Who was Cassandra?
In the Iliad, she is described as the loveliest of the daughters
of Priam (King of Troy), and gifted with prophecy. The god Apollo
loved her, but she spurned him. As a punishment, he decreed
that no one would ever believe her. So when she told her fellow
Trojans that the Greeks were hiding inside the wooden horse...well,
you know what happened.
Too good to leave in the Comments thread: read Chris's story of a raven here.
7:55 PM
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Woman on the beach at Chabahar (a port in the south-east of Iran) by Soosan Zahedi, a member of "Sheednegar", Society of Iranian Women Photographers from Kargah, Iranian Artists' Site
Today I was at the high-priced local grocery store. I go to buy shade-grown coffee and a few other things that I can't get elsewhere, but now that I go infrequently, it's a shock. The parking lot was filled with the de rigeur cars for upscale New England: Subaru Outbacks, Saabs, Volvos, and SUVs of every type and description. Each vegetable is shiny and perfect, and so are the shoppers: well-dressed, well-fed, tanned, white-skinned, and totally absorbed in their own little worlds. Oh, gosh, today it made me so tired. I've been thinking about the rest of the world, the poor world, and a quote I heard again, not long ago, from the minister of Riverside Church in New York: "We need to remember that our having has a great deal to do with others not having." I'm so idealistic and optimistic sometimes, but this scene really hit me today, and I was left with the recurrent question: How do you get through to people of such privilege and such entitlement, that it's all interconnected? How can you tell someone like this that it may not last forever, or, at the very least, that they ought to be grateful for every mouthful of food, let alone the immense freedom we have?
3:56 PM
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" Not being alienated from one's own essential nature is itself a field of blessings." - Hui-Neng via whiskey river
There's a lot of longing going on in the blogosphere lately. A number of the recent Ecotone posts about suburbs longed for things we've lost, for connections made difficult by time and distance, for a kind of childhood that seems impossible today. Lisa's post at field notes and Butuki's both for July 15th and 16th at Laughing Knees were especially poignant, and beautifully written - both of these bloggers are excellent, sensitive writers day after day. Carlos at Mysterium just posted a fine poem of his own composition. And Kurt, over at The Coffee Sutras, is hosting a full-fledged discussion on longing spurred by his own, as usual, very searching reflections.
I could go on for pages about this subject...it feels like I spent an entire decade, from 35 to 45, more or less consumed by trying to figure it out. I don't think we ever arrive at a place of non-longing, but we can better understand its nature - and through that, our own "essential nature" that Hui-Neng speaks about. For me, studying the mystic traditions of many faiths has been a key. All point in the same general direction - toward a God or sense of the divine, the limitless, the unknowable that is also at times absolutely immediate and non-separate from us. They tell us that glimpses of this unifying reality are possible in this life and we all have them, we just may not recognize it (I think the notion of God most of us grew up with makes this vastness hard to conceive). We also hear that insight into the nature of this reality is to be gained not by grasping and wanting, but by letting go, even "dying to self". The paradox is that you can't get onto the path without longing, but at some point, when all your human efforts to find what you desire have proved futile, you totally give up -- and there it is, a piece of the puzzle, enough to keep you going.
"You must lose your life to save it," say the Gospels. This isn't a literal statement at all, but I think it means that solving the enigma of longing actually involves giving rather than wanting and getting - giving one's old self; surrender; giving up one's myth of having the answers. We long so desperately for something or someone to complete and affirm us, without actually realizing that IT is longing for US.
Maybe longing is the sand in the oyster. Irritating us to form hearts of more perfect beauty. Maybe it’s never suppose to be fulfilled. It’s supposed to push the process. Maybe. Somehow. 8:29 PM
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Thank you all so much for all the comments on "Suburbs"! After all the writing and talk about "place" yesterday, today felt like a day for thinking and being quiet.
Zazen on Ching-t’ing Mountain
The birds have vanished down the sky. Now the last cloud drains away.
We sit together, the mountain and me, until only the mountain remains.
My neighbor wears wild grapevines wreathed about his shoulders. He wrestles and pulls, wrenching the honeysuckle from the earth, and vines from the trees where they once hung in wild joyful loops.
Angry, hot, sweating, he sits now and wipes his forehead with the back of a wrist, sets his face and begins hacking again, reducing the terrible invasion to something he can comb and smile at, satisfied, before turning toward his day.
He sees me looking up and tells me what he’s doing, as if I too might like to relocate the brambles and their kin which lie between my feet and his to some other neighborhood.
I smile politely and tell him that I like to see the birds that live there.
“Oh!” he says, surprised. “Are there birds?” --
Twenty-five years ago, when I moved to this small village, the hill in back of our property was filled with goldenrod and woodchuck holes, dotted with a few houses above. This whole hillside was orginally a farm; we planted our garden where the chicken coop had stood. Deer regularly came down to eat apples underneath the old trees in our yard, and in the evenings a reclusive hermit thrush sang in the underbrush.
