Anam Cara

Je Suis dans Les Ravissements

  
 

There is a wall around Monet's garden.  When I saw the wild extravagance of it, I wondered if they were afraid it would escape if not restrained.  Perhaps unfettered poppies, cornflowers, and roses would run amuck, polluting the landscape of Giverny with fragile blossoms of pink and purple silk and sky blue taffeta.  Perhaps the fragrance would so intoxicate the residents that they would forget their work......and their problems.

When I was a very newly married 21 year old, I bought my first "painting" of Monet's garden.  It cost me ten dollars.  That cheap poster still hangs in our house.  And I have never lost the infatuation with the garden, or with the painter who rendered it so marvelously that all I had to do was stand in front of it...and I was there.

 

Stepping into the real garden was like stepping inside a painting.  At every turn I was confronted with a landscape already wondrously familiar.  And yet...here the painting breathed.  Blossoms nodded, bees hovered, grasses and stems swished and shushed.  And the scent!!  Oh that I might convey to you the deliciousness and complexity of it.  Sometimes sweet candy, sometimes earth and musk, sometimes citrus and sunshine, and sometimes so recklessly wild and bewildering that it defied category.  I could only breathe and sigh and give thanks for being in that place in that moment.

 

The lily pond completely mesmerizes, altering with every few steps.  Frames made of arching grasses and blossoms floating on invisible stems, or willow fronds playfully dancing in the breeze, continually give you fresh perspective.  Sometimes the water appears murky and dark.  Next moment, it is blue sky with white clouds.  And ever and always, in their midst, islands and continents of waterlilies.

 
  
"I am following Nature without being able to grasp her...I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers."

~Claude Monet

I think I get that.  As I sometimes floated and sometimes stumbled through Monet's gardens, ravenously trying to drink so deeply that some part of the garden would go with me, my heart was so full it ached.  And even now, I am compelled to share it...to give some piece of this extraordinary joy to you.  Monet did it with his paint box.  I attempt to do it with my words.  I certainly do not believe I have done it.  I wonder if he did.

 

The title of the post is drawn from another Monet quote.  The garden became his obsession.  He once said, "Everything I have earned has gone into these gardens." But almost in the same breath he also said, referring to the gardens, "I am in raptures!" ("Je suis dans les ravissements!")  I feel this captures my sentiments as well as anything.

If you care to see more photographs from the garden you may visit the photo album.

Salzburg Serenade...

Delicacy, elegance, and a friendly ostentation that is somehow endearing.


Clamber and clang of ancient bells, string quartet, horses' hooves against cobblestones, rain.


Strong, frothy coffee and sumptuous, decadent pastries served on porcelain and linen, with tiny forks, under spreading chestnut trees.

Eighth century church with a confectionary ceiling, catacombs and caves, and a cemetery that ironically throbs with life.

Baroque cathedral where voices chase one another around a great dome, then hang in the air, making me forget to breathe.


Mozart, Mirabell, and Maria...


Dearest Salzburg,

I am completely under your spell. Your labyrinthine streets and alleys suddenly opening onto vast plazas, your exquisitely ornate appointments, your spires and domes, are endlessly distracting. Your cafes spilling onto the cobblestones, your coffees and pastries, bring me great delight. And the music...the music that was born here, and the music that is the city moving round me...sing to me still, even as I reluctantly ride away from you.

Tell me, do you ever tire of watching the mountains, so fierce and solid, yet ever changing? I watched clouds wrap themselves around their tops, then drop to sleep inside their crevices. I watched as the light painted them deepest blue, then purple with soft swaths of green, then gray under violet clouds carrying rain. Entrancing.

Thank you, sweet city, for enfolding my daughter and me within your self for a few blissful days. You helped us create memories that will bring tender smiles and flutters of delight for many years.

Your Most Ardent Admirer,

S

*Couldn't resist including this last shot. Even McDonalds has to dress up to play Salzburg. :)

Bits and Pieces, This and That...

It occurred to me just a few days into our trip that, with an 18 year old and a 16 year old in tow, this just might be the last great odyssey we five will ever take...just five...all five. It has made every moment keenly poignant and every memory priceless. Memories of laughter, of standing in holy places and feeling the whirl of the sacred all around us, of lighting candles and saying prayers, of astonishing beauty that left us all breathless...together...with a cord of knowing winding us ever more tightly together. Getting lost together, telling family stories, speaking from the heart, watching each member of the family draw something out of another that he/she could not find alone.

