Fenway Park – Love in the Spaces

Gardens of Sound

I hear music everywhere, especially in the quietest places.

In the then-present of this photo from Ireland, three of my children and I looked out from darkness to the vivid light of day beyond the window. I didn’t consciously hear music at the time, but I hear the soundtrack when I look at the picture.

The trip was in honor of their father, on the second Father’s Day without him here with us in the traditional way. In the picture, I hear music. I travel back in time to Phillips Church and hear the Rev singing the words to Thaxted, from Jupiter in Gustav Holst’s The Planets Suite.

All of that afternoon’s music floods back. It comforts me. The sibilance of Sweet Baby James sung by hundreds. Becca’s For Good.

Lilting notes and words of light and love and fellowship floating above an empty black plane nothing escapes.

I wish everyone could hear it.

Photos somehow press “play” and I hear songs my daughter sang and music she and her siblings played. Papa Dick singing a customized song for each of fifteen grandchildren he bounced on his knee on countless Sundays. I listen to tuneful and argumentative birds I watched years ago. Satiated crowds chattering around a mirrored sculpture in Salem just after Thanksgiving. Blue Angels roaring overhead. A John Philip Sousa sound track to July fireworks, and I cycle back to countless marching band and Percussion Ensemble performances and practices. Beloved beagles synchronously snoring and baying. The sounds of silence at sunrise.

And this one? I hear Fenway Park. Birds singing to each other along the Emerald Necklace. “Put me in, coach.” The Standells’ Love that Dirty Water. Dropkick Murphys shipping up to Boston.

Please, Come to Boston. If only for the springtime.

Ears to the heavens, let me hear you again.

Past Contrasts

Each snippet of the past is shaped by contrast. Then and now. Before and during and after. The light that was and the light we now see. The place where we stood, the air we breathed, the living and the dead.

When I took the above photo, I was struck by the near-perfect parallel positions of an eternal rock and a juvenile Plover (who may have been preening or its opposite, hiding from relatively giant petite me). They shared cream undersides and identically angled topcoats of variegated rust and oak.

A single sentient being and an eternally evolving rocky shore, perfectly positioned together in the millisecond I captured them.

And each photo I take represents another contrast: I am both outside and in my own head, here today and somewhere in the past.

In a single image you may find opaque and transparant, solid and liquid, shallow and deep. Man-made and nature-born. Straight lines turned to wavering reflections. Black and unbound color. Earth and fire and water and sky. Day and night.

Earthly and ethereal. Prickly and soft: an adorable peril. Black and white.

Oil and water. Aloft and anchored. Vibrant and fading.

Liquid and solid. Water and ice. Trapped and free, by degrees.

*An unfinished panorama my husband*
*had been piecing together*

Finished and unfinished. Work and play. Practice and perfection. Hits and misses. Monsters and men. On and off base.

Sound and silence. Alone in a crowd.

Gone and still here.

Spirited Away

Spiritual sites abound in the great wide world. But we need not go far. Sometimes they are within our homes, or mere steps away. Occasionally they are only in our minds. They may be felt in the presence of the quotidian. A napping cow in Varanasi. A pair of pigeons in Casablanca. Painted panels in a college chapel in Maine.

Such sites and sights, for me, are portals to the past. A single gold flower in the wet heat of sunrise over the Ganges in an ancient city. Storks nesting atop ancient Berber-Roman columns’ capstones, open to the heavens after the structures they held have crumbled away. In Volubilis, a nesting parent appeared to bask in the perfection of her landing atop a now freestanding pillar near Meknes.

Although I have been known to suspect saints are underfoot, I tend to find more traditional spirits while looking up.

Sometimes, neck-craningly high….

My daughter took me to Qutb Minar, where brilliant lime parakeets looked down on us from a crown of carved bricks on a minaret taller than ten stacked Green Monsters. The view from the ground left me thunderstruck. I can only imagine the awe in surveying the earthbound from such heights.

Lowering my gaze to the horizon, I also regularly find spiritual sights and sensations. On gray and pastel mornings, and when an ordinary day catches fire–sometimes just for a few minutes–and on every day in between.

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: