Happiness Is

Today is one of those perfect days. The sun is out and it isn’t super hot like it has been so the dark clouds around us might yield rain, something we haven’t had in a week or so. My water bill and my vegetables will be most appreciative. Whenever I’m finished working in the yard, I always reward myself with flower arrangements. It feels completely decadent to have a house full of cut flowers. My perennial garden is amazing and we are blessed with monarch butterflies as well as honeybees. There is a working farm nearby and I wonder if they are keeping bees which would rock to find local honey. A few weeks ago, we were discussing the lovely alchemy of keeping bees and wouldn’t it be an interesting thing to do. Deadly in her case because she’s very allergic, but in theory it would be so very Zen. Handling bees you must absolutely be in the moment. I have a hard time being in the moment so tasks and jobs feel mysterious and sacred to me. Bees and butterflies are two signs of a healthy garden. I’m not sure I could stand the bliss if I had frogs, too. Poor frogs are dying off all over the world. We did see huge frogs at Angkor Wat in the reflecting pool and heard them at night and in the early morning at our hotel outside of the city.

Tending the garden, yard and flowers never fails to make me smile; even when it’s hot dry and dusty. This year’s beds aren’t as lush and varied as last year’s when we had a wet and temperate summer. But I am a little concerned about the front flower bed, everything bloomed way too early and is now dormant. I’m wrestling with setting more things out, annuals and such. I do have zinnias (the most cheerful flower, according to Oldest Friend) which will bloom in a week or so but otherwise the terraced bed looks a little woebegone and sad. Even the 4 O’Clocks are being stubborn and refusing to grow and bloom. Much to be joyful about today despite my worries.

My step-mother’s granddaughter (my--what--step-niece?) is an amazing artist and keeps a lovely blog, today she listed pictures of things that make her happy. This being a perfect day it was easy to find things that make me happy. Here are eleven (I like prime numbers) as they occurred to me.


Summer days when it’s not blazing hot, dry and windy so the back porch is “Command Central”


My flowers

The Girl is making chicken and polenta for dinner tonight and C from next door is coming over, maybe with her new beau who isn’t terribly handsome but he adores her and thinks she is the most amazing woman on the planet.

My Oil d’Provence (an infusion of my own herbs d’Provence in olive oil) was a huge success.

Tending the vegetable garden and worrying over the delicate tomato plants which were set out a little late and on a very hot day. Finding big sweet carrots, sweet peas, three habanera peppers, four cucumber blossoms and the golden beets which will be ready any day now. I’m boiling them and serving them on their greens cold with a pungent blue cheese and pine nuts. I. Can’t. Wait. I have fantasized about this beet salad for a year.

Getting to spend the whole day with TG.

Honey bees.

Butterflies.

The dog hasn’t turned over the trash can or escaped from the backyard today.

Wally let me take a picture of him.

When Good-bye Means Hello

ADD girl has three separate pieces started for this week’s blog. Fortunately, the other two will keep because they aren’t going to seem any less current in a week or three from today and y’all will never know next weeks idea didn’t spring forth from my forehead the second I sat at the computer. (Oh don’t I wish!) I’m on day three of three off and I’ve kept myself busy with projects in the drafty, dark basement I ironically refer to--when I’m feeling expansive--”the studio”. We celebrated my birthday in fine style at my favorite drinking hole. Nothing like starting a dreaded birthday in a whimsically decorated room sipping a breakfast martini with two of your very favorite people on the planet.

I finished organizing all the lace, trims, linens and fabrics I have been collecting or inherited over the years this past week, too. I refurbished a few tee shirts, sweaters and made a dress this week, too. I’m not such a great seamstress, very slow and can’t get it perfect enough before frustration sets in but this week, I swear I was channeling my mom; a talented seamstress and designer. I was doing things I didn’t know I had forgotten how to do. It was very cool and Zen.

For about a minute.

