Re-Entry

Tonight's sunset in Columbia. I got home the night before last and as expected, met a mountain of backlogged work. I'm still wallowing in the afterglow of my time in New Mexico, followed by a week in Texas with my parents which included a side trip to the Hill Country where we stayed in a cabin at Canyon of the Eagles Lodge on Lake Buchanan and though the eagles are not due back until November we did get to see four moons of Jupiter at their observatory.

Along the way there and back we stopped in several little towns, where SUVs are pulled up in front of storefronts where horses once were tethered. Towns like Hico, Llano, Burnet and Marble Falls where we ate Mexican food, browsed antique shops and ordered iced lattes to combat the intense, dry heat. It's true: Texas is a whole nother country.





But here, tomorrow night, Eva Ellingsworth, a woman I met at the Glen, is performing in town before her return to Holland. And though airport security seized the one dangerous jar of Branston Pickle I had been able to locate in a year and was chuffed about bringing back to my husband, I do have a stack of great books I brought back with me, including Christine Casson's new book of poetry, "After the First World," another volume of B.H. Fairchild's poetry, "The Art of the Lathe," two of the three K. C. Cole books I discovered at the Atomic Museum in Albuquerque, and "The Forgotten Desert Mothers" by Laura Swan which I picked up at Christ of the Desert Monastery among others that I can't wait to dig into. So I'll stretch the glow out a bit as summer in Missouri takes a bow, the skies around here giving Santa Fe a wee bit of competition.

End of the Glen

So the Glen has ended and I've reluctantly said goodbye to friends of the last couple of years and this one, sad to pull my plug from the charge that a gathering of 200 artists, writers, musicians, thinkers and sojourners engenders. But I think my batteries are loaded as, tired as I am, I can't find sleep, my mind still whirring and buzzing with the stimulation of the stark and ravishing desert, with soulful conversations and explorations, and with the overabundance of beauty, created and uncreated, that fusion of art and religion and landscape that truly marks New Mexico as enchanted. As much as I'm done in by the wash of lush desert hues which shift by the hour, I'm struck wordless again and again at the eloquence of the humble, rough hewn art I stumble upon around every corner and bend in the road.

Look at the face of this figure I saw in a large, dusty, art yard, carved into a tree trunk by Max, an 85 yr. old local artist. See how he's incorporated the tree's natural lines and eddies to bring forth a face so human, so broken, so honest, I get weak in the knees.

New Mexico is where superlatives fail me, where I spend the week blithering like an idiot, trying and failing to articulate the reasons for all that so moves me here. I should know by now just to shut up.

Scenes from a week well lived:


This is the church that Georgia O'Keefe would have seen from her home across the street in the village of Abiquiu. She moved to this village from Ghost Ranch.




On the way to Christ of the Desert Monastery, after leaving the village of Abiquiu and then the highway, snaking slowly down a 13 mile rutted dirt road. The day was brutally hot and after we parked and hiked down the dusty road and around a bend, we looked up to see this humbly majestic monastery seemingly jutting from rockface, just as the bells began to toll. We entered the chapel and took our seats moments before the monks filed in and began chanting. We'd inadvertantly arrived just in time for their midday worship which was gorgeous beyond words. Huge windows above us exposed the rock formations behind the church and lit the sanctuary. It would be hard to find another 15 mins. more lovely than those.





These from the Santuario de Chimayo. We were not permitted to photograph inside the church this time. This is the gate to the courtyard and a sculpture hanging between restrooms.























The Tee House where I occasionally escaped to absorb the input and calm down.


























































The Hacienda Antigua, my after Glen oasis in Albuquerque. I'd planned a two day solitary stay to rest and regroup after the intensity of the week. After settling in and checking in with my family spread from England to Dallas, I headed to my car to find some dinner and was startled by a handsome man in the parking lot. Fortunately, that man was my husband. Which was the icing on the cake of a very sweet week.

Flipflop joy

I bought these flipflops 18 years ago, before tenting my way around the Southwest for most of a summer, rightly predicting I'd encounter every manner of showers except a clean ones. I've brought them with me to Santa Fe for the third time now as I attend the Glen Workshop, held on the lovely campus of St. John's College. You got it: dorm showers. But the trip here is in its way like that glorious summer of wanderlust--a sustained dose of wild beauty, although in more ways than open road and dramatic landscapes. In this gathering, I'm saturated daily with the beauty and fire of art and words and music and ideas and community, as well as a landscape that particularly ignites my soul. Had I belief in previous incarnations, I am certain I must have been a desert rat. I am, again, so happy to be here.



