the most beautiful thing: felt sense

I got excited about crafting today. I got excited about making things with my hands again. I got excited about doing something with the textiles I love to touch. When I was ten, I got sent to an art summer camp. On my application, I wrote that I wanted to be in the “So You Wanna Be A Star?” section – the acting camp. I remember we chose two and I think the second was a comic drawing class. Well, my mom wrote in my recommendation letter than I had a tendency to make elaborate art projects out of things lying around the house. So, in their infinite wisdom (and probably facing an onslaught of preferences for the acting section) the camp administrators put me in the puppet building workshop. What a joy! I still remember how wonderful and effortless it was to construct elaborate marionettes and stick-armed puppets out of the piles and piles of scraps laid out before us. I wish I still had some of those puppets I made. Well, I’m on my way to making more!

And today, in my still-recouping ramblings through cyberspace, I uncovered a most most beautiful artist site. You see, my newest passion is for felt. And this Italian design site PezziUnici got my blood pumping in so many ways. Just look at the gorgeousity there (as captured in the above pic). I must say, also, that part of my sudden urge to create came in part due to watching The Science of Sleep. I love how creative Stephane is and all the magic that comes about in his creations. It reminded me of being a kid and creating things with whatever was around me. It’s time to get back there, to there most beautiful world. 

The Science of Sleep

tmbt: dusk and dusk remembered

I think there are two most beautiful times of the day. Dawn and dusk. Just now, I am sitting at my keypad with a view of the dusky sunset and I am reminded instantly of childhood. They told us again and again, “Come home when it gets dark.” And dusk is when the first warning bells go off inside that it is nearly time to call all neighborhood shenanigans to an end for the day. It is at dusk that we realize any moment now the street lamps will come on and it will be time to pedal fast up the strip and onto the dirt path to the big house under the walnut trees. Pedal fast past the dark roots, past the mulberry tree with the old mattress lodged in its branches, past the garage and cars to slide in through the back doorway sweaty and bug-bitten, another summer day fully, if not well, spent. Pedal fast to the safety of the house as if something black truly were nipping at our heels. Pedal fast away from brushes with fate and love nearly captured this time. Pedal fast and try to forget the heartbreaks that pulled the sun down in the first place. Pedal fast enough and finally be the one to holler “Olly olly oxen free.” 

Image by BJ.

tmbt: rainbow hour

There is a special hour late in the day when the light hits just so and my entire living room; walls, floor, ceiling, and everything in it is covered with rainbows. I call it “rainbow hour”. It is of course no mystery. I have several crystal globes hanging low inside my balcony doors. I have a direct view of the sunset, and so have direct sun rays flooding my apartment early each evening, flooding the room and filling the crystals for the special prism effect. It’s just one of the joys of my new apartment and often the most beautiful thing about coming home after work. Somehow, I forget to expect it then “pow!” my apartment is flooded and it’s like a sweet surprise each time. 

Image by Thelma. 

the most beautiful thing: slipping reality

The veil is thin and the moment quick, too quick, stepping between concentrated reality and the movement underneath which is its own reality. Interpretation is an art. “It’s art, not journalism,” she said. And mid-fever I have taken it to heart more than I would have expected. There is an oscillating shadow at the door and as the sweat falls into my ear, I am sprung up, alerted to something here, certainly here, certainly. Real. I say “hello.” The angels hum silently and send direction from corners.

Just before my fever broke, there was an eery wind and an ominous silence and for a moment I thought I might lose my mind. It is not so hard to do, perhaps. It is a thin veil, after all, that separates us from the waking and dreaming, living and dying moments. I have talked to them that sit just on the other side of the fabric. I have talked to them and found little to discard. This night was no different. Some would say it was delirium, a fever-induced hallucination. I say it was a chance meeting that the heat in my veins arranged and they, knowing it would not hold water, inched closer than normal too, a brazen rag-tag bunch when our defenses are lowered.

And real or no, it does not matter. Because always we are treading softly on boundaries between worlds that offer a reminder from early youth: this reality is not nearly so solid and these imaginings are not nearly so false. They both slip from their holsters and we are blessed with the not really knowing, the beauty of fever, of exhaustion, of out-of-the-corner-of-the-eye, of dark corners and blinding sun spots. If nothing else, I am reminded to ask. What is real? What is not real, if anything is not? That, my friends, was the most beautiful thing about my time here in the land of meningitis. The beautiful remembering to question and the other-worldly moments of a slipping reality.

Painting: Study for the Dream Sequence in Spellbound 1945, Salvador Dali 

the most beautiful thing: poem

and now…

and your asking told me you were ready
and the rain fell for us every time
and your hands shook with nervousness
and I forgave you my hurt feelings for the sweet shine in your eyes
and you kissed me tentatively and apologized for everything
and you wished me smiles
and you kissed my head over peas and over again
and you kissed me fervently in the winds
and you loved the smell of my hair
and I suddenly noticed pink roses everywhere
and I wanted you to dance with me in the rain, but you wouldn’t
and you said if I could just hang in there
and I waited for your heart to melt
and I waited to sing that song to you if you’d asked
and I waited for my own senses to pull me toward them
and then Telluride broke my heart, and so did Tuesday
and then there was just missing something that maybe never was there

and now we just have a pile of stumbles and maybes… but mostly no’s…

and we were probably better left friends at that bar after the blizzard laughing in a way that reminded me so much of home… 

 ~ H.M. Philipp
June 25, 2009

Image found here. 

the most beautiful thing: speak up

It’s a peculiar feeling, this stirring and climbing. From the gut, sometimes hip, sometimes ribs, these words emerge as if seeking sunlight is finally safe and breathing new air is finally a delight instead of a burden. It is an uncoiling of scales iridescent and wise, a reconstituting of membranes long laid to waste for want of kinder eyes. It is a quick intake of breath and slow rummaging of will through heartstrings. Cut here. Tie tighter there. Spin anew where none was before. It is a sweet surrender, a whisper that threatens to be violent but lands with the touch of lashes on cheek, and it is right now.

