New England – Page 2 – Love in the Spaces

Tell me Why….

“Tell me why….”

The generic three words appear in countless songs. Today, I happen to hear them in a (no-longer) boy band’s lyric. Improbably, that particular earworm began burrowing before the turn of this Century.

The tone and cadence in asking for an explanation of “why,” as with most communication, is important. It can be calmly delivered, or beseeching–even a crie de couer.

It can be inquisitive, and take us back to the wonders of the world as they begin to catch our young children’s attention outside infancy’s cocoon.

“Why is the sky blue?“

“Why do manta rays leap above the ocean?”

It can express the joyful wonder and bottomless despair of other unanswerable questions and pleas for explanation.

“How could I have been so lucky to spend this life with you?”

“Why him?”

I’ve taken on the task of picking out a portfolio of ten photographs I most want to share, and the more formidable challenge of explaining my choices. I realized after selecting them that I took most of them while I was alone, at least among humans. The few exceptions were taken in countries and on continents far from my assorted homes.

Above, an Icelandic pony was perfectly framed among lenticular clouds as the sun started to drop in Aukerie. I treasure revisiting the peace and beauty and even the pure air of that day.

I was completely alone in Southwest Harbor for this astonishing sunset on Mount Desert Island. Acadia National Park was a very special place for my late husband and for our children as they grew. It took quite awhile for me to be able to travel by myself and be able to recapture more joy than melancholy there. I felt my husband’s presence as I took this picture, as I do every time I look at it.

An extraordinary ordinary palm frond towered above me, and calls me back to a cool night with regal birds milling all around. In the unseen background, the High Atlas Mountains formed ribbons of snow atop vivid blue peaks.

Each sunrise moment is an ephemeral work of art, there for us to keep and share and revisit in a photograph.

A return to deep greens and blues. . . . In New England’s coldest days, I can still feel the warmth and wonder of walking along a field filled with peacocks in Rajasthan, India.

From the same spot in Newcastle, New Hampshire, one can see two lighthouses in two states, and endless permutations of light. This is one of my favorite glimpses of dawn.

A juvenile Kingfisher was my companion for sunset at the Artichoke Reservoir, a hidden jewel in Essex County, Massachusetts. The photo brings me peace; I remember how the sight helped me to breathe and settle my soul at a time of frantic medical issues in my family.

I’ve taken countless of Whaleback Lighthouse from two state’s shores. This one stands alone: without touching the picture’s natural color, it looks to me like a silkscreen print of sunrise.

A snapshot in a butterfly garden in Western Massachusetts preserved a butterfly taking flight, and the rich colors of a tropical forest in a distant part of the world.

A single water lily… on a glorious day spent on another continent with one of my daughters. The simple shot carries me back to her, and to the sun and golden birds outside an ancient fort and museum in Jodhpur, the Blue City.

And I am sneaking in one more photo, the last I was able to take of the beloved and protective faithful companion of a sterling neighbor who contributed so much to every part of the world he occupied, and will be profoundly missed after leaving all too inexplicably soon. His handsome dog passed only weeks later, to join him in another view of such earthly wonders.

Simple Gifts

“‘Tis the gift to be simple, ‘Tis the gift to be free, ”Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be…”

When we are lucky enough to choose and be able to navigate our paths, we will always find simple gifts there. A single starling or bud. A cove of cairns. Storm-fallen leaves gathering themselves into a tree formation. A cluster of burnished yellow leaves shaped like a lone heron in a field of pure green.

Glowing lilac petals on two continents and a tiny balletic figure trying to dance out and away from a July flower’s sodden plum-yellow skirt. Reflections rendered in brass ribbons by a dropping sun. Sunny buds singing from limestone seams.

Weathered wood. A slumbering canvas sail about to be unfurled to catch the wind. Each of the infinite time-rounded stones beneath my feet.

Such gifts can be gathered almost everywhere.

Every time I consciously think of the simple gifts around us, I hear a single verse in Alison Kraus’s voice, accompanied by Yo-Yo Ma. And an undertone of Raffi, from a time when my children were young and safe with my husband and me during some of the best days of our lives. Woven into those glorious days, for me alone now, is the lacerating beauty of the music Yo-Yo Ma played at my son’s graduation, two months to the day after his father’s death. The first of so many graduations, including one only weeks ago, which my husband ought to have been able to attend in the more traditional way.

Such Tralfamadorian layering is not only part of each simple earthly gift, but is its essence.

In his introduction to the time traversed and gifts lost and regained in TransAtlantic, the late, great Colum McCann quoted Eduardo Galeano’s exquiste observation about the give-and-take among and melding of memories and moments and movements: “the time that was continues to tick inside the time that is.”

And so it does.

McCann’s novel has ties to New England, particularly the state of Maine. Perhaps it is not a coincidence that Simple Gifts originated there, too, in a mid-coastal Shaker community where it was thought to have been written by Elder Joseph Brackett of Alfred, who was called to the ministry in 1848.

Almost a century later, Aaron Copland used it in scoring a 1944 ballet, Appalachian Spring, and in 1950 he repurposed it among his Old American Songs. From there, it was a hop, skip, and a few generational jumps to the embedded memories of the parents and children who raptly listened again and again to the old-school Raffi cassette tapes and CDs which carried us into the next century.

“When true simplicity is gained,
To bow and to bend we shan’t be ashamed,
To turn, turn will be our delight,
Till by turning, turning we come ’round right.”

McCann wrote a lesser-known TransAtlantic in the same year he published his historical fiction: the lyrics to the eponymous song in Clannad’s album Nádúr. In it the singer describes walking among the ordinary sights along the roads of her home country, in whose “shadows, a light of” someone absent “flared.” Across the Atlantic again, she walks along the water where “dreams were calling out/ Of sky and stone.”

Simple elements and offerings in complicated and transformative layers and combinations.

From Cóbh to New York, blood and shadows and dreams and memory, water and stone and sky, regrouping and reshaping themselves and us for as long as we are here.

And perhaps long afterwards.

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