The Big Dipper is hanging outside my balcony of my dorm room and down below, the lights of Santa Fe flicker against a backdrop of rolling mountains. Cricket chirps and distant bursts of laughter float up from somewhere on campus. Tomorrow morning, after trying to wrestle sleep from an overstimulated brain and lumpy pillow, I'll return to my drawing workshop with renowned artist, Barry Moser, and trace the human form, miraculous in its form and functionality, and be grateful I was granted an opposable thumb. It would be much less appealing to have to draw with claws. And I don't think my flipflops would fit.

OMG!

The days leading up to my annual trek to the Glen Workshop in Santa Fe delivered an extra portion of OMG! moments: Monday’s all nighter in the E/R coincided with fearsomely violent storms, heralded by lightning bolts so bright and close it seemed our tiny car ferried the roving bullseye of an electrified cosmic dartboard. Though the flashes ushered us the entire way to the hospital in the wee hours of the night, the flood engendering downpour did not ensue until I’d deposited my husband with bleeding foot and our two daughters at the E/R entrance and gone to park the car. I was held hostage there by an irrational fear of death by barbeque until the knowledge that I had our insurance card in my bag and necessary stitching would likely be withheld until I coughed up proof of coverage finally propelled me, through vast sheets of water and death voltages, wet as unspun laundry, inside, where we spent a chilled and sleepless night. When we arrived home at 4:30 in the morning, after stops for meds and an Egg McMuffin for the hapless victim of the jagged stone left on the deck stairs while trying to rescue our kitten from prowling raccoons, none of us could sleep due to the crashing cacaphony that raged outside till late morning.

Fearing the lawn seats I’d secured weeks ago for the Jonas Brothers rain or shine concert in St. Louis would be rained out, I got online and found some same day seats available under cover, for twice what I’d paid for lawn seating, but who’s going to tell a 10 year old, who’d been dreaming intensely of this event for months, that mom did not care to sit in a downpour for 3 hours (the forecast that morning predicted a 50% chance of more rain at 6 pm) watching a tween band through waterspotted binoculars. I wouldn’t have done that for the Monkees. So we left at 4 pm, making one quick detour to St. Charles in hopes of grabbing some Branston Pickle and Twigletts from the British Store which had closed 30 mins. before we got there, and by foregoing dinner, arrived at the Verizon Theater promptly at 6 when the gates opened. And thus began a night I’ll never forget, not that I could anyway, what with the hearing loss I sustained.

Have you ever been in a car with five or six excited little girls? Have you ever noticed how shrill their little shrieks and shouts become? Multiply that by 10,000 and turn up the amps full blast, then sit back and try to relax for the next three hours. Bliss.
My daughter owes me dearly.


At one point I truly feared for our lives, this before the line-up began and after a mass sustained shriek erupted from the sea of preteens. Apparently, the JBs were signing autographs. We rushed with everyone else (my daughter in full fan mode, not to be deprived) to see and were caught in such a shove and crush of frenzied, mouth foaming girls that I thought we suffocate or our brains would forced out our ears. Fortunately, most of the aggressors were under 100 lbs.; had this been a soccer game in Europe, we’d have surely lost our lives.


You’ve heard of soccer dads? Meet JB moms...fascist women patrolling the crowds issuing threats of ticket confiscation to small un-armbanded girls should they dare to crash the “meet and greet.” How were we to know about armbands? Those moms were worse than the yellow shirted security detail who stood idly by the barricade fence watching the bone crushing, lung collapsing, sweat running spectacle. How were we to exit the horde when we could not move our feet? Those moms somehow yanked us out. I guess I should excuse their disdain and be grateful.

We arrived home in the wee hours, again, ears ringing and heads throbbing, one happy 10 yr. old’s dream come true.
That behind us, the rest of the week was its own crush of getting work finished, packing, shopping, etc. Anything but the chance to catch up on sleep. Running back to the St. Louis airport and dispersing family members to England, Louisana and New Mexico. Then reading the local paper at my parents’ home in Texas on Friday that the Jonas Brothers have reportedly bought a home in the neighborhood adjoining the one where my parents’ live. OMG!