By the same token, back then you couldn’t buy a decent head of lettuce – other than iceberg – from October through June, let alone fresh herbs for your pasta, or a mango, or twenty different kinds of shade-grown organic coffee. You certainly couldn’t spend an afternoon browsing the bookshelves and drinking cappuchino at Borders; there weren’t art galleries or repertory theater companies; and there was a lot less choice about almost everything, from housing to housecoats.
The coming of suburbia to rural northern New England is both blight and blessing, and I find myself participating in both. As often as I cry, “I don’t want to live in Connecticut!” when I see yet another giant concrete-block box store extending the horrible strip mall further into the countryside, emptying not only the original downtowns but the earlier, now-unfashionable malls, I do go there on occasion and am grateful for some of the amenities and convenience. The fact that my area – and my business – have been largely protected from the economic vicissitudes of recent years is a result of a healthy local economy and continued growth – the same growth that eats up farmland and turns woodlots and wetlands into commercial developments.
This sense of inexorable creep resulting in compromise – compromise of place and of personal values – is what suburbia represents to me. Although we’ve participated in forums on sprawl, and served on committees to preserve and strengthen local communities, deep down I recognize the insidious and seductive lure of change, opportunity, and convenience. The difference between me and the “flatlanders” – the suburbanites who come here from Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York and New Jersey – is that I’m acutely aware of what’s being lost.
Today, the entire hillside in back of our house has been developed. The winding road where I used to walk every morning is filled with whizzing, commuting cars, and the warbler-filledwoods at the top have been cut and replaced with a 50-unit condominium development. And even with our plantings of wildlife-feeding and -sheltering shrubs, and refusal to manicure the underbrush, the deer and the hermit thrush don’t come to our backyard any more.
“Oh?” says my transplanted neighbor. “Are there birds?”
"I've always wanted a pergola," I said to our hostess last Friday night as we walked from her backdoor to the driveway through a lovely white lattice walkway wound with flowering clematis vines in purple and soft pink.
"Ah, yes! A pergola," she said. "I haven't heard that word for a long time. We had one in the convent."
Pergola Rosita Copioli (Italian, 1948-)
I dreamed I had a pergola which later became a meadow of weeds, of twigs of stones. And a few steps in front, the sea—which had spread light and sun and infinite cries—turned gray little by little in the white northern light, and died out. But from the broken limbs of the garden to the villa with its vine-covered pergola and dark bunches over the marble doors, from the broken limbs, the sun outlined my hands on the marble and let them fall as itself was falling. The door jambs, the vine shoots, the small white chairs shattered in the sun. And from the villa not far from the sea, dust rose with the sun, dust and white seeds, the wind.
"Rosita Copioli graduated from the University of Bologna, Italy, with a Ph.D. in classical studies with a dissertation on “The Idea of Landscape in Leopardi.”
"Copioli’s work deals mainly with myth and nature. She is interested in the dawn of life, of history, of civilizations. Time and history are often compressed in her work. This compression is distilled in lists: enumerations of winds, of cities, of mythological characters, of minerals and flowers, of geographical places. Her world embraces the Mediterranean sea and the effects of modern civilization on the pristine world of the Greeks and the Romans." --from thedrunkenboat
"At its most successful, my 'touch' looks into the heart of nature; most days I don't even get close. These things are all part of a transient process that I cannot understand unless my touch is also transient-only in this way can the cycle remain unbroken and the process be complete." Andy Goldsworthy
I've been following Goldsworthy's work for a couple of years, since seeing a book of photographs of his "sculptures" - for this is, by and large, the only way one can experience these pieces which are made from nature and reclaimed by it. The film, narrated only by an occasional comment from the artist as he is filmed in Nova Scotia and his home in the highlands of Scotland, allows the viewer to be present at the birth, end, and often precipitous collapse of Goldsworthy's amazing and - to me - very moving creations. Some, like his stone cairns, do persist and may be around for a very long time. But others, created of found objects like leaves of graduated color joined into long "paper chains" by thorns and set afloat in a river, or tree leaves "sewn" together with a seemingly endless "thread" of reed, or the incredible stars and ribbons made of ice, confront us with the nature of time itself, and our own place in both its relentlessness and indifferent but heart-melting beauty. This is what preoccupies and motivates Goldsworthy, along with, I think, a desire to have us look more closely at our world.
Goldsworthy works a lot with a dark, rocky river that winds through woods in his property; I think he said that he sees that river as a metaphor for life. The water has worn deep cavities in the rock, and one of his favorite devices is to fill one or two of those cavities with a starting color - hundreds of dandelion petals, for example. In one segment, he pulls a rock out of the river and rubs it hard against another, creating a red powder - there's so much iron in the rock that it crumbles red. He spends a whole day crumbling rock, and uses it to dye one of the pools. And we're shocked - what is it, but our blood, made red by iron too?
For someone who makes almost nothing that can be "sold", Goldsworthy has certainly done well through the photography that he uses to document what he makes, but I love the way his work circumvents and questions the whole art gallery establishment; it is more like dance, fleeting but haunting because it goes to the core of who we are on this planet.
