Capturing Something Essential in the Floatiness
An Investigation of Un___s.
There is something big on my floor. Something unsmall.
Our studio tour is next month and I am not sure yet what I’ll show. When yesterday I went into the barn, I found a window where the wall I was planning to use was. How did that happen? Walter quickly cut a piece of plywood to fill the space for me. He is all problem solving and heart.
Now to fill it. I channeled my map making kid and my every year’s desire to share a land transformation story at the Five Acre Wood. But if you visit, you will not find a garden — there is no garden here. But I shall give to you a tiny window — nothing fancy, made from trash. And if you look through it, you will find magic, as do I.
Dear Katie —
It can be good, the bad timing. I shall scribble to you instead. So much wants out but the talking makes a hurried writer of me. You were in my dream again, another clanky old ski lift over a hilly park — this time in Philadelphia. I dropped something important from that great height. This morning I listened to eighty-three year old Joan Baez on On Being. She has a book of poems entitled, “When You See My Mother, Ask Her to Dance.” In the author’s note, she describes a book that is "filled with unschooled techniques, undisciplined phrasing, haphazard thoughts, and much channeling from sources residing within me and sources unknown.”
Yesterday, in my writing group, we talked about how adding un to something - rather than negate the thing, sets it free. It becomes a freedom for the unlearned, the ungardener, the unvoice, and invites the feelinged wanter to put marks into the world.
I am a feelinged wanter, and so are you.
That is poetry, I think. All of these years I said I didn’t understand it, weighed down by rules I didn’t know. Weren’t the first poets, the first anythings the same, without rules?
I’ve always been a small thinker. But many littles make a lot.
Here, a poem from this week:
My Dog
When it is warm inside,
Strong sun through closed windows, and
Pearl is on her flea market quilt,
I am transported to childhood,
To my warm wallpapered room,
Sunny yellow, green, orange
To a time before words Love,
Margaux
Things come together. They always do. Yedda is feathering her eggs in the nest in preparation for her outing with Toots.
Another little window. Another sunny spot on my map.
Nice drawing. Captured it! Completely.
so lovely