Looks like it's going to be a good day

"British are asked to save their leftovers"

Full English, originally uploaded by staple diet.

"Evoking an era of World War II austerity, British families are being urged to cut food waste and use leftovers in a nationwide effort to fight sharply rising global food prices," reports the St Louis Dispatch.

Did they really have to ask?

Um, yes.

Eleven years ago I married a Brit and seeing as I was marrying someone from the Motherland, I took for granted we'd have no significant cultural clashes to overcome. Calling an elevator a "lift," the TV a "telly," saying TO-MAH-TOES instead of TO-MAY-TOS and deeming something stupid "schtoopid when we checked our "shedule" struck me as charming. Going to "Hospital" instead of the hospital. Putting on your "swimming costume" instead of your bathing suit, etc. etc. Finding the same exact breakfast placed before you every day wherever you are in England. Realizing my husband was not necessarily rude, he was English. Whew.

I've since come to love Branston pickle, Jaffa cakes, Yorkshire pudding and Twigletts but still don't get the Marmite, Spaghettios or baked beans topped with fried eggs on toast thing. When he first arrived on our shores, my husband blissfully consumed his first serving of ribs at a summer picnic, chasing it down with an entire bucket of coleslaw, though he still can barely tolerate Mexican food (and what could be more American than that!)

However, for the last twelve years, I have endured duress, persecution, derision and harassment at the end of every meal we've eaten out at a restaurant. The source of contention? Doggie bags. I bring home the two or three extra meals left on my plate.
Brits don't DO doggie bags and look askance at those who do. They throw away the heaps of food left on their plates at American restaurants without a single twinge for the children starving in the third world country of your conscience.

Once, when Wayne and I had traveled to England and were staying with his aunt who had prepared us a full on English roast dinner (all that time! all that effort! all those pounds of the monetary sort!) my eyes bugged out when, after clearing the dishes, I watched the roast, the peas, the cooked carrots, all the doings, slide in gravy trails down plates tipped toward the bin. When Wayne's uncle arrived home from his hospital shift a couple of hours later he had to make himself a lousy sandwich while the lovely roast cooled amidst the potato peels. I was beyond speechless, I was sputtering. This did not compute. My English in-laws were equally apalled by my riffraff insistence on carting home every last crust of bread.

But now the British government itself is urging its citizens to use leftovers! You can eat the roast beef for lunch tomorrow. Think of the time you'll save, the effort, the Euros! The next thing you know we'll see parliament throw off those powered wigs and lug stacks of smelly stryofoam boxes home from the chip shop.

"Nothing Occurs Here That Is Worthy of Remark"

In less than two weeks I'll be making my annual trek to The Glen Workshop in Santa Fe where, instead of taking my usual writing workshop, I'll be taking a drawing workshop with Barry Moser, hoping for some creative cross pollination. I've met some great folks in workshops over the last two summers, including poet Ned Balbo, whose work you can read online in the current issue of Unsplendid, including the poem "Nothing Occurs Here That Is Worthy of Remark" which is paired with the painting shown above. Ned shared work from this series of ekphrastics (poems that respond to works of art) last summer and I am pleased to see the fine job the journal did in featuring his Marco Polo series of poems generated from the enigmatic art of Nora Sturges. (I also highly recommend Ned's book Lives of the Sleepers, winner of the Ernest Sandeen Prize in Poetry.)

Will work for music

I have to thank Jenni for this tip (and some good music.) NoiseTrade will let you sample the music on any album they feature and then download the album for free if you'll do them the favor of forwarding the recommendation to three friends. Hopefully, you'll forward the music you think the three people you choose will enjoy so in the end it's a win win win situation. I'm enjoying Katie Herzig at the moment. Pass it on!

ArtRageous Fridays III

This is the third of the series of posters I designed for Columbia's quarterly artcrawl. The first poster appears here. The second poster appears here.One more in October will complete the set.

Wouldn't it be nice?

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

Home is not always where you come from.

Home is where you arrive.
....
And maybe you have to surrender something to find your way home; there is a world of other places you might be, including the place where you were born. You may need to lose a home to find one. Maybe it doesn't have to be a whole country you lose, but if it is, imagine how much deeper into you your sense of home, your newfound place, will sink. And part of what home feels like will always be the ache--that never goes--of exile from wherever it is that you are not and cannot now be again.
Home is a choice. But it's not you who makes it. You'll know you're home because it'll feel like you're the one who's been chosen.

