Of Worms and Wings and Other Sacred, Ordinary Things

Hello, my friends!  Below I have posted the transcript of a talk I gave this past weekend at a celebration of Emily Dickinson's poetry and gardens.  The event was hosted by the Powow River Poets at the beautiful Old South Church in Newburyport, Massachusetts.  At the end of the day, some folks asked if I'd be willing to share the transcript, and I thought posting it here on the blog might be the easiest way to do just that.  Those of you who read my blog regularly may recognize a few lines here from a post I wrote over the summer as I was drafting this talk.  I've included a few of my photos from past posts here with the talk, too.  Again, if you've read my blog for a while, and you know about my passion for gardens, fields, and woods, you'll immediately understand my love for Emily Dickinson.


Of Worms and Wings and Other Sacred, Ordinary Things

Thank you so much.  I want to say a special word of thanks to the Powow River Poets for this wonderful celebration of Emily Dickinson’s poetry and gardens.   I can’t think of a better way to spend a Saturday--especially an October Saturday--and you’ll see why in just a bit.

I should begin by saying that I’m not an Emily Dickinson expert.  I’m simply a devoted fan, and I have been ever since I was a kid in the 1970’s.  Back when I was about 9 or 10, I had two summertime obsessions.  They weren’t obsessions that I shared with my friends or anyone else.  These were mine alone.

The first was one that I’m guessing many of you also had and probably still have; I read every single thing I could get my hands on. Magazines, books, cereal boxes—if it had words, I read it.  And somewhere in all that reading, I stumbled upon a collection of verse among my dad’s old college poetry textbooks that included some of Emily Dickinson’s poems. And among those poems I discovered the first verse beyond the nursery rhymes of my early childhood that I knew I had to memorize.  It seemed to me so clever and true that I wanted to put it in my pocket and keep it for myself always.  So I did:

“The pedigree of honey
Does not concern the Bee—
A clover anytime to Him
Is aristocracy.”

These lines embody much that I loved then and still love now about Dickinson’s poetry—economy of line, frankness, and a knack for telling the small but significant truth.  In these four lines she captures the perfect symbiosis between blossom and bee—one of the world’s most essential relationships.  This tiny poem has always stayed with me.  When I was learning calligraphy as a teenager, it was one of the sentences I would write again and again, decorating it with flourishes in the curlicued shape of a bee’s flight pattern.  In the years since then, it’s been a mantra, a touchstone that even now I repeat when I’m working in my garden: “The pedigree of honey does not concern the bee,” I murmur as I trellis the sweet peas or weed among the thyme and rosemary, and again at night as I drift off to sleep, knees aching, hair still smelling of mud and leaves . . . “a clover anytime to him is aristocracy . . . .”

But getting back to my childhood summertime obsessions.  The first was reading, and as you might have already guessed, the second was gardening. I loved spending hours in my mother’s flower garden with my face as close to the peonies, the phlox, and the tiger lilies as possible.  In the garden, my senses were heightened, things seemed more real, and I felt more connected to all the thousands of lives around me than I did anywhere else—connected to the worms in the soil, the butterflies careening among the cosmos, the cardinals calling one another from the branches of our white lilac tree.  I wanted to be near enough to spy on the bees working their dizzy magic, near enough so that the flowers would, as Dickinson writes, “make me regret / I am not a bee” (808).  Beyond the garden was noise and flash and distraction, the next-door neighbors arguing, planes roaring overhead, and the distant wash of cars on the highway—people rushing off to a world that seemed preoccupied with less vital things--at least to me.  There in the garden was the much smaller, more vibrant world that Dickinson describes in Poem 1746:

The most important population
Unnoticed dwell,
They have a heaven each instant
Not any hell.

Their names, unless you know them,
’Twere useless tell.
Of bumble-bees and other nations
The grass is full.

