How to Start the Day

This is our breakfast spot.  On days when we have a little time in the morning, we pick up bagels slathered in pimento cheese  here  or whatever looks most amazing here and head to Cape Elizabeth to watch the day begin at Portland Head Light.

It's never the same twice.  I've munched happily here on calm days, during fierce storms, and every kind of day in between.

This is one of the most painted and photographed lighthouses in the world, so I have nothing new to show or tell about it.  Like so many others, I take pictures every single time I am here.  I'm drawn to the beauty of the light itself, but also to the ancient, cragged rocks, and to the sound of the waves.  Always the waves.  See?  Nothing new here.  Just crazy love.

This isn't even the first time I've posted about the lighthouse, and I have a funny feeling that it won't be the last time.  For more sunrise shots like the one below, take a peek here.  For other pretty ones, look here.  

And for those of you who are wondering, no one died in the Annie C. Maguire shipwreck of Christmas Eve, 1886. 

A Bit More Mist . . . and a Few Thoughts About Solitude and Togetherness

Do you mind a few more photos of fog?  These are shots I took at Willard Beach in South Portland.  It's a lovely neighborhood beach in any weather, but I do love a good rolling fog for a walk. 

I also wanted to say thank you for all the wonderful comments and emails about my last post.  They made my week.  

I can't help it; in my head I've named this shot "The Happy Couple."

I've been writing a great deal lately, and helping clients work on their writing projects, which is a process that brings rewards of its own.  Often when people ask me for advice about how to become a writer, I am hard pressed to give them any one answer.  Of course, reading heaps of books is up near the top of my list, and writing every day--or as close to every day as possible.  But I think maybe the most essential trait a writer can cultivate is a love of solitude.  Social butterflies are not suited to the task.

When you do seek companionship, it is helpful to find others who love solitude, too.  Then you can be alone together.  They need to be people who don't fret when you wander off for hours to stare at leaves and shells and rocks and twigs.  They need to feel very secure in their own ability to be alone when you lock yourself away for hours to write. They need to not wait for you to come out of hiding.  Instead, they must have their own quiet obsessions that occupy long stretches of time.  In this way, when you do come back together, it will be out of a mutual joy in the work and play you are both pursuing.  There will be much to share, much that sustains both. 

And there will be no petty jealousy.  Each will support the other in his or her pursuits.  I'm not saying this is an easy path to choose, but it is certainly a more joyous and productive one when we can share it with like-minded spirits.  This all seems like an obvious thing to say, but I know what it's like when a writer (or an artist of any kind) tries to share her life with someone who does not understand the need for solitude.  This leads to a silent pen, which leads to loneliness, something utterly different from solitude.  The latter nourishes, the former leeches one dry. 

Are you someone, writer or not, who needs solitude?  If so, how do you find it?  I think it is increasingly rare in our relentlessly "connected" world.  One trick I have is that I don't watch television . . . at all . . . ever.  I'd love to hear some of your strategies for finding solitude.

Wishing you a week of beauty and lots of creative energy, my friends!

No Man is an Island . . . Except when the Internet is on the Fritz

Hello, lovelies!  Please forgive my long absence.  My hiatus from blogging was completely unexpected.  Actually, it was a hiatus from all things online.  Mr. Magpie and I were staying over on the island with friends, and we'd been assured that our rental cottage would have internet access.   When we arrived, however, we discovered that it didn't.  Not one single bar.  Not a wee bit of the World-Wide Interweb.

Ah, the mixed blessings of no internet.  Yes, it was lovely to be completely cut off from email and Facebook, and we would have relished it were we there on a straight-up holiday, but it was a working-vacation for most of us, so the lack of access to the outside world proved to be a challenge.  In fact, Mr. Magpie ended up coming back to the mainland to work quite often, and I simply postponed all internet-related tasks.  

That, combined with one non-functioning shower, a busted DVD remote, a chair held together with cardboard and contact paper (I'm not kidding), and a toilet that ran until you lifted the lid and adjusted the ball cock, made for much improvising all week.  In fact, we've changed the name of the cottage from "Beach House" to "Make Do."

