Ornamental

firsts

  i try in vain each time i grab the camera to focus on walter without there being a blur.  this is not possible, unless he is fast asleep:  this little puppy is constant motion, whether chasing a butterfly, eating a flower, or dancing after my feet.  i'm reminded of the pokey little puppy when i watch him wandering around out in the grass, scuttling after a morning moth - not by his speed, but by those brown and white spots, by the moth that is fluttering so close to his nose on the ground.  we had a quiet independence day celebration together here - his first - and after he'd gone to sleep for the night, i sat out on the deck in the dark as the lightning bugs hovered, and watched some distant fireworks spread their colorful, fleeting light out over the closest mountains.  it was a dark and quiet but wonderful time.  how we spent the day?  like this.  a blur of motion, circling around inanimate objects, over and over again.

 

 

and then, just like that - bam! - he is out for an hour or two.  and then peace comes temporarily back once again. 

it is an overcast day here in the mountains, cool and quiet, no noise save the crickets deep in the woods and an occasional family of titmice at the feeder.  there is a multitude of flowers popping up around the house, first planted by the woman who built this house in the 50's, then by becky who lived here for seven years and who is now my landlord and friend.  there are dozens of fuschia cone flowers just beside the steps that lead to the upper back yard, and down below the deck are a smattering of sunflowers that were planted by my resident birds who flung and scratched at seeds as they ate in the spring.  i have a beloved pitcher that sits here always on my little blue green desk, one made for me by my talented and very sweet potter friend julie whitmore (for whose work i suffer quite an addiction!); i try to keep it filled with flowers, whether purchased or snipped from the yard, and this morning i carried walter with me outside to run about as i cut and arranged long stems of gladiolas, queen anne's lace, butterfly bush (just a snippet, becky, i promise), sunflowers, black eyed susans, blossoming mint, and cone flowers.  it was a vain attempt at introducing walter to the floral world, and i failed.  or maybe not - he relished drinking water from the top of the pitcher (so much better with flower stems, outside, than drinking from his indoor bowl, you see), and i told myself it mattered not that the stems were shortened or broken when he toppled the pitcher over on the ground.

  

 

another first for today:  walter and i had our first dance, to the tune of "i feel it all" by feist (thank you gypsy girl alex, for introducing me to this), and he seemed to follow my lead quite well, other than the nips on my hands and his stepping on my feet just the tiniest little bit; it was when i left the room and the tempo changed that he came running and whining for me to hold him close.  music startles him, and i'm trying to introduce him slowly, to gentle things like clair de lune, one tiny, stumbling step at a time.  we've come so far, little walter and i; he sleeps in his crate through the night and past 8am now, he stays in his indoor Xpen here during the day without too much of a fuss, he naps and i can tiptoe about moving a nina mess from one room to another.  the mess never goes away, but at least i can shift it about without wearing myself down, you see?

 one more first:  i'm going to have a visit tomorrow for lunch and for the day by the mystery man, who is coming to see me, me, me.  well, walter and me.  i'd be dishonest if i said i wasn't nervous or anxious, but i'm also schoolgirl excited; it's been a long long long long long long time since i entertained, and this time it will be with three dogs at our feet.  yes, mystery man, you'll be frustrated with me for mentioning anything, but remember:  i choose to share and spend the day with you and only you.  i haven't a clue as to what to wear, but i'll be adorned with a necklace i made for myself over the weekend, a necklace in greens and soft browns that make me think of moss and quiet forests and of all things fresh and new.... xo

green mansions

 

Long ago, when I was an early teenager, I read a book called green mansions – the contents of which I cannot recall, but what I do remember is the sensation of looking up into leafy ceilings of verdant green and feeling the protective natural shelter as a room.  Now, every summer when july rolls around, when the blackberries are plump on the vine and I walk around outside in the grass with my tender bare feet, when the evening breeze smells damp and sweet, I go back to the summer days when I lay sprawled out across my four poster bed with the book that spoke of these things.  As I walk about out in the back yard with walter, I watch the breezes flip whole poplar treefuls of leaves to their tender back sides, exposing shades of waxy, paler green that flutters and shimmers in a sea of waving leaves.  I remember these things, in other forms, from the days of my younger years and am grateful for a set of parents who exposed me to the joys of books, and the joys of absorbing the beautiful world that envelopes me.

"Here Nature is unapproachable with her green, airy canopy, a sun-impregnated cloud--cloud above cloud; and though the highest may be unreached by the eye, the beams yet filter through, illuming the wide spaces beneath--chamber succeeded by chamber, each with its own special lights and shadows." w. h. hudson, Green Mansions

 

I’m feeling more and more of a bound connection between how I spend my days in awe of my natural surroundings and the way my ornamental trinkets are resembling the voice with which I speak.  At this stage in my life, I cannot help myself; I spend my days absorbed with observations, with arrangements of words, with rearranged objects of beauty.  And I can’t complain; it is a privileged life that I lead, out here in my quiet and gentle solitude of the woods.

