The Power of No

The Power of No

“Open your eyes! Open your eyes!

This exhortation has been bellowed at me by every partner I’ve ever had on a ride at the fair as I sat folded in on myself like a clam, eyes shut, white-knuckled hands gripping the cold metal bar that held me in place. Knowing full well that I deplore thrill rides, I have nonetheless allowed myself to be coerced into their little metal death cars more times than I care to admit. School friends talked me into The Scrambler once, with disastrous results that involved the loss of my dinner behind one of the livestock display tents. Several years later, I was talked onto Space Mountain at Disneyland only to have it break down midway through the excursion, leaving me hanging like a side of beef, half upside down in total darkness.

The Songwriter himself has been successful in using his considerable powers of suggestion to place me squarely onto some of these rides, once sending me plummeting thirteen stories in the all too appropriately named Tower Of Terror. As my stomach relocated itself somewhere near the vicinity of my collar bone I made a decision.

Never again.

I didn’t say anything about it. I just calmly stood in line for the next loopdeloop with a smile on my face. But when the roller coaster cars came roaring into the station and everyone climbed aboard, I simply stepped into, and right back out the other side of, my car. I turned to see the startled face of The Songwriter as he flew off into oblivion, seated next to a tow-headed six year old boy. Sighing a peaceful sigh, I purchased a cool drink, took a book out of my straw bag, and sat down under a palm tree to await his return. Thus ended my thrill seeking career.

The power of “no” is a marvelously liberating one, but one most of us seldom employ. We trot off to lunches we’d rather not attend. We join committees we loathe. Now of course we all must do things we’d rather not, perhaps every day of our lives. There are dentist appointments and tax returns. We all have to muck out the stable sometimes. But I speak here of those extracurricular activities that we are no more bound to participate in than we are to fly. Why do we say yes, when we want to say no? I was once invited to a cutlery party by a neighbour. She was a very nice woman but try as I might I simply could not warm to the idea of sitting in a room full of ladies sipping wine and buying knives. So I called her up and told her I could not make it. She asked me why, a question I was unprepared for. So I told her the truth.

“To be perfectly honest”, I said, “it just isn’t something I care to do.”

To my surprise she laughed a hearty laugh and praised me no end for my candor saying, “Good for you! If only I’d been so brave, I wouldn’t be having this damn thing at my house. I just didn’t know how to say no!”

It was my uncle who got me on my first ferris wheel when I was just a toddler. As the car we were in rose higher and higher in the air, swaying malevolently all the while, I became more and more terrified until I was too scared to scream. Then I noticed my father on the ground far below. His expression was grim and highly determined as he faced down the operator of the ride. I could read his lips as they formed the words,

“Get Her Off This Thing. Now”.

Ignoring the line of riders waiting to board, the ride slowly, slowly, lowered until my little feet could touch ground and I ran like a bullet to Daddy.

“You don’t ever have to do that again”, he said.

Such a valuable lesson.

It just took me awhile to learn.

Anniversary

And did you get what

you wanted from this life, even so?

I did.

And what did you want?

To call myself beloved, to feel myself

beloved on the earth.

by Raymond Carver

We had no contingency plans for the future. We calculated no risk.

We leapt into a cloudless sky with grins on our faces.

We married for love.

It wasn't intentional, but we married on the birthday of both Lewis Carroll and Wolfgang Mozart, and it seems those two chaps took charge of our days, blessing us with music and wild imagination, a harmony of heart and mind that has gifted us with laughter and a deep, deep joy.

Today is our anniversary.

The sun is shining and the air is crisp.

We are off to the woods with Edward and Apple for a long, long walk.

Holding hands.

Dreaming

Dreaming

People tend to oversleep in my guest room. The ceiling is painted like a night sky and the tapestry curtains, when closed, shut out even the most gregarious moon. If one chooses to leave the Moroccan star light on up above, its soft blue lightbulb casts evocative shadows perfectly tailored for dreaming. Consequently, I keep a dream journal on the bedside table and have been delighted to read the entries written by those guests whose dreams have taken them across extraordinary thresholds while asleep in that room.

We are extravagant dreamers in this house. We soar, wingless, through palettes of technicolour in reveries guaranteed to confound even the most sagacious of interpreters. Think I’m kidding? For a while, The Songwriter experienced a recurring dream of a traveling evangelist with the strange and wonderful ability to turn himself into a gorilla rug at the close of each tent meeting.

He once dreamed of a cow that transformed into a monster when the moon turned full. Don’t laugh, now. He turned that particular dream into a song called “I’m A Werecow” that remains an annual favourite on the Dr. Demento Halloween radio show.

As for myself, I tend to be a fairly baroque dreamer. My somnolent travels are lavishly decorated with all the lilies gilded and Elizabethan music floating in through glassless windows. For years I have had a recurring dream of a neighborhood covered over by gargantuan, animated trees. The streets are now as familiar to me as my own. They spiral and twist past houses I recognize completely, though I’ve never seen them in my waking hours. And there is one house, large, with windows like the sightless eyes of the blind. It sits behind gates of wrought iron, mysterious and unsettling to my mood, looming silently in the shadows of a late afternoon, unwilling or unable to allow me entry. Strange, no?

My dreams have been easy to interpret of late. Populated with exploding sweet potatoes and suitcases full of water, they tell me I am feeling overwhelmed and behind. I hear their admonishments to slow down and breathe deeply, and I intend to heed them as best as I can. How wonderful that they communicate in such entertaining ways.

How about you?

Any good dreams lately?

Do share.

Silence

Silence

It is said that the brilliant writer, Edith Wharton, wrote in bed. With her Pekinese on the pillow beside her, she would lie back on the pillows, writing in longhand and throwing the finished pages on the floor beside her for a secretary to gather up and type. Marcel Proust, another famously supine author, had the walls of his bedroom covered in cork and reclined with a fur lined coat draped over his legs as he wrote his beautiful words.

Thackeray wrote in hotel rooms.

Thomas Mann, in a chair by the sea.

J. K. Rowling prefers a noisy cafe and Victor Hugo wrote in the nude.

For all my pecadillos, and I have them to be sure, I have found that I really only require one ingredient for optimum concentration when I’m writing, but it’s a vital one. Quiet. Blissful, peaceful, almost Franciscan, quiet. This past week, my lack of, and need for, a quiet state became apparent and a good friend tossed me the keys to her wonderful house in the marshes of South Carolina, telling me to make my way there in haste. Without being told twice, I threw a few old sweaters into a bag, grabbed my laptop, a book or two, my knitting, and fled. Upon reaching the low country, I stopped off at the market for yogurt, celery, Pellegrino and fruit and arrived at my sanctuary just as dark pulled her curtain across the tops of the pines.

And I noticed it as soon as I stepped cross the threshold.

Blessed silence.

Calling my friend to let her know I had arrived, she proceeded to give me instructions on operating the space age electronic system, but I only heard a few words.

Television, docking station.... iPod... Tony Bennett.

I had not the heart to tell her, but I had no intention of turning the thing on at all. Music dancing through the house would perhaps be perfect for a summertime visit, with the windows and doors thrown open and me with nothing to do, no thoughts to think. But this trip was to be different. This trip, I needed to work and to work I needed silence.

It’s been said by those wiser than me that true silence is a sound unto itself. If that’s true, then it is, I’m afraid, a sound we in the modern age rarely, if ever, hear. So akin as it is to solitude, many of us find true silence unsettling and avoid its company whenever possible, preferring instead to fill our hours with a bombilation of sound so profuse it is often difficult to distinguish any individual component. But just as I occasionally thirst for solitude, I also crave silence at times and this week was to be a quiet one, with only Nature’s calming voice in my ears.

I opened the double doors onto the capacious screened porch, and heard a dusky breeze rifling through the palmettos outside, like the rapid turning of the pages in a book. A waterfall of rain hit the roof one morning, a soundtrack so pure it served to focus my thoughts rather than distract them.