The garden to me, as a kid, felt like existence at its most essential.  While I reveled in its beauty, I don’t really think I held a romanticized notion about the pretty flowers, because, I saw life and death quite clearly for what they were when I was in the garden.  In fact, I think if you want a child to understand death, you give her a hoe, a spade, and a pair of shears, and you send her out to vanquish the weeds, turn the compost, and deadhead the roses.  Much as Emily Dickinson did in her own mother’s garden when she was growing up, I saw death all around me in the garden—and in some cases, I was even the cause of it, whether I wanted to be or not.  I quickly learned that this was an unavoidable part of being a gardener.

I also witnessed intimately how everything that dies helps to bring new life into the world.  And that many of the plants that died each year had ingenious ways of coming back to life the following spring.  As Dickinson asks, “If a pod die, shall it not live again?” (Prose fragment 18)  Over time as I continued to garden, continued to watch pods die each season and then live again, and continued to read Dickinson’s poems about the gardens, orchards, and fields surrounding her home in Amherst, I knew that I had found a kindred spirit—and isn’t this one of the key reasons that we read (and write) poetry?  Dickinson herself called the poets she read “the dearest ones of time, the strongest friends of the soul.”

As a girl, I couldn’t put into words what I was discovering about the interconnectedness of life and death in the garden.  In fact, I don’t even think I can now, really.  As Dickinson writes,  “Nature is what we know— /Yet have no art to say" (668).

But she doth protest too much, because she did have the art to say it: When Roses cease to bloom, Sir, /And Violets are done,” she writes,

When Bumblebees in solemn flight
Have passed beyond the Sun —
The hand that paused to gather
Upon this Summer's day Will idle lie — in Auburn —
Then take my flowers — pray!”

Or in “A Bird came down the walk," where she describes the bird that bit an angle worm in halves, “ate the fellow raw,” drank some dew from the grass, and then “hopped sidewise to let a beetle pass.”  She intimately captures in her poems Tennyson’s “nature red in tooth and claw”  (“In Memoriam A.H. H.") with a scientist’s precision and a poet’s sensibility.  At the same time, she also explores the sacred in the everyday.  “I hope you love birds too,” she wrote to her cousin Eugenia Hall. “It is economical. It saves going to heaven.”  And in “Some Keep the Sabbath” (236) that great old chestnut taught in Introduction to Literature courses everywhere, she eschews conventional religion, finding her spirituality in the family orchard:

Some keep the Sabbath going to Church –
I keep it, staying at Home –
With a Bobolink for a Chorister –
And an Orchard, for a Dome –

Some keep the Sabbath in Surplice –
I, just wear my Wings –
And instead of tolling the Bell, for Church,
Our little Sexton – sings.

God preaches, a noted Clergyman –
And the sermon is never long,
So instead of getting to Heaven, at last –
I’m going, all along.

For Dickinson the garden embodied immortality. As a girl, she describes heaven in a letter to a friend as “the garden we have not seen.”  And many years later, just before her death, she asked to have her casket carried—by the workmen who tended the family’s grounds—in a circle around her garden, through the barn, and then up through the field of buttercups to the Western Cemetery in the center of Amherst.  Heaven was inseparable from the flowers, the birds, and the bees, which were all parallels to and metaphors for her own life—for our own lives.  That is not to say that she didn’t see them as ends in themselves, but that by seeing and valuing them for their own sake, she came to understand her own existence all the better.  In the garden she found a way to comprehend mortality—and proof of immortality.

When I was a little girl in the garden with my shears and my spade, Emily Dickinson taught me something that I would later come to feel in my bones as true, and it’s that at root, a gardener thinks about life and death always as one. In each flower's race toward blossoming is its race, too, toward decline. I'm saying nothing new, only that when you garden, this thought is always present. In the spring garden I am surrounded by the new growth of runner bean sprouts, the full flush of a climbing rose, and the last breath of a lush peony all at the same moment. My wheelbarrow is piled high with a day's kill: the weeds I pulled, faded blossoms I plucked, lily beetles I crushed between gloved finger and thumb. The gardener must not be squeamish about death. She must recognize its necessity even as she rejoices at the sight of her first ever iris uncurling itself with a flourish from the spear of its stem.  She must also accept its necessity when that iris blossom dies.

It’s a Saturday in October, and the garden is dying.  But it will live again—improbably, miraculously, this coming spring.  Even as it dies, it is living, and it will always live on, as will the iris, the rose, and the jasmine, the Indian Pipe and the clover, in Emily Dickinson’s words.

And so, because she had the art to say it, as well as anyone ever has, and as reverently, too:

“In the name of the Bee—
And of the Butterfly—
And of the Breeze—
Amen!” (21)

Note: Numbers in parentheses refer to poem numbers in The Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by R. W. Franklin, 1999.

October

Always my new year. Always a beginning. Always an answer to an unspoken question. 

When I stray too far from the ways that keep me centered and whole--thinking, listening, sitting quiet and still--October reminds me. 

In my kitchen I watch a ray of sunlight shift to copper at day's end. Apples on the counter wait to be peeled and sliced. Ginger simmers on the stove, its steam curling a golden trail through the room. Outside a cardinal calls to her mate from the oxblood leaves of the ninebark tree. What she sings to him I can never know, but her song keeps time with the beat of my own heart. 

Hard Frost

I knew it was coming.  I felt it before I'd even checked the forecast.  As the sun sank behind the pines last night, I scurried around the garden beds, gathering as many blossoms as I could to bring inside.  

So even though it pained me to look out the back window at the frozen gardens this morning, here in the house I had the small comfort of all my rescued blooms in vases and pots and pitchers.

Really I don't mind this turn to the darker months.  Here in Maine it is the best time to head to the woods or the beach or the mountain trails.  Soon the last of the leaf peepers will climb back in their SUVs and head for warmer states, and we will have all this beauty to ourselves again until next June.

And this turn outside means it's time for the turn inward, too.  Time for fires in the fireplace, candles on the mantle, cups of tea, and thick books to read.  I've piled up the warm blankets and taken my sweaters  out of storage.  And there's still plenty to do in the garden--bulbs to plant and leaves to rake and beds to prepare for the long, cold winter to come.     

Finding Stillness

What do you do when one of your oldest and most treasured blogging friends announces that she will be holding a still life photography workshop for three magical days at her brand new studio in Rivers, Manitoba . . . and another of your oldest and dearest blogging friends invites you to come stay at her house just twenty minutes from the workshop . . . and those two sweet friends also happen to be among your favorite photographers in the entire world?

If you're me, you thank your lucky stars, and you book a flight to Manitoba.  

In my post last week I mentioned that I've been a thousand miles away both literally and figuratively.  Really, I've been two thousand miles away, but the miles cannot begin to measure what my time at Kim Klassen's The Studio meant to me.  

Finding Stillness was much more than a workshop.   

It was a time and a place where we had the freedom to set up a shot, and to keep coming back to it as the sun moved across the sky over the course of the day--no distractions, no responsibilities, no other task than to play with color and focus and shadows and light.

It was a space filled with well-worn tables and chipped-paint chairs and shelves of cups and bowls and books for us to use as we practiced making magic.  

Kim Klassen giving a demonstration on how she makes her magic

It was also the place where after years and years, I finally got to meet my two incredible friends for real . . . and to watch them work . . . and to soak up their brilliance.

Aeleen Sclater setting up a shot

Barb Brookbank, Diana Foster, Kim Klassen, and Shelley Rounds out for a morning walk on the trail

And it was, perhaps most importantly, three whole days that I got to spend with ten inspiring and talented photographers from the United States, Canada, and the UK.     

Carol Hart and Diana Foster

We talked shop--lighting, cameras, lenses, techniques and tips--but we also talked life.  And we laughed.  A lot. 

