Journeys by Water

 

Later this week (after a journey by air) I'll take a harbor cruise on Lake Superior, a place I've never been before, though I've just learned that the lake water flows eventually and most circuitously into the St. Lawrence River, which I have seen and noted in Quebec, and that its name in Ojibwe is gitchi-gami, flowing in its turn into Longfellow's poem "The Song of Hiawatha" which I came across in school ages ago.

The flow of words takes me (circuitously too) back into letters and journals, which find me staying in "a green-roofed attic high above the St. Lawrence River in Vieux-Québec," seeing "the blue copper roofs above the St. Lawrence River in old Quebec," and reading The Cleaner of Chartres, "which sent me off on a quest after porc aux pruneaux—which morphed into chicken with prune and mustard sauce, which I'm making for tonight's dinner.  Next time it will be lamb tagine with prunes and apricots.  I first found prunes as an ingredient in meat dishes and pies in old Quebec City, as I was walking around checking menus, high above the St. Lawrence River."

In June 2012 I wrote "I do love being on the water.  One of my favorite ways of exploring a new place is to take a boat ride around it—whether an architecture river cruise in Chicago, a ferry to Tiburon or Sausalito with views of the Golden Gate Bridge and the diminished San Francisco skyline, a cruise on the slow green river below Durham Cathedral, a ferry from Boston down to Cape Cod, a kayak trip down the irrigation ditch in Kohala, a ride around the San Juan Islands or to Victoria, BC, a hydrofoil up Lago di Como or from Crete to Santorini, a rowboat on Wisconsin’s Bone Lake, or a paddlewheeler down the Mississippi from New Orleans."

 

And back in August 2009, just looking out at boats, "It’s good to be back in Chicago, one of my favorite big-cities-away-from-home (along with Boston’s Back Bay, midtown Manhattan, and Washington, DC up near the cathedral and zoo).  Despite the early hour, it’s pleasant to walk to work along the green river, under a lofty drawbridge, with architecture tour boats moored quietly along the opposite bank, impressive buildings rising all around.  To see the reflection of sky and clouds in a new hotel, on my way to the Corner Bakery for decaf espresso and croissants.  Then later in the day, sprung from the windowless, timeless exhibit hall, it’s reviving to see the play of fireboats and water taxis on their journeys to and from the lake, to sit with sandwich and notebook watching the wakes erasing as they go and the contemplative sparkle of sun.  And when the night comes on again the enchantment of lights reflected, multiplied, and with them unarticulated yearnings for things past or out of reach, the far places in me I long for and am always already leaving again."

 

And finally, further back and much farther away, sometime in the late 1980s, I noted the details of a journey by water among many in Greece, this from Santorini:  "There is room for only one boat to dock at the volcano, so the three or four that came after just tied up to the first and we disembarked by being handed across all the boats in turn—a bridge of boats.  After climbing we sailed around to the other side of the New Burned Island and went swimming off the boat, in thermal waters.  There was a small white church in the cove, and above it a cave with an outhouse in it overrun with goats."

 

All this especially luring, probably, because my birthplace was landlocked, and water so scarce there. Boat journeys came to seem the stuff of fairy tales.

 

 

image:  Henry Holiday, Sappho and Phaon

Ashmolean Museum, photo by Christie Cochrell

 

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