Opening the Heart … Through Sickness?
March 28, 2008 | 8:54 am
I’m not one to do anything half-heartedly. And I enjoy a good challenge. So when I started packing for moving my home and my work from New Hampshire down to Cape Cod, that naturally wasn’t enough: I needed to spice up the experience by contracting this respiratory flu that’s rampant throughout the U.S. and Europe right now.
I’m well into Week Two of it now and still sound like I’m perfecting a trained seal routine.
One learns a lot when one is sick. One learns how much effort it takes to do things that one normally takes for granted. I sit and look at groceries on the counter, papers on the worktable, magazines on the chair, and the effort it will take to deal with them is overwhelming to even think about, much less perform.
Oddly enough, my helplessness is opening my heart. It’s opening my heart to the delight in movement, now that I can’t move very much. It’s opening my heart to the joy of clear thinking, now that all my thoughts seem muddled. it’s opened my heart to the freedom of mobility, especially now that I am once again living by the ocean and long to go explore what the sea brings in every morning.
Perhaps we all need a time like this, a step back from everything that we take for granted, an opportunity to really understand the wonder of all we have.
In the meantime, though … back to the tea and ginger!
– Jeannette Cézanne
www.JeannetteCezanne.com
Posted by: Opening the heart — jcezanne
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Love in a Cold Climate
March 25, 2008 | 7:21 am
That’s the title of a book, later a movie, which I’ve neither seen nor read. It’s just a phrase I’ve heard since I was young, mentioned years apart by different people in different contexts, no import attached. Yet it has always hung in my mind.
The phrase resonates loudly on days like last Friday — the first full day of spring — when the temperature was 15 degrees and falling, with wind driving icy flecks against my face, and the snowpack like steel beneath my feet. In such moments I always ask myself, “Why don’t you leave?”
The same answer always comes back: “Because I can’t.” Which always leads to the question, “Why?”
Today, at last, I shoved aside the usual excuses involving money and commitment and came to the true answer: “Because I love it here.” Not just here, my homestead, but here, the four-season north. Although I dread winter’s merciless clench upon the land and count the minutes until it passes, I still love it, even require it, because without it there would be no spring. No summer. No fall.
Winter embodies the truisms that there’s no light without darkness, no pleasure without pain, no birth without death, no hope without despair. Wnter also brings its own beauty — a glimpse of heaven, perhaps? — in its smooth whites, sparkling glints of silver, soothing lavender shadows, dazzling blue skies, over the muted grays, greens, browns, and ochers of dormant life
Winter fills me with gratitude as I huddle safe and warm indoors, aching in compassion for the creatures stuck outside in its hardship. I can’t imagine how they survive, so their creative adaptability and endurance fills me with wonder. And during all the long months of waiting, I am kept charged by hope, because I know that no matter what happens, no matter how long it takes, spring WILL come.
This faith is what opened my heart to gardens. Plants embody the life force in their cycle of birth, growth, decay, and renewal, coloring and feeding the world as they grow. Despite all the obstacles flung at them by man and nature, they come back and flourish. They fulfill hope.
In the course of writing “Open Your Heart with Gardens,” I asked many people to express why they gardened, and received many different answers. Underlying all, I noticed, was the same reverence I feel during winter. I don’t feel it during the warm seasons because I’m too busy experiencing life to reflect upon it as deeply as I do during winter. So it’s only now, on the cusp between winter and spring, that I understand what “love in a cold climate” really means.
Carolyn Haley
Author: “Open Your Heart with Gardens”
3/25/08
Posted by: Opening the heart — Carolyn Haley
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| 7:20 am
Posted by: Opening the heart — Carolyn Haley
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The Adoption Process
March 19, 2008 | 10:13 am
No, I’m not looking for another child: the two part-time ones I have (I’m a stepmother) are quite enough, thank you, especially now that they’ve become adolescents whose job description appears to be driving the adults in their lives completely around the bend.
No; I’m talking about geocaches.
We’re officially moving down to Cape Cod, to the Provincetown area that has long been my spiritual home and now will be my fulltime physical one as well. It’s a Very Good thing, but entails juggling more details than I’d ever imagined.
