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 |  A journal of impressions, memories and thoughts. |
| This journal’s goal is not to chronicle the vagaries of daily life, but to record those moments when the greater passions of existence touch the mundane moments of life. As a child, I was inspired by the Romantic poets. I read their journals, and I found in them not mere records of activities but instead deeper musings on existence and on the world around us. |
| It is one of those perfect mornings, crystal, clear, chilly. I traced my way from my car to the building at 7 this morning, my footsteps echoing in the still air. For a moment, there was no traffic, no air conditioning, just the hush of the Florida winter. My breath puffed in the air in front of my face, curling out into tendrils as it dispersed into the silence. It had been a rough night; I had struggled for most of the night with a difficult decision, and sleep was elusive. But stepping out of the metal shell of the car, there was a sense of peace, of liberation. I traced my way across the familiar route: mailboxes, campus map, rose bushes huddled in the cold air, and then a sound cut across the silence. I looked behind me, unsure where the noise had come from in the deserted morning, and a flash of movement caught my eye. Above me, hanging against the pale dome of the sky was the dark silhouette of one of our two resident kestrel hawks, her wings beating as she winged her way across the periwinkle dome above me in search of breakfast. I stood there, shivering, watching her move, beauty in motion. The sky over the live oaks was just beginning to shift from mauve and into blue and the last stars of the night before were still visible, paling in the brightening glow of the sun. The light seemed to cling around the kestrel, casting her into deeper shadow as she moved away from me, winging her way across the bowl of sky. Closing my eyes, I breathed in the cold morning air, savoring the moment. I turned and walked up the stairs and into my office, dreading the workday, but knowing that I would survive, dwelling in that single moment of freedom and beauty. |
| I have always envied artists, those gifted with making something of almost supernatural beauty. From the time I was a child, I was drawn to them. Some of my happiest memories are the times spent in the presence of that miraculous flow of beauty from someone’s pencil or their keyboard. I can sit for hours, watching someone draw or paint, barely breathing because I know that I am in the presence of something not quite of this world. I love to lie beneath a piano, letting the wash of sound overpower me in the dusty shadows and transport me to a world of wonder and safety. There is something amazing in that creation, a spiritual drug, if you will, that is utterly intoxicating. In the Bible, the first Creator is, of course God. The next are a pair of artists, the men inspired to create the Ark of the Covenant. According to scripture, they are directly inspired by God, touched by something beyond any human experience. That touch may have been millennia ago, but its implications ripple down through history. True artists are always a little other, not because being different is artistic, but because they have touched something that is so great that it changes them merely by the contact. That artistry, the ability to be a conduit for a power beyond comprehension is a magnificent gift, and a gift given only to a precious few. But it is not the only gift given. I know that I will never play music or sing it; four years of piano lessons as a child produced only a profound dislike of my piano teacher. I will never draw or paint. Yet I too have a gift; I too can touch the light of creation, for I can appreciate the beauty given. Back in Stratford, I was able to see Schaeffer’s Amadeus. It changed my life in many subtle ways. I empathized with Salieri’s pain, and yet I learned from it. I learned that in hating what he saw as his mediocrity, in obsessing over his inability to create the dazzling beauty that he saw in the work of Mozart, Salieri crushed his true gift. Salieri was given the gift of appreciation. Of all those who listened to the work of genius, only Salieri truly heard it. Only his soul ached with the beauty, with the inexpressible wonder and emotion of the work. And yet that gift was not what he wanted, and he scorned it. That gift is mine. No matter how I try or how hard I strive to twist the words to my will, there is no way to express the beauty of a beautiful piece of music, beautifully played. No words can express the swell of emotion when a poem or painting says exactly what we need to hear, its images, coupled with the well of imagination, playing out on the mind’s eye. I yearn for beauty, because I can appreciate it. It touches me, pulling me out of the crowd while others hurry by. It makes me weep while others pass unmoved. When I dare to allow it, it sweeps me away. Even in my darkest moments in college, days when I was bent on self destruction, I remember sneaking into the balcony of the chapel, huddling in the shadows so that I would not be noticed, stealing beauty as I listened to rehearsals for upcoming concerts. For those moments, I was not alone and miserable; I was caught up, flying on the wings of Mozart’s Requiem or peering through the frames at Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. I think that passion is the thing that drew me into teaching. I am aghast at the cultural illiteracy of the adult students at the college where I work. They do not see the wonder or the beauty. For most of them, art is an annoyance rather than a pleasure. My burden is to draw back the curtains of superficiality and show them what lies beneath, to sensitize them to the wonder and let them catch a glimmer of the light of creation that lies just beneath the surface of any true art. I do not know how to express to them the great truth that not all of us are born to be artists, but so many of us are capable of appreciating, of fulfilling the great purpose of art. Every artist strives to communicate, but he must have a willing audience to communicate with. My goal, my passion is to make my students hear, to let the music of creation roll over them and open the eyes of their soul. It is a lonely zeal; even most of my friends are easily bored by my outpourings and plans for illustrating the ache within me, but it is an obsession, and I cannot walk away. Perhaps the bar is set too high, and yet as I square my shoulders and face another semester, I must have faith. And, of course, when all else fails, I put on my headphones, cue up Mozart and sail free. |
| There is still magic in our world. We miss it, caught up and swept along in the linear stream of time in which we organize our existence. So busy caught up in the unyielding march from then to now to tomorrow, we fail to look at the gaps in the mesh of existence, the tiny spaces between the concrete realities where the wonder slips into our world, keeping it a place in which it is worth living. Those tiny spaces, those moments, house all the magic we can imagine, compacted, as befits magic, into an impossibly small space. It is up to us to reach beyond the riptide of reality and seize those moments, the tiny building blocks of existence, to savor them, wringing from them every last bit of wonder, and to realize the magic that we already have, the magic that makes up our being. Perhaps that is easiest in moments of art and of epiphany, those moments that carry us out of ourselves into a place that is usually lost in the mists of memory and childhood. Closing my eyes, I can trace a thousand of those moments in memory: sitting on the steps of Versailles, listening to the hum of the tourists and hearing the echoes of silk and smelling the scent of powder; feeling the press of souls in Notre Dame at twilight; feeling the floor of the stadium bounce beneath my feet as the entire crowd moved with the music at a concert. But that magic is not just in those places, those once-in-a-lifetime moments of epiphany. It is within every response to art, every moment when we let ourselves go, giving ourselves over into the arms of unrestrained anticipation and wonder. I touched that magic today at the theater. My husband and I went to see The Chronicles of Narnia. It was the earliest showing – 10:05 a.m. – and the film was in one of the smaller screens nearer the back of the theatre. We got there early, as is our wont, and settled in, popcorn and smuggled candy bars in hand. The theatre was nothing special – industrial blue-grey walls, standard squeaky-springed theater seating, and the musty stale-popcorn smell inherent in every movie theatre in existence. The pre-show was mundane; the previews ranged from interesting to abysmal, and the people in the row behind us kept kicking the seats. And then the lights dimmed, and the curtains at the side of the screen rolled back. And there, for one shimmering moment, the magic was tangible. I know that the darkness lasted only a few seconds, the blink of an eye as the screen began to fill with the smoky blues of the production company logo and the music began to lift me into a new place. But that moment was otherworldly, a universe of magic packed into a split second. For that moment represented the opening of the door, the cracking of the borders between what is and what might be that hold us so tightly within the walls of existence. I knew what was coming – the glorious gestamkunstwerk of cinematic art, marrying sound and image to tell a story that carries us into the world of possibility. All art thins the borders between magic and reality; that explains, in part, my passion for the arts. But more than the art itself, I love the possibility, the moment when the walls of reality flicker and fade. It is the spiritual equivalent of that second when the car pauses at the top of the roller coaster hill, the breathless moment before the rush of sound and adrenaline. It is the moment when life holds its breath, and one has a chance to realize what is about to happen. In that moment, the moment before it all begins, the wonder swells within us, reminding us that we are alive, and, indeed what it means to be alive. Therein lies an infinity of magic – if only we have the sense to hold our breath for that instant, let go of our burdens and our fears and simply be. |
| Words are strange little things, lines that we invest with emotion, meaning, and relevance. They are concrete, definite, denotative, reliable in the meanings that they convey, and yet equally vague, relying upon the receiver to endow them with context, relevance, and import. We take them for granted, using them in ways that communicate effectively, yet tell a great deal about us as individuals. Take, for example, a tiny word. Writing my own mini-biography here, I let the thoughts spill to the page, taking their cramped, black forms, and then re-reading the paragraph, a single word stood out to me as inherently different from the descriptors and writings of my friends. I instinctively described myself as a woman whereas they described themselves as girls. How odd. The anomaly stayed with me, my brain teasing at the semantic puzzle in the moments when it had a free moment, asking what the difference meant; was I in some way defective, old? I am still unsure of the answer, but after two weeks of searching, I do have some insight: I am different. In my early and formative years, I spent most of my playtime wandering around the house arrayed in a variety of bedsheets, slips, and scarves, being tortured by imaginary evil queens and being rescued by a myriad of handsome, romantic princes who always thought that I was more lovely than any other maiden. Yet the fact that princesses consistently had lovely names like Aurora, Beatrice, and Ariana broke my heart. My name was ugly, and I would never be a heroine because of it. And then, at long last, I found a heroine in a book called Peter Pan who shared my name, and I clung to that book as if it were the last piece of driftwood in a heaving sea. I read it over and over, I played out a thousand embellishments to its plot, and I fell in love with its characters. For better or worse, however, J. M. Barrie’s book is not the children’s book promoters usually treat it as. It is a book which can be read to children, but which is saturated with the satire and themes of an elder soul. In the story, only one of the children really understands the other side of growing up, and, in consequence, understands the importance of forever remaining a child in a far less direct manner. That one character is the heroine. Perhaps I drew my concept of girlhood and womanhood from the pages of Peter Pan. Perhaps I drew it from the bevy of old and older women who comprised my social group. Regardless, I find myself as an adult in a very different position from most of my friends. I have no desire to be a girl in most contexts. To me, a girl is powerless, playful, innocent. When I read the word, I see a young teenager on the cusp of adulthood, her dress white, her hair honey colored, its waves caught away from her face in broad satin ribbons. Or I see the child I once was, dressed in torn jeans my father’s plaid flannel shirts, climbing trees and sitting for hours, chiseling the rocks around my parents’ pool until they were smooth. Those images are indeed beautiful to me, but they are not how I see myself. Instead, I instinctively see myself as a woman, a bit taller and more curvaceous, an instinctive caretaker, where a girl has the luxury and the shortcoming of thinking only of herself. Like J. M. Barrie’s hero, I aspire to the elegance and mystery that only a woman holds. I would hope that I have still that kiss in the corner of my mouth which I have the power to give only to one man. In honesty, I admit that I must describe myself as a woman because I long for the power that appellation will always convey in my mind, and I willingly bear the burden that the word carries in exchange. Of course, no woman exists without sharing space with the girl she once was. I still find peace in climbing trees and in the darkness of the tree shadows, free from human contact and the responsibilities it inherently brings. I still tell myself outlandish stories in which I feature as the heroine over a soapy sink of dishes, and I still dream of piloting a space ship while I steer my car to work. But a girl? No, not me, by choice. I prefer to be a woman who can indulge in her girlhood, not a girl who must occasionally be a woman. |
| I moved to Florida from the North. I had always been a country girl; always alone, I had my choice of playing in the house with the straight lines of the manmade world around me or in the wild wonder of the natural world. The seven acres of my young childhood was luxury; the hundreds of acres we moved to in my middle school/ junior high years was paradise. I was no naturalist, but I knew the sounds of that world, its rhythms, its soul. Even in college, that connection remained. When the world was too much with me and the darkness closed in, running to the trees, the earth, the soul of the tiny wild spaces between the straight lines, gave me peace. But while I was there, fighting my own demons and seeking to find a light in the darkness, my parents moved away from the acreage of my childhood, the green silences and the wind whispering in the birch leaves. They moved to Florida. I