June 26: Up at 5 and am down on the rocks by the shore to write these pages. Missed the redness of the sunrise and now there is a molten path leading through the pale sea to the pale orb. The horizon is a band of translucence, a cream color bounded by the palest of golden-hued blue and the greyed pink of sky. Ducks float by, but that light at the horizon and the gold-washed, pale blue of the ocean's surface are colors to breathe in, absorb.
On the other side of the cove, one house has chosen to build a seawall, a sturdy covering for their bit of land. Its angularity and smooth-stoned face are a marked contrast to the rough-hewn and ever-creased ledges and pebbled shingle on either side. Its owner has chosen to place this house slightly closer to the edge of the sea and built a garrisoned wall with a fence outlining its top. I imagine the heavy storm seas battering it — finding a minor crack in the mortar and slowly extracting the dirt behind until a piece of the mortared face collapses. I could see that wall being torn apart in a hurricane-driven tide and the fill behind it washed away and the proud, three-storied house sagging unfounded.
A hot big bumblebee zooms past, aiming for the next clump of rugosa roses. The scent of rugosas, no matter where I am, always evokes this Atlantic coast, where hedges and clumps abound along the roadways.
The difference between ducks and lobster buoys — ducks leave. A gull has perched on a large, upthrust rock, a statue to patience. The houses are gathering in the sunlight, not yet awake. And the cormorant has resettled its often-hidden body directly out from me. It curves its neck, its beak points down, and it dives.
Ten days after I arrive before I finally get out of bed to watch the sunrise. Tomorrow I will have film in my camera and work faster. I will also be sleeping in the east room again and will waken when the light begins. I have taken off my sharp glasses so that I will not be distracted from this page.
I wish to enter the heart's eyes and find what there is to see there. With the quiet roll and break — the susurus — of retreating tide providing background tones. Yesterday I finished, more or less, The Vein of Gold. Julia Cameron has some valid and expansive insights into creativity of the self. Just about at the end, she talks about media deprivation, reminding the reader of the week of not reading which is part of The Artist's Way. I decided yesterday afternoon that I would begin right then. I have been experiencing a feeling that I had read a lot in the past nine days — with the stack of books that I brought and that Pat brought. Last night I decided to work on the narrative time line and write it in a small journal book which I just had been given. (I have learned to receive what is given with a simple thank you, even when it doesn't seem to fill a need.)
A bevy of ducks and ducklings come bobbing along, heading east along the shore, swimming into the path of gold. A cormorant pops up on a lone rock. Soon the ducks circle the rock, and the cormorant spreads its wings, posturing its displeasure at such close company, looking for all the world like — well, like a priest spreading his cassock wings over his beneficants. (Is there such a word? Not according to spell-check.)
Later, after a post-foray retreat to sleep, I am writing on the shaded deck with a cool breeze blowing. I keep pausing and looking out at the wedge of sea I can see between two houses. The tide is definitely retreating because people are standing in the ocean and waves are breaking. Sound carries amazingly well as the shrieks of people getting doused with chilly water comes to me.
Discovered yesterday that a song sparrow can have at least four distinctive variations to his song, and this morning I had the illuminating thought that maybe that's why it is named 'song sparrow."
It is always at the beginning of this third page that I get logy on what to write. But, of course, I don't have to think about what to write because its just putting the pen down on the paper and writing one word and then another. And then another. And then another. And then another. Molly is reading me bits from Helen Nearing's Simple Food cookbook, which is less about cooking than not cooking…vegetarianism, animal cruelty, choice of not eating meat. The way of the wizard — now, where did that come from? (Is it cheating to hear someone else read bits and pieces?)
We watch a man next door hold a sign with the words "Summers Rest" up to a position on the eaves of the porch as an elderly man tells him that that is where to place it — that's where the old sign had been. How we are tied to the old ways of doing things; at times, the memory overrides all else — particularly the present.
How did the word "present" come to mean a "gift"…"now"…"here"?
The trouble with writing out here with the wind blowing is that the pages blow over my hand and cover the words, and then I look off to the sliver of sea and see the sand emerging from the water and more bodies in it and the chatter of a mockingbird making more noise than music and the man next door is running the vacuum cleaner and I am nearing the bottom of the page.
June 28: After supper last night, we all went down to the beach as the tide was beginning its race back out. I drew a seven-circuit labyrinth in the first pitch of wet sand, bending over with a rock to furrow the surface, and it came out great. The three of us walked it, and a woman came up and asked to walk it. So this morning, I'm going down to mark another on the sandbar after the tide has pulled out.
So, thinking about keeping the pen on the paper, sitting on the back deck in the shade of the house and the cool of the morning's wind. A faint cloud bank lies north and west. It is supposed to be cooler today — hope so. Hope the forecast hasn't changed from yesterday. Hope that I will continue to write words on the paper, trailing word after word after word….
