Journaling: from the Lake Pond, August 29, 2006
I know now why I am so drawn to picture jasper. It is the color of pondbank stones, of the gravelbars in Ozark creekbeds. If I could string this pond, I would use picture jasper and nephrite jade, would add onyx and bloodstone and a little peridot. Perhaps some brecciated jasper, too, for the red clay earth, iolite and blue lace agate for the heavens mixed today with dark clouds and bright patches of clear sky. The waters themselves ripple-pleated by the wind? Something greenish grey or greyish green with pyrite flecking across its surface. The woods were all moss agate and silver moonstone.
I was full of thoughts to write on the walk here. Now I arrive and find the thinking was enough. Sometimes lining one's interior rooms with precious things means not bringing them out and spreading them over the lawn.
The air is cool today, breezy. I wrapped in a throw, puttering around the house this morning. The first hickory nuts have fallen in the woods. One small tree flamed scarlet against the deeper greens and forest greys to the side of the path. Small golden leaves scattered from another as I stepped into the hidden meadow. Not until the sun blazed from behind a cloud did I realize my arms had goosebumps, so subltly had they risen. Daddy-long-legs spiders are daily brushed down from the ceilings in the house and transported outside.
I want to leave something beautiful behind. Perhaps not great or amazing, but something small and lovely, something that glows softly like light caught in fog.
Alchemy. Lead to gold. Science or art? Art, I believe. One well worth pursuing. It does strike me that to turn lead to gold, though, one has to begin with lead.
Yesterday I had a long conversation with B. She's got some topics she wants to pursue in writing but finds herself putting them off because of the heavy emotional price she knows she'll have to pay in order to write well about them. It takes a great deal of emotional and spiritual energy to write well about some things, to write what you know needs to be said in the manner in which you need to say it. Lead is heavy. When one works with it, one becomes fatigued.
6 comments:
Wonderful imagery. Thank you, dear friend -- you made my day, my week, my semester -- the phone call and this lovely reminder. Still not writing, but will have to soon or lose my grip on reality altogether.
At least classes are going well -- but then they provide another distraction by not driving me to the writing to escape them! It will come.
Love you --
Beth
Your blog posts seem to come less frequent these days. (sigh) I suppose quality is better than quantity.
Your language is so profound that each post is a masterful piece of art that always beckons me back.
Beth--Go ahead and lose your grip. Reality is overrated, anyway. :)
Kristin--Thank you very much. Most sincerely.
Michael--Thank you for the encouragement. Have been making some internal adjustments, and perhaps the blogging will pick up a bit in the future. Am enjoying Stick Poet in the meantime: it has actually given me two topics I really want to blog about but need to think through more thoroughly. (Or maybe I just need to "get the lead out.")
This from she who need not walk into a classroom of college freshmen . . . They already think I've lost my grip; we're reading Dillard's The Writing Life. :)
Beth
I concur with the rest -- beautiful lovely sensuous writing, Cindy. Thanks for the peek back into the woods (hickory nuts) of home.
Teri
Teri--They're daily growing more beautiful right now, these woods, and the cooler weather makes it easier to enjoy them. May you have an excellent long woodswalk next time you're home.
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