July 14th

 Today is John's birthday. I posted some photos on Facebook for the boys and then I tried not to dwell on loss. I just can't do that anymore. I was a bit ill yesterday and watched Jane Austen films. Today I worked some and now have called it quits. Too early but it's all right. I have worked hard the last ten days. I moved my office and then I went through all my writing papers and trashed many of them. I felt trapped by them, as though they existed to remind me of work I might not ever do. I don't need that guilt or reminder. I have enough work to last me until I die. Death will catch me working. So I tore them up and threw them in the garbage outside. They are gone. I kept the work I wanted to focus on. The ideas that spring from my reading and art. I am satisfied. And the new room is just the thing for continuing the rest of the year. It stormed yesterday. I slept in the late afternoon and didn't wake until seven last night. Smiling. Joey brought me some supper but I really couldn't eat it. And today I've had little. Cream of Wheat. Toast. Water. I am going to watch Reign of Fire and stare at the dragons. Laughing. I suppose this is more change. And more grief. And some depression. That's okay. Tomorrow is a new day.

Green is the color of my soul.

 

Monet's Bridge.

I am ill. It feels physical and yet, I know it is so much more. It rained today, which brought a smile and great relief to these long days of intense heat. I do love summer, but this week I have worked extremely hard in the garden, detailed work, like weeding and deadheading and spraying for insects. Yes, green is my favorite color, the color of my soul, and I suppose that is about summer and grass and all the flowers and plants, the leaves on the trees. Monet had a beautiful garden. Darwin had a beautiful garden. Dickinson, too. Shelley loved Nature. When I go outside, I always have this strange feeling when I come in the house, as though I have left something behind. Sometimes I look down and find a blade of grass stuck between my toes. Yes, I often go barefoot. And I smile at it, as though I have brought a piece of what I love with me.

Tomorrow is John's birthday. Going on six years without him. We had separate interest and did spend a lot of time separated from one another. But I always knew wherever he was and whatever he was doing, he busy and content and alive. And he loved me. He knew this about me, too. But John and I shared a love of gardening. The summers were ours.

And now there is this hole I cannot fill.

Perhaps I have been too busy, too happy, and now, I must be otherwise. And so, I am ill.

Time

 

This morning, I had to stop creative things and do cleaning and organizing things. I tried not to be too resistant as that only makes one unhappy over nothing and causes stress where stress is really not real, just self induced in a kind of stupid way. Smiling. But there are moments of tension, and one looks at the pile of papers one must go through and just...well checks out Twitter. :Laughing ironically:

The one is me. Laughing more.

Time.

It's running out every single day and I know it. And I feel it. And I still have to go through papers though I have decided to throw most of them in the garbage and be done with it!!!!! What once mattered, matters no longer.

Time is so real I can feel it pressing down on me.

Facepalm

Brian Molko is so objectified and fetishized. That's the post. That's it.

Pink Steam | Sonic Youth | From The Basement

Guitar and rhythm ecstasy.

I am in the studio today drawing and reading and cleaning up. I love these days.

 Interior with a Girl Reading, 1905, Matisse.

(The master of color)

A note on Climate Crisis.

 A note on Climate Crisis: I lost power today around 3 in the afternoon. I did not get it back until almost 9 at night. This is the second time within 4 weeks that this has happened. It was 115F degrees. I've lived here a long time. This has only happened 2 times previously, and one of those times was an ice storm and the other a car wreck where someone took down an entire pole on the highway. But this, this is infrastructure in an unseasonable season of above average temps. Yes. Since middle of May, it's been extremely hot. I haven't complained. I love summer. I grew up in the South without A/C and I tolerate the heat. I've worked outside nearly every single morning since March. I walk in the mornings. But what about other people, those who are more frailer than myself, those who have serious illnesses such as COPD or severe diabetes or asthma, etc. I am writing this because this is the future. This is what we will be facing. I live in the richest nation on this planet. I can't imagine what India, the Horn of Africa, Iran, etc. are facing. And this never makes the news. And by news, I mean CNN and CNN International. People don't read newspapers anymore and some people do not have access to the Internet. They have phones and TV and radios. Some places are going to burn this year. I read a story where 2000 cows died from heat stress in Kansas in June. I don't know how often that happens statistically or the context, but that's not good. It doesn't matter if you eat meat or not. Animals dying in fields (and they were in a field) from heat exhaustion is not good. 

We have known some serious science on Climate Crisis since the 1970s. That is 50 years according to my research. Half a century and how have we prepared, what have we done really? Today I was browsing through Twitter and people were making their usual complaints on this and that, all real issues for discussion. But they don't really discuss. While they are writing tweets and complaining, the world is burning and yes, people are already suffering from Climate Crisis.

