Terri Windling's Blog, page 161

Frogs, toads, and days of gold

From A Circle of Quiet by Madeleine L'Engle:

"Just as we are taught that our universe is constantly expanding out into space at enormous speeds, so too our imagination must expand as we search for the knowledge that will in its turn expand into wisdom, and from wisdom into truth.

"But this is violent, and therefore frightening.

"Children are less easily frightened than we are. They have no problem in understanding how Alice could walk through the mirror into the country on the other side; some of them have done it themselves. And they all understand princesses, of course. Haven't they all been badly bruised by peas? And then there's the princess who spat forth toads and snakes whenever she opened her mouth to speak, and her sister whose lips issued pieces of pure gold.

"I still have many days when everything I say seems to turn into toads. The days of gold, alas, don't come nearly as often. Children understand this immediately; why is it a toad day? There isn't any logical, provable reason. The gold days are just as irrational; they are pure grace; a gift."

I've always liked frogs and toads, but the tiny pond in front of my studio was mud-choked and rank when I first came here, housing nothing remotely so interesting. I cleared out the trash, the dead vegetation, stocked it with plants to re-balance the water, and then asked a friend, knowledgeable in these matters, how I might get frogs or toads for my pond. 

"You don't need to 'get' them," he told me, "just create the environment for them, and they will come."

Weeks passed. Months passed. The frogs didn't come. What was I doing wrong? I asked.

"Just be patient," my friend told me gently. "These things take time."

And yet time, I'm afraid, was not on my friend's side. He died the next winter (too soon, too young), my little pond remained stubbornly empty, and I wondered if his advice had been right. He'd been a folklorist, after all, and perhaps this was just an old wives' tale.

Another summer passed. No frogs. No toads. In deference to my friend, I did nothing more than tend the pond, keep the pondweed in check. I could say I was patient, but really I was busy and distracted and I stopped thinking about it.

Then one day I looked through the studio window and saw my husband crouched by the pond. I put down my pen and notebook and went outside to see what he'd found.

A frog? Oh yes. Not one, but dozens. Frogs and more frogs, everywhere we looked -- hiding in the weeds, sunning on the rocks, bobbing together in the golden pond water. How had we'd never seen them before? And how could one tiny pond hold so many? Big frogs and small frogs, brown, red, and green, all looking like they'd lived there forever.

Now the frogs re-emerge in the pond every spring, grinning up at me from the water and weeds, watching the studio's comings and goings from their sun-dappled kingdom nearby.

I wish I could tell my friend he'd been right. Create the environment and they will come. He'd also been right when he answered every inquiry with, "Terri, just be patient."

I believe it's the same with creativity. Feel dry, uncertain, empty of ideas? Then create the proper environment: a space you can work in, the right tools at hand, and good work habits, regular and steady. Inspiration will come. Be patient, and it will come.

It's pure grace; it's a gift.

Art above: "The Frog Princess" by Gennady Spirin, a detail from Virginia Lee's "The Frog Bride," "Darwin's Frog" by Gennady Spirin, "Alice and the Frog Footman" by Arthur Rackham, "The Frog Prince" by Warwick Goble, "Thumbelina" by Lizbeth Zwerger, and "The Frog Prince" by Arthur Rackham.

Tunes for a Monday Morning

This week we're going back to the early days of the UK's folk music revival with three beautiful songs from The Pentangle, and one from The John Renbourn Group.

Pentangle was the creation of two young men who went on to become folk music legends, the great John Renbourn  and Bert Jansch -- along with vocalist Jacqui McShee, bass player Danny Thompson, and drummer Terry Cox, all of them strong musicians themselves. (The band's name, representing the its five members, came from the device on Sir Gawain's shield in the Middle English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.) In various incarnations, Pentangle released twelve albums from 1968 to 1995 -- but they're best known for the work of the original line-up (1967-1973), especially for the highly influential albums Cruel Sister and Basket of Light.

Above, "Let No Man Steal Your Time," an early concert performance filmed back in 1968.

Below, "Hunting Song," performed for a BBC special in 1970. The song is introduced by Bert Jansch -- who died,  much too early, in 2011. It's remarkable to see him so young here.

Next:

"Cruel Sister" (audio only) -- which is a variant of "Twa Sisters," Child Ballad Number 10 -- recorded for Pentangle's album Cruel Sister in 1970.  That album, interestingly, was considered a commercial disaster when first released, but it's been deeply loved by folk music enthusiasts for generations since.

In the mid-70s, John Renbourn began to host a series of musical gathering of friends...which turned into The John Renbourn Group, melding folk and medieval music with jazz and Eastern influences. The Renbourn Group, with various line-ups, performed together until 1981, and produced three wonderful albums.