The pops and creaks of a settling house when the temperature drops at midnight.

The cry of a hawk sailing over the trees.

The splash of an alligator as it slides down the bank into the pond cross the road.

Hot water running in the bath.

Bubbles in a glass by my chair.

One tiny blossom cut from the newly blooming tea olive as it lost its grip on the branch in the vase and fell like a cottonball to the table beside me.

These were the sounds I began to notice as the week slipped by, inspiring sounds that seem to bestow, rather than steal, creative thought. And my mind, so cluttered and crowded, befuddled and loud when I arrived, was shiny and sharp on the long drive back home. No longer were my thoughts and ideas undisciplined, each one talking over the other in rowdy bids for my attention. Now they politely sat in my head, orderly and accommodating, waiting for my consideration.

Dear Virginia Woolf once advised that a woman requires “money and a room of her own” in order to write. I would respectfully add a wee bit of silence to that equation.

After this week, I highly recommend it.

“True silence is the rest of the mind.

It is to the spirit what sleep is to the body, nourishment and refreshment.”

William Penn

1644 - 1718

•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

A marvelous book on living with silence was written a couple of years ago by Sara Maitland, entitled Book of Silence. Included in her experiences with silence, she describes a forty day solitary stay on The Isle of Skye that I find both courageous and, occasionally, utterly tempting.

A Quieter Palette Now

A Quieter Palette Now

The colours of Christmas have gone. The house, so recently lavished with shades of scarlet and new penny copper, an iridescence not unlike song that enabled the rooms to lift up their voices like angels, now yields to a quieter palette.

Debussy and Satie have replaced Mozart and Handel.

Icy blues and greys are drifting down like snow.

The calm colours slowly fall and I feel their presence like a comforting hand on my shoulder.

I take deep breaths.

I sigh.

Despite the happy occurrence of my wedding anniversary at the end of the month, January has always tried to lure me into a melancholy mood. Over the years I have learned to outwit its blue intentions by treating the month as a holiday all its own, sweetly special in spite of itself, and to that end....

I fill the house with white flowers.

Hydrangeas, freesia, lily and rose.

My candles are scented with coffee and fir.

I indulge in pedicures and massages.

I see good movies and read good books.

I build roaring fires in the fireplace and curl up with Edward to re-watch Waking Ned Devine, The Secret of Roan Inish and Babette’s Feast.

From the watery depths of lime scented bubble baths I plan the vegetable garden and window boxes of Spring.

I read poetry.

I write.

In other words, I try, as a friend of mine declared as his resolution for the new year, to be “good to myself”.

I highly recommend the practice.

The icy blues and greys of January, though perhaps bleak colours to some, are now, to me, colours of serenity and repose which provide a restful background for a gathering in of myself - my thoughts, my plans, my wishes for the year. I now jealously crave this month and find that just like the hyacinth bulbs now asleep in the garden, I need the tranquil time it offers to be my best self throughout the rest of the year.

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If perhaps you have found your spirits a bit sluggish since the departure of the holiday season, here are some colours of January to make you smile.

1. The Return of Downton Abbey

Sunday night!

I cannot wait!

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2. Owl Cake

I’m making this cake this week for a little friend who’s a bit under the weather.

I think it will make him smile, don’t you?

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3. Winter Yarn Wreath

And I’m making this to make myself smile.

I’m adding a wee bit of lavender to mine.

Read how to make it HERE.

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4. Mohawk Hat

No you're right, I’d never wear this.

But you gotta love it.

Find it HERE.

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5. Hugo

I highly recommend this magical movie.

The perfect antidote to a cynical world, Hugo is sublime.

And sublimely beautiful.

Especially in 3-D.

Also, The Descendants was wonderful.

And I’m counting the days till The Iron Lady!

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6. London Shower Curtain.

I love the city of London in winter.

Even on a shower curtain.

Love this.