So for the last month I've been working on repurposing clothing, using bits and pieces of antique textiles on reclaimed/used clothing. I thought I would love it. I thought I would just love love love designing the clothing, doing the handwork, piecing them together. The Girl thought she would just love love love the grunt work at the sewing machine.

Um no.

And that’s ok.

It felt like a chore except for that minute when I fixed a waistband the majority of the time I was discouraged or bored or both.

But this is the first time I have abandoned a project and didn't feel like a failure or that I was quitting because I was too lazy to finish what I started. Quite to the contrary. I feel liberated in the knowledge that I'm really not meant to design clothing from scratch.

Tis the week for beginning new things or putting to rest old things. A Happiness Project was launched by one of my new Facebook friends (love this woman. Love. Her. Sister of a guy I went to high school with. He was cute and wild and sort of dangerous back then. Apple doesn’t fall too far from that tree or so it seems.) Another friend is meeting with a group of architects and designers to discuss the feasibility of starting a career in design in this economy (I have one word for her: Slim) Finally, I know I have yammered about this to death but my father is getting married! I can’t wait to get to know our new family. Everyone has been so warm and welcoming, it’s grace at work. Besides this I have a great excuse to go to Texas Hill Country as many times as they can stand me.

I'm still putting together an Etsy store (if I'm satisfied with this spring's work, I'll open in July and the few pieces of clothing we did will be there. I have a feeling the store is going to be a mish-mash of all sorts of things I like to do. My biggest fear is I will end up on regretsy.

Today is the first day in a few I’ve been really happy--at the bottom of my soul happy--in about a week. Growing older was weighing on me; my exhaustion with nursing is at a critical point; and my son’s frustration with joblessness and boredom is weighing on me. Apparently, it’s so hard on him he can’t bring himself to clean his room or empty the dishwasher when asked…but that’s another blog, isn’t it? And OH. MY. GOD. his utter lack of sound judgment has me closer to running away than my job! The good news (?) I’m not alone in this and know more mother’s with kids like this than I care to think about with shutter over the future of the planet. His underdeveloped cerebral cortex is making me wish for a lobotomy or running away some place no one think to look for me like Vegas or Pittsburgh.

But isn’t it wonderful I know what makes me happy? Playing with words, ideas, paper, glue, paint, and little bits of stuff makes me happy. Cooking, nagging, and taking care of sick people: not so much.

This made me really happy today:

The Discipline of Joy
3/10/2010
Joy's a choice. Joy's a discipline. Misery's easy. Sometimes, you don't feel like you can handle the burden of joy, so you slouch and frump and sigh and feel exhausted. Joy can be a real pain,like doing elevated push-ups on your TRX system in the basement. Right now, the joy doesn't want to ignite. I'm feeling the pressure of writing against the schedule of outside things. Inside vs. outside. I have to rush back to school today--my writing day--to sit in a PhD oral defense. Tomorrow, I have to teach, though I can get in some writing after. But Friday, I rush away to Tucson
Festival of Books. Love Tucson, love my friends there, love the festival, and I
love fancy hotel weekends with Cinderella. But...Teresita...Tomas...deadlines...work. I can't get it done. So my decision
today is to embrace the discipline of Joy. Capital J. Because I'm feeling a li'l
beat. Luis A. Urrea


It’s a tough job but someone’s got to do it this burden of joy.

Find some joy. Like me, you might have to look in the spaces between the words or the space between the beat of your heart but it’s there. I promise.

"the dimension of stillness"

Ezra Pound/1916 photo by Alvin Langdon Coburn

THE GARDEN

Like a skein of loose silk blown against a wall
She walks by the railing of a path in Kensington Gardens,
And she is dying piece-meal
of a sort of emotional anemia.
And round about there is a rabble
Of the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor.
They shall inherit the earth.
In her is the end of breeding.
Her boredom is exquisite and excessive.
She would like some one to speak to her,
And is almost afraid that I
will commit that indiscretion.
Ezra Pound (1916)


I love poetry and whenever I discover a “new” poem I get a bit obsessed by it. This is my current obsession, likely because my theme this winter seems to be all about becoming a crone. A crone in the post modern sense of the word. Not the hooked nose-brewing up poison for unsuspecting maidens-sense of it.