 

Ever since I placed the wrought iron table over in the corner of the deck, under the dancing fronds of the little walnut tree, I’ve savored taking my jewelry makings out on a tray and sitting in the shade of late morning and early afternoon, listening to the birds, looking up from time to time to see the clouds overhead, loving the green, green, green that fills up so much of what these blue green eyes of mine can see.  Blue for the sky, green for the forest, that is how my eyes now look to me.

 

  I have so much to share with you here – so many photographs of little walter, so many stories from recent travels that time has not allowed me to bring back to light again.  Walter turned eight weeks on Wednesday, that magical number that seems to be the height of fresh puppydom; I’ve had him here with me two weeks today, and I’m spending many a moment staring at him in disbelief of the rate he is growing every day.  I remember once when I hugged a very young roy good night and told him to stay just like he was, to not grow up, to stay as he was forever.  “well, it’s right too late now”, he earnestly said; and so it was.  I feel that way about walter.  Wait!  I want to cry - don’t go!  I’ll eat you up, I love you so! (thank you mr. sendak); but walter just says no…. and is bounding up the stairs like the best of big dogs.    His muzzle has grown longer, as well as his legs; he’s beginning to sprout the feathery fur on his legs that older spaniels have.  Time moves so incredibly fast; I have a feeling that I’ll wake up tomorrow and it will suddenly be autumn again.  Don’t go, sweet summer; please don’t go.  I’ll write long, beautiful, tenderly bittersweet stories about you, I love you so.  please don't say no.

see?  i live in walter world.  forgive me the proliferation of photographs, the stories too sweet to be real.  but they are.  and i love him more and more every day; aspen, i think, would be proud.  he shares all my hours with me as i sit and create, as i sit at my desk and write down my thoughts, as i twist and twirl together feelings and memories.  with walter nipping at my feet, i’ve relished pulling together all the shapes and sizes and shades of green that I could muster from the tiny drawers and trays within my studio; out of a small bin came a snippet of embroidered vines from a swatch of fabric that beloved Lesley gave to me a few years ago, another from a strip of woven kimono sash silk from the collection of dear sweet Katie.  More tatting crops up in the form of a packet from my sweet friend Lorri, along with a lovely creamy crocheted panel of love birds.  I pull out bits and pieces of things I worked on as samples when teaching at valley ridge just a few short weeks ago:  into the beautiful cast silver bezels of pal susan lenart kazmer  go tender blades of valley ridge grass, sealed with resin as I taught to grateful fellow artisans; out came a small square bezel with the words I’d pulled from a small vintage book I carry with me everywhere I go to teach:  “green robe of her summer”, and “dream”.  Onto strong, delicate strands I slip pearl after tiny green pearl, mixing the lot with small sterling wired gemstones of peridot, amethyst, prehnite, chalcedony.  The words sound like faraway green places in themselves, places like peru and machu pichu, Katmandu.  The whole world loves green; no wonder.  It is the color of life, of growth, of distant lush horizons foreign and familiar all at once.

  Ah well.  It is to you that I wish the best of the summer, the best that times of leisure or work have to give.  When you sit out of an evening and sip wine or iced tea, think of me; when the last of the day’s birds are singing their bedtime lullabies to one another, remember  my name.  they call my name, they call yours as well, they sing songs of this green world for everyone to hear.  Just take the time to listen, and you’ll hear them singing to the rhythmic beating of your own heart most of all.

                           Recognitions

Stories come to us like new senses

a wave and an ash tree were sisters

they had been separated since they were children

but they went on believing in each other

though each was sure that the other must be lost

they cherished traits of themselves that they thought of

as family resemblances features they held in common

the sheen of the wave fluttered in remembrance

of the undersides of the leaves of the ash tree

in summer air and the limbs of the ash tree

recalled the wave as the breeze lifted it

and they wrote to each other every day

without knowing where to send the letters

some of which have come to light only now

revealing in their old but familiar language

a view of the world we could not have guessed at

but that we always wanted to believe

                                    w.s. merwin   (thank you dearest sharron)

 

farewell, beloved june

   last evening i stood out on the deck in the lingering deck and watched the final day of june's soft light fade into the distant west, and felt the cooler evening begin to descend like a filmy, gossamer cloak of twilight blue.  goodbye, sweet june, i wanted to say, and wanted then to stand and wave farewell with a wispy white cloth of ancient threadbare linens or of clouds, thin as air, woven into a small square of evaporating cream.  goodbye, goodbye, i said to the sky; goodbye to the soft days of june.  hello, july, and all the hearty middle of summer promises you hold.