Find it HERE

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7. Gretel’s Polar Bears

A lot of you know Gretel Parker, Cotswold toy-maker extraordinaire.

Everything she creates is magical, each creature seems imbued with a wee bit of seriousness that I just find irresistible.

Her polar bears are my favourite.

They remind me, of course, of Edward.

Visit her HERE.

And best wishes for your January!

The Glimpse of a Promise

The Glimpse of a Promise

They flood my television screen as the hour nears midnight. Variegated hives of revelers swarming the streets of iconic cities - arms pumping the air, faces split open in joyous grins. No one is immune to the palpable excitement that builds as the numbers fall - ten, nine, eight - into a mad frenzy now keeping time to the fireworks popping outside my own window. It is a universal excitement that almost takes form - swelling out, stretching up, reaching back, branching forward - sprouting hope and desire that flower almost before our eyes into goals and ambition; a great rolling tide of optimism that gathers us all up and leads us, singing, into a new year.

Here, we share a quiet kiss.

A dog’s head gets a tousle.

Thus, we pass another waypost on our journey through time.

We turn a corner.

We start off anew.

Prone to contemplation, I am sitting by the window in thought when I hear my name called. The Songwriter has accompanied Edward and Apple on their bedtime ramble out in the back garden and I am being summoned to join them. I wrap a shawl round my shoulders and head outside to the dark.
“Look up”, he says, smiling.

And I do, into a sky of navy blue, speckled over with winking stars.

“Yes, it’s lovely”, I say.

“Keep looking”, comes his reply.

And then I see it.

Skimming across the canvas of night like the spark from a magic wand, a hope made manifest, a visible dream encircling the stars.

A shooting star.

“I saw one, and now you’ve seen one too. Good omens, I should think”.

We wait a while longer, but no more flash above us.

Just two.

Just for us.

We reach down and pat the dogs sitting silently at our feet.

One white, one black. Both dear.

We four follow each other back inside to the warmth, knowing whatever this untested year has up its sleeve we may hold fast to the glimpse of a promise that soared through the sky on its very first night.

Happy New Year indeed.

The Gracious Time

The Gracious Time

Some say that ever ‘gainst that season comes

Wherein our Saviour’s birth is celebrated,

The bird of dawning singeth all night long:

And then, they say, no spirit date stir abroad;

The nights are wholesome; then no planets strike,

No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm,

So hallow’d and so gracious is the time.

William Shakespeare

The presents have all been delivered. They sit under the sparkling trees of our friends and family, waiting to be unwrapped in the cool light of Christmas dawn. Wine is mulling on the stove and carols are softly playing through the cottage. Edward and Apple, tummies as full as their hearts, lay at our feet, breathing in the fragrance of fir trees, star anise, and orange, and no doubt planning what to say when midnight strikes, affording them their once a year gift of magical speech.

Thus begins the gracious time - an unhurried time of peaceful reflection.

A time to celebrate all the quiet joys; my favourite week of the year. If you chance to think of Edward and me during this week of endings and beginnings, think of stacks of books waiting to be read, long walks taken in the the cold afternoon air, soup simmering on the stove.

And please know how much I appreciate each and every one of my readers. Your letters and comments make my world a richer place and I am grateful for your friendship, each and every one of you.

As we enter this special season, I thought you all might enjoy a glimpse into the House, and the Garden, of Edward at Christmastime.

Edward and I wish all of you a most Happy Christmas!

Do They Even Need A Christmas?

Do They Even Need A Christmas?

Even though the night is clear, and sown with more stars than normally allowed this close to one of man’s more colossal achievements of a city, still, I cannot see it. I stand in the back garden staring up at fistfuls of shimmering diamonds casually tossed over the dark velvet cloak of a sky, looking for another blue ball with swirls of icing white - a sister, a twin, of my own.

But I am disappointed.

Well, I didn’t really expect to find it.

Too far away, after all.

But still.