It also means that we can no longer “own” geocaches in the New Hampshire area. When one places a geocache, one also commits to maintaining it, to checking it periodically to make sure that appropriate objects are in it, that the logbook isn’t full, that no one has moved it. To do that, one must be physically present, so the custom is when one leaves an area that one either removes the cache or puts it up for “adoption.”
My Manchester cache was easy to place: MuchAdo, a local caching friend, loves the cache (called “Dark Satanic Mills,” for obvious reasons) and asked for it as soon as he heard about our proposed move. So he has now officially adopted it and my cache is no longer my own. Yes, there’s some sadness in that, as there’s sadness in any good-bye.
Paul’s caches are all intricate, involve several waypoints, and are often in difficult-to-reach places, making them difficult-to-place-for-adoption caches. He was able to persuade a sometime-geocaching friend down in Lexington (Mass.) to adopt “Bridge Over The River Something,” as it’s close by where the friend works. Eventually HockeyPuck, a Manchester friend, agreed to take on Paul’s caches in toto, mostly because he didn’t want to see them go away. HockeyPuck was treated for cancer some years ago and kept his mind away from dark thoughts by working on Paul’s puzzle caches on his way to and from Boston’s Mass. General for treatment, so these caches are meaningful to him.
My stepson Jacob, on the other hand, was happy enough to permanently disable his cache, the cleverly titled “Hard Rock Caché.” Anastasia wants hers to be adopted, so soon we’ll put up a notice, and include the request that a fellow horse-lover take it on; its name, “Sparkle and Shimmer,” refers the visitor to a poem about horses … “gypsy gold.” We’ll see what happens!
All in all, it’s an emotional time. We’ve all put hard work into putting our caches together; we’ve read with delight what geocachers have written in their logbooks about our caches and their adventures finding them; they’re our creations. To say good-bye is tougher than I’d imagined.
–Jeannette Cézanne
www.jeannettecezanne.com
Posted by: Opening the heart — jcezanne
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It’s nice to be wrong sometimes
March 18, 2008 | 2:17 pm
3/18/08
It’s nice to be wrong sometimes.
Normally I hate being wrong. It’s frustrating, embarrassing, and often sets you back.
But sometimes being wrong leads to a happy surprise — like today, when I discovered that I had flagged the wrong day on my calendar for the vernal equinox (a.k.a., first day of Spring). I thought it would be Friday the 21st. In fact, the official source says it will arrive 1:48 a.m. EDT, March 20. A day sooner!
(For those of you who share this little obsession, here’s a website that counts down to the equinox with a clock ticking off the seconds: http://www.srh.noaa.gov/ffc/html/sprgcdown.html)
A different calendar in the house puts the equinox another day closer. Whatever the true time and date, it’s for the astronomical equinox, which pertains to sun position. The layperson definition is “when day and night are equal” — 12 hours each. And that phenomenon occurs today!
So it’s (un)officially the Up season now. For the next three months, everything will be in the grow mode, everywhere in the northern hemisphere. This is the most exciting time of year for all creatures from humans to honeybees, as well as for all plants.
Here in Vermont, we get proof of the change with the onset of sugaring season. One day near the equinox, when sunshine and temperatures combine just right, the sugar maples start pumping sap. It began three days ago, brought to our attention by smoke and steam billowing from the motley assortment of sugar shacks strewn around the landscape.
We knew it was coming because, during the preceding weeks, the woods sprouted miles of blue and black tubing, and collection tanks appeared at roadside. Some people still stud their trees with old-fashioned buckets. No matter how they gather the sap, industrious folk gather together in the sugar houses for marathon boiling (and socializing) sessions for two to four weeks. Strangers are welcome to hang around and watch, always leaving as friends.
The trees know better than the calendar when Spring really does arrive. The running of their sap signals the opening of garden season.
Carolyn Haley
Author: Open Your Heart with Gardens
Posted by: Opening the heart, gardens, yard, plants, spring — Carolyn Haley
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The countdown begins!
March 12, 2008 | 7:05 pm
3/11/08
Here in the north country, Winter is very long. Some years longer than others; this year, heading into its fifth dreary month. Those of us who favor plants over skis and snowmobiles watch the calendar obsessively and start counting down to Spring as soon as we can believe it might come again.