~ an excerpt from "A Faster Kind of Sandstone" by Mark Tredinnick in Isotope

This past week marks the start of our third year in Missouri. Being here still feels new and strange, lacking the unconscious comfort of deep familiarity, the settling back with your feet up on the coffee table. The move here after 17 years in Texas served to make Texas feel like home though it never did as long as I lived there. So I've become convinced that as a product of a truly mobile society, the concept of home has become a fluid, elusive concept, perhaps determined only in hindsight, in the wake of pondering what one has left behind. And what one has taken with.

Folding 1000 Cranes

The Vox features an article about my friend Sonya Nicholson. She's an origami artist here in Columbia but her origami cranes fly everywhere. Click on the video link to hear Sonya explain the lovely idea behind folding 1000 cranes.

Unaccustomed Earth

I've just finished reading Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth and I'm majorly bummed. It's been 8 long years since the day I reluctantly turned the final page of Interpreter of Maladies, Lahiri's first book, utterly smitten with a collection of stories from someone I'd never heard of. I was convinced I'd discovered a great new voice from an unknown writer, having picked the volume up at random from a book table at Oxford University's bookstore while traveling in England. Turns out I was in a cast of thousands--that book, her first (!), won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000. Her next effort, a novel called The Namesake, was recently made into a film. The Namesake was okay but had that been all I'd known of Lahiri's writing I'm not sure I would have become an avid fan. With Unaccustomed Earth, however, Lahiri has returned to the short story form and she does not disappoint. It's even better than Interpreter of Maladies--and I can only groan to think how long it might be till I can get my hands on another volume of her stories.

Lahiri's stories deal with contemporary Indian-American families' challenges with assimilation and its resistance, which may sound less than compelling to those who deem this subject matter irrelevant to their own experience, except that Lahiri is such a deft and incisive navigator of cultural and familial nuance, her characters so vividly drawn, her psychological insights so cutting, you are swept away into a world so fully fleshed you feel you've become one of the characters walking around in her pages. Now that I've finished the book I feel like I've been sent home, the party over, and I want to knock on the door and ask if I can stay just a little bit longer, until the other guests have said goodnight.

At least someone is feeling creative

My brother forwarded me this:


MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

and check out this:

I think I'll become an accountant.

Things that go bust in my head

I have a massive technology headache. From my laptop to my dryer, I've been consigned to the third rung of technology hell. That's the rung where you race in infinite circles and get nowhere, one rung above emptying the ocean with a bucket. A leaky bucket. The loaner dryer (the only stackable set we can order here that fits our space is not in the country) that was finally delivered today does not work. Nor does the clothesline that broke from the outside wall last night. But who needs a clothesline when it rains EVERY day? If there was a smidgeon of room left in my head beyond completing urgent tasks which, now that I think of it, rival that ocean emptying manuever, something might go bump in there. As it is, a nickel couldn't drop.

Whew!

We moved from a city of 5 million to a town of 200, actually to outside of a town of 200, hoping to slow it down a bit. How is it then that I still find myself running around at 90 mph, trying desperately to capture and savor the present moments and hours ever retreating in my wake? Oh, but spring has come, or is coming. And I squeezed in a lovely visit from my parents over the weekend. These are some of the moments that went whirling by...

I bought some flats of flowers and herbs, forgetting it's not safe to plant before Mother's Day. Last year, I lost a whole heartbreaking round of beautiful blooms I'd planted and resolved to wait this year. Oops.

A trip to the St. Louis airport is a great excuse to stop in St. Charles for lunch and a trip to the luscious Rock, Paper, Scissors shop. Last December, Wayne wrapped my anniversary gifts in handmade paper from this shop and I've been dying to go there ever since. I can report it's the best paper shop I've seen and now I'm fantasizing about opening a paper shop of my own. How about a books/paper/coffee shop? I'd call it entry to heaven without requiring last rites.

When I heard that Jeremy Casella was going to perform in Columbia I knew the name rang a bell--I'd read about Jeremy on Jenni Simmons blog. We really enjoyed hearing/meeting him and now his songs have edged out Justin Timberlake on my ipod. Yes, I confess I bought a JT song I'd gotten hooked on in Jazzercise before I knew who sang it, proving I can still surprise my kids (and myself.)

