Terri Windling's Blog, page 228
February 13, 2012
Recommended reading
I highly recommend Paul Kingsnorth's provocative, impassioned essay in Orion Magazine: Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist. "I became an 'environmentalist,' " Paul writes, "because of a strong emotional reaction to wild places and the other-than-human world: to beech trees and hedgerows and pounding waterfalls, to songbirds and sunsets, to the flying fish in the Java Sea and the canopy of the rainforest at dusk when the gibbons come to the waterside to feed. From that reaction came a feeling, which became a series of thoughts: that such things are precious for their own sake, that they are food for the human soul, and that they need people to speak for them to, and defend them from, other people, because they cannot speak our language and we have forgotten how to speak theirs...."
You can also listen to a fascinating podcast of Paul, David Abram, and Lierre Keith discussing the article; and there's a related post by Paul on the Dark Mountain Project blog.
Do you all know about the Dark Mountain Project? (Rima Staines posted about the group in July; and also about their Uncivilization Festival in September.) Dark Mountain is an inspired and inspiring creation, so if these folks aren't already on your radar, please go check out their website -- and the website for the group that David Abram is involved with, The Alliance for Wild Ethics.
If you're unfamiliar with Paul Kingsnorth's work, or David Abram's, then I also highly recommend their books, particularly Paul's Real England: The Battle Against the Bland, and David's The Spell of the Sensuous and Becoming Animal. Also Gary Snyder's classic book of essays, The Practice of the Wild, which Paul discusses in his blog post.
Images above: "Wistman's Wood" and "Archie Parkhouse in a wood near Dolton, Devon" by West Country photographer James Ravilious (1939-1999)
February 12, 2012
Tunes for a Monday Morning
Today, gorgeous tunes from two of Scotland's finest singers.
Above: "Bothan airigh am braigh raithneach," a traditional Gaelic song performed by Julie Fowlis, who hails from the island of North Uist in the Hebrides. (Go here to see a lovely short film about her, and about the history of the music of the western isles.)
Below: "Follow the Heron," by singer/songwriter Karine Polwart, who comes from Banknock in Stirlingshire. The performance was filmed at the Shrewbury Folk Festival in 2009.
February 11, 2012
Prints for auction
Con or Bust: The Fans of Color Assistance Project is running their annual auction, raising money to help more readers (and aspiring writers) of color to attend speculative fiction conventions. There are many good offerings this year, so do go have a look. I've donated a set of four signed prints (pictured above) on the mythic theme of animal transformation, with the help of my Endicott Studio partner Midori Snyder. The auction runs until Feb. 25, with new items listed daily.
February 9, 2012
Kissing the earth
A little too abstract, a little too wise,
It is time for us to kiss the earth again,
It is time to let the leaves rain from the skies,
Let the rich life run to the roots again.
- Robinson Jeffers (from "Return")
February 8, 2012
Morning prayer
"A writer — and, I believe, generally all persons — must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art."
- Jorge Luis Borges
This morning's prayer: May we have the skill to work with the raw materials we've been given, the clarity to understand their best use, and the tenacity to weave even thread spun from nettles into cloth that is beautiful and strong.
February 7, 2012
The path ahead
"For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin -- real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way, something to be gotten through first, some unfinished business, time still to be served, a debt to be paid. Then life would begin. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life. " - Alfred D'Souza
"What matters is to live in the present, live now, for every moment is now. It is your thoughts and acts of the moment that create your future. The outline of your future path already exists, for you created its pattern by your past." - Sai Baba
"As one gets older one sees many more paths that could be taken. Artists sense within their own work that kind of swelling of possibilities, which may seem a freedom or a confusion." - Jasper Johns
"It may be when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey." - Wendell Berry
"It is good to have an end to journey towards, but it is the journey that matters in the end." - Ursula K. Le Guin
February 6, 2012
Snow and phantoms
No, it hasn't snowed again, not in Devon anyway. These pictures, recently sent to me by my friend Shany Niv (artist and master creator of magical domestic spaces) were taken two winters ago -- showing our Tilly, Shany's Ozzie, and Howard cavorting in the snow on the village Commons.
Readers of this blog have met Ozzie before, in the "On Your Desk" post about Shany's studio last spring, as well as back in 2009 when Tilly was just a pup. And readers of David Wyatt's blog have also met Ozzie, in the gorgeous painting "Comfort in Quilting"(which is, by the way, now available as a print in David's Etsy shop).
As for me, I've got flu and deadlines this week...not a very good combination, alas. And Tilly is moping on the sofa beside me, in the last phase of a phantom pregnancy. We're hoping that she "gives birth" soon (she's been nesting quite a bit, so the time is probably close), after which she'll finally snap back into her usual bouncy self.
Rex Van Ryn often claims that he, too, has a dog, but that his dog is an invisible one. So now I'm wondering if phantom pregnancies are where invisible dogs come from? I'm imagining Tilly's invisible phantom puppies chasing each other around the house, identifiable only by touch and sound. There's a story or a painting in there somewhere.....
All of the photographs in this post are by Shany Niv, and appear here with her permission.
February 5, 2012
Tunes for a Monday Morning
Today, two performances from Brooklyn Rider -- a New York based string quartet with a fabulously interstitial, interdisciplinary, and genre-busting approach to making music.
Above, the group plays one of my all-time favorite pieces: "Mishima" by Philip Glass. It's simply stunning.
Below, they're joined by the great fiddle player Martin Hayes to perform a collection of Irish tunes.
Want more? Try "Air to Air," an amazing piece of world music performed by the lads of Brooklyn Rider in their other guise: as members of The Silk Road Ensemble created by Yo-yo Ma.
February 3, 2012
Living among the trees....
February 1, 2012
Contributing to the world's beauty
Snow-melt in the stream: Mama Nature turning winter's storms into nourishment for the soil, fecundity, and beauty. This is what I must now learn to do with the stormy weather I've been passing through: turn it into beauty, turn it into art, so new life can germinate and bloom.
One example of a creative artist who does this is my friend Jane Yolen, who wrote her exquisite book of poems The Radiation Sonnets while her husband was undergoing treatment for the cancer that would eventually claim his life. This is what all artists must do: take whatever life gives us and "alchemize" it into our art (either directly and autobiographically, as in Jane's book, or indirectly; whatever approach works best), turning darkness into light, spinning straw into gold, transforming pain and hardship into what J.R.R. Tolkien called "a miraculous grace."
"I have, for my own projected works and ideas, only the silliest and dewiest of hopes; no matter what, I am romantic enough or sentimental enough to wish to contribute something to life's fabric, to the world's beauty.... [S]imply to live does not justify existence, for life is a mere gesture on the surface of the earth, and death a return to that from which we had never been wholly separated; but oh to leave a trace, no matter how faint, of that brief gesture! For someone, some day, may find it beautiful!" - Frank O'Hara
Yes. Yes. Yes.
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