They are climbing, the words. Up. Up and out and into the winds blowing in this still still quiet room. And the rise and fall of them is like your sleeping breath, sometimes heavy, sometimes deceptively light. And wherever they fall over there is just fine for it is the launching and the flying and the memory of wind on face and pulse in palms that is the most beautiful thing of all. And if they land safely in your pulsing palms, all the better, all the more beautiful.

Image by 10verlada.

tmbt: bittersweet regret

It arrives suddenly at first, a stinging slice through the chest, a hot poker searing behind the heart. Then the realization that it was creeping up and into full view from the moment the words were hurled. Out loud, it is almost too much to see, the edges blurred as if the heat of it has bubbled its hem, the wind haggered its trim, and red clay mud rouged its periphery. Then the joy. Joy. A funny thing to find under the sheets here. The joy of possibility, of possibility of release, of possibility of forgiveness, of possibility of change. There’s a sweetness here in the insight of wrongdoing, of falter, of long-coming, unearthed madness buried deep, buried often. A sweetness that is both soft and bitter that makes regret shine with an odd sort of beauty.

My mother sends me bouquets of bittersweet most seasons. The dark orange berries cling to the vine, a few lost to the bottom of the tissue paper-packed box, the brilliance and delight of it hiding the poisonous nightshade compounds settled into its folds. I form it into wreaths and swags and remember my mother’s love for the garden, for her birds nourished by these berries, for the poetry of love and loss, and the loss. And every year it seems I see more and more closely how my mother’s loss and absence while even in the same room has shaped my vehemence for something different. And it is that vehemence that brings me the burning carnelian berries that I feel now poking through the walls of my chest. The bittersweet asks of me many things in these moments: remember. let go. soften. soften. soften. give. 

And so, I eat these berries of regret and pray they have only enough poison to extinguish the vigilant yearning for inhumanly perfect love, unimaginable prediction of need, and otherworldly capacity for intimacy that keep me from the other bittersweet of this world: the rough and tumble closeness, the lumping almost godly touches, and well-seasoned if off-kilter romance that marks human steps two by two both far and near and back again ad infinitum… in essence, the right very now present. I pray only enough poison for this, and not for the killing of even one cell of my one true heart, a wall of so many more berries than these which stain my cheeks such a beautiful orange.

Image from The Barn Nursery.

the most beautiful thing: cloud cover

The most beautiful thing about this morning is the cloud cover. In abundance this spring, we have seen from these clouds much rain and been given must rest from the onset of sun’s warm up to dry summer weeks spent retreating up the canyon. In these few weeks, I have come to adore the cloud cover and its inspiration to sink in… to the chair, to my bed, to solitude, to rest. This morning, there is little room for rest and solitude, but the sweet, moist inclination hangs in the air around me like soft Portuguese guitar, scent of lily, whisper of lashes on cheek. Cloud soul hovering, you are beautiful and can stay around as long as you like.

Image by Akhil Tandulwadikar from his Lazybug blog.

tmbt: warm wind swimming

The wind and the space inside the caverns came together for a harrowing and transforming moment. Again and again, the moments. And your hands told a story of the bones underneath them and the bones to come from them bathed in the sparkling grace of air that begets fluid movement. And they opened the eyes of my heart up to see a long path though not yet the things that would befall it under this foot, under this bone, under this sweet intake and out breath that was the wind. And my hair was tangled up in the waxing and waning presence of it all.  

And your golden eyes burned a quiet, urgent fire that pulled open my mouth, my heart, and my reserve. Your warm wind makes the most beautiful swimming water.

Image found at Ride The Waves of Life. 

the most beautiful thing: corazon humana

His voice reached in like it does each and every time, it reached in with surgical steel precision and plucked the suchers sewn hastily in the wake of disappearance, sewn hastily again and again, sewn hastily under no stars and all stars and morning stars and mistaken stars where planets used to be. His voice and his melancholic melody swam in and around this heart a hemisphere above the disappearing act, the disappearing act a quick flash of hand on the screen, disappearing, this disappearing, this damned cayote cut out like nothing before or since. This simple heart of human, this corazon humana left exposed and gasping in the wake of every melancholic timbre ridge. This corazon humana preciosa. Preciosa. Much longer tonight and I will not know which voice it is that rings in my ears. Is it his, unwrapping suchers, or yours ungagged behind heart walls? You say it again and again in my ears. Mi preciosa. 

And I think to myself, it is a miraculous thing to hold this heart. In hands. Miraculous. It is. Did you know that when it was your hands doing the holding? Did you know that every word would etch its way across my chest, scraped letters traced again and again on my riblets, carved phrases shredding the arterial walls? Did you know? I have left you only two options. Which is the lesser crime? 

I long so deeply to feel those Pacific breezes on my cheeks again and to look up at the satellites cutting through the Cruz del Sur and to drown in palta morning and night, lips heavy with oil, eyes dusted with joy. And if I do, it will not be because of you.  It will be because this heart is opened at the softest depth of touch and will keep being opened again and again, massaged to life by way of near-collapse mid-song and mid-night to reveal the doves nesting within begging for spring cleaning. And with every sweep, I will be closer to making the trip alone. 

And the only heart beating against my chest in the airport will be my own. This beautiful, precious corazon humana. And I will sing a simple melody to myself to remember this night and these stars and the one I loved.

“I threw stones at the stars but the whole sky fell.”
                                                            ~ Gregory Alan Isakov

Photo by JC Lewis.