Eva Zeisel, "A Maker of Things"

 "We are actually concerned with 'the playful search for beauty'. . . . The word 'playful' is a necessary aspect of our work because, actually, we have to . . . make, produce, lovely things throughout all of our life. . . . So, how can you, without drying up, make things with the same pleasure, as a gift to others, for so long?"
          --Hungarian-born ceramicist and designer Eva Zeisel (1906-2011)

Ceramicist and designer Eva Zeisel passed away in late December, at age 105. Over a career that spanned 80 years, Zeisel had a profound impact on modern design. She played with color and form, inventing a sinuous vocabulary that translated equally well into tiles, rugs, and furniture as it did into her iconic tableware. Her playfully curved and sweetly nesting Town and Country salt-and-pepper shaker set was, she noted in a TED talk in 2001, "a portrait of my daughter and myself."

I keep coming back to Zeisel's idea of play as a fuel for lifelong creativity. I rarely allow myself that freedom to play, to give myself over wholly to messing around with paint and paper and glue in an open-ended way.

This morning, I gave myself the gift of some play time. I sat down and worked on a collage, this one focused in part on Zeisel's work. I happened upon some word combinations that would be fun to explore further (e.g. "A bee lost its way."). I let myself try some techniques without worrying about whether they would work or not. And, just as with my earlier collage, I was surprised at the little cropped vignettes I ended up with.

Most importantly, I had FUN!

I hope you have some time to play this weekend. Please feel free to share your creative wanderings in the comments section; I'd love to hear where you ended up.

Happy Valentine's Day

"Let your heart open now, and let love flow from it; then extend this love to all beings."

--Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying

Extend it even to the lady who cut me off in the parking lot yesterday?

Yeah.

Even to people who do even more terrible things to each other?

Yeah.

OK. 

I'll try.

Moon-eating Fish Castle

Thaw

While northern Europe is suffering under a deep freeze, we've had two weeks of unseasonably warm weather in upstate New York. The highs have reached well into the 50s F, even the low 60s. Yesterday the sun beckoned. I declared a personal San Lunes (Saint Monday) holiday and spent the entire morning outside.

There are puddles and muck everywhere from two recent snowmelts. It still freezes overnight, so a thin coat of ice covers the puddles. Freeze-and-thaw circles are scribbled on the surface of the water. Still-vibrant fall leaves float as if trapped in resin.

Early February is much too early for the Great Thaw. (Punxsatawney Phil can tell you that.) I'm enjoying the ease of getting around this winter. But I feel a little un-easy about it as well. Is the warm weather a result of climate change or just a normal climate fluctuation? (Scientific American reports that the immediate cause of the dry, warm winter is the strange behavior of the jet stream.) 

Whichever it is, I know we need a return of colder temperatures and more snow. Fruit trees need a certain amount of cold days to maintain their period of dormancy, essential for spring flowering. Plants and our reservoirs need a good solid snowpack for the snowmelt in the spring. Animals are affected by a mild winter as well. They come out of hibernation early, hungry at a time when food sources are scarce. This coming summer we may see an increase in mosquitoes and deer ticks because of the warm winter. 

And spiritually? I have come to rely on a cold, snowy January and February to do a little emotional hibernating of my own. I read; I meditate; I stew about issues great and small. It's sometimes an insular and painful period. But it's a spiritual requirement for introverted me, a sort of emotional fattening that prepares me for a more gregarious spring and summer. I wonder what sort of emotional climate I'll look forward to without it?

**You may notice from the highly processed photos that I've been playing around with Photoshop lately. I like unedited and gently touched photos. But I wanted to experiment with enhancing my photos to more clearly convey nature's emotional impact on me, to express its poetry as I receive it. Please check out Helena Cooper's photography for some stunning examples of how processing--and of course her clear eye and sharp focus on color and pattern--can render a photograph like an abstract and deeply emotional painting.

A Lowering Sky

I took a walk at the arboretum today, under a lowering sky. It’s been over a year since I’ve been there, and I’m not sure why I’ve neglected it, and myself. It’s a place that fills up my soul with the poetry of the trees and leaves and branches and blossoms.

The arboretum is a beautifully carved bowl, a vestige of an old farm. It’s a manufactured landscape in the best sense of the word. Master gardeners have shaped the vistas with an understanding of what the eye will appreciate through the seasons.

The arboretum has been designed by human hand, but nature still holds sway. There is accidental poetry to be found all around: in the crinkled leaf staked by a red stem, in the tendrils of a vine curled tightly around a branch, in the tired branches of an old willow, in the sensuous curve of the bulb of a skunk cabbage.

Emotions sometimes overwhelm me when I walk in the arboretum and notice little details. I was so excited to see the first skunk cabbages that have emerged in the soggy ground under the huge old tree among the moss and dried leaves. I felt giddy, like seeing an old friend in an old haunt. I felt happy that I remembered the first time I had seen them, happy to remember the friend I walked with when I saw them in the marsh, happy to remember the sense of accomplishment I felt after researching and writing a poem about the plants.

The skunk cabbage and I share a history; we have formed a connection. What a feeling of rightness it was to see those skunk cabbages coming up again in the same place, at about the same time as previous winters (maybe a little early?). They have cycled through the seasons and are emerging, just as I feel I have been doing lately. They are a reminder to pay attention, to notice not one but several skunk cabbages in various stages of emergence still partially hidden under the brown leaves.

After my walk, as I was driving home, my body felt heavy and light at the same time. My face felt a heavy numbness from the wind, a heaviness that felt peaceful, like I had worked just hard enough to deserve a rest. My limbs felt similarly heavy and peaceful, but there was a stirring of lightness around my chest and shoulders, a happy fluttering of my heart and a lifting of my shoulders, as if little wings or skittering leaves had attached themselves to my shoulders and were helping to lift them up, boost my spirits, lift them of a heavy burden.

Two-Word Wednesday

Skunk Cabbage