Visual Feast VIII

ALL IS GOLD

More gold has been mined from the thoughts of men than has been taken from the earth. 

- Napoleon Hill 

I slump in front of the laptop. I can no longer hide from myself that I have, once again, taken on too many projects. The weight is unbearable as if I am carrying each and every one on my shoulders, evil little imps of doom and despair. They snigger in my ear, their hot, fetid breath on my neck; their constant jeers taunt and tease, my brain rattles and the urge to simply push myself away from the desk, away from my laptop, to drop it all with a resounding thud sweeps over me.


He, on the other hand, continues to take on more and more projects, working like the devil has him by the toes, bewailing every second of spare time he has, no matter how badly he truly needs a break. When he does pause from one of his many activities, he hops and dances around my desk, urging me to pay attention, to join him on a jaunt around town, to alleviate his boredom, satisfy his need for movement.

For in the true nature of things, if we rightly consider, 

every green tree is far more glorious than if it were made of gold and silver. 

- Martin Luther 

Photographs of autumn past. A golden glow lighting up the city that fires my imagination. Something unreal, intangible thoughts, elusive emotions lie in the gilded wonder of a city in autumn.

My romantic sensibility is awakened. Golden photographs scattered across my desktop like a handful of jewels tossed across the floor. A fantastic landscape of wonder, a fairytale vision of our everyday, ordinary life.

The alchemists in their search for gold discovered many other things of greater value. 

- Arthur Schopenhauer 

I love autumn for its glow, its magic. Crisp cool days in a dazzle of sunlight, a flourish of leaves as my feet kick through the carpet of gold, yellow, red. Everything suddenly takes on that resplendent intensity and my own burdens seem lighter, irrelevant in the flush and splendor of fall. A sky of burnished gold welcomes me in the morning. Everyday objects, touched as if by sorcery, blend in with their glorious surroundings as painted on a canvas.

A city on fire, suffused with a luminosity that cannot but draw me out of myself and my own melancholy.

When I feel the burden of winter, or, worse, the dreary limbo in between two seasons when the weather just cannot make up its mind, when more days are blank, gray phantoms, ill defined, obscured behind hazy, dingy dispositions, I return to the golden days of autumn.

Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, 

but by washing away from it all that is not gold. 

- Leo Tolstoy

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Visual Feast VII

THE ART OF THE CITY

The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls. 

- Pablo Picasso 

While others are battling breathtakingly wild snow storms and digging their way out of mountains of white, while romantic flurries swell and intensify into a blizzard like a bad mood seething hot, smoldering until fierce and out of control, while others are building snowmen and having snow days and stuffing tiny hands into mittens and little paws into booties, we are experiencing one blustery, uncomfortable, dreary, gray, ambivalent day after the next. Weather that simply cannot make up its mind. Weather that simply does not want to turn into winter. I peep out the window every morning to see what I can see, to take the temperature, figuratively speaking, of the day ahead. Tar black or a deep rosy glow, soft, pale blue or angry gray smeared with menacing puffs of charcoal clouds. It is impossible to plan the day, inconceivable to know what to cook.


Rare moments of sun, a gentle glow or a blazing light flood the apartment and invite us outside. As usual, I grab my camera or my phone to capture moments in the life of my city. Phone in hand, I see objects as more than simply modes of transportation or a quiet place to sit. Each and everything is a work of art, a story being told, an emotion inspired, a laugh evoked.

Pink

What fun are our days if everything we pass is just ordinary?

Graffiti becomes art, bicycles a study in color. Chairs tell a story of souls no longer present, edifices loom up a canvas against the sky. Light and shadow, color and texture change and move; day moves into night and ghosts appear, and everything around me tells a new story.

Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life. 

- Oscar Wilde 

Blue

How often do we stop and look around. We walk the same roads each day, pass the same buildings, the same street art soon blends in with our surroundings and we no longer see it. How often do we take to the streets rather than being hermetically sealed in a car, tuned out to the outside world? My own city is small in comparison to those tremendous metropolises, quiet next to the noise and bustle, the swarming masses of larger urban hubs. My city is a model of sameness, predictability. Faced with the everyday of our lives, we no longer see the beauty, the movement, the energy of our city, our town, our surroundings.

Yet open our eyes; stop and pause. Look around, listen, feel and suddenly everything comes to life.

The rain begins again and I sit at my desk and write, distracted too often by the veil of fog outside offering a mysterious, romantic landscape, absorbed by the tickety-tick of rain on the sill. The mood outside suffuses the room with a sadness, yet I am cheered by the progress I make, of my articles being published one by one, as plans for the Plated Stories Workshop take shape. I was astonished and thrilled to be interviewed by and featured on RDV Des Arts Culinaires, an incredible bilingual website dedicated to gastronomy Cellar Cooking Table, as well as having my favorite Chocolate Spice Cake featured. My article Nantes Now on Nantes’ evolving and exciting new food scene has appeared in the Food & Wine issue of France Magazine. And more pieces have been finished and submitted. I have also been asked to speak and offer a workshop at an important food blogging conference in 2014 and am more than excited.

With all on the table and driving my life hard and fast, I love nothing more than sneaking outside with my iphone and discovering and rediscovering my lovely city.

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Home Again

WASTELAND

April is the cruelest month, breeding 

lilacs out of the dead land, mixing 

memory and desire, stirring 

dull roots with spring rain. 

– T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land 

Barren lawns where we used to play, yards once filled with rambunctious laughter, ever-moving children, now there is no sign of life other than the well-trimmed hedges and the perfect lawns, the rhythmic splitter splatter of sprinklers dancing across the green, a chill hit of water painting across unsuspecting legs. No sign of life in this city of mine other than the odd car, hermetically sealed, a faceless driver clutched onto the wheel breathing air-conditioned contentment, the occasional jogger enveloped in an ipod haze.

Feet slipped into battered pink sneakers, I wander the neighborhood, up and down the streets, around the curves as the sun splashes across hard cement sidewalks step on a crack, break your mother’s back. I crisscross so many streets where I used to walk with girlfriends, gossiping, talking about boys, giggling and chattering nonsense in sing-songy voices of childhood. I wander over time-worn blacktop of the streets that used to know the wheels of my bicycle as I would circle around and around, going nowhere, a gaggle of grade school kids just for fun. I search for life, the noise and vibrancy, the non-stop activity I once knew. And it isn’t there.

Monday, Tuesday, Saturday, Sunday. Silence. The city sleeps. Every afternoon I lace up those sneakers and trudge outside for my brisk walk. Today’s the day I will finally see children playing outside, I promise myself, old folks sitting on front porches, kids biking up and down the streets. I walk to the end of the block, up and around and trot briskly up the main drag, the one named after the Spanish explorer who discovered this part of the world. I follow the drainage ditch dotted with palms, the same wooden footbridges that still cross over the ditch reminding me of so many afternoons, year after year, that I would sit there, legs dangling over the sides, inches above the meager slither of water. Those bridges are now barren; no ponytailed girls huddle atop the wooden slats, talking about boys, pushing and daring each other to go and ring the cute guy’s doorbell, the one who lives just facing the bridge.

I push my way in the heat, just a few more blocks, sun beating down on my bare shoulders, sweat trickling down my back, my eyes squinting against the glare of the white light bouncing off the sidewalks. No respite. Even in April, the weather is hot and muggy and I wish I could have said it’s 90° in the shade but there is no shade to speak of. No screen doors squeak, few garage doors are flung open to reveal a jumble of junk, bikes and mowers and surfboards and garden hoses. On every other street, I pass the occasional guy in sweat stained t-shirt and grubby jeans trimming a lawn with the monotonous brrrrr brrrrr brrrrr of an electric edger, but no one looks up to say hello. No one to acknowledge my existence.

I am ineffably sad.

A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, 

And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, 

And the dry stone no sound of water. 

– T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land 

Squirrels race up trees, lizards dart quickly across open spaces, I spy the occasional black garden snake as it disappears into a clump of bushes. A graceful heron or plumed egret moves in slow, even, elegant strides across lawns, pecking in the grass. But no children. No adults. No one. Emptiness has swept through my old neighborhood.

Where have all the children gone? No toys in yards. No bikes leaning up against the sides of houses. No hopscotch grids chalked onto sidewalks like the one that was permanently scratched in front of our house, a gathering place for the neighborhood kids, smooth flat rocks scattered across the cement. When we weren’t playing kickball in the street or tag in the yard or throwing hoops in the driveway. 

My last day in Florida and I take a new turning and finally come across a sign of childhood, a sign of life among this cement and palm tree jungle – bright chalk drawings in pink, yellow, white and blue. I smile.

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