I start counting on February 1. By then, returning daylight has becomes apparent. Birds have subtlely changed their behavior. Sunshine has acquired the power to warm your cheek and melt ice on the walkways. The shortest month, though, always feels longest. Nevertheless, you can tell that the world has turned.
In March, the roller-coaster ride begins! Our region, historically, gets the bulk of its snow during this nail-biting countdown month. One year we got five feet in ten days right after a melt exposed the lawn. Another year, I drove to a neighboring town and experienced rain, sleet, snow, thunder and lightning, hail, fog, wind, and sunshine in 25 minutes. Oh yes, and mud.
As of today’s calendar, we’re 10 days from the official season turn. But you would never know by what’s outside. There’s a foot of white cement over four inches of opaque ice that can’t be cracked using a rock bar; the driveway is a luge run to the mailbox. Yet the day’s sunshine exposed a lip of a rock wall and grass I haven’t seen since November, and a song sparrow arrived in the yard. Objects that yesterday looked like white mushrooms today revealed themselves as cars, garden gear, or debris piles from their emerging peaks and corners. The last ledge of compressed snow on the roof released with a crack, whoosh, and whump! like a guillotine blade into the five-foot-high snow mound on the deck. Out the kichen windows, it was still broad daylight when I started cooking supper.
The world may not be green yet, but as far as I’m concerned, Spring has sprung!
Carolyn Haley
Author: Open Your Heart with Gardens
Posted by: Opening the heart, gardens, gardening, yard, plants, cultivation, growth, spring — Carolyn Haley
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Open Your Heart with Moving!
| 9:50 am
Moving day is approaching for this particular author. I already spend part of each winter on Cape Cod, and now I’m moving there permanently. It’s an event that surely opens my heart — the Cape is in many ways my spiritual home — but the activity itself of moving house certainly doesn’t do much for opening the heart!
Or so I thought. But I found that, amid the tension and the pressures inherent in moving, there are truly moments where the heart can be opened, moments of what the nuns at my parochial school would have called grace.
Sifting through papers, I’ve come across old love letters, and sat and re-read them with a smile. A jar on a shelf, overlooked because books had been placed in front of it, yielded beach glass and shells from the two weeks I spent on a writing fellowship at a dune shack, and the warmth and joy of that time flooded back into me again. Drawings made by my stepchildren when they were young; a forgotten geocaching coin; a paystub from the dark ages before I started working for myself.
I encounter bits and pieces of my life like so much flotsam and jetsam as I sift through all the objects one accumulates over time, and I feel that I’m seeing facets of myself, of my past, of the path that led me to where I am now.
Yeah, moving house isn’t the most glamourous of activities. But it does open the heart as it takes one on a journey into one’s past. And that’s not so bad, is it?
Jeannette Cezanne
www.JeannetteCezanne.com
Posted by: Opening the heart — jcezanne
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Creativity and Opening the Heart
March 5, 2008 | 12:25 pm
Sometime in January I went to an art exhibit in Cambridge, Massachusetts (I believe that it was leaving soon for someplace in California) called The Writer’s Brush. It was an extraordinary exhibit, really, of visual artwork done by writers, most of them well known: Arthur Rimbaud, George Sand, Hermann Hesse, Djuna Barnes, William Faulkner, Hans Christian Anderson … I could fill this space with names.
What I loved in particular were accompanying comments. D.H. Lawrence said, “All my life, I have from time to time gone back to paint because it dave me a form of delight that words can never give.” Henry Miller wrote, “To paint is to love again.” Gunter Grass noted, “Look, says the image, at how few words I need.”
What was extraordinary to me was the ease with which some of these people pass from one form of creativity to another. Many of them, to my mind, were as fine visual artists as they were writers, and I wonder about another project — one taking the words of artists and celebrating their writing ability. My first nomination would be Camille Rose Garcia, whose words speak as eloquently as her art.
Perhaps the point of all of this is to say that there are many ways of opening the heart, and that those who are creative and can share the opening of their hearts — in whatever medium or media — do us a great service. We should be grateful.
– Jeannette Cézanne
http://www.JeannetteCezanne.com
Posted by: art, Opening the heart — jcezanne
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