On the other hand, the lack of amenities made for much hilarity as we discovered each new broken item in the house, and we cared very little about showers or sitting down when we were just a few yards from a sandy beach and a sky full of stars.  Mostly, the holiday was about reconnecting with dear friends during long walks and bike rides around the island, afternoons of beach combing, ferry rides at sunset, and food--pots of steamed mussels, bowls of fiddleheads, plates heaped high with fresh local greens.

And did I mention writing?  There was writing, indeed.  Loads of it.  With no interruptions from the online world, we wrote our hearts out.  And truly, what could be better than that?

Hoping you are well and flourishing.  Looking forward to catching up with you.  xo Gigi

     

The Sun, the Moon, and Everything in Between

I shot this photo of Portland Head Light just before nightfall with the sun setting (in a spectacular blaze of orange) behind me.  The colors here in Casco Bay are beautiful any time of year, but there's something special about a late winter sky.  If you can stand the tear-inducing wind long enough to get one semi-decent photo, then you are rewarded with remarkable, watercolor blues and pinks.

Two years ago I lived for a few months on an island just across the bay from this famous lighthouse.  Here in the city tonight, as I looked up at the star-pricked sky and the waxing crescent moon, I recalled how much more connected to the sun and moon and stars I felt on the island.  I woke every single day with the sun and I watched it set nearly every evening.  The ocean waves were just a few yards (on stormy days just a few feet) from my front door, and I walked the road that ringed the island rain or shine, telling time by the rise and fall of the tides.  Whenever I'm back there to visit with friends or even stay a night or two, I feel my heart slow down to an even rhythm.  Life's purpose and my place within it become clear when I look to the sun and moon to keep my pace.    

Why I Live Here #1: Sunrise

The colors in these shots are not augmented or exaggerated, I promise.  Coastal Maine is simply a beautiful place to watch the sun come up.  That first shot was taken this morning on the Eastern Promenade in Portland, looking out towards Peaks Island (where we lived in the Fall of 2009).   The rest of the shots are of Portland Head Light in Cape Elizabeth.  I have lived many, many places, and there's nowhere else that makes me feel the joy that I do when I sit on a big, craggy rock by the sea, watching the sun take its sweet time to rise over Casco Bay.  

  

Irene

Thinking today about our neighbors in New Hampshire and Vermont--and others up and down the Eastern Seaboard--who were hit much harder by Irene than expected.  Here in Portland, Maine, it was windy and rainy, but nothing particularly out of the ordinary.  As the storm hit, we went for breakfast at Becky's Diner down on the waterfront, along with loads of other locals, then checked out area lighthouses and landings in Cape Elizabeth, Portland, and Falmouth.  For as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow put it, "The best thing one can do when it's raining is to let it rain."  

Sending best wishes to those recovering after the storm.  

I See the Moon (in Everything): My Obsession

Ember Grove

As Mr. Magpie and I were leaving the house last night for our evening walk around the neighborhood, I said, quite casually, "I think I'll bring my camera."  This, of course, is a little like a scuba diver saying, "I think I'll bring my oxygen tank," a fact I realized even as I was uttering the words, and which was confirmed by my husband's uncontrolled laughter.  Many of you know what I'm talking about.  Our husbands, friends, and families have come to accept that dinner won't be served until each dish has been photographed in just the right light with steam rising tantalizingly from the pasta/potatoes/risotto.  They know that any visit to a new restaurant will require shots of the decor, the specials board, the entrees, and the creme brulee.  They no longer bat an eye when we haul out our cameras at greenhouses, antiques shops, used bookstores, and, the big one . . . cafes--for who among us can resist snapping a foamy latte on a granite counter with a pretty heart fashioned from the milk froth?

Angela Adams

I'll come out and say it: I am an addict.  I'm hooked on the click, the frame, the snap, and shutter.  I'm hooked on light and color and control.  That's right, control.  I decide what to leave in, what to leave out.  I decide how bright or dim, how focused, how blurred, how washed out or saturated with color.  Most of all, I'm hooked on remembering moments--flashes of perception and thought and feeling.  A photo brings back smells and sounds and emotions.  It brings back physical sensations: the feel of cobblestones beneath my feet, the salt breeze coming in off the bay.