I had been sitting in the center of Christmas, midst a swirling flurry of red and green - a bit of baking flour on my cheek, a snippet of ribbon stuck to my sleeve - when I first heard the news. Another planet had been found. This one a mirror image of our own, where water flowed and life could presumably flourish.

Information such as this has a profound effect on a dreamer.

It ensnared my thought for days.

So very, very far away .........

do other blue eyes watch the sky, eyes just like my own?

Do other lips sing carols?

Other hands hold other hands?

Do they even need a Christmas?

Is it necessary to remind them not to lie, to hate, to kill?

Would we have to explain war, or illness, or fear?

Would they look at us in horror, or too well recognize our state?

Or was the apple never eaten?

Did they never fall from grace?

The possibilities are amaranthine for this unknown kin wandering round their own blue planet. It floodlights the mind to imagine. I wrap my scarf a bit tighter round my neck as I leave the speckled darkness of the garden, climbing the back stairs with Edward close at my heels. He never worries about such things, I know. Contentment weaves a cocoon around him and he shares it liberally with me. Just sitting beside his quiet soul provides a balm to my own and I am grateful for his sweet example.

But still, I can’t help but look up over my shoulder as I enter the warmth of the house.

So far, far away...

It is always summer, never winter?

Do they even need a Christmas?

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You can read more about this newly discovered planet,

found in what scientists call the Goldilocks Zone (I love that), HERE.

Santa

Santa

He was the mysterious figure in red that sat in the shadows of Christmas. Though I’d never seen him face to face, never hid behind the living room door to watch in amazement as his black booted feet descended from the netherworld of chimney darkness to land like raven feathers on the hearth, still I believed without question in his solid reality. He knew what I wanted for Christmas, always. I didn’t need to write him a letter. I didn’t need to share my requests with my parents, something that for some reason I never quite understood, tended to cause them a bit of consternation.

Why did they need to know what I wanted?

Santa knew.

Each year we would make the annual pilgrimage to visit the department store Santas, but being blessed with an imagination that was liberally sprinkled with a healthy dose of suspicion, no one could convince me those fellows were real. There were far too many of them for one thing. And it was a rare occurrence when even one of those chaps remotely resembled the genuine article. Too baby-faced and whiskerless, with beards that tied behind their ears. Or too bombastic and patronizing, lacking even the remotest twinkle in the eye that the real Santa Claus would most certainly have. Oh I still stood shoulder to shoulder with other children my age, as we wound our way through the sugar plum forests and candy cane villages of the toy departments in local stores, waiting my turn to relate to these red-suited impostors the things I most wanted for Christmas. It was a ritual not without amusement and I participated in the festivities quite willingly. But I knew, yes I did, that the actual Santa could only be seen in the silver light of Christmas Eve.

So every year, I would endeavour to stay awake and catch the old elf at his work. I would leave out the cookies and milk for his refreshment and toddle off to bed as usual, never hinting at my plans for a sleepless night.

Snuggled under blankets, eyes wide and heart thumping, I would lie awake in the darkness, my little ears tuned for the sound of sleigh bells, staring, unblinking, at the vertical crack of my bedroom door.

The longer I lay there the more terrified I’d become.

What would I say to him when we met?

Would he catch a glimpse of me and instantaneously evaporate into mist, leaving me stunned and present-less?

Or would he pack me off to the North Pole where I would become a toymaking elf, always wearing green, never to return?

Big thoughts for a little girl.

As the night grew frosty and still as the grave, I would strain to hear the hoof beats of reindeer from up above on my roof, my little body rigid with the increasing terror of my vigil.

Waiting.

Listening.

Listening.

Waiting.

And then - how suddenly it always seemed- the pale pink light of a winter dawn would nudge me awake. Awake to Christmas morn! And I would run, slipperless, down the hallway to the living room door and throw it open wide. There would be the Christmas tree shining and bright, almost laughing as it presided over a room full of presents.

The cookies were eaten, yes there were the crumbs!

The milk was drained from the glass!

