Terri Windling's Blog, page 226

Tunes for a Monday Morning

Since I'm in New York City right now, today's tunes come from one of my favorite New York bands, The Punch Brothers. The group was created by singer/songwriter Chris Thile as a "bluegrass-inflected musical experient," with the name taken from a Mark Twain story. The other members of the band are Gabe Witcher, Paul Kowert, Chris Eldridge, and Noam Pikelny. They've got three albums out, including the newly-released Whose Feeling Young Now?

Above: "This is the Song," performed at a radio station in Charlottesville, Virginia. I love this one so, so much.

Below: "Rye Whiskey," a great foot-stomper of a tune, recorded at the same session.

And one more:

"Sometimes," an instrumental piece that shows off the band's dazzling musical chops, recorded for Guitar Magazine.

On My Desk

Here's another entry for the "On Your Desk" photo series: The desk where I'm working while I'm in Manhattan, in Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman's magical, rambling, Arts-and-Crafts filled old apartment near the river on the Upper West Side. The drawing on the desk is by my young friend Magda Hackney--a picture of the hills of Devon to remind me of home. (Tilly, Howard, Magda and I are in it, along with a couple of enchanting Dartmoor fairies.)

Jane Yolen sent me this beautiful poem today, and gave me permission to share it with you. She's been writing a poem a day for quite some time now, and I'm honored to have inspired one of them.

Letter to Terri in New York

So you are in the exact right place now,

where William Morris meets Riverside,
where fantasy and reality are tree and holly,
where love is the knobbed trunk
sorrow grows like ganglion,
and Devon informs the rest.
Long after you are home,
both spine and spindle will remember
this place, this last homely home

where comfort surrounds you,
coffee sustains you,

and welcome is always on the mat.

"Letter to Terri in New York" is copyright c 2012 by Jane Yolen, and may not be reprinted in any form without the author's permission. My photos of the guest room in Ellen & Delia's apartment also appear here with permission.

The things that save us

"Sometimes it is the smallest thing that saves us: the weather growing cold, a child's smile, and a cup of excellent coffee."  - Jonathan Carroll

It's been a difficult week, in terms of dealing with the Life Stuff that has brought me to New York -- but any week that ends, as this one has, with Ellen Kushner, Delia Sherman, Catherynne Valente, Theodora Goss, Lev Grossman, Kat Howard, and C.S.E. Cooney sitting in the the livingroom at Ellen & Delia's flat (where I'm staying) talking about books and the art of writing can by no means be considered entirely bad. It's good to be back in the publishing community again, even under these less than ideal circumstances.

It would be all too easy to focus only on what's difficult right now, ignoring the gifts that the city throws up daily: friends and colleagues, good American coffee, the particular frisson of walking down streets that echo with years of one's personal history. I miss my home and the woods of Devon with an ache as physical as heartburn...and yet there is also value in rediscovering the person that I used to be, back in the days when this was home and these were the trees I walked among. I didn't want to make this journey. But I'm here... and I am thankful for these gifts. These friends. And the damn good coffee.

Sometimes it is, indeed, the smallest things that save us.

"You need a village, if only for the pleasure of leavi...

"You need a village, if only for the pleasure of leaving it.  A village means that you are not alone, knowing that in the people, the trees, the earth, there is something that belongs to you, waiting for you when you are not there."   - Casare Pavese

Tune for a Monday Morning

Today's tune  is "Love is Making its Way Back Home" by Josh Ritter; the wonderful video is a stop-motion animation (made with over 12,000 pieces of construction paper) by Erez Horovitz, Sam Cohen, and Sarah Graves of Prominent Figures.

I'm actually writing this post on Sunday (it's scheduled for automatic posting tomorrow), because by Monday morning I'll be in London, en route to the airport, then New York City. I love New York, where I lived in my twenties as a young book editor, and where I still have many good friends and colleagues, so I'd normally relish a trip back to Manhattan -- but this particular journey is a daunting one, necessitated by the difficult Life Stuff that my family and I have lately been dealing with. Howard, meanwhile, remains in Devon, looking after the pup and the homefront.

I don't know how long I will be in New York, and I don't know what this blog will be like in the days ahead. The blog, like my creative work, is deeply rooted in my wanderings through the leaves and brambles with Tilly and the rhythms of my quiet rural studio...but now my Country Self must be set aside while an older, sharper part of me, the Urban Self, comes to the fore. The road ahead leads into Uncertainty...which is another name for Mystery, and therefore (I remind myself) not always a terrible thing. I'm uncertain of what the coming weeks will bring; I'm uncertain of how my work will progress or of how this blog will function. I'm uncertain of many things, except for the need to be strong and go forward.

Maya Angelou once wrote: "Because of the routines we follow, we often forget that life is an ongoing adventure....Life is pure adventure, and the sooner we realize that, the quicker we will be able to treat life as art: to bring all our energies to each encounter, to remain flexible enough to notice and admit when what we expected to happen did not happen. We need to remember that we are created creative, and can invent new scenarios as frequently as they are needed."

And so here is this morning's prayer, offered to the rising sun from the crest of our hill, sweet Tilly perched on the rocks beside me:

May I see every journey, no matter how daunting, as a mythic adventure, a quest, a story unfolding, a fairy tale in which even the smallest of heroes finds her way through danger and the dark of the forest...and faces down dragons...and wins love or treasure...and then goes safely home once again.

Today's tune goes out to Howard.

Mist on Meldon Hill this morning...

...viewed from Nattadon Hill.

"Tell me the landscape in which you live, and I'll tell you who you are."   - Jose Ortega y Gasset

Changes

There's a change in the air. In the woods behind my studio, the trees are still sleeping their winter sleep, but in their topmost branches the birds have begun to sing of the springtime approaching.

The faeries who hibernate among the tree roots are stirring, yawning, rubbing sleep from their eyes, brushing moss from their cheeks...

...while the stones who stood vigil all through the long, dark, cold months whisper: Wake, now. It is time to awake.

Tilly knows proper woodland etiquette: she chases pheasants and squirrels, but leaves waking faeries strictly alone. (Which is wise, because waking faeries are grumpy.) Today, walking quietly past their burrows, she leads me to a place in the woods where daffodils poke through the forest floor...  

...and it's then that I know that the season is changing. Things change. We don't stay in darkness forever.

Spring will come, and the dafs will bloom. Things change and we change. As we're meant to.

Why we sometimes struggle to find the way forward

"Creativity - like human life itself - begins in darkness."  - Julia Cameron

Why we create

"But unless we are creators we are not fully alive. What do I mean by creators? Not only artists, whose acts of creation are the obvious ones of working with paint or clay or words. Creativity is a way of living life, no matter our vocation or how we earn our living."  - Madeleine L'Engle

"Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn't make us  better, then what on earth is it for?"   - Alice Walker

Why we read

"Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed? What do we ever know that is higher than the power which, from time to time, seizes our lives, and reveals us startlingly to ourselves as creatures set down here bewildered? Why does death still catch us by surprise, and why love? We still and always want waking."  - Annie Dillard

Photograph by Alan Lee.