That is depressing. I've cut so much social media out of my life. My blog is for my family really, to read after I am gone. It's not for money, or status, or bullshit. It's for me and my children. I really don't feel like I need to explain this to anyone. I just don't understand people anymore. Jaron Lanier is correct. There is no Left or Right on Twitter anymore, just DOWN.

The Bicentenary of Percy Bysshe Shelley's Death: An Online Global Event

Percy Shelley dies on this day, in 1822.

To thirst and find no fill, -- to wail and wander

With short unsteady steps, -- to pause and ponder, --

To feel the blood run through the veins and tingle

Where busy thought and blind sensation mingle, --

To nurse the image of unfelt caresses

Till dim imagination just possesses

The half-created shadow, then all the night

Sick . . .

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

(This is how I feel on this day about Shelley)

Snow Patrol - What If the Storm Ends? (w/lyrics)

What if the storm ends?
And I don't see you
As you are now
Ever again
The perfect halo
Of gold hair and lightning
Sets you off against
The planet’s last dance
Just for a minute
The silver-forked sky
Lifts you up like a star
That I will follow
But now it’s found us
Like I have found you
I don’t wanna run
Just overwhelm me


What if the storm ends?
It leaves us nothing
Except the memory
A distant echo
I won’t pin down
I've walked unsettled
Rattle cage after cage
Until my blood boils
I wanna see you
As you are now
Every single day
That I am living
Painted in flames
A peeling thunder
Be the lightning in me
That strikes relentless


What if the storm ends?
And I don’t see you
As you are now
Ever again
The perfect halo
Of gold hair and lightning
Sets you off against
The planets last dance
Just for a minute
The silver-forked sky
Lifts you up like a star
That I will follow
But now it's found us
Like I have found you
I don't wanna run
Just overwhelm me


This is a love song, an intense love song that is about intimacy and more. It's one of my favorite songs by Snow Patrol. And it was always the background theme to the WIP. This is the version that I love and cherish so much, all these years, all these years of so much loss, and now, I can write about it and think about it and not fall to pieces. It's corny and perhaps silly to some, but love never dies.

Marc Chagall was born July 7 in 1887.

“Love and fantasy, go hand in hand.”

If one has read this blog, there are other posts on Marc Chagall. He's a favorite of mine, what I call a true Romantic in the literary tradition. He so believed in love. I look at this and I see two people, flying over a world that is full of the usual conflicts and troubles, etc. But they have embraced each other in complete trust. Not in complete perfection, because there is no such thing, but in an agreement to trust and be themselves, to be honest, to support one another. This has to be the finest kind of love. There is no doubt that Chagall and his wife had such a relationship, that he loved her very much, and she loved him. Bella Rosenfeld Chagall died tragically and unexpectedly from a bacteria infection a few years after Chagall and her fled occupied France in 1941. For many months, Chagall could not paint at all, and what stirred him to return to work was Bella's memory as she became symbiotic with all the Jews dead in that terrible, dark war. His second marriage was much more an agreement for companionship that had more to do with his being an older man living alone, etc. I'll write more on this later. This statement is not meant to diminish the importance of Vava Brodsky in Chagall's life. It was just a very different kind of relationship.

Chagall incorporated elements of fantasy into his art by the way he showed his memories. He loved the circus. He loved clowns. He loved lovers and kisses. This is all very important to my own work, to my own heart's desires. There is always an element of fantasy when it comes to love, the way we dream it, think about it, act it out, couple with each other, in moments of shared intimacy, whatever that intimacy may be. I like to think that Chagall and Bella were happy lovers and friends and told each other stories and even fought with each other with the same passion that they loved one another. No one paints like Chagall. There is really no one to compare him to, unless one thinks of color and then Matisse. Chagall's focus was narrow. But there was only one of his kind. Those are the magical people to me. The ones who really are alone in the world except maybe they have a trusted lover. These creatives live in their own heads, they create their own imaginative universes.

Happy Birthday, Chagall. I am posting one day early because I might not be able to do Internet tomorrow. I've art to make.

William Faulkner died on this day in 1962 and he was only 64 years old; a tragedy.

"The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and to hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again." — William Cuthbert Faulkner

How we unplug and tune out in order to create.

“We want the creative faculty to imagine that which we know; we want the generous impulse to act that which we imagine; we want the poetry of life; our calculations have outrun conception; we have eaten more than we can digest.” 