The song below, "A Maid in Bedlam" (audio only), comes from the album of that name, 1977. It's the best of the three, in my opinion (being partial to vocal harmonies), but the other two albums are also very good. The performers here are Renbourn, McShee, Sue Draheim, Tony Roberts, and Keshav Sathe.

For an interesting look at the people and music of the UK folk revival and early folk-rock scene, I recommend "Electric Eden," a fascinating profile of the period by Rob Young.

Photographs:  Renbourn & Jansch in the '60s, and The John Renbourn Group in the '70s.

Fire and light

From Linda Hogan's painful, honest, beautiful memoir, The Woman Who Watches Over the World:

"To open our eyes, to see with our inner fire and light, is what saves us. Even if it makes us vulnerable. Opening the eyes is the job of storytellers, witnesses, and the keepers of accounts. The stories we know and tell are reservoirs of light and fire that brighten and illuminate the darkness of human night, the unseen. They throw down a certain slant of light across the floor each morning, and they throw down also its shadow."

"As time has passed, things in me have been burned away and I see my life more clearly, more cleanly, than I had ever seen it before. And in that vision of my past, my history, my body, I also saw that there was something inside me that had survived and not merely survived but had done so whole and nearly intact. The hurt child raises itself and doesn't just walk but swims and flies. This child sees that life may never be easy but may be beautiful...

"Fire, like pain, like love, is a power we do not know. Yet from the ashes of each, something will grow. No one knows if it will be something beautiful and strong. But in our lives it is sometimes the broken vessel, as writer Andre Dubus calls it, that spills the light."

Art above: "Expansion, New York City" by Paige Bradley (U.S.) and light installations by Bruce Munro (U.K.).

From the archives: When Women Were Birds

This was first posted back in 2012, but seems relevant to the conversation this week....

I've recently read Terry Tempest Williams' new book, When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice, and I'm completely under its spell. It's a beautiful meditation on land, love, family, faith, activism, and art...all rooted in the red rock of southern Utah; a book that I already know I'll return to often in the years ahead.

When it ended, I found myself so unwilling to part with William's clear, honest voice in my ear that I pulled out a stack of her previous books: Refuge, Red, Leap, etc.. They are wonderful to re-read all at once, in the sequence of publication, which allows one to follow the evolution of her work, politics, and spiritual beliefs. And although I first read these volumes when I, too, lived in the American South-west, returning to her books from the green hills of Devon underscores how universal our need is for connection to the wild.

Today's quote is from When Women Were Birds -- excerpted from a passage in which Williams reflects on the powerful art installation pictured below, in which the birds are made out of X-ray film from hospital MRIs. The author comes from a family that has lost many of its women to cancer (almost certainly due to radiation from bomb testing in the Utah desert), and had been diagnosed with cancer herself at the time that she wrote these words:

"Now, in a shift of light, the shadows of birds are more pronounced on the gallery's white wall. The shadow of each bird is speaking to me. Each shadow doubles the velocity, ferocity of forms. The shadow, my shadow now merges with theirs. Descension. Ascension. The velocity of wings creates the whisper to awaken....

"I want to feel both the beauty and the pain of the age we are living in. I want to survive my life without becoming numb. I want to speak and comprehend words of wounding without having these words become the landscape where I dwell. I want to possess a light touch that can elevate darkness to the realm of stars."

Yes. Yes. Yes.

The installation art above is "Swoop" by Julia Barello. Please visit the artist's website to see more of her work. The sketch above is one of mine. For a previous "Into the Woods" post on on the folklore of birds, go here.

Finding the door

"The doors to the world of the wild Self are few but precious. If you have a deep scar, that is a door, if you have an old, old story, that is a door. If you love the sky and the water so much you almost cannot bear it, that is a door. If you yearn for a deeper life, a full life, a sane life, that is a door." - Clarissa Pinkola Estés (Women Who Run With the Wolves)

"Real beauty is so deep you have to move into darkness to understand it."  - Barry Lopez (Artic Dreams)

Indeed.

The beauty of brokenness

Artist Lunar Hine, who lives right up the street from me, has recently discussed the concept of beauty that comes from brokenness, quoting Billie Mobayad:

"When the Japanese mend broken objects, they aggrandize the damage by filling the cracks with gold. They believe that when something's suffered damaged and has a history it becomes more beautiful."  What Mobayad is referring to is the ancient art of Kintsugi.

Related to this, as Tai Carmen explains, is the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi, representing an "aesthetic philosophy that embraces authenticity over perfection. Characterized by asymmetry, irregularity, simplicity, economy, austerity — modesty & intimacy — wabi-sabi values natural objects & processes as emblems of our transitory existence."

I am often astonished by the beauty and strength that can arise from our own brokeness -- from wounds, and scars, and the scratch of the brambles as we journey through the deep, dark forest.