On Sunday, we drove to Hannibal, Missouri, home of Mark Twain, in case you didn't know. Here is one of the only items, signs or otherwise, that wasn't named after Mark Twain, Samuel Clements, Tom, Becky, Huck or one of the other myriad places or peoples that populate his stories. I tried reading the first chapter of Tom Sawyer to the girls last night. I might as well have been speaking Scottish.



We had lunch at the Mark Twain Diner (I can safely recommend the strawberry shortcake, but thats about it) just a stone's throw from Tom Sawyer's House (and white picket fence) and around the corner from the Mark Twain Museum which housed a number of original Norman Rockwell illustrations of Tom Sawyer. Even if you are not a fan of Norman Rockwell's images, these paintings, exhibited beside their black and white studies, were stunning.



Back home Monday night after the return trip to STL, the dryer broke and my plants, still awaiting new homes, had frostbite. But the azaleas are in full bloom, the clothes on the line are infused with the scents of spring and tonight I attempted to resusitate any plants still semi conscious. We might have rescued the geraniums, rosemary and mint, but I think the tomatoes are goners.

Mug shot of the day

This old soul was spied crossing our lane today. It was clear who had been in the neighborhood longer and thus who had the right-of-way.

ArtRageous Fridays II

This is the second of the series of posters I designed for Columbia's quarterly artcrawl. The first poster appears here.

horses

horse dreams, originally uploaded by wizmo.

A few years ago I stumbled upon a poem that stopped me in my tracks. I found it online in the Missouri Review archive, though I cannot now remember how I ended up there. Tomorrow Jude Nutter will read here as the poetry winner of the MR's Jeffrey E. Smith Editors' Prize. And here is the poem that made me a fan:

Horses

Still, the horses are beautiful and their grace keeps me occupied.
—Linda Hogan

We pass them being wheedled
and cajoled around small corrals, a confetti
of spit across each wide breast and the sweat
between their legs worried up into foam.
Their hooves flash in the dirt like polished bells.
We pass them as they sleep, standing up,
among the dandelions and tasseled grasses
gone to seed. They enter our lives
like fragments of Eden: the place that's always been
our most difficult, elaborate dream; and once seen—
even from a freeway when you're doing sixty,
aware of your own peril—it's an effort of will
to take your eyes from a horse
in a field. Grace is like that. No other animal

occupies its skin so precisely, or walks forward
so carefully, as if pushing through great hauls
of dark water, chest deep in a stiff current.
I don't believe we are meant to think about death,

even on those evenings
when a thin mist rides on the fields and their hooves
waver beneath them like votive flames. A horse

becomes its own myth and religion: out from the dark
machinery of its body something better,
and more beautiful, is always about to begin;
and if you ever need proof that it's good
to have a physical body, touching
a horse in this life is the closest you will get to it.
To catch grace off guard: a lone horse
dozing in a field with the long reach of its neck
presented to the world, its thick
bottom lip fallen away from the fence of its teeth
and there, beguiling as god's empty pocket,
pale skin of the inner mouth. Before you die look
into the eyes of a horse at least once
and discover how each is an immense, empty room
lit by a single candle. The emptiness of waiting.
Because if the gods ever come down to walk among us,
this is where they'll live. And so when a horse,
seeing nothing about us it can recognize, lowers
its soft, deep mouth to the grass, and when that grass,
appearing wet in the sunlight, rises to greet it,
as if the lips of the dead were puckered skyward
for its kiss, it should be no surprise. How can we not
love an animal that spends so much of its life
with its mouth so close to the dirt. That they take,
with such tenderness, the mints
and the carrots we offer—as if the world

were ours to give—is the miracle; that they let us
slip on the sky-blue halter and lead them
through the cool of the evening.

When it rains

This morning brought yet another wet, cold, not-spring-yet day in Columbia. After my jazzercise class I met Wayne at the coffee shop where he jumped in the car out of the rain and presented me with an exquisite white rose. What a way to perk up a day. Later I found a small gift wrapped on my desk...a tin of bird stamps by Cavelli. I think he's gotten me every bird item they make (and that is not a few) but this item had just come out, at least where we are. So tonight I couldn't resist trying out a few stamps and ended up making a new batch of cards.