                       — Percy Shelley

It's July and I have a particular mission. It's how to balance the amount of information I crave with the need to let my imagination thrive. That's pretty simple in a sentence. In our post 1980 lives, this is a very difficult thing to accomplish, though as one can read in the above quote, Percy Shelley was thinking about it in the 19th century. For creatives, it's extremely difficult at any time in history. We are running on curiosity and ideas. Soaking up information of any kind is just natural. All the new and colorful tools, all the processes shared by other creatives, these things are temptations. But at some point last year, during my CBT therapy, I came to realize that all this information was really entrenching on my personal dreams. I did some of my best raw work during the early 1990s, before I had the Internet, Amazon Prime, and a phone. And I am willing to admit that this changed not only my process but my imaginative space. It is true, I am a better painter and writer right now due to the fact that I have studied more, practiced more, had good information and so forth, but as Shelley wrote, I have eaten more than I can digest, I have miscalculated. My imagination is suffering, my dreams are suffering. I can see this happening not only to myself but to others. For example, I've been studying ADHD and how it works on the brain and in particular, how that might affect creativity. Psychologists are now doing studies on the connection between social media and ADHD and how social media may do more harm than good with ADHD patients. Information overload does affect how creatives think so why would it not seriously affect those with altered executive skills due to ADHD?  My mission is to regain some of that 1980s and early 1990s imaginative spirit. This means less social media. Less reading. Less conversation. I want to nurture my own creative space and give my imagination a place to grow.

My favorite painting by Matisse.

 

There is no doubt that Matisse is my favorite painter of the moderns and that includes anybody who came after. I love Picasso, Chagall, and Van Gogh as much, but not many other artists interest me as much as the post expressionists. Instead of ordering a copy of this painting, I am going to paint my own copy. Smiling. I am ending this month, feeling accomplished and ready to tackle my new goals set for July. 

I have so much to do. I sincerely hope and live in possibility that I will get as much work, if not more, done this coming month.

Art makes me happy. I am always interested in color. That is my thing. So it's no surprise that post expressionism is my thing.

Summer is full of color. 

June always.....

“Green was the silence, wet was the light, the month of June trembled like a butterfly.”

— Pablo Neruda

I need to make a June summary.

 Wow, I don't even know how to summarize such a beautiful month that has been full of pains and errors and joys and delights and so much beauty and possibility. And I've worked very hard.

FOR one thing, it's been an incredibly hot June, above average temperatures, some days so hot it was impossible to really go out after 1 pm. Heat indexes were always triple digits. I got up and walked most mornings by 6:30 and then I spent the rest of the hours until about 11:30 working in the garden and flowerbeds.  I saved the afternoon and early evenings for writing. There were days I had to take off. I dehydrated badly a few times and paid the price for that with muscle spasms in my legs. My doctor told me I was over exercising and probably could not drink enough no matter what. How strange the human body is. I am stronger than I have been in ten years, but I have challenges to that strength. I have certain things that are happening to me because of age and I have to pay attention. Another aspect is that I was basically hauling a lot of dirt myself and that's new to me. Before there was always someone who moved the bags of dirt, mulch, and etc. for me. Now I have been hauling that around in my small garden wagons, etc. I feel good about this but it is a lot of work and rebuilding the flowerbeds has been a daunting task. I am not even finished. It will take me ALL SUMMER to achieve this.

I did have a beautiful birthday. I even had cake. And I bought a gorgeous bottle tree from the guy in Sunflower MS (very significant and sentimental thing) and lots of blue bottles as the gift for myself. All my children were extremely kind and generous, and so was Haylee and the boys. My neighbors, etc. Such a wonderful birthday.

The only thing I regret about June is that I have not went swimming yet.

Besides all this, I've written some lovely pages, read some great books, and been to the local Malco to see a movie. 

And Joey finally moved in, which is also a really happy event. I've been totally alone for over three years now and it's nice to have someone in the house besides the furniture and cat.

The flower above was a surprise. It's one of my beautiful rose mallows and it popped up unexpectedly, and now has a full bloom. Come fall, I'll dig it up and divide carefully and replant in another flowerbed. In some ways, June surprised me, too. I love summer and I have thrived, even in this heat. I have done more work. Been happier even though I have a clear head about what is going on in the world.

Special things. Placebo is touring and Brian Molko is as wonderful as ever on stage. Of course, he's mercurial by nature. I am not going to Texas to see Placebo, a decision I made final last week. Several reasons for that decision. The only other venue is Chicago. Riot Fest. I think not. I've pretty much given up on the idea of ever seeing a live performance of Placebo outside YouTube. Laughing.

Things I love about June. The beautiful moons, the heat, the long days and shorter nights, the day lilies, swimming, the sound of lawn mowers, the smell of barbecue in the neighborhood air, the color green, the afternoon thunderstorms. My birthday is the first day of June. I always have cake. I love cake but only have it occasionally. June is my favorite month out of the year. It often reminds me of the girl I was, the wild flower, my childhood days. Happy days.

White hardy hibiscus has been assailed by insects.