Ilse preparing a gorgeous salad while Xanthe Berkley, Barb Brookbank, and Barbara Skrobuton shoot

We also ate the most delicious and nourishing food, cooked by Kim's mom as well as by Aeleen, and by Aeleen's friend Ilse, an incredible chef who graciously let us photograph her preparing our gourmet lunch on the final day of the workshop.  It was a relief to be in a room full of people who not only didn't roll their eyes when I grabbed my camera to take endless shots of a gorgeous basket of peppers or a bowl of fresh salad tossed with line vinaigrette, they grabbed their cameras, too, and we all happily snapped away.

And then there was the stillness.  I found it each day in moments both expected and surprising.  We all shared an hour a day of silence, during which we were free to keep photographing or to process shots, read a book, write, take a nap--whatever our hearts desired.  I treasured those hours, as I'm naturally a pretty introverted person who loves to spend most of my time working in silence.  

But I discovered many times of quiet stillness throughout the day, even working side by side with other photographers.  It was easy to simply be.  Kim created such a light-filled and welcoming space that I think we all felt at home, whether we were gathered around Carol Hart giving a shop talk on using studio lighting or watching Xanthe Berkley make one of her incredible stop-motion animations or learning the secrets to gorgeous top-down shots from Barb Brookbank.  

The feeling of home extended beyond the four walls of Kim's studio to the town of Rivers itself, where we took walks, went out for supper, and popped into some of the local shops.  Everywhere we went in this small prairie town, people welcomed us, asked where we were from, and swapped stories.  I can't imagine a more perfect spot for a photography retreat.

Kim's sweet dog Ben was our muse and companion.

For me, the retreat extended beyond Rivers all the way to Aeleen's beautiful house on the prairie.  There, I got to meet her husband and one of her sons, hang out with her in the evenings, and run out the front door, into the fields each morning with her sweet pup Zoe.

Morning light in the room where I stayed at prairiegirl's place

Everything in prairiegirl Aeleen's world is arranged with love.  The shots above and below were taken in her house.  I didn't have to set them up, because this is just how she sees things, how she crafts beautiful vignettes at every turn.   

me and beautiful pg (Aeleen)

On my last day in Manitoba, I got to roam around early in the morning, taking shots full of color and texture at Aeleen's like the one above.  And her gardens!  And her studio!  I think I need to save them for another post.  There's too much to share.

As if staying with Aeleen were not treat enough, on my last night there, she took me to her neighbor Willi's Octoberfest, where we watched the full moon rise over the fields, and I got to see the biggest, most impressive bonfire of my entire life . . . not to mention fireworks and a fire lantern being launched.  Fire was definitely the theme of the evening!  And Abba.  Did I mention Abba?  There was much dancing to Abba.  Perhaps there wasn't much stillness that one night, but it was a time I won't soon forget.

Spoons and leaves at prairiegirl studio ~ love

Since returning to my own life back on the coast of Maine, I've been swamped with work, but I've also been finding that my week in Manitoba is very much present in my mind in heart.  The people I met there, and the time we spent simply sharing our love for taking photographs, have helped me to see why I turn to my camera so often, why I set up corners all over my house, always chasing the light, always seeking to discover a mood, a moment of stillness that once I've captured it, will always be mine . . . and maybe someone else's, too.  

Ben

I found myself using one hashtag again and again on my Instagram account while I was in Manitoba: #feelingblessed.  Thank you Kim, Aeleen, Xanthe, Carol, Diana, Barb, Brenda, Dorry, Shelley, and Barbara for three days full of more blessings than I can count.  

October

I have been a thousand miles away--for real and true.  There is much to tell, and I will, but for now there is October, the clear light it brings, and the days that disappear to dusk when I look away, when I take a breath, when I least expect.

Each leaf that shifts to gold on the maple outside my window is another blessing.  We will rake them, pile them out behind the shed, let them take their sweet time to turn to magic for the borders and the raised beds.  And there are bulbs for planting.  I'll haul out the barrow and the heavy spade, dig troughs for crocuses and daffodils.  There will be whole hills and mountains of snow between now and the next full bloom, but gardeners bank on hope, and October's sunlight gives just enough to keep me until spring.