i love it when it feels as though the keenly tuned music of the spheres is in complete sync with me, when the cogs and wheels turn as freely with my train of inspiration as a well oiled piece of petite machinery.  for days i've worked on a necklace that has quickly become one of my all time favorites, wiring the tassel while i was still in alabama, wiring those glittering falling star beads as the overhead fan spun around and around overhead.  i cut the sterling back piece and hammered the border in the middle of last week, and only yesterday late afternoon did i sit down in the disheveled studio and hammer the back message letters one by one.  i had wanted, initially, to create a design that was homage to the beautiful blue skies of north carolina, the azure that consistently has sheltered me at the upper edges of my green summer mountains here at home.  i wanted as well to use some words from A Midsummer Night's Dream, a play that has been haunting me in all the right ways of late.  but in slowly leafing through the onion skin pages of my trusty old bartlett's quotations, where throughout the years i've liberally penned asterisks in the margins and pencilled circles around favorite lines, i fell upon these beautiful words from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet: 

"When he shall die, take him and cut him out into little stars and he shall make the face of heaven so fine that all the world will be in love with night and pay no worship to the garish sun." 

  beautiful, yes?  i thought so, too, and the necklace transformed itself with my own inspired words that i hammered onto the back... transformed it from an object of blue skies and white, white clouds to one of dusty blue twilight and glittering stars.  i love this job; i do.    it allows me to sit and gaze into the evening skies, to flip through words of shakespeare, to hammer out words of my own into silver, to gather dozens and dozens of pearls and topaz and aquamarine and transform them into a cascade of stars, dripping out of a velvet sky.  stitch by stitch this piece transformed itself before my widening eyes, and by this beautiful blue dawning morning as i wired the last fine pearl into place, i was aware that something very magical had occurred.  why, hello there, july.  let the mysteries keep on coming, let the love of all things summery wrap its sweet, strong arms around me in a season's gentle embrace. xo

heaven

  i've been doing a lot of short walks up and down these stairs to the upper back yard with walter of late, usually carrying him up and then plopping him down in the cool green grass of the drive or yard.  he was afraid of the steps when first he came here last week, but with lots of trips outside, he's finally conquered the climbing up part; it's the going down that freezes him in place still, every time he reaches the top of the stairs.  while wandering around out in the grass, i've noticed over and over again the little circles of taller grass, something i've always called fairy rings, and when thinking of rings i recalled one of my favorite quotes, by robert frost.   i wrote the words down on old paper, carried them outside to place within a ring; but mr. trouble wouldn't stand for that, plunging headfirst into my artwork to consume a word or two if allowed.  so, onto the steps they went, and walter has bounded over them ever since i put them there late yesterday afternoon.  this month, my favorite of the year, has proven itself to be one full of magic and beauty.  i sit out on my deck every evening and watch the sunset spread itself slowly over the western sky, watch the mountains turn from green to lavender,   to shades of murky blue.  i never tire of this; i don't grow weary of the quiet moments watching the dusk settle itself around me, seeing the stars come out shyly one by one, listening to the final warbling calls of the wood thrush for the night.  i'm quite sure there are those of you who would be climbing the walls for lack of some other place to be, a restaurant or a movie theatre, a grocery store to buy your exotic foods, your beautiful faraway fare.  this does not grow old for me, these times of quiet and contemplation; i'm still surprised each time the moon rises above these trees, each time a cloud is painted pink or orange and fades into the night in the gauzy shape of a dream.  oh, lucky, lucky me!

  my beautiful elder child, named for a bird, came home this weekend to spend some time with me; we laughed deep into the night, shared nonstop stories with one another, marveled over walter, hugged and joked and opened our hearts again and again and again.  motherhood just seems to keep right on getting better, the older we three get, the more our lives breathe in and expand out beyond the boundaries of known places and scenery.  i love my boys so much it hurts; to share robin with walter was a sweet sweet thing, to watch him loving on and playing with a puppy he only just met a scant three days ago.  i see walter as a gangly, awkward unsuspecting little puppy, innocent to everything from figures on tv to diane keaton as beloved annie hall singing "seems like old times" (a sound that frightened him so much he stopped his chewing to whimper frantically in my lap).     we all grow up so awfully fast, every one of us, and time keeps right on marching no matter how vainly we attempt to frame things in our dusty boxes of scattered memories.  little boys turn into men, puppies into elderly dogs that eventually leave us behind; and i'll be leaving someone behind as i fade into senility one day, much as my father is leaving us, bit by little remembered, fragmented bit in his beautiful and genteel old age.  ah, life.  it fills my swelling heart to overflowing, day by intricate day.

