One Letter at a Time

 

Changing the world, even one letter or two at a time. 

 

I get the idea while sitting in the garden at the medical clinic across the road from our scholarly press, considering dappled tree bark and lanky winter rosemary.  I’m in a sad and gripey frame of mind, and trying very hard to escape it.

  

Thinking of one who sidles in, unpleasantly, but changing him to one who made saddles, my gentle grandfather, working with leather in Flagstaff.

  

Thinking “I cannot bear . . .” but then, instead, “Oh yes I can, bear”—responding to the little black bear, oso negro, scented with juniper, which hung in my early childhood on the gin bottle from Juarez in the dictionary room, the treasury of words.

 

Brash becomes the softer brush; hiss becomes hush, or wish, or even listen (o list!).  Thrash becomes a thrush—a wood thrush or a hermit thrush, plump and with tawny legs, or even a blue whistling thrush, found in the Himalayas with the snow leopards and dancing prayer flags.  Grind becomes a jaunty grin, or rind—of melons or of oranges, tangerines.  And even gruel, the flavorless and nearly empty bowl of poor Oliver Twist, becomes the Grail, holy and sought after by whole armies of knights. 

 

And so it goes, changing. 

 

(from my Writing with Light blog, Jan. 13, 2015)

 

 

 

image:  Christie Cochrell, Treviso

Giving Way

 

The first picture I saw this morning was taken at Hovenweep, six prehistoric villages on the border of Colorado and Utah, and showed the “the moon giving way to the morning sun.” 

 

In my sleepy state, on the border of dreaming and waking, before my decaf Sumatra and warm croissant with olallieberry preserves, I started wondering about the idea of giving way—my dreamy morning hours giving way to rain and midday obligations, winter beginning to give way to spring, and everywhere, examples of this continuity which makes up life. 

 

The meaning of it, giving way, is ceding, passing the baton or the torch, letting the other have its turn. 

 

But beyond that, giving way is allowing passage, enabling a journey, leading to or even carrying. The stairs give way.  A train gives way, as does a horse, a mule descending the Pololu Valley, or a donkey climbing the steep rise of Santorini with its sheer white cliffs.  A wheelchair, graciously, gives way to those whose only way is that. 

 

And in a further sense of that, the spritual, it’s causing or inspiring a creative path.  Claude Monet wrote “I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.”  The flowers by their very nature gave way to Monet’s paintings of them, which in turn give way to the viewer’s pleasure, sharing the flowers. 

 

The meaning of that first moon and sun “giving way” is yielding, but that, too, has several sides.  Yielding as in letting someone else go ahead of you, as in losing yourself to temptation (both implying a kind of lessening of self, a ceding of one’s place in the landscape or moral world); but also as in producing—offering—yielding fruit or flowers or some other rich and generous bounty.  Giving of yourself to others, to the world, with natural and voluntary grace.  Not losing anything, but gaining everything. 

 

Finally, the giving way reminds me of the Navajo Blessing Way and Beauty Way, another way of healing and of finding harmony. 

 

(from my Writing with Light blog, Feb. 7, 2015)

 

 

image:  Hovenweep National Monument

Creator: NPS/Chris Wonderly 839447496169876 

Copyright: Public Domain

Writing Spaces: Reading

 

Reading, like tracing

fossils, ancient marine life

in white chalk cliffs,

remains or impressions

of thoughts and dreams

cast into immutable form.

Like stone maybe, but

always giving, carrying

forwards and back.

Fluent in voice and time.

 

 

image:  Blanche-Augustine Camus, woman reading

Grandmother's Hands

 

“Why does she have a grandmother’s hands?” a friend’s young daughter asked of me many years ago, hurtful in the unwitting way that young children can be. 