Wherever life takes each of our children and whoever joins them on the journey, I am confidant that we are inextricably wound into one another's lives. Moments like we have shared over the past two and a half weeks have helped make this be so. For this, I am profoundly grateful.

On a lighter note, here is a bit of travel trivia for you from the journey thus far.

MODES of TRANSPORT: plane, train, tram, taxi, subway,ferry, bus, funicular, car, boat, our own two feet.

*MOST AWKWARD CULTURAL ADAPTATION: The Turkish/Greek plumbing systems are unable to accommodate both personal waste AND paper waste. So toilet paper (USED toilet paper) has to be disposed of in the trash can. I had experienced this in Kosova, but it was new to the rest. More family sharing than anyone was bargaining for. :) It had Kelsey and me longing for our pit toilets in Africa.

CLOSEST BRUSH WITH the LAW: The border crossing from Turkey to Greece took about 45 minutes on each side. We all had to exit the bus while luggage was searched and passports collected. We watched officials slicing open boxes on tractor trailer trucks and pulling out their contents. We were told by locals this was unusual. Apparently something was expected.

ROWDIEST CROWD: In Turkey, all male citizens serve a two year stint in the army just after graduation. We encountered a celebration for a group of these guys our last night in Turkey. Flags, alcohol, fireworks, LOUD chanting and singing. Scary til we learned what was happening.

COOLEST PASSPORT SWAG: Our Turkish visa.

SWANKIEST TRANSPORT: Stena Line Ferries. They are practically cruise ships sans swimming pools. Games, movies, restaurants, comfy seating with picture window views.

CULINARY ECSTASY: full Irish breakfast, porridge with Baileys Irish Cream, Greek Mezes underneath the lighted Parthenon and a full moon, Fresh Mussels (in both Ireland and Scotland),
Hearty and savory seafood chowder, banofee pie, whiskey cake, Turkish delight, Guiness in Ireland and Single Malt Whiskey in Scotland.

LANGUAGES: Turkish, Greek, Gaelic, French, German, Italian. Those last three are here in Switzerland alone. Each prevails in a given region. Also, in Bern and environs, a native language, very old, is spoken as well. It has been humbling to watch the most ordinary person here glide easily between French, German, and (for our benefit) English. Makes me feel lazy.

MOST BEAUTIFUL SIGHT: Yeah, right.

CURRENCIES SPENT: While the European Union certainly has made traveling between countries easier, not everyone is playing along. We have used the Turkish Lira, the Euro, Pounds Sterling, and the Swiss Frank. Once Kels and I reach Austria tomorrow, we can consolidate all our leftovers to Euros for the remainder of the trip.

Big shout out to TripAdvisor and Booking.com who helped us find interesting, comfortable, and affordable lodging exactly where we wanted to be.

"For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travels sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilization, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints."

~Robert Louis Stevenson

Painting in Watercolor...

Think of a rainy day when you were a child. Remember it now as you saw it then. Remember how it was scary, and exciting, and cozy all at the same time. Remember begging your mom to let you play in it. Remember feeling individual drops fall on your face. Remember the stream that somehow trickled from inside your hair down over your eyes. Remember feeling the strength of the storm inside your tiny body. Remember your fingers and toes going numb from the cold of it. Remember the warm of coming inside....of being dry. Remember how being at peace, at rest, was never so vigorous as in that moment with the sting of the rain still pulsing in your skin...

Welcome to Scotland.

Scotland, for us, was at all times a dance with water. Water bending the slanting rays of sunset into an ever changing palette of color. Water gathering itself into ferocious clouds that crawled over mountains, spreading its fingers down their sides. Water frozen in patches of snow on the blue craigs not so very far above us, blowing its arctic breath inside our collars.

Not only that, but water so deep and dark that mystery could live could live inside it. A story...of an elusive, mythic creature...a remnant of an age long past. Lingering? Visiting? Loch Ness....

And finally, water in cloaks of mist, enwrapping the tops of steeples and towers. Water dripping from turrets, and spires....washing cobblestones and transforming the simplest stroll into an act of the will, an heroic display of fortitude...plunging a gorgeous old city into the depths of myth and intrigue. Delicious intrigue. Edinburgh...

I hoped it wouldn't rain. That's the truth of it. I abhor the discomfort and inconvenience of it. If I had my way, we would have seen Scotland in sunshine. But sometimes God gives us what is best for us, rather than what we ask for. Blessed be His Name!!

I can't imagine getting inside the head of writers like Sir Walter Scott, Robert Burns, and Robert Louis Stevenson without seeing Edinburgh as they so often saw it...inside the fairytale mystique of cloud and damp.

And truthfully, St. Giles Cathedral, icon of The Church of Scotland, and of Presbyterianism in general, is not a fair weather church. Hers is a story of heroic defiance and deep conviction. The very architecture of the church seems to tell the tale. It is a discomfitting and tragically gorgeous building. One you mayn't consider lightly.

Today we left Edinburgh in the mist in which we found her. And even as I write this, warmed already by the sweet sunshine of Switzerland, the tingle of Edinburgh is still in my skin...

Wonderment and a Delicious Trouble...

 
"This is the spirit that beauty must ever induce, wonderment and a delicious trouble; longing and love and a trembling that is all delight..."
~Plotinus

 
This morning I am waking to the sound of seabirds on the Dingle Penninsula. It is one of the most extraordinarily beautiful places I have ever been. At a singular moment, you might see, in one breath, fields of a dozen shades of green and gold climbing towards mountains of stone, underneath which lies the sea, dark and turbulent but with glimmers of sunlight, while in the distance are mountains of purply blue so cloaked in mist that one wonders if they are real. All this is seen across a stone fence over which climb wildflowers in an extravagance of color, while seagrasses wave at their feet. Not to mention that the sky over all is clouds of rose and lemon and charcoal and snow which constantly push one another out of the way, exposing flashes of cerulean underneath.

 
I told my family yesterday as we were arriving that I was afraid this could possibly be too much beauty for me. That I was concerned that my heart just might explode from the intensity of it. So far, I have survived, but it has been a sore trial...of the most splendid sort...wonderment and a DELICIOUS trouble!
 

Healing Mystery...

We drove out of Dublin into a storybook landscape: Stone cottages with roofs of thatch; wild, austere peat bogs in deep greens, browns and blacks punctuated by tufts of chartreuse grasses and wild flowers of mustard; bucolic valleys that were patchwork quilts of a dozen greens separated by ancient stone fences and populated by a hundred sheep; a turbulent sky at war with itself urging dark, brooding, blankets of gray against pillows of white, all on the same azure ground; great rhododendrons higher than houses and covered with cotton candy puffs of purple; and water...water gurgling through the bogs, past rocks, to plunge in breathless cascades down flat faces of rock; water wending its secretive path through a mountain to emerge in a white shaft over the edge of a precipice; and water sleeping still as glass in the great lakes at Glendalough, making two of everything, mountain, sky...


We traveled down tiny winding lanes through the Wicklow mountains to Glendalough. St. Kevin established a monastery here in the seventh century. Only remnants of it remain today, most of those built in a day later than his own, but the spirit of the place lingers still.


I stood in this valley of the two lakes and thought of the monastics who made their home here. They surrendered the right to posses anything, even, in a sense, their own will. They would eat what they were fed, wear what they were given, and do what they were told. Many of the pleasures of life would be forbidden them, and yet... Like the monks at Meteora, they had chosen to live out this life of surrender in a place of astonishing beauty. What does this say about their perception of the relationship between spirituality and beauty and nature?


Pre-Christian Celtic spirituality had always been very sensuous, very reverent towards the world around them. It seems that early Irish Christians were able to integrate these beautifully in a very sacramental way of life; in, as Thomas Cahill describes it, "this sense of the world as holy, as the book of God, as a healing mystery, fraught with divine messages..."

I found myself thinking that, for all the intervening centuries, for the external differences in our lifestyles and clothing, we are not so unlike, these monks and I. God, who I can neither see nor touch, makes Himself visible and solidly Present to me through His wondrous works. He uses them to restore and refresh me, to humble me and give me perspective, and to draw me into Himself. For this, I give thanks.

"We need to develop the art of reverence... Ultimately, reverence is respect before mystery. But it is more than an attitude of the mind. It's also a physical attention of the body that shows that the Sacred is already here."
~John O'Donohue

Notes From Dublin...