 Of all the plants I have in my garden, it is the hardy hibiscus that is always endangered. Sure I lose annuals and certain perennial daisies from the heat, but the hardy hibiscus dies from insect hunger. I have lost as many hibiscus as tea roses and in the humid South, that says a lot. Tea roses are mere annuals here. The humidity and black spot destroys them. INSECTS destroy hibiscus. This year, this organic gardener has decided to fight back with Sevin, probably the kindest of the seriously dangerous insecticides. It is not a pleasant choice. And I have waited and waited, and used everything else possible to save these gorgeous plants that I so love. This plant is located in the back/north lawn. The ones located in the front/south lawn are facing extinction. They look bad. They are suffering. It's liquid, ready to spray Sevin so I won't poison myself too. I wrote that gardeners are optimistic people, pragmatic too. If I were younger and had more days, I'd not have these plants. But I am not young anymore and my days are short and precious and I want them. So I am going to use Sevin and kill the insects and possibly poison a bee. Decision made.

Are we allowed to make mistakes, are we allowed to speak even when wrong, are we allowed to learn and do better?

"What I tend to see happening more and more is people retreating into their own corners. People seem scared to get things wrong or be shouted at so they form villages in which they agree with every other member, and maybe they go out and shout at the people in the next village for fun, but there’s no interchange of ideas going on. I think we have to encourage the idea that you’re allowed to think things. I have thought a great many stupid things over the years, and I can tell you that there’s not one stupid thing that I ever thought where I changed my mind because someone shouted at me or threatened to kill me. On the other hand, having great discussions with good friends, possibly over a drink, has definitely changed my mind and made me try to do better. You’re allowed to do better, but we have to let people do better."

— Neil Gaiman

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec “The Cartwheel”,1893.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec “The Cartwheel”,1893.

This rose mallow is my favorite flower.

 

Summer arrives.

 

When summer officially arrives in the Deep South, the daylily reigns. I have a goal of planting several new breeds before summer is over. This and phlox is a my dream, to just have beds full of them. Smiling. I love summer. When I was very young, I lived in a swimsuit all summer long. We swam in rivers and lakes, in the local towns' pools. I think I learned to swim in my grandmother's bathtub. She had one of those big claw-footed things and the water was deep enough for a toddler to swim. Later, my mother sent me off to swimming lessons. Both my parents spent a lot of time on lakes, boating and fishing and that sort of thing and felt swimming was a natural thing. These daylilies are from my mother's yard. It was her favorite flower, considering she had thousands of them in her garden. This is the longest day of the year, June 21 or so, depending. Summer solstice. Every day now on will get shorter and shorter, the countdown to the shortest winter day. But I won't think about that right now. Summer is here, full of warmth and color and so much beauty.

Jane's Nursery

 This is my cool corner of the garden where I sit a lot and also store all the plants that right now, I HAVE NOT PLANTED. Some eighteen single plants and five flats of smaller ones. It's 10 degrees cooler here than any other part of the yard and shaded. I was late watering today. I got up later than usual and then the Att tech was at my door, working on the wifi for the second day in a roll. He did repair the line, in more than one place, all found by another tech the previous day. That poor tech, it took him over three hours to find the problems. And it was 105 F degrees outside. I want some more ferns. Laughing.  Unlike most people, I love the heat, not quite this hot, but I tolerate it better than most. I don't run my A/C lower than 78 all summer. It's the cold that bothers me. I could live in the tropics, well I do I guess, because Mississippi is hot in the summer and fall and it's humid. I also have spent a lot of time in southern Louisiana. What can I say? I am a summer girl. If I had a pool, I would be swimming.

My zen moments are always in the garden, an update post.

 

After John died, I had to go to a mental health facility for a few days. Within ten years, I had experienced 6 major deaths, my son's marriages, a divorce among one of those, and the unexpected birth of a grandchild whom I had to care for. I had also quit writing. Add to this trauma the fact that I had torn two disks in my back, L4 and L5 while caring for John who chose to die at home and one can wonder how I even had the chance to process any of this. I think in some ways, I was just emotionally exhausted by it all and losing John was so painful that I thought I would not know how to live. That kind of depression is a bad place to be. Looking back, I am still haunted by some of those memories. And I have to look.

While at the facility, where they forced me to eat and attempt to sleep, I attended an art therapy class and saw a trauma specialist. Both were good for me and interconnected in that each asked about where I found myself happy at all. The answer was in my garden, doing the work. I call these my zen moments, where I lose myself and can completely empty my mind. One doesn't achieve this kind of mindfulness overnight. I began gardening when I was a very young girl and this habit of "not thinking anything" developed then. It was erratic but by the time I experienced all these stressful events later in life, I had mastered gardening into zen moments aka mindful meditation. You become nothing really, you think nothing, you lose ambition and even desire. What I notice in these moments are my breathing or the action of my body and a sense of calm. Even when I break the more meditative moments and say, talk to myself about the action (planting something, weeding something, clipping something, searching for an insect something) I am calm and detached from the world. It's not like hyper focus at all, because it's not fueled by the desires or anxiety often attached to focusing as in writing or painting or playing music. It's as though I have left me and joined nature.