“In her is the end of breeding”

When I read this poem the first time a week or so ago, my first conclusion was firmly rooted in an old school feminist lit criticism: Pound saw women who can’t breed as useless. Middle-aged women are useless, better off invisible…blah…blah…ageism…blah (Let’s all raise a fist in solidarity. . .)

After I finished my self inflicted eyeroll, I reread the poem and took a lighter view of it, one actually more in keeping to Pound’s sensibilities. In 1916 he was writing imagist pieces and finding inspiration in the Pre-Raphaelites. With this in mind, she is the symbol of a Goddess too perfect to breed. A bit more sympathetic but a stretch: “like trying to cross the rim of the Grand Canyon on a suspension bridge made of dental floss” (my favorite literature professor wrote that in the margin of a particularly terrible paper I wrote promoting some harebrained deconstructionist screed.. It made me laugh out loud and still does)

My final and favorite interpretation is a literal one: Pound observed a beautiful and genteel young woman walking through the park and their eyes met. She improperly held him in her. As he was about to speak to her; she suddenly turned away, raising her nose, sniffing at the idea he would dare speak to her in public. My interpretation is heavily influenced by all the romance novels I’ve read. Very simplistic and almost crosses into the realm of “precious”. I manage to back away from the preciousness by insisting on the feminist reading: By virtue of her sex and gender, this lonely woman is “dying” as a result of her independent and private leanings which are in opposition to the expectations placed upon her by virtue of her class. She was further a symbol of how society was changing and how women were changing. Big shoes for a little poem to fill.

I’m actually not a big fan of Pound. His Cantos string together beautiful and memorable phrases--like the title of this blog from Cantos XLIX--but I don‘t think I ever fully understood them. I remember attempting to understand the Cantos ions ago when I returned to school. It’s a big mess of a poem and some feel it was never completed. He draws on imagists, troubadours, economics, politics, his bitterness about the futility of war. Granted it’s very long but he tries to do everything in this poem and it makes my head hurt. Pound was also a vocal about his anti-Semitism and spewed his opinions on Italian radio during WW II. Once, I was chided by a Pound lover (see the professor from above) for failing to separate the artist’ politics from the art. At the end of his life, he expressed great regret for his political views during the war. Having just learned this a few years ago, I relaxed my knee jerk reaction of: “Ack!! It’s a poem by Pound, so it will be dangerous and hateful political ravings couched in weird images and nonsense! “ Now my reaction is: “Ack!! It’s Pound, I won’t get it!“ I’m relieved I didn’t get the Pound Brain Freeze when I stumbled on "The Garden".

I wish I were one of these people who reads a poem and immediately understand what the poet is trying to say. Most of the time I can’t interpret poetry without the aid of a PhD telling me what they think it means. Poems must be verrrryyyy simple and straightforward for me to grasp their meaning. Or they must be abstract and the art is simply the way the words are arranged and sound together. I can do that. I can suspend my hamster brain for a few minutes and just enjoy words and the images evoked for the sake of art. My wise and well-educated Oldest Friend told me she thinks unintelligible poems aren’t necessarily good poems. Of course I agree with her because it bruises my delicate ego when I can’t interpret a poem.

All of my feminist mumbo jumbo aside, I have imagined interpreting this poem through another artistic medium by setting up a picture: Huge piece of brightly colored sari silk blowing against a dirty graffiti covered wall. I think it would be interesting if the graffiti said: "Her boredom is exquisite and excessive" Maybe in Italian as a tribute to Pound‘s years in Italy.

I do know I never want to feel "exquisite boredom" especially if it is anything like exquisite pain. I wonder if Wally would be marked down for "poor usage" in his composition class if he called boredom exquisite?

Sweet poetry: the literal meanings of word are suspended for the sake of art.