but then

I often work in silence.  I don't ever intend to.  I just become absorbed and it doesn't come immediately to mind.  But then I remember.  Music.  So today there was silence, and this, and some Ella.

cassoulet

la deuxième partie:

The book that inspires this endeavor -- how I came to have it -- has a story of its own.  I was browsing the shelves of my favorite book store and was asked if there was anything with which I might be helped.  In one of those perfect demonstrations of serendipity, another bibliophile in close proximity overheard me say something about M.F.K. Fisher and pulled me over to the cookbook pile to show me The Cooking of Provincial France ... written by none other.   Since then I have been on the lookout for any of the Time-Life: Foods of the World books.  I love the recipes.  I love the pictures.  To flip through the pages is to step through places that no longer exist.  To contemplate the food -- a lure of being transported through space and time, if not by plane or boat, by fork and knife, aroma and taste.

But to go, is not to go lightly.  Most of the recipes seem to have a requisite, not of skill, but of commitment, and this is the kind of food I can get down with.  A thirty minute meal can become a duty.  Dare I say, a drudge?  Give me a whole day.  Two days. Shopping. Selecting.  Choreographing.  The fluid movement from one step to the next with nothing but perfect attention to each moment.  Dicing.  Simmering.  Browning (the sometimes nearly excruciating willpower required to resist moving things around in the pan too soon). Arranging. Composing. Watchful waiting.  Mindful waiting.  Grateful waiting. Grateful for the blessing and the absolution of time.  Grateful for the world in sublime order.

cassoulet

première partie:

True, this is most often about wandering and other bits, but travelling via food counts, and so the second annual voyage to Provence begins this evening.  Flageolet (flageolet, une haricot et une flûte? coïncidence? Les Français ...) are soaking.

The aroma of roasting duck draws a crowd to the kitchen -- and a yields a bounty of fat for future use.

And just in case you are curious, my music choice for the long, slow, careful haul of roasting/turning/basting duck is Lyle Lovett.  

And just in case you're curious... it's pekin duck, not muscovy.  The difference is in the fat.  Pekin ducks traditionally live in colder climes and thus have more fat.  (Note photo above.)  I'm not great at math but duh, everyone knows that Fat = ♥.

Suivante: un tas de viande...

snowy morning

I can tell it's there before light, before I ever peek through the blinds.  Snow makes a perfect quiet, pulling all sound from the air and tucking it neatly between its many shimmering, crystalline layers.  Soft, solid silence. It's the first thing I notice when I wake on mornings like these.

It's my dad who taught me to appreciate a walk.  Through fields and woods -- beside creeks, rivers, lakes -- shine, rain, snow.  He pointed out tracks, broken branches, scars in bark, scat, birds and their songs (I've not heard a bobwhite in years but its song still plays in my head), trees and blossoms and nuts -- beech, hickory, walnut, oak, apple, dogwood.  For me, he catalogued countless items found only in the world that makes sense.  I also learned that walking is a means to an end, but also an end unto itself.  An exchange, with each breath, between self and landscape, inhaling to capture and releasing to set free.

Thanks, Dad.  Much love.

solo

vertical desert

one more:

return

dreaming

...since I've had the time, I'll let myself go with it.  I have wild gray hair and the weathered skin I've forever been warned about.  At least 8 cats.  Maybe I wear smocks, with pockets.  Brilliant sunsets in a dusty trailer park.  Nothing in my backyard but the desert and a front yard full of original "sculptures" -- collages of found objects -- rusting, fading in the relentless sun.  My hands.  I have seen their future.  Thick, curled. Gnarled artifacts of devotion.

 

pond 12-27

collection

travels have been short in miles but long in substance lately.  distances of heart-expanding endurance that sustain, and are sustained by, all that is woven into the definition of home(love).

wind

I'm into its easy wayfaring -- breezing in from somewhere else and then blowing back out for destinations unknown -- picking up only what is light and willing to be carried away.

Shaking the rafters!