On this Thanksgiving Day, I offer two quotes from that wisest of women, Julia Child, in the hope that they might alleviate any little moments of holiday stress.  Keep them in mind as you mash your potatoes or as you reach for your second helping of stuffing.  

"With enough butter, anything is good."

"People who love to eat are always the best people."

xo Gigi

Giving Thanks

I keep thinking about what I want to say for this, a post of thanksgiving, and I am struggling to find the words.  I usually keep my personal life and my blog life quite separate, writing only about the things here that inspire me and feed my creative spirit.  

Giving thanks for such things is easy.  I feel blessed to live in a beautiful part of the world, to have friends and family in abundance, to have food in my cupboards, and to have a roof over my head.  For these and so many other blessings I am grateful beyond measure.  I can blurt out my thanks without thought or hesitation.  

There is something else I am grateful for, though, and it is harder to express.

This year has been a difficult one for me and for some of the people I love most.  Truly, it has been a year that has sometimes felt like it was endured more than lived.  That's probably not a good thing to say aloud in the land of lifestyle blogs, where things tend to feel rather nicely tied up with candy-striped baker's twine.  Nothing in life has felt nicely tied.  All has been at loose ends.

The ends are still loose, and even a bit frayed at the moment, but that's just it--I don't care.  I am grateful for this truly horrible year.

I am grateful for what it has taught me about empathy, about love, about holding on tight with both hands, and about letting go, too.

I am grateful for what it has forced me to face and for what it has forced me to feel.  I am grateful that I've had the chance to learn very difficult lessons from someone much wiser than myself--and to learn them in the most loving and supportive of ways.

I'm also grateful that even on the most wretched of days, there is always room in my heart for a walk through fields and woods.  Yes, I am truly blessed.

 

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Fall Botanicals: Tips for Arranging Floral Patterns

Earlier this fall during my annual cleanup of the gardens, I began putting some of the colorful leaves, blossoms, and berries into a basket.  Their shapes and textures were so beautiful that I decided I needed to do something more memorable than just plunking them into a mason jar to keep on the windowsill for a few days.

Using a worn old tablecloth as my makeshift backdrop, I arranged torn petals from marigolds, nasturtiums, and hydrangeas into simple medallion shapes on my picnic table.  I combined them with tiny pinecones and whatever else I could find in the yard, and then I grabbed my iPhone and snapped a few shots of the various arrangements.

I had to work quickly, as it was a chilly afternoon, and my fingers were growing numb, but I found that the more fanciful I got with the arrangements, the more I was loving them.  Later that evening, safely inside with a cup of Earl Grey, I processed the photos on my laptop and then shared a few of them in a post here on the blog, as well as on Instagram and Facebook.

I was quite surprised and touched by people's reactions.  Some folks even emailed to say that they thought I should turn the images into greeting cards.  I've been making and photographing more of the arrangements since then, and I had some prints done on Shutterfly.  I'm on the hunt now for some vintage gilded frames so I can hang the prints in our guest bedroom.

Today, as I worked on the latest in my "Autumn Gatherings" series, I took photos of the steps as I went along so I could share the process with you.  This isn't really a tutorial, since anyone can arrange flowers in beautiful patterns, but I have discovered a few tips along the way that really work for me, and I hope they may be helpful for someone else trying this.

First, the background is key.  If you want your arrangement to have a sort of vintage, nostalgic look, it's  helpful to begin with a vintage background.  Today I used this wrinkled, worn, and faded piece of Irish linen that I've had for years.  The colors of the flowers printed on it are just right as a backdrop to autumn leaves and branches.  (In fact, I used this same fabric as the background for my Artful Blogging post.)

Next, I gathered from our yard whatever flowers, berries, twigs, leaves, cones, and seed pods struck my fancy.  If your backyard happens to be more of a wooded forest, be careful, as some plants can be poisonous. 