 

Sun damage I could have said; my having grown up in the high desert of New Mexico, holding the reins of palomino horses on rocky June trails, catching minnows in mountain streams.  My not painting my nails, maybe she meant—because they chip (except in Italy when I drank frothy steamed milk several times a day in earthy calcium-rich cappuccino) and break while planting blue lobelia, chopping garlic and onions for guacamole, playing Chopin nocturnes rather badly, stumbling on the notes.  Once playing jacks, gathering agates, figuring algebra on a chalkboard.  Washing dishes at dusk, feeling the grace of smooth-lipped bowls held in both hands, making them clean.  My never being able to get enough lotion to soak in, scented with lavender or almond, cherry blossom from the south of France or my favorite Bert’s Bees milk and honey, or discontinued sandalwood. 

 

But I love this hand I photographed in a garden in Saratoga, weathered and full of life.  I should be grateful to have hands as worn as this, a pilgrim’s hands, prayerful hands, practical hands, unpampered hands which gather marjoram and sage and put out water for the birds, which write on paper and computer keys always wherever in the world I am and that way talk to friends and gather stories and history and lives through thoughts and scoop up joy and gratitude with insatiable greed. 

 

“What do you do with this hand?” a massage therapist asked me one December, surprised that it was so tired and tight.  I was surprised in turn, thinking “well, live.”  What don’t I do with it?  "I am a writer," I told her.  It seemed so obvious. My hand is what I am. 

 

So in the end I couldn’t ask anything better than to have the hands of a grandmother, of my own grandmother and grandfather too, the hands which made Orange Pekoe tea and worked the leather of saddles, the hands that held me, showed me love.  The hands of strangers which stroke saffron on a forehead, which carve santos, which stitch up wounds, which offer shadowplay in firelight, read Braille, string pearls, polish a skate blade, plug a dike.  The hands in which a tarnished coin might lie, reading heads/tails, telling my own or someone else’s fortune, while the lines of my palm show the way. 

 

(reposted from Writing with Light, April 2015)

 

 

 

 

image:  Christie Cochrell, Hand, Villa Montalvo

 

Writing Spaces: Glastonbury Tor

 

image:  Christie Cochrell

Writing Spaces: July Jottings

 

image:  V.E. Jenkins

Among the Amazons

 

Another somewhat whimsical story of mine, exploring an eccentric family's stockpile of treasures and secrets, has been published in Rathala Review's Spring 2025 issue.

 

(And don't be fooled by what they say—"Christine" is really only me, Christie.)

 

A family of all women, when the story opens, which the main character, the history-loving sister, Ava, sees as a band of Amazons.

 

    We did have horses, of a kind—the little herd of faded carousel horses that lived out in the barn along with Beulah and Otis’s trunks and souvenirs and Dad’s old snare drum set and heaps of files from everyone (even our kindergarten art, and an “opera” I had begun at six for Sam, whom I adored, called “Tigger on the Tigris”). Also, from Dad, a life-size Sphinx, on wheels, a fiberglass palm tree, and a ruminative caravan of camels painted on a long canvas backdrop. A gypsy caravan, minus a wheel. An Eiffel Tower made of resin coated styrofoam. Some faux French Art Deco posters, bigger than me. Props he’d made and painted for one of the independent film studios in LA, long before computer days, which he’d brought north to Santa Clara County, the inland, midpeninsula reaches of the Santa Cruz Mountains, with his three motorbikes. One fatally twisted but not gotten rid of (why ever not?)—the one Aunt Talia had met her fate on, that inglorious September afternoon. 

         I was the keeper of the horses, like the heroines of Flika, or National Velvet, keeping them spic and span, lining them up just so, taking arty pictures of them for class projects—glass eyes, swept manes, gilded bridles, legs flying in a gallop. I wasn’t a real Amazon, I knew, only the horses and the archery kept me a kind of honorary member, rather disdained by the others, considered insignificant. 

 

When Ada, keeper of horses, becomes keeper of family secrets as well, things of significance happen.

 

 

image:  Antique Ilions Supreme Carousel Horse