With the song sparrow singing one of its variations — suddenly the Goldberg Variations popped into my head, replaced with the idea of Song Sparrow Variations. There's a gull sitting on a ridgepole of a nearby house. Gull sits on the telephone pole by the front of the house, gull sits on the chimney. One gull per house. The robin is singing his cheerful song.
The wind is from the north. And all shall go forth.
And where shall we find the lost ones
And what shall we see in the caverns
And to whom shall we give our gifts
And in the cracks between the worlds
Who is there to lead, to comfort
To show us the way
Ourselves, our other, our delight
Our wonder, the images of light and dark
June 29: Back from a two-mile walk with Pat and Molly. Got warmed up, all right. The sea at high tide is extremely calm. Gotta keep the pen moving across the paper. My hand swollen after the walk — all that blood flowing down the arm and having to fight its way back up. What to write?
I'm in a place that is the last day here, two weeks and no computer. In my fourth day of not reading. Am I getting any clearer in thought? Don't know. But after last week's deep dive in reading at least half a dozen books, it does feel good not to read. Although I do get a deck of cards and play solitaire and freecell on the dining table. The five us played rummy last night. Kristen, who has never played before, won. She kept going out first, leaving us with cards to deduct. And then we would run out of cards in the pile.
Now to keep the pen on the paper. Hard to do this morning. Hard to do. Keep writing. Mining the well of thought, mining the eye of observation, mining it all for quiet insights, insights, sightings.
I drew a labyrinth in the sandbar at low tide yesterday, and the woman who had walked the one the night before last was there and walked it. A couple of young girls walked it (running). Drew one last night after the high tide had dropped far enough to expose the wet sand. This drawing of impermanent labyrinths is a strangely satisfying endeavor, one that I could do in many places.
I could build one at Pat's and she could plant flowers in the boundaries, flower colors relating to the chakras. Pat was thinking about the weeds. Remembering the big one in Evergreen and how the plants were noticeably darker green than surrounding vegetation. Thinking of Marty Cain and her seeing the whorls of energy descending and ascending from the center of the labyrinth, the one we built with the big center at the Labyrinth Conference in 1999. She also didn't have the strict crossing in the entrance path. I will do one in paint on sheets first. That is what I have promised myself I would do and I haven't begun it yet. Decorate it with painted flowers in the chakras colors.
Actually went swimming in the ocean yesterday. Not any more bone-chilling than a cool pool, it was really nice. Hunger for the ocean is a real thing. Although I simply don't understand the folks that lay in the hot naked sun and bake their skin. Dermatologists see money sitting there, I'm sure. But here I am, nearly at the end of our idyll. I asked yesterday whether just doing this would begin to pall after a while. Yes. I think it would. I would need other focus, maybe having one's computer and a garden would make it doable. In other words, live here and not just visit.
June 30: June has fleeting feet, but I have spent it in a lazy way. Each day has been warmed by people about whom I care. Molly agreed with me that two weeks is long enough to not do much. She never painted once — there is a definite lack of passion for painting there, just as there is with me. Lack of passion = lack of paintings. So the idea that we are painters — where does that come from? That I have in the past painted some oil paintings that do have a good feel to them, that I like. And where does that take me?
As I was packing up shells yesterday, I started laying out a spiral with the iridescent ones being the center trail to the center of the spiral. It looks like it will work. Perhaps glued down with sprinkles of sand filling in gaps between pieces.
We are packing up this morning, getting ready to leave. I have broken my reading fast twice to read a newspaper article yesterday and another one this morning. But I have not sat and read through a whole paper and I haven't opened a book since Monday afternoon. So, in some ways my eyes have rested.
July 2: (Back in Westmoreland, New Hampshire) After several thunderstorms rolled through yesterday afternoon, the advancing line of the cold front, this morning's air is crisp and beautifully clear. Pat showed up at 7:30 to take us for a walk down the hill to the cornfield and around the field to the Connecticut River. The wind was briskly refreshing after the last two days of heat and humidity.
The elderberries are in bloom, great umbrels of white florets. I picked one and brought it back to grace the dining room table, where it yields a light fragrance as I write these words. The sky is that clear bright blue and the clouds small and white and speeding by. The breeze sweeps through the house for a while and chills it to 60 degrees, and we close the west windows.
The thought came to me yesterday that I would like to do some different work besides office-managing type work. I have had sufficient time learning and doing that chore. Do I want to go to college and study that which intrigues me? Molly has a copy of Deepak Chopra's How to Know God, and I began it last night and it zinged me out to the ethers of realities or, as he has renamed them, domains. Virtual domains, because virtual realities have become such an abused terms in computerized gaming.
I'm thinking of the course at Iliff on researching techniques that I saw in their catalog a couple of years ago…if I should dive into deep ecology at Naropa…or writing classes at wherever (after these long, meandering pages, perhaps you will say the latter).
Just what do I want to pursue? I listen.
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Letter to the Author: