Elizabeth Adams's Blog, page 17

Hermit Diary 57. Winter Scenes in the Park

Pandemic notwithstanding, this has been one of the loveliest winters in Montreal, weatherwise, that I can remember. We've had two months of velvety snow, temperatures mostly in the 10s or 20s, lots of bright sun and blue skies, and essentially no rain. That's the crucial difference: when the weather alternates between freezing and thawing, with periods of rain, the whole city turns to ice -- and that's become normal in recent years, thanks to the changing climate. But not this year. I've been out for long brisk walks in the park every single day, which has helped save my sanity during these longest months of winter confinement, as well as keeping me in somewhat decent shape. I've also seen a lot.

The city provides two hockey rinks, so the thwack of slapshots and sticks hitting the boards is a constant rhythm, and the players somehow work out a system to rotate both older players and kids on and off the ice so that the game doesn't exceed a certain number of people, and everyone gets a chance to play. As I draw closer, I can also hear the decisive slicing of their blades: sprinting, changing direction, pivoting to a rapid stop.

To help provide recreation for people stuck in the city, the park service has also laid out meticulously groomed cross-country ski trails, and they're being used all day long, though the trails never seem crowded. It's fantastic, and gets my former-downhill-skier blood excited; if we could count on the weather in future years we'd consider investing in equipment.

But I've never seen so many people free-skating on the lake: some weekend days it looks like the whole city has shown up. I walked to the eastern side of the park on a less-crowded weekday, and stood on a high bank above the frozen surface, watching as the skaters slowly made their way up and down the serpentine lake. It was a dreamy kind of dance, seen from an aerial perch, and somehow the feeling encapsulated how I have felt much of this year: a lone observer, standing off to one side, as others, mostly younger people, engage in a life I remember but in which I don't participate. That doesn't make it less beautiful, but it's melancholy too. I gave my skates away to a young neighbor this year -- it's not the pandemic that keeps me off the ice, though those crowds don't appeal: it's being long out of practice, and the accompanying fear of breaking my wrists, which would be a disaster for me!

The dog park is another scene entirely: manic and chaotic, with a lot of individual characters, both canine and human, who I've come to recognize. At dusk it seems almost Bruegelesque, with dark shapes moving against the snow, but in the sunlight there's an ever-changing tableau of leaping and barking, sniffing and chasing, while the owners chat with each other, consult their cell phones, throw the occasional ball, or sit alone on the tops of picnic tables at the far periphery, capturing a few precious moments of solitude while their charge runs free. The purebred dogs all have their distinctive attitudes: some haughty and proud, others friendly to a fault. The well-trained dogs obey their owner's commands to heel or sit, and come when they're called. the popular huskies and malamuts look like they've just gotten off a sled run, while standard poodles arrive in expensive tailored coats, and little lap dogs in their winter booties. Meanwhile the eager mutts just get on with playing as hard as they can.

Today, in another part of the park, I heard someone whistling in the distance, as if calling a dog, but when I got closer I saw it was a man with a bag of seed or breadcrumbs, whistling to call the squirrels, and sure enough, there were dozens around him on the snow and climbing down out of the trees.

And I admit I wondered: if I still lived here when I was really elderly, or really alone, would I turn into an old lady who wanders through the park, feeding the squirrels?

Hermit Diary 56. Eros and his bow

Still life with shells, orchids, and bowl. Fountain pen in sketchbook, 9" x 6". The ceramic bowl was made by my mother when she was around 20, long before I came along. I use it most days for my cereal in the morning because it reminds me of her.


On this Valentine's Day I'm thinking about all the people who've lost their lover, their husband or wife, their child or parent -- especially those losses that have occurred during the past year. It's an astronomical number. A mind-boggling number. A river of tears stretching around the world. For many of us, there may not have been an actual death of someone we loved deeply, but days and months when we feared it more than anything we've ever feared.

Why do we take the risk? Why do we love, if we know we're either opening ourselves, or the ones we love, to inevitable, eventual pain?