After John's death and fallout, I could actually summon my special garden space and calm myself, even when I failed to be meditative as zen, even when I was full of anxiety or under the weight of depression. The color of my mind is always yellow in these moments. Yellow for the sun. Yellow for flowers. Yellow is my happy color. It seems silly, but trust me, it's not.

TODAY, I worked four hours in the garden and did the things I felt were best for a day that was going to turn 115 heat index. I finished before the heat arrived and took this photo around 10:30 in the morning. Everything got water soaked because this week is going to be very hot. I washed the patio furniture, cushions, pillows, etc. I cleaned out the potting shed. Put out some mulch, planted some Carolina jasmine (yellow). Despite the growing heat, there was a strong breeze in the first three hours. Felt nice. I took a break at 8 and hydrated, sitting under a tree. Lots of shade. Nature always amazes me. The beauty of it. How we manipulate it, too. I like the sounds of nature. I hear birds everywhere and I have three bird baths which I filled with water. I think a crow watches me, because I usually work in the garden in the morning and there is crow sound, very distinctive. But I can't see it for the trees. I didn't have any bird seed. Much buy soon.

Other update, Joey (youngest son) is coming to live with me for a bit. He needs to buy a car. He'll have to use my car for work until he gets one, which will be awkward but doable in a temporary way. It will be strange having Joey in the house since I am now very used to living alone. But he will be working mostly. I'll just have to figure out how to make plans to use my own car when he's off work. Again, awkward now but not impossible. Joey was in a relationship and now the relationship is over and they are splitting. Actually the split happened last year and they have been sharing a house and car despite the split. Now it's become unbearable. No way Joey can afford both a car note and rent at same time. Oh, well.

Without memory, what are we?

'What you remember saves you.' — W. S. Merwin

Disappointment hurts.

“What hurts so bad about youth isn't the actual butt whippings the world delivers. It's the stupid hopes playacting like certainties.”

               ― Mary Karr

Francesca Woodman Update June 2022

 Someone asked me the other day (not the first person) would I do a detailed sketch and summary of all the materials I have been reading and studying on Francesca Woodman. It's a nice thought, but it's a lot of work to recap my reading notes and then type them up into a prepared form for a blog. If anyone truly looks at my blog, they would realize that it's just really scattered notes, mainly written for my grandchildren, a kind of digital scrapbooks of marginalia, ideas, paintings, quotes, an assemblage is what I would call it and have called it. 

I've finished four additional books on Woodman since fall 2021, and I really haven't thought on how to organize my notes on the books or individual photos, but I will do that and see if I can come up with a plan. I don't think there is any one individual site dedicated to the photographer but the Woodman Trust on Instagram, and while that's the source to go to, it lacks contemplation. Simply put, there is not much discussion on the photos.

I think it should be quite obvious to people at this point that Francesca Woodman was a genius, that even in her youth, she had developed some mature skills and perspectives on her own work. That despite her pathology at the end of her short life, she had the needed objectiveness that goes with good art.

She is a fascinating figure to me for several reasons. One, she was working in the early 1970s, a time when my friends and I were also working in photography, though we were all younger than she. She also used low light, and very little materials to compose her images. But she was clever and very instinctive in just trying something new to see how it worked out. But what artist does not do the latter? We all do and we have far more failures than we have successes.

I've been working very hard this year myself, catching up from really two years of muddling my way through Covid anxieties and even 20 weeks last year of Cognitive Behavior Therapy. When one is creating, it's hard to blog and reflect, one is busy doing the work.  Even my journaling is anemic. But I have agreed to do some kind of written reflection on Woodman.

The Age of Extremes 1914-1991 by Eric Hobsbawn

 There is much to ponder here. Outside the fact that Hobsbawn doesn't trust unbridled capitalism, he has arguably described the 1970s onward with an observant eye. Others who believe that capitalism has done its best, disagree. I walk a different line. I lived the 1970s onward with a wary eye. This is an extremely detailed book with economics at the heart of it. And I get that. Materialism moves the world. What we see here is how we are always fighting fascism in one form or another. Always. When people are left out of the system, especially those who work and pay taxes, things go a bit haywire. And what does that say about the future when Climate Crisis is going to be pressing down on us all? To shift from fossil fuel to green energy in time to mitigate Climate Crisis, we are going to be less than fair with a lot of people. Some are going to get lost in the shuffle.

I just don't know. I just don't know. 

Birthday Post aka Things I am Grateful to have in my life. (2)

 

Lydia missed my birthday. She's in Italy with her parents. She is an incredible human being. And I love her very much. When I realized that she was going to be swimming in the sea near where Shelley swam in the sea and drown in 1822, I did cry. I am so happy her parents are able to share the world with her, that she will spend many of her years traveling. It's a privilege and an education. Ben and his two girls. Smiling.

