Terri Windling's Blog, page 201

Tunes for a Monday Morning

Today's tunes come from two roots bands out of Colorado:  The Lumineers, from Denver, and Elephant Revival, from Nederland.

Above: The Lumineer's 2012 video for the song "Hey Ho."

Below:  Bob Dylan's "Boots of Spanish Leather" covered by The Lumineer's Wesley Schultz. There's more here, in a Liveset Session recorded in New Orelans.

Below:

Elephant Revival performs "Remembering a Beginning" at a Music Fog session in Nashville.

And last:

Elephant Revival's 2012 video for "Quill Pen Feather."

A book of snow

“Maybe it's wrong when we remember breakthroughs to our own being as
something that occurs in discrete, extraordinary moments. Maybe falling
in love, the piercing knowledge that we ourselves will someday die, and
the love of snow are in reality not some sudden events; maybe they were
always present. Maybe they never completely vanish, either.” 
- Peter Høeg (from Smilla's Sense of Snow).

I am a book of snow,

a spacious hand, an open meadow,

a circle that waits,

I belong to the earth and its winter.

- Pablo Neruda (from Winter Garden)

Images above: "Gerda" (from Hans Christian Andersen's The Snow Queen) by Edmund Dulac;  snow on the village Commons; and "Strawberries in the Snow" (from the Grimms' fairy tale Little Brother & Little Sister) by Arthur Rackham.

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow

It's the first big snow of the season here on Dartmoor -- a magical, wonderful thing to wake up to. The hills are covered, the trees are sheathed in white, and as I write this, it's still coming down. This post is late because I spent the whole morning out in the woods and up on the hill with Tilly: an utterly enchanting Snow Queen's Realm. But alas, the pictures here aren't of that journey, and here's the reason why:

First Tilly and I walked in the woods (a snow white, holly green fairyland), then we made our way out to the open hill, where snow was falling thick and fast. I'd had the idea of taking photographs on the very spots where I'd shot yesterday's pictures -- which would, I thought, be a lovely way to show the landscape's overnight transformation. This, however, required a long, steep hike, made treacherous by thick, unbroken snow. Tilly was dashing about in mad delight, but I struggled and several times almost gave up -- slipping and sliding, huffing and puffing, tripping over brambles and battered by the wind. I made it to the higher path at last, pulled out my camera, and....

And nothing.

I adore my new camera, but it does have one flaw: the little mechanism
that opens the battery compartment is not particularly secure. Somewhere
in the woods or on the hill the little bugger had slid open once again, and the battery had dropped out. (Or else those pesky snow faeries had snatched it away, the
little tricksters!)

I retraced by steps twice (so that's three
journeys up and down a steep, snowy slope), but the battery was nowhere to be found, buried somewhere in a blanket of white. Tilly, meanwhile, thought this was a terrific game, going up and down and up and down again, and she was having a splendid time, surfing through the drifts like a little black snow seal. 

 After the third climb, I admitted defeat. The battery was good and truly lost (and that darn little thing alone was worth what my entire old camera had cost).  But clever me, I'd recently purchased a back-up battery, which was sitting back in the studio. So I slipped and slid down the hill once again (Tilly running in excited circles around me), made it through the woods and over the stream and back to the studio at last...and only then discovered that the camera company had sent me the wrong one.

Curses!

So the pictures above aren't from today at all, they're from a similar storm two years ago. I'll venture out into the snow again, no doubt, with the little old point-and-click camera that I'd been using up until last month (when Ellen & Delia gave me the fancy new one for my birthday, bless them, as their very sweet way of supporting this blog). And I've just ordered a new new battery...

...which, of course, won't be delivered until the very storm I want to photograph has passed and the roads are passable again.

Ah well. That's life.

The video above (which some of you will have seen) was shot in January 2010, when Tilly was six months
old. It's footage from a camera little better than a cell phone so
it's not exactly a work of art, but it captures Tilly's very first
experience of snow. There are no special effects, the film hasn't been
speeded up in any way, that's really how quickly and madly she jumps and dashes about when
she's excited. (Prime example: the "Snow Dance" photo above.)