Later on Christmas Day, when I was sitting amongst my new books and dolls, feeling richer than Croesus, it would hit me. I’d missed him again. Drat. Well, there was always next year, I’d say to myself. Always another chance.

But next year came and all the years after that, and still, ever tricksy, he eluded me.

But perhaps..... just perhaps....with Edward’s help....this year...

One never knows.

Now, I ask you.

Do you blame me for wishing myself far, far away

from this obviously spurious department store Santa?

The Aunt

The Aunt

It was a winter wedding, the very best kind, and I was attending alone because The Songwriter was out of town. Ushered into the splendid reception hall, I spied her, sitting beside my uncle at the round flower-filled table in the middle of the room. There was my seat, I could see it empty and waiting, beside her. This particular aunt had always been a bit of a mystery to me - a mystery still unsolved, for I rarely saw her. Straight-backed and starchy, she seemed to wear her propriety like a well-earned badge of honour on a cloak of unwavering religiousity that appeared, at least to me, to preclude any type of whimsy or fun. But this was a wedding reception, I told myself. Surely she’d be a bit more relaxed in this festive setting.

I squared my velvet-suited shoulders and headed her way.

“Hello, Aunt J”, I said, giving her a hug and sitting down.

We exchanged a few pleasantries about the beauty of the wedding and I picked up the golden-edged menu that lay by my plate.

“Ooh, pink champagne”, I exclaimed.

“We Don’t Drink”, came the instantaneous reply, delivered like an edict from on high, stern and autocratic, each word capitalized and underlined in invisible red.

I decided to have a bit of fun.

“You don’t?”, I asked, in what I hoped was a tone of pure innocence. “Oh, but you should! Now let’s see, you’d probably not like sherry or port. Too strong for your palate if you’re just starting out. Although those can be incredibly delicious on a cold winter’s night. But now, pink champagne! I just know you’d love that! You simply must try some when it’s served!”

Silence.

I could tell by her look of surprise that she thought I had missed her point entirely. It was not simply that she’d never gotten around to having a drink, for Pete’s sake. It was that she did not approve of the practice. How could she make this clear to me?

She began to elaborate her position, just as I noticed the tuxedoed band in the corner, beginning to tune up.

“How wonderful!”, I said with a grin. “There’s going to be dancing!”

“Your uncle and I Do Not Dance”, she sputtered, her face colouring with emotion.

“Oh, but you should!”, I said with a smile, feeling ever so evil but enjoying myself far too much to care. “It doesn’t matter whether you’re good or not, everybody’s just having fun. And I know you’d both love it. What a handsome figure you’d cut on the dance floor! And it’s such excellent exercise. You must try it tonight. No arguments!”

I batted my eyes in her direction and noticed to my great surprise - barely visible, but there nonetheless - an infinitesimal smile beginning to play around the corners of her pursed lips. Apparently, somewhere, deep down deep in her corseted soul, a bit of fun still lurked. She was on to me. And then, my soul, there it was. A grin. A genuine grin. From that moment on we chatted about everything, becoming fast friends before the evening wore down.

We stayed in touch after that wedding, exchanging Christmas cards and visits. She and my uncle even drove miles to hear The Songwriter in concert, my uncle leading the standing ovation at the close of the show.

These days it seems there are chasms that yawn between so many of us. We look across at one another, unsure of the best way to construct a passable, plausible bridge. Far too often I fear we simply retreat, preferring to remain in our more familiar climate where we’re comfortably surrounded by those who applaud our views and beliefs.

I could have easily stiffened at the implied judgment of my aunt that evening we were seated together at the wedding reception. Chilled by her provincial opinions , I could have chosen to maintain a polite, perfunctory silence and the night would have passed by pleasantly enough, I suppose. Instead, as is so often the case, a wee bit of humour was all that was needed to weaken her established defenses and allow us to forge a friendship in the few years remaining before she passed away.

I am grateful I made the effort.

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I thought I'd better clarify.

The above photograph is certainly not my aunt.

It's Mamie Eisenhower.

However, the countenance is strikingly similar.