Birthday photos 2022

 

As some people know, my love for selfies and narcissism on the Internet are over. My deadline was my birthday and these are my lovely Birthday photos, taken in my garden this morning. I wasn't even going to post any and then I decided to have some fun. I took about two dozen of them, all silly, all messy, and I hit the vivid filter on a few. One can see it here. Otherwise I am very gray. Laughing. I've been aging naturally my entire life. I don't dye my hair. I don't hardly wear any makeup, none here but a little lipstick. I'm a grandmother. I told someone today that I don't think I wanted to grow up and because I was always teaching or around bands, I have retained my silliness and youthful feelings. But I am getting old. Even if genes have been kind to you, one feels aging. Your bones feel it. Your legs at night, after a long day in the garden, hurt. Your hands, especially if you are like me, an artist and writer and gardener, and have used them your entire life, a lot, really ache. I broke some bones in my left hand in high school, my senior year, and I can feel those bones right now. They ache badly at times. My skin is thin, there are wrinkles everywhere. My hair is going to be white soon. I'm fading even though I don't like it. No one gets out of this place alive. This is why I posted the photos, another reminder to my grandchildren that I was here and even once upon a time, a girl of 17 with all these dreams. I still dream. That's my gift. But I have to work hard for those dreams. I have to remind myself that I am lucky I woke up this morning and not to take anything for granted. Nothing last. And I won't last. It's all okay. I've helped bury a lot of people who died younger than me.

Look around you. Everyone you meet on the street. Everyone you know. Everyone you love. Everyone rushing around you in the same city or country is going to die. And I am writing this on my birthday because I am lucky to have a birthday, to be aging and still feel love, hope, and a kind of innocence I felt as that wild child of 17 years of age.

That's my birthday gift. That I can find joy and wonder at my age, with all I have experienced, with all I know to be true.

I hope if you are reading this, anyone, that you can find joy, too.

June 2022 is here.

"And then one fairy night, May became June." — F. Scott Fitzgerald

Birthday post aka Things I am grateful to have in my life (1) Haylee

 

Haylee came into my life in 2007. I still remember the first time I saw her. I didn't know at the time, she was only 17 years old, though she would be 18 in October. I also didn't know she was pregnant with my first grandchild. We had a mixed beginning but during that time, I learned a lot about myself, her, girls, what I thought was life and what was really life. It made me a better person and I will always look back on that time as a period of great growth and understanding of the world. Haylee came into my life when my parents were also leaving this world. I saw old things falling away, things I held dear, I felt great loss and chaos. It was chaos for Haylee too. At 18 she would have her first baby and be living in a very troubling situation. That's just too young but so many girls experience this. And I felt it. I understood it. It humbled me. It reminded me of my youth. It reminded me of how we change in life but how we are always part of our past selves.

Haylee is beautiful, not only on the outside but the inside. She loves with her whole heart. She's been my best friend for so long now. And I see myself in her, and I also see myself through the lens of her own view. 

On my birthday, I promised myself to be thankful for people this year, to be happy that I was having another birthday and was healthy enough to enjoy it both physically and mentally, because that hasn't always been the case in the last six years. Haylee's presence in my life is the gift. That I know her and she loves me.

🔴 Paramore: Decode [LIVE IN JAPAN 2009 | SUMMER SONIC] 🔴

 "How did we get here, I used to know you so well? How did we get here, I think I know."

There are moments in our life when we wake up and just wonder how in the hell did we get here. This is the performance I love, too. It is also about waking up one day and seeing someone differently. Not in the pathology sense that some people do. There are people who fall desperately in love or have relationships and because they are people with black/white thinking, they are always going to fall out of love soon or destroy the relationship. This song is not about that. This is about personal growth and maturity and seeing someone through that growth. Seeing your own feelings that way. You know. You just know.

All May has been about writing and gardening, the latter overwhelming.

 I have lots of pots to fill. Today I made a Home Depot run, bought sage, lavenders, ferns, caladiums, and 3 flats of vinca. I have sweet potato vines, creeping jenny, lantana, bee balm, and hardy hibiscus to put out, too. All this I am going to finish this week and fill up my pots. I will be putting out zinnia seeds, too. I am very fond of  zinnias. The large plant here is a rose mallow and it's in trouble already. Something is eating on it, so tomorrow I will spray. Very frustrating. It's a beautiful plant and I have rooted two new ones. I suppose one could say that gardening is often filled with disappointments. Plants die. One is always fighting nature to grow a simple flower. It has rained too much, which has given the insects a head start and good environment to thrive in because I can't spray my bug repellant in the rain. I also can't plant either. And it's very muddy right now. I'll have to plant pots first and let the ground dry for some other plants, phlox, coneflowers, jasmine and yes, creeping jenny.