Squid and Whale Tattoo

Last night, as we made the long loop up the hill and around our neighborhood,  Mr. Magpie waited patiently while I snapped pictures as if our little world would disappear tomorrow.  The thing is, for me it would.  At least this version of it would, this twilit June night under a full moon when the air felt soft and still warm from the day.  The streets were quiet.  Nearly everyone was inside watching the Bruins beat the Canucks for the Stanley Cup.  As I framed a shot of the moon rising over our park on the bay, joyous shouts rose up and tumbled out the open windows of one of the old Victorians on the Prom.  The Bruins  scored their first goal of the night just as I took the shot below. 

By the time we made it home, I had taken 86 photographs.  Just like that.  Nearly half were of the moon.  But then, as I looked through the shots, I began to see the moon in all of them; circles emerged, full moons and half moons and silvery crescents.  I realized then another reason I'm obsessed with photography: patterns.  This fascination also lends itself to my love of writing and of art in general.  I love patterns--the ones I see in a field of daisies, in a well-wrought poem, or in a lovingly designed room.

  

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And so, it was there in the O's of a favorite restaurant's sign--the moon was in the spoon-- 

and soon, I found it in the patterns of windows . . .

Laura Fuller Glass

in the spectacles (or lunettes as in lune, as in moon) in a favorite studio

in the creamy white of a bloom . . .

Willa Wirth

Willa Wirth

in the display and sign of an amazing jeweler . . .

Otto Pizza

in the pies at a beloved hangout . . .

and strung on a line behind a neighbor's place.

The moon was everywhere at once, and it was up to me to find it.  And that's just it.  Camera in hand, I am both treasure-seeker and archivist.  And the treasure usually lies where I least expect it--in a mood or a color or shape . . . or something else I didn't see at all until I peered through the lens.  

On Memory, Mood, and Manipulation

Here in Coastal Maine, as anyone will tell you, we haven't really had a spring this year.  It has been cold. Period. We've had a few hours of glorious sunshine, but not the kind of slow, golden afternoons that warm your bones after a long winter.  And mostly we've had more than our fair share of rain, clouds, fog, drizzle, and mizzle.  I took these photos in Falmouth down at the town landing on a rare sunny afternoon, and then I processed them to look a little like 1970's postcards.  I always loved the overly saturated colors of postcards when I was a kid.  They were like real life, only in Technicolor.  

The sky on the day I took these wasn't actually very blue.  It was more the slightly bluish-white of bone china.  The shades of blue you see here I added, which made me feel deceitful, but also a little god-like.  There were people at the landing on that day: a mother playing with her young daughter, a woman beach combing, a fisherman in his boat, several men on a building site.  I avoided capturing any of them in these shots because I wanted the images to feel a bit lonely and moody.  

Photography, like writing, is a manipulative art form.  When I teach writing to students (which I do a lot of, if you are ever looking for a writing tutor or coach), I like to remind them that to write is to manipulate the perception of the reader.  Since you have total control over what to emphasize and what to downplay as well as what to reveal to and what to conceal from the reader, you should think of it very much like how a photographer thinks of framing and processing a photograph.  Everything--point of view, color, texture, mood, light, and so much more--is in your hands.  What a thrill . . . and a responsibility.

Because my whole life is wrapped up in writing--and has been for a very long time--I think about small details everywhere I go.  I look at the angle of a rooftop, consider the shape of puddle, and note the hemline of a woman's dress.  No, that is an understatement.  I obsess about these things.  And now that I am an enthusiastic amateur photographer (who is beginning to get a few paying gigs), I obsess about such details even more than before.  It's a lousy habit if one is to accomplish practical tasks, but it's a glorious habit if one is to craft anything of beauty or even interest.  Ah, and that's just it.  I didn't want to make these particular photographs beautiful exactly.  I wanted to make them capture a certain mood, a certain angle of light and memory from about 1975.  That memory isn't pretty or picturesque so much as it's intensely saturated, scrubbed with bright white sunlight, slightly blurred, and more than a little lonely.  But lonely in a way that I rather enjoyed that spring when I was eight years old--and still enjoy now all these decades later.