i've slowly begun to integrate my jewelry work back into the day to day routine here on firefly road, tough as that may be with one frisky, scampering baby springer spaniel trying his best to foil me.  for now it works to have a tray with tools and gemstone beads on my lap here in the living room, a tray that can be set down each time i have to rise and take walter out, to feed the both of us, to check on incoming mail.  the colorful "begin" piece has been purchased by a shining star (thank you so much, ms. jonatha) who will wear it with beautiful flair; this other i've finished will be listed in my etsy shop as soon as i can get this fool connection of mine to allow the photos to load.  i love the lighting in this photograph - it hints of the twilight beginning to fall outside the windows, of the wash of golden light that paled slowly with the dying of the day.  come, moth, come peaseblossom, come puck and mustardseed - come dance in the grass with me as the lightning bugs rise, come whisper ancient secrets in my quiet, listening ear!

 i've enjoyed showing you jewelry pieces as they begin to unfold in front of me; this time i've stitched one of my sterling silver gates to layers of fabric that are the color of the morning sky, dusty blue interspersed with whites and cream.     when time permits, i''ll hammer or engrave words into a silver panel on the back, from which i'll dangle bits of glittering, heavenly blue.  it's fun to see these designs as they emerge from the unconscious part of my mind; the surprise is as much there for me as it would be for you when finally you see the finished piece.  for now, i'm enjoying sitting and working with the sky and mountains framed in the windows across the room from me; for now i'm happy to share my time with walter as the two of us continue to learn more about one another.  life is sweet, that way.  xo

the magic of inspiration

 

moths are once again on the wing now that it's the middle of summer here on firefly road; now, too, that i am outside barefoot in the wet morning grass early mornings with walter, i'm seeing the last of the previous night's lingering visitors resting in the glistening dew.  this one i found early today, at 7am; and because it didn't flinch as i picked it up, i assumed it was already dead.  in we came, this moth and walter and i, and i snapped a photo before setting it aside to save the wings -at which point it flew up to the front windows and i assume is resting there until nighttime falls once again.  in the wings of this moth three things i see:

1.  a nude figure from behind, with arms stretched upward, legs together, head bowed to the front (which, in turn, makes me think precisely of beautiful this)

2.  the letter Y

3.  the shape of a heart in the outline of the wings

looking a little deeper, i see paper cut out shapes much like the ones we used to fold from notebook paper and snip into snowflakes, or paper dolls.  or raggedy valentines.  what things might you see in these wings?

 

some of you will recognize this wonderful rug, hand hooked by my grandmother from strips of old woolen clothing, and resting now on the polished hardwood bedroom floors of my parents' house in alabama (keli, this photo is for you).  i love the colors of this rug, ones that are dominant here in my own home in north carolina.  i love the deep reds, the soft dusty blues, the faded yellows like the inside of a roadside buttercup.  i'd never been one to use much color in my jewelry, or the mixed media bookwook and assemblage that i create - at least not until this beloved june was fully in summer swing.  and now?  well, now.  goodness.  i can't seem to get enough color into my work.  i credit the beautiful, magical words and imagery of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream - it has always seemed very special to me, one of my favorite plays of all time, full of mischief and mayhem, magic and soft summertime.  there are the spritely fairies who, shakespeare says, are employed to seek "dew-drops, and hang a pearl in every cowslip's ear", to "fetch jewels from the deep".  there are the beautiful names of Peaseblossom, Cobweb, Moth, and Mustardseed; there is the nighttime prankster called Puck, and in my hometown of montgomery - on the shakespeare theatre grounds under a tree beside the lake - there is a marvelous bronze sculpture of Puck himself, dancing under the leaves.   and now, yes now, as the lightning bugs multiply, as the blue ghosts that appear for a mere two weeks circle and twirl and leave tiny blue-colored streaks of light in the night, as all of the magic of summer unfolds, it is the words and images of this play that i am remembering each and every june and july.  and it is those words and images, little tidbits of magic and splendor, inspiring me to make jewelry pieces that are playful and full of color and summer, mystery and the sparkle of life.

i've started three necklaces - more like four, if you consider the bits and strands i've begun and set aside now that i have a baby in the house.  nothing that i'm showing you here, quite obviously, is in its final, finished form.  the "begin" piece i started in alabama, working on the dozens of multi-colored gemstones that drip down in what one of my sweet valley ridge students, linda, calls "chandelier tassels".   i love the glittering drippiness of that name, the light and the effervescence of it - and it will stick.   when i was showing the "begin" piece to kathy here at home the other day, she remarked that the mix of colors and shapes reminded her of a friendship quilt, one that some call crazy.  yes, yes indeed.  i do love that as well.  and the moth?  well.  a little bit of shakespeare and firefly road thrown in to the mix and we have mountain magic.  and to you who have been reading my words this past week and are drawn, as you say, "like a moth seeing the light", this piece needs no further explanation.  i thank you for the gentle nudges and for the wonderful inspiration.  xo