Monsters of Folk - "Temazcal"

if

...if this were the last day, it had some good things in common with all the rest of them.  I woke up.  Stared at the sky.  Worried.  Chipped away at the stone.  Stared some more at the sky.  Missed the woods.  Spent an inordinately long and lovely time planning some very small things of little consequence.  Baked some cookies.  Was a little grumpy.  Tried my best to love.

Were it not for the boy, his own worries (and deeply furrowed brow), I might not have noticed at all.  But what if?  So we hauled out the new kicks -- and some wine -- because as far as I know, both Christmas and Friday are coming, but now is all that is ever certain.  So I also know a happy boy who is going to bed in his new shoes. Shouldn't it always be this way, especially the sky and the small things of little consequence and some love?

grand canyon

one possible explanation

I'm really not that far out there.  I don't read my horoscope, don't know my Ayurvedic body type, don't plan my days or life by numbers or my Myers Briggs type.  But. I like to consider more marginal explanations for little things. I am interested in that.  For instance, knowing that I was born on the Cancer-Leo cusp -- with both some fire and water things going on -- may account for a nearly unconscious affinity I seem to have for everything in the magenta-purple range.  (I guess I have a closet full of evidence, but I'm told you need only see me walking about.)  Likewise, I don't dwell much on being an ISFP personality type but I have made a small note of occasional tendencies toward acting on irrational impulses, as well a propensity for speaking out in what some times seem to be almost Tourette's-like non sequiturs.

It recently occurred to me to look up the moon phase I was born under -- and of course there's a whole philosophy to go with that.  While researching, I was a little discouraged (if not surprised) to learn that I was born on a new moon and accordingly, that this is my first incarnation.  I'm a beginner.  My first trip.  I've still got a lot to learn.  

Despite tendencies toward the irrational, I can be quite good at "rationalizing," so upon reconsideration, I'm liking my novice status more and more. For one, it conveniently confirms at least a few things, like my fondness for the phrase, "Well, this is my first day," or alternately, "Every day is like the first day." And then there are the things along the way that repeatedly fascinate me.  Things that rivet my attention in the same way that my infant son was once fascinated by the quivering shadows of leaves on a blanket.  Pure enthrallment. These things grab me just like love and make me pray there will never be enough.  So please forgive me if you've seen it before it seems that it's just my first time around.  

i tried hard to tell you

...i was no kinda dancer

rare

A rare food post.  Not because we never do it, but because we don't like to boast.  

field notes

falling clouds:

fragment

“There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.”
-Anais Nin

belt of venus

prison girls

a little john prine poetry

...because the weekend doesn't last forever:

It's gonna be a long Monday

Sittin' all alone on a mountain

By a river that has no end

It's gonna be a long Monday

Stuck like the tick of a clock

That's come unwound - again

And again

spotted

I was, that is.

Singing out loud and wearing magenta gives me away every time.

collection

field notes

Hamamelis virginiana -- Witch-hazel, also called Winterbloom (which I just learned and like very much):

pandora's box

through

Separation

Your absence has gone through me   
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.

-W. S. Merwin

tandaradei

Under der linden

an der heide,

dâ unser zweier bette was,

dâ mugt ir vinden

schône beide

gebrochen bluomen unde gras.

vor dem wald in einem tal,

tandaradei,

schône sanc diu nahtegal.

Under the linden tree

On the heather,

Where we had shared a place of rest,

Still you may find there,

Lovely together,

Flowers crushed and grass down-pressed.

Beside the forest in the vale,

tandaradei, 

Sweetly sang the nightingale.

-Walther von der Vogelweide

cultivate

Freedom is not given to us by anyone; we have to cultivate it ourselves.

-Thich Nhat Hanh

the kind of day...

It was the kind of morning where it wasn't difficult to spend an hour studying color charts in an effort to determine if the pre-dawn sky was violet blue or ultramarine -- an activity which had the unintended consequence of turning me into some strange sort of blue "radar."  And so it has turned into the kind of day where I've somehow managed to yield all kinds of time to similarly compelling pursuits of questionable utility: