exacerbated by the fact that I can't have caffeine or sugar to give myself a bit of a boost. Lately I've been thinking that Canadians should adopt the custom of siesta. Just taking a break (and a nap) in the middle of the afternoon sounds awesome.
This photo is from the same art installation as this one. There were some really great pieces there.
You Must Believe in Spring
Jan Zwicky
Because it is the garden. What is left to us.
Because silence is not silence without sound
Because you have let the cat out, and then in, and then out,
and then in, and then out, and then in, and then
out, and then in, and then out, and then in,
enough.
Because otherwise their precision at the blue line would
mean nothing.
Because otherwise death would mean nothing.
Because the light says so,
Because a human being can gladly eat only so much cabbage.
Because the pockets of your overcoat need mending.
Because it's easy not to.
Because your sweaters smell.
Because Gregory of Nazianzen said geometry has no place in
mourning, by which he meant despair presumes too
much.
Because it ain't over 'til it's over. - Hank Aaron, Jackie
Robinson. Satchel Paige.
Because Kant was wrong, and Socrates, Descartes and all the
rest. Because it is the body thinking and Newt
Gingrich would like you not to.
Because I love you. Or you love someone. Because someone
is loved.
Because under the sun, everything is new.
Because the wet snow in the tress is clotted light.
Because in 1941 it took six cords of wood to get through a
winter in one room at Harvard and two-thirds
of Main used to be open country as a result.
Because sleeping is not death.
Because although an asshole was practising his Elvis Presley
imitation, full voice, Sunday morning, April 23rd
at Spectacle Lake Provincial Park, the winter wren
simply moved 200 yards down the trail.
Because the wren's voice is moss in sunlight, because it is
a stream in sunlight over stones.
Because Beethoven titled the sonata.
I mean: would Bill Evans and Frank Morgan lie to you?
Because even sorrow has a source.
For, though it cannot fly, the heart is an excellent clamberer.
I know this post is a little out of season since (fingers-crossed) summer seems to be underway in this part of the world. However, the lilac bush at my parents' house never blooms when it ought to. All of the other lilac bushes are blooming like mad, perfuming the air and displaying their frothy purple blooms, but not this one. It's still just barely budding. And it will patiently wait until the other bushes have faded. Only then will it burst forth in a jubilant celebration of a season that is long gone. There is something about this that delights me.
This poem by Jan Zwicky also delights me. This idea that the light demands a belief in spring resonates with me. Light is such an integral part of how I think of the seasons. It, more than the often wacky weather, dictates when the season has begun to change.