"The beauty that emerges from woundedness is a beauty infused with feeling," wrote the Irish philosopher John O'Donohue, "a beauty different from the beauty of landscape and the cold perfect form. This is a beauty that has suffered its way through the ache of desolation until the words or music emerged to equal the hunger and desperation at its heart.

"It must also be said," O'Donohue continued, "that not all woundedness succeeds in finding its way through to beauty of form. Most woundedness remains hidden, lost inside forgotten silence. Indeed, in every life there is some wound that continues to weep secretly, even after years of attempted healing. Where woundedness can be refined into beauty a wonderful transfiguration takes place."

It seems to me that this is precisely what so many traditional fairy tales are all about: the transformation of a wounded soul into a hero, the transfiguration of great calamity (a spell, a curse, the loss of home or fortune) into a new life of potential and promise.

We emerge from the fairy tale woods (if we emerge at all) with the "magic" of strength,  fortitude, and compassion; we're broken and then mended with gold.

Beautiful not despite the scars we bear, but because of them. And all they represent.

Illustrations above: "Buried Moon' by Edmund Dulac (1882 - 1953), and "Donkeyskin" by the contemporary Russian illustrator Nadezhda Illarionova. This one is for Lunar.

Tunes for a Monday Morning

This morning, music for a quiet, sleepy, overcast day here at the edge of Dartmoor....

Above, "Lachrimae" by the English composer John Dowland (1563-1626), performed by the great English classical guitarist & lutenist Julian Bream.

Below, "Nocturnal, after John Dowland," by the English composer Benjamin Britten (1913-1976), performed by the Scottish classical guitarist Paul Galbraith.

Next:

"Cantus, in memoriam for Benjamin Britten" by the extraordinary Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, directed by Edward Gardner.

And last...

Just in case you haven't seen it before: "The Art of Jeanie Tomanek," in which Jeanie's goregous paintings are paired with Arvo Pärt's equally gorgeous music.

Jeanie Tomanek is a contemporary mythic artist who lives and works in Georgia, near Atlanta. The music here is "Spiegel im Spiegel," beautifully performed by Sally Maer on cello and Sally Whitwell on piano, both of them based in Australia.

The Dog's Tale

A series of posts in which Tilly has her say...

Happy Father's Day to my Person! (My other Person.) And to all you other good fathers out there, whether of the regular, grand, step, adopted, fairy godfather, or inter-species kind.

"Sometimes I think my papa is an accordion. When he looks at me and smiles and breathes, I hear the notes." - Markus Zusak (The Book Thief)

The Dog's Tale

A series of posts in which Tilly has her say....

I'm filling in for my Person again today to say that while she's away this week, perhaps you might like to amble around and visit our neighbor's studios:

Rima Staines' "The Hermitage"  and Tom Hiron's "Coyopa"

Tom, Rima, Macha the lurcher, and me

Andy Letcher's "The Bosky Man"

Nomi McLeod's "Air and Parchment"

Suzi Crockford: the magic of the natural world

The Art of Virginia Lee

Wendy Froud's "The Realm of Froud"

Elizabeth-Jane Baldry & the Chagford Filmmaking Group

My other Person, Wendy, and me

Jason of England, Gold- & Silversmith

Miriam Boy Hackney's "Silver and Moor"

Damien Hackney's "OakLeaf Jewellry"

Danielle Barlow, Artist

Angharad Barlow's "Sustainable Stylings"

Lunar Hines' journal of art & Dartmoor life

Steve Dooley, Artist

Rex Van Ryn, Comic Artist

Damien and me. I love music.

Steve, Rima, young Silvie, my other Person, Miriam and me. in Jason & Ruth's field

David's sketch of me as a pup.

...and David Wyatt's illustration blog.

I have a great big sloppy crush on David. He tickles my belly just right.

David and me ❤ ❤ ❤ ❤

I hope you enjoyed our little ramble.

Now I'm heading back to my Person's side, and I wish you all a good weekend.

The Dog's Tale

The Dog's Tales are a series of post in which Tilly has her say....

My Person is still dealing with some Big Stuff that even I can't help her with, except to see that she gets properly walked twice a day. So I thought I'd step in and leave a post for her. Here's the quote I've chosen for you, which comes from John Grogan's Marley and Me:

"A person can learn a lot from a dog, even a loopy one like ours. Marley taught me about living each day with unbridled exuberance and joy, about seizing the moment and following your heart. He taught me to appreciate the simple things -- a walk in the woods, a fresh snowfall, a nap in a shaft of winter sunlight. And as he grew old and achy, he taught me about optimism in the face of adversity. Mostly, he taught me about friendship and selflessness and, above all else, unwavering loyalty.”

One day at a time, I keep telling my Person. Just one day at a time.

It's a good thing she has me.

"Bubble" by King Creosote & Jon Hopkins, animation directed by Elliot Dear @ Blinkink