Here in Maine, we're deep into autumn, but I still have a few hardy flowers blooming in my garden beds and in the pots on my front porch, so these were musts for me, plus some scarlet runner beans left on my arbor, and the last of the husk cherries in their lovely paper-lantern shells.  Various shrubs and woody perennials provided lots of great material, too.  The most important thing is to find an interesting range of textures, shapes, and sizes.  The colors this time of year tend to be fairly easy to harmonize.

Now that it's getting really chilly out, it's easier to work inside, so once I'd gathered my materials and placed any tender stems in water to stay fresh while I was working, I stationed myself on a large table on my sun porch, which was ideal, as it gets flooded with a particularly lovely warm, golden late afternoon sunlight this time of year.  

I began by playing with colors and shapes.  I tend to lean toward ovals and circles for my designs, but other shapes would, of course, be beautiful, too.  What I love about making medallion shapes is that you can have a beautiful, useable shot at almost any point in the assembly process.  If you want something as simple as the above mini pumpkin surrounded by geranium leaves, this would be nice as is.  You could move right on to cropping and processing the photo from here.  

I found myself smitten with this sweet little robin's nest that had fallen from one of the mock oranges bordering our yard.  I would never steal a nest from birds, but I do collect the windfall nests that I find on our property every autumn--or you could fashion a little nest yourself from twigs and moss.  This one just seemed like a perfect centerpiece for my medallion.

I love varying textures, shapes and colors, and then repeating certain ones for effect.  Once I had placed the yellow flower (the last one of the year from my porch planter) in the center of the nest, I knew that I would want to pick up on that yellow and accentuate it.  So, I simply played with possibilities.

Lamb's ears are particularly wonderful because of their silver-green color, their spear shape, and their fuzzy texture.  I love them contrasted with the azalea leaves that I've laid on top of them; the azalea's leathery texture and its burgundy color contrast beautifully with the lamb's ears, but both plants are the same basic shape, so there's some repetition, too, which is always pleasing to the eye.  The dark purple leaves radiating out from beneath the geranium leaves are from one of my many forsythias.  They repeat the same shape, but offer yet another color.  Plus, as yellow's complementary color, purple is a great back layer.  

As with any creative process, a huge part of it is trial and error for me.  I tried adding bits of pink begonia blossoms along with the purple and pink scarlet runner beans, but then the whole thing started feeling just a wee bit Easter-y, so I scrapped that idea and continued on.  This time I used much more autumnal petals of orange marigolds and red nasturtiums.

In the photo above I felt I was nearly finished, but I wanted one more layer to give it a sense of blooming out almost beyond the borders of the frame.  

My final step was to add some lavender leaves to the outer tips of the forsythias.  They pick up on the silver of the lamb's ears, and they also repeat the shapes of the central flower blossom petals.  I love that not all the leaves in the image are exactly the same size, and I never fuss over making things exactly symmetrical.  Perfectly imperfect suits my eye and temperament much more.

Finally, when it comes to processing the photos, I tend to play with lightening the exposure just a little bit.  I also sometimes blur the edges of the image, as I've done in the photo above.  Many of you are incredible photographers and much more brilliant than I at photo processing.  If you're newer to it, you don't even need to be a Photoshop expert.  Try using a simple online photo processor.  Most of them have loads of ways to give your photos a vintage look.  Or, simply snap away on your phone and use a processing app to get wonderful results.  If you want to see live examples of how others process their photos, YouTube is always a great teaching tool.  The version below is finished off with a final texture layered over the top of the image.  The texture is a photograph of another piece of old linen, which, once processed, gives an even more vintage look to the image.

Before I have Shutterfly print up my next round of photos (and my first batch of "Autumn Gatherings" greeting cards), I'll likely play with each image a little more, tweaking it until I'm satisfied with the results.  For me, the most important aspect of making this series is how much fun it is to create beautiful patterns from the bits and pieces I've gathered from my own backyard.  Now I can hardly wait to make the "Winter Gatherings" series.  I'm already imagining the dreamy Christmas cards.  Holly, pine, and arborvitae, here I come!