She's still like that, still a puppy when it comes to snow. And she's a happy girl today.

Writing in blood

"As a child, I read because books–violent and not, blasphemous and not, terrifying and not–were the most loving and trustworthy things in my life. I read widely, and loved plenty of the classics so, yes, I recognized the domestic terrors faced by Louisa May Alcott’s March sisters. But I became the kid chased by werewolves, vampires, and evil clowns in Stephen King’s books. I read books about monsters and monstrous things, often written with monstrous language, because they taught me how to battle the real monsters in my life.

"And now I write books for teenagers because I vividly remember what it felt like to be a teen facing everyday and epic dangers. I don’t write to protect them. It’s far too late for that. I write to give them weapons–in the form of words and ideas-that will help them fight their monsters. I write in blood because I remember what it felt like to bleed.”  ― Sherman Alexie

“I write to give myself strength. I write to be the characters that I am not. I write to explore all the things I'm afraid of. ”  - Joss Whedon

“To be an artist means never to avert one's eyes.”  ― Akira Kurosawa

“I wrote to find beauty and purpose, to know that love is possible and lasting and real, to see day lilies and swimming pools, loyalty and devotion, even though my eyes were closed, and all that surrounded me was a darkened room. I wrote because that was who I was at the core, and if I was too damaged to walk around the block, I was lucky all the same. Once I got to my desk, once I started writing, I still believed anything was possible.” ― Alice Hoffman

"Stories are the only enchantment possible, for when we begin to see our suffering as a story, we are saved.” ― Anaïs Nin

Stories have always been my salvation, my guides over every mountain and through every dark forest. Where would I be, who would I be, without a lifetime of stories to show me the way?

“I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life," says Mary Oliver. "I write that way too.”

Mary Oliver, too, in her own quiet, luminous way, is writing in blood.

Dorothy Allison advises, "Write from your fear" ... and she of all people would know. But also write from your joy, your anger, your compassion, your love and humour and exasperation.  Write from the heart but also from the belly, the liver, the spleen, from your hands and your feet. Tell the stories that are yours and only yours to tell. And don't stop. Don't ever stop.

Morning

An excerpt from "How I Get to Write" by Roxanna Robinson :

"In the morning, I don’t talk to anyone, nor do I think about certain things.

"I try to stay within certain confines. I imagine this as a narrow,
shadowy corridor with dim bare walls. I’m moving down this corridor,
getting to the place where I can write.

"I brush my teeth, get dressed, make the bed. I avoid conversation, as
my husband knows. I am not yet in the world, and there is a certain
risk involved in talking: the night spins a fine membrane, like the film
inside an eggshell. It seals you off from the world, but it’s fragile,
easily pierced.

"....The reason the morning is so important is that I’ve spent the night somewhere else. This is nowhere I can describe exactly, only that it’s mysterious and
limitless, a place where the mind expands. Deep, slow currents, far
below the surface, shift me in ways I needn’t understand. There is no
sound, no scrutiny. Waking, I’m still close to that silent,
preconscious, penumbral state, still focussed inward. I’m still in that
deep, noiseless place, listening to its voices, very different from
those of the outside world."

(The full article is here.)

I read Robinson's piece (on The New Yorker blog) thinking, "Oh my gracious yes, that's it exactly!" -- for I too like to be up
and out to the studio before anyone else in the house is awake, climbing
the hill from house to studio by the light of the stars. I don't want to speak or be spoken to; I don't want to be jogged from this liminal state; I want to rest on the delicate threshold between the Night World and the Day World just as long as I can.

At this moment as I write, the sky is still dark, the studio
hushed with pre-dawn enchantment; the only sounds are the ticking of the
clock, water rushing in the stream outside, and a single owl calling from the
woods. I compose these morning posts as I drink my coffee, waking (as Agatha
Christie's Poirot would say) the "little grey cells" up. But I musn't be too awake, not yet, in order to slide gently into
the writing day before the "fragile membrane of the night" has been
pierced.

Tilly snuggles up beside me, yawning, dozing, waiting for our
morning walk out in the woods. The tap-tap-tap of the computer keys is a
familiar, comforting sound to her. She is waiting for the sun, and the click of the laptop closing, and the words: Okay, girl, let's go.

“Outside, there was that predawn kind of clarity, where the momentum of
living has not quite captured the day. The air was not filled with
conversation or thought bubbles or laughter or sidelong glances.
Everyone was sleeping, all of their ideas and hopes and hidden agendas
entangled in the dream world, leaving this world clear and crisp and
cold as a bottle of milk in the fridge. ”

- Reif Larsen (from The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet)

The paintings above are by Andrew Wyeth
(1917-2009). The photograph at the top of the post is of the Kuerner
Farmhouse in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, where he often painted.

The weather within...

“To make myself understood and to diminish the distance between us, I
called out: 'I am an evening cloud too.' They stopped still, evidently
taking a good look at me. Then they stretched towards me their fine,
transparent, rosy wings. That is how evening clouds greet each other.
They had recognized me.”  - Rainer Maria Rilke (from Stories of God)

"At first they were
just clouds, like any other.
Then they broke open.  This is, I
suppose,
just one of the common miracles,
a transformation, not a
vision,
not an answer, not a proof, but I put it
there, close against my
heart, where the need is, and it serves

the purpose."

- Mary Oliver (from her poem "Clouds," published in Why I Wake Early)

These beautiful and deeply magical images of "indoor clouds" were created by the Dutch photographer and installation artist Berndnaut Smilde.

Tunes for a Monday Morning

Today, The Avett Brothers (from North Carolina), in honor of their lovely new album, The Carpenter. The band consists of singer/songwriters Scott & Seth Avett with Bob Crawford on the standing bass, Jacob Edwards on drums, and the amazing Joe Kwon on cello.

Above, the band performs a song off the new album: "The Once and Future Carpenter."

Below, a charming, bluegrass-inflected song for a cold, wet winter's day: "January Wedding." (It comes from their fine last album, I and Love and You.)

And one final video:

After posting Seth Lakeman's performance with the BBC Concert Orchestra last week, it seems fitting to include this video of the Avetts performing "I and Love and You" (my favorite of their songs) with The Brooklyn Philharmonic. 

A beautiful, stripped-down version of the song can be heard here. (If you want more this morning, try their Tiny Desk Concert for NPR, the animated video for "Head Full of Doubt," or the father-and-daughter song from their new album.) Oh, how I love these guys -- for their musicianship, their interstitial blending of musical genres, their lyric poetry, and for unapologetically wearing their hearts on their sleeves in this often cynical world.

The dog who could see the wind

My old friend Neil Gaiman has written a very moving eulogy for his dog Cabal, posted here.  If you're a dog-lover yourself, beware; it's virtually impossible to read the piece without a few tears. As I wiped off my own, I turned to Tilly and insisted, "You're going to life forever, right?"

To lose a good dog is to lose a best friend and family member all in
one.
Rest in peace, Cabal.

The painting below is "Know But Do Not Tell " by the wonderful American painter Jeanie Tomanek. The name, I'm guessing, refers to this quote from the letters of Emily Dickinson:

"You
ask of my companions. Hills, sir, and the sundown, and a dog as large
as myself that my father bought me. They are better than human
beings, because they know but do not tell."

I brought a cold back from London, alas. I'll be back...

I brought a cold back from London, alas. I'll be back in the office soon.

“Illness is the night side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone
who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in
the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use the good
passport, sooner or later each of use is obliged, at least for a spell,
to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.” - Susan Sontag

Image: Small deer on Hampstead Heath

Down with a cold. Back on Monday.“Illness is the ni...

Down with a cold. Back on Monday.

“Illness is the night side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone
who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in
the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use the good
passport, sooner or later each of use is obliged, at least for a spell,
to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.” - Susan Sontag

Image: Small deer on Hampstead Heath