light

I can't figure, for the life of me, why there are some things that I just can't learn.  Can't get past.  Most of my scribbling these days has been about fear.  I don't really have anything new to say.  You've heard it all -- facing it, overcoming it, banishing it.  For me though, it is almost like my skin.  I want free of it, but I need it after all, so I can't let go. A perfect nemesis.  

Starting something new always makes me think of the first time I stood at the edge of the high dive.  And I would not jump, I had to dive in head first.  I stood there, shaking, at the edge of the quivering board, my arms stretched in a point over my head as if something as small and insignificant as my own extended fingers could somehow save me.  Thinking, "This is going to hurt, I don't know what I'm doing, why am I doing this?" Feeling the weight of everyone waiting, watching to see what I would do.  But, I hate anything that has so much power over me.  Anything that gets in the way of my will. The perfect nemesis.

So I am a bull, plowing headfirst into every damn thing, and I'm not exactly cautious, even if I am scared to death.  But there is always the experience that follows -- the free fall, colliding with the surface and feeling it give way, the reception of water, and the push to surface, to breath again.  It is like light.  Like the sun going around spilling gold.  

wishlist/why can't i...

retreat

“In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.” 

― Albert Camus

collection

of secrets:

Transcripts from the persistent whisperings of the winds.

half

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.