So I have been writing a lot while it rains, taken advantage of the fact that I cannot walk or plant in the garden. I can't even paint the deck.

Overall, I am pleased with both the writing and the garden. I've worked hard. I've been listening to Placebo and even have been making notes for the essays. The only time I took a break the last two weeks was to post some Placebo songs on the blog and to watch Stranger Things, Season 3 because Season 4 dropped today on Netflix. I like Stranger Things. It's so 80s and I love 80s anything. I have been active on Twitter, too. Facebook not so much. Mostly looking at what other people post. Watched a lot of films people recommended. Finished a big history book on the 20th century, more on the book later. I loved it. But it was depressing. lol

But May has been about writing and gardening. It's one of the most productive months I have had this year. And I've been really in the flow and able to do all the things I wanted, even here on the blog. 

Other notes. Ben, Chelsea and Lydia are in the UK today. They will spend a week in England. Then move on to Italy for the rest of their vacation, ending in Pompeii. Jack had to run all kinds of errands today so I didn't get to see him but he called and we talked two hours. It was cold when I went to Home Depot this morning. Warming up soon. Haylee and I need to plot a trip to the zoo in Memphis. Joey told me he would come Sunday and spend the day and night with me and leave Monday afternoon. I imagine we will go see a movie and cook on the grill. It's a birthday thing for me. 

My birthday is June 1st. I will take another birthday photo. Smiling. None from last year, since I was really ill and Laverne was here and we were all so depressed over Lana's death, May 24. Not even cake.

This year I am having cake. 

Placebo songs off the new album, Never Let Me Go,  I have made notes on:

Happy Birthday in the Sky.

This Is What You Wanted.

Forever Chemicals.

Perfectly dystopian album full of despair and anger. But mostly just sad. Very sad. For all sorts of reasons. I hope it was cathartic for Molko. Damn.

"Self-Portrait with Peacock Waistcoat, Standing" (1911)

 

Acanthus Moroccan Landscape 1912 by Matisse.

Acanthus Moroccan Landscape 1912 by Matisse.

I am starting to thrive once more.

I will be the gladdest thing
    Under the sun!
I will touch a hundred flowers
    And not pick one.

                    — Edna St. Vincent Millay

Experience teaches you everything if you let it.

We hear a great deal of lamentation these days about writers having all taken themselves to the colleges and universities where they live decorously instead of going out and getting firsthand information about life. The fact is that anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days. If you can't make something out of a little experience, you probably won't be able to make it out of a lot. The writer's business is to contemplate experience, not to be merged in it.

                     — Flannery O'Connor

Still gardening and cleaning up...to be continued.

 Planting these today. I just returned from my walk. Wow. I started at 6:30 and sweated the entire time. Humidity is rocking it this morning in the South. Feels like August weather. I did gain some distance and broke my walking record but it was work and next time I will carry water on me. I have to plant two flats of impatiens and one flat of sweet potato vines this morning. Then move and arrange the clay pots. Tomorrow it rains. I don't mind. We really need it. Two days. I'll be celebrating my Mother's Day with Ben in the rain, Saturday. Laughing. It won't stop us from shopping for some hardy hibiscus. We'll pause for dinner with Jack, Jamie, Pete, and Chris at Longhorn's. I couldn't think of a place to meet at noon but there.

Things I have accomplished. With Patsy's help, I pressure washed the deck, getting it ready for painting. Patsy pressure washed chairs and the concrete patio. Wow. Looks so good. She and I both cut and removed dead or faltering roses, plants, tree limbs, crepe myrtle messes from the front lawn. It's amazing how much we got done. Just amazing.

Happy Mother's Day 2022

I'll tell you:
Life for me ain't been no crystal stair.
It's had tacks in it,
And splinters,
And boards torn up,
And places with no carpet on the floor --
Bare.
But all the time
I'se been a-climbin' on,
And reachin' landin's,
And turnin' corners,
And sometimes goin' in the dark
Where there ain't been no light.

                 — Langston Hughes

P.S. My mother did belong to the greatest generation of the 20th century. When I reflect on her life objectively, I don't know how she stayed sane. She was flawed but incredible. As we often say in our family, Mother was a force of Nature.

Things are happening everywhere.

“Do stuff. be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It's all about paying attention. attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. stay eager.”
                  

                                 ― Susan Sontag

The Girl with a Hoe.

 Serious gardeners have the best weapons. Seriously. (lol) This is my new garden hoe, made of recycled agricultural disc blades.  One guy said it was the Scottish claymore of weed killing, seven inches of welded steel. It's heavier than I like but the payoff is less work. It's sharp and designed to hit rock. Rogue brand. I am about to go to work. I just got back from my walk, a record breaking one according to my Apple watch. Amused. It made me think of the girl with the hoe, Jeanne Crain, from the film Leave Her To Heaven. The sister who loves to garden. Her sister is a sociopath murderer. Gene Tierney plays the part of Ellen. When Ellen realizes she's lost, she dies and from the grave implicates those who once loved her. Yes, I know, I watch too many old films. But this one is so good.

Donna Tartt's book has deeply affected me.

“Even if it meant that she had failed, she was glad. And if what she'd wanted had been impossible from the start, still there was a certain lonely comfort in the fact that she'd known it was impossible and had gone ahead and done it anyway.”

               — Donna Tartt, The Little Friend

Will we? Did we?

"The twentieth century proves that the victory of the ideals of justice and equality is always ephemeral, but, if you manage to safeguard the freedom, you can, however, start over ... do not despair, even in the most desperate situations. "

                — Leo Valiani

              Erring on the side of Hope

The world is unjust and much about it must be endured or maybe abandoned.

BUT SPIT AT IT IF YOU WANT TO!!!!

But do no harm.

Cordelia's Farewell by Edwin Austin Abbey

Shelley moved into Casa Magni today in 1822.

Casa Magni

Shelley's House. From a drawing. Lerici, Gulf of Spezia, Italy

April 30, 1822, Percy Shelley and family and friends took possession of house.

Escaping....

 Gardening is my escape. I disappear in work and simple pleasures. I don't think about anything. It's the only time that my mind is truly at rest. And I do feel happy there, weeding, planting flowers, getting dirty. Right now, at this moment, I have this mental image in my head, of a younger me, kneeling over a new flowerbed in a house I once lived in and I can almost recreate the feeling of it. I can see it. There are so many moments like that and they are always in gardens with me working. By myself. Most people don't take as much pleasure in weeding as I do. Weeding...

My "happy place" has always been in the garden.

And I know it's my escape.

The spiderwort is going wild, as planned.

 

Emma by Jane Austen is a novel I really like a lot.

By chance and one might say, luck, I read Emma by Jane Austen this last week. It was the one novel by Austen that I had not (really) read. I suppose I flipped through its pages several times and read passages, but not a deep read. Perhaps I thought it a straight comedy and was never in the mood for that. I hardly know or remember. Emma has left a deep impression on me, which may or may not have something to do with the Romantic Period or Percy Shelley or English gardens, I don’t know or care, but I have decided to put aside my previous reading plans and reread all of Jane Austen along with some biographies, letters, and other non-fiction materials. I am going to reread Richard Holmes’ biography of Shelley, too. And it’s spring and summer and I am thinking of gardens and flowers and paintings and the beauty of nature. If I had lived in England, I would have loved a cottage and a garden and country life. I have lived a country life. Emma is a very mature work by Austen, a novel with themes that explore self-reflection, self-awareness, and the how people can move from self-delusion to reality. It should be taught in senior year of high school where young women can discuss these themes and ask themselves questions. I’d love to teach it. There is a harshness to Austen that many overlook. She might have even been more radical than we normally think. No, she didn’t run off with a married poet like Mary Godwin but just maybe Austen had more psychological insights than the former authoress, perhaps because Mary Godwin Shelley was plagued by depression and abandonment issues. There is such clarity to Austen’s work. That was her gift. One just has to read closely.

Easter is about Hope.

Image: The Easter Bonnet ~ Anna Whelan Betts

My garden 2022

 This iris is an old fashioned two tone purple with an orange beard and came from my mother's garden. It was destroyed (after years of nurturing) by the water pipe replacement winter of 2020-2021. The loss was deep as it reminded me of both my mother and husband, both dead. 

And now I realize just how difficult it is going to be to replace this plant since this is an old fashioned Heritage plant. Mother and I had these in our gardens for years and I may not be able to replace the plant.  I do so feel this terrible loss, though I am not sure if it is for the plant or my mother or my husband or all three. Or am I lamenting the passage of Time and the loss of all things eventually. 

It is a beautiful iris. I want replace it. I am going to look carefully in May for any signs of smaller plants that may have been scattered across the lawn and flowerbeds by digging equipment. I do see a few of the white ones pushing out here and there. Maybe one of these survived. I nursed this one for years and it was so beautiful. I had no idea it was a heritage plant, but now looking back at my mother's garden, I should have known better. I've attempted to maintain the plants she gave me over the years and have been successful to a degree. But the iris was her favorite plant. She loved them so. She could not grow them in Greenville, the town we moved from years ago. It never got cold enough.

Speaking of cold, after the last two winters, I will never wish to live anywhere north of where I live in the entire world. If anything I wish to live south of where I live, closer to New Orleans. I need the sun. I need warmth. Winters ruin me.