knew Florida; we had visited there once or twice a year throughout my childhood. I loved the sound of the surf, the breeze in my hair, the sand moving beneath my feet. I loved the soul of the borderline, the space where land and sea met. But it wasn’t my home; it wasn’t the same feeling, the same place I knew so well back in Pennsylvania. I had no desire to stay there, on the strand between earth and sea; I wanted to stay with the sweetly dangerous soul of the deciduous forest of Pennsylvania. And then I visited my parents. Instead of the sound of the surf and the wind, the place of transition, I found that they had moved to a completely foreign landscape. They had moved to central Florida, to a place filled with straggling trees, jungle undergrowth, and oversized insects. I hated it. Graduating from college, I had little choice. Broken and broke, I was essentially forced to go with my parents, to the land of heat and harshness, away from the green spaces and soft breezes of home. I thought that I had come to a place with no soul. Central Florida was so inhospitable that it seemed as though it was consciously trying to be so. Even the grass was sharp, coarse, cruel on the feet. Every plant seemed to sport thorns or poison, and every creature that inhabited the landscape bit, scratched, or poisoned anyone who came in contact with it. The pine trees, instead of rising in graceful cones, straggled upwards, reaching skeletal branches to the blue bowl of the sky. And where man had touched the landscape, he had imposed his own straight lines on it with a vengeance. The county where my parents had taken up residence was divided between the rich and the poor. Where the poor resided, they let nature take its course, occasionally daring to mow the harsh grass down or sprinkle it with toys or the scraps of life. Where the rich lived, they created circles of mulch, planted straight-trunked palm trees that stretched to the sky, and perforated the grass with smooth arcs of concrete for walkways and driveways. I had every intention of staying just long enough to find my feet and save a little money, and then head straight back home, to the land that held my childhood. But it didn’t work out that way. The vagrancies of life stepped in. A job presented itself; my parents’ health remained at issue; I got involved in local theatre. And somewhere, in the round of life, I sat still. Back Home, I had discovered that sitting still created magic. A place that seemed utterly devoid of life was never truly dead. If you took the time to sit utterly still, alone with your thoughts, your self, listening to the rustle of the wind in the trees, life sprang up all around you. Birdsongs wound their way in counterpoint to the wind and the groan of the swaying branches. Tiny creatures hopped through the leaf litter, ladybugs crawled and bees hummed. Like magic, life was there, you simply had to look for it. By accident or purpose, I did the same thing in Florida: I sat still. And, just like at home, the world came alive around me. Certainly, it was not Pennsylvania, not the sweet sylvan spirit of my home, the soul I had grown up knowing, that had become so much a part of me. But there was beauty in the landscape around me, breathtaking beauty. Florida had a soul, a mighty soul, broad, deep, magnificent and tumultuous. Its soul was primal, old, unfamiliar and uncomfortable with the trappings of humanity and the noise of modernity. Unlike the soul of my home that hid in the quiet glades, slipping in golden green sunshine between the houses and through the waving grasses, the soul of this place in Florida spurned the touch of man, withdrawing from it or fighting against it. I live here now, and I have no desire to leave. I still miss the beauty of my home, the sweet smell of dark earth, and the sound of deer skittering through the fall leaves. But I just miss it, I do not pine for it. I have found a new home here, and I know its soul. Florida is an old man with a flowing beard of Spanish moss, lightening in his eyes and the sound of the hurricane in his voice. There are no words for the beauty of the spreading branches of the live oak, reaching its shade across seemingly impossible stretches of grass, its branches as mighty as the tree trunks of my home. There are no words for the sight of storm clouds piled up so high that they look unreal, blinking like Christmas lights as the lightning flickers within them, casting their contours into eerie relief. There are no words for the blue bowl of the sky that reaches from horizon to horizon, lapis lazuli at its heart and fading to stonewashed-denim white where it touches the land. Florida is a place different, a place that most people see as ugly and harsh, a place to impose human order on, a place where landscaping is an “Improvement.” Florida isn’t an easy place, but it is a place of mighty beauty, a place that holds onto its identity in the face of an unbelievable onslaught of humanity. It is a place that does not ask to be understood, but rewards those who sit still. It is a place of wonder, of ancient magic, and of soul. |
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