From the moment we arrived in Dublin, we felt right at home. Perhaps it is partly that we are in the familiar west again. But far moreso, it has been the generosity and goodwill of strangers that has made this feel like a place of belonging: offering directions, pointing out things we mustn't miss, starting conversations in pubs...

Dublin has proven very nourishing to me. I hardly think there is an aspect of who I am that has not been touched in some way.

On Monday, after a quick look-see round the city and lunch at The Stag's Head, we set out for the Guinness Storehouse. A gentleman who had been on the bus with us pointed out just how far in each direction the Guiness enterprise stretches. Mammoth!

I loved seeing inside the process of making one of my very favorite beverages in all the world; running my hands through the barley, smelling the roasted grains, standing INSIDE one of the great fermenting casks... Oh yeah, and the tasting room (where Kelsey had her first official glass of Guinness). The kids loved perusing the many creative advertisements, old and new. We ended the tour with a free pint of frothy goodness in the Gravity Bar which, at seven stories, offers a commanding view of this beautiful sky-scraperless city.

Yesterday, we visited the storied Dublin Castle. I was fascinated with the tales of Vikings, Norsemen, King John I, Knights of the Order of St. Patrick, and the Easter Rising. I was also entranced by the gorgeous Waterford crystal chandeliers.

While there, we took a look at the Chester Beatty Library. Beatty was a collector of mostly Asian and Persian artifacts with a particular interest in religious items. We saw beautiful accoutrements belonging to Buddhism, Hinduism, Shikhism, Islam, Judaism, and Christianity, including fragments of 2nd and 3rd century gospel papyruses. Each display is accompanied by a thoughtful articulation of the essential tenets of the faith and the significance of the items. It was a thought provoking (and discussion provoking) exhibit. Glad to have seen it with my children.

In the afternoon, we walked back to Trinity College to view a national treasure, the Book of Kells. The exhibit provides a detailed and delightful introduction to the world of manuscripts, illumination, and bookbinding. If you do not have a reverence and affection for books when you enter, I'll wager you will have both when you are done.

After proper preparation, we were allowed to enter the room where two of the gospels were open for us to see. It was a remarkably sentimental experience for me. I thought of the men who labored tirelessly with such exactitude and devotion. I thought of artists who ground precious pigments and created meticulous, vibrant works of art that helped the gospels say all they were meant to say; who put bits of themselves into each work. I thought of how their faith called something from them that was bigger than them. And, as we poured over their work, it was as though all of us stood in that room together for a bit.

And we were not done. Not yet. The "exit" from the Book of Kells exhibit leads through the long room of the Trinity College Library. This is the largest single room library collection in the world. Two stories of precious old books. Floor to ceiling. Deep, dark wood shelves. Rolling ladders to access the upper shelves. Wrought iron spiral staircase leading to the second floor. And the smell. If you are a true bibliophile you know it. That very particular essence of well loved and much used books. I breathed long and deep, taking in nourishment for my spirit.

I left the Trinity bookshop with a beautiful edition of James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It is my favorite of his works, and this will be a treasured keepsake of our visit to Dublin.

I close with a bit of whimsy. Diligent, hard-working scribes were known to be sometimes mischievous. On more than one occasion, they added addendums to a passage they copied. One of my favorite of these is a poem found affixed to a sacred book. I like it for its whimsy. But I also like its theme: Darkness into light. Enjoy.

Pangur Ban

I and Pangur Ban, my cat,
'Tis a like task we are at;
Hunting mice is his delight,
Hunting words I sit all night.

Better far than praise of men
'Tis to sit with book and pen;
Pangur bears me no ill will;
He, too, plies his simple skill.

'Tis a merry thing to see
At our task how glad are we,
When at home we sit and find
Entertainment to our mind.

Oftentimes a mouse will stray
Into the hero Pangur's way;
Oftentimes my keen thought set
Takes a meaning in its net.

'Gainst the wall he sets his eye
Full and fierce and sharp and sly;
'Gainst the wall of knowledge I
All my little wisdom try.

When a mouse darts from its den.
O how glad is Pangur then!
O what gladness do I prove
When I solve the doubts I love!

So in peace our tasks we ply,
Pangur Ban, my cat and I;
In our arts we find our bliss,
I have mine, and he has his.

Practice every day has made
Pangur perfect in his trade ;
I get wisdom day and night,
Turning Darkness into light.