We seem to be wired for it, don't we? Of course, some of the people with whom we're in relationship came into our lives without any choice on our part: our families, mainly. But when it comes to erotic relationships, is it choice or fate? 

Eros and his mother Aphrodite, from the museum at Pella, Greece, the birthplace of Alexander the Great.

Our modern minds tell us that love is a product of free will, but I'm not so sure. Cupid is featured in so much valentine imagery, but the Greeks who gave us Eros (the Greek name for the winged child-god, son of Aphrodite/Venus, with his quiver of arrows) didn't see him as a cute, benign cherub, but rather as the source of fatal attractions and passions that often satisfied the gods' desires to punish and torment humans. Their myths and plays are full of stories of star-crossed lovers, maidens and youths dying of unrequited passion after being struck with one of Cupid's arrows, or humans who've spurned the advances of the gods, only to be doomed to a fate of loving someone unattainable, or who dies (or is turned into a rock or a tree or a star) before the couple can attain happiness. Of course there are some stories with happy endings, too, but the Greeks understood the double-edge of love -- as most of us do, too.

I fell in love at first sight, more than forty years ago, and actually did feel like I had been pierced by an arrow. Somehow it worked out and has lasted a lifetime. We know how fortunate we are to wake together each morning. And more than ever before, we do not take this for granted: the happiness of being together is colored with the knowledge that it won't be that way forever. This year, in particular, I'm not inclined to post pictures of hearts and flowers on a day when so many people must be grieving. We ourselves had a close call this past year, and I've never been more frightened, or wept in such anguish. Love comes with risk. Is it worth it?

Yes. At least it has been for me.

Learning to love with my whole heart, and to accept love the same way, isn't the province only of romance: love takes many forms, as it needs to. Unless we open ourselves to the path of loving others, we'll never learn what it means, and never be changed by it. And of course love, and relationships, are never simple. Some exist for a lifetime, but many more do not, and there is always a temptation to hold back and protect ourselves from the possibility of loss. The paradox, though, is that the more we love, the more we see that our heart can be a pitcher that always refills, and that there will always be other people, as well as the earth and all its creatures, who need our love, even if Eros only gave us great romantic love for one person, and for a limited duration. The love we give throughout our life continues to reverberate for a long time. Realizing that nothing, not even death, can destroy my capacity to love, has been a comfort to me.

Hermit Diary 55. Inside, Outside, and Elsewhere

Interior with rubber tree and straw angels. Sailor fude-nib fountain pen on paper, 9" x 6".

I've been trying to draw and paint more regularly. It's therapy, and it's a joy, and it's a way to remember who I am -- as well as, I suppose, record who I was. My sketchbooks are just as much a diary as a written one, but that reminds me of my recurrent dream where I'm seated at the piano and required to play, except that what's on the music stand isn't a musical score but a painting. Somehow, I start playing what I see, and in the dream, it seems to make sense...

For someone who works in both words and in images, as well as being a musician, that dream feels all too real, and it makes me ask the question of whether a diary of one's days isn't just as valid if it is drawn as when it is written. Of course, the two can be merged together, as I guess I sometimes do here on my blog. But because I often find words (and especially, my own words) tedious, I like the idea of "reading" a sketchbook in order to discern something about a person's life.

Orchid and quilt. Sailor fude-nib fountain pen on paper, 9" x 6".

When I look through my drawings of the past year, however, I don't think anyone else could tell we're in the middle of a pandemic. Taken in the context of all the other sketchbooks from other years, it's clear that the artist often goes other places, and hasn't in a long while. But otherwise, except for a couple of pages at the beginning where the chaotic state of my mind was evident, all I can detect is a turn toward more color, the same objects appearing repeatedly, and occasional forays into places I've visited, mainly Mexico City, Sicily, and Greece.

As we near the one-year mark of isolation, in another month, in the middle of yet another winter, I can tell you that I am intensely tired of these walls and these two rooms. I've been going up to my studio a couple of afternoons a week, and managed to do a painting of Sicily this week.

Segesta, Sicily. Watercolor, 12" x 9".

I was working on a Cartiera Magnani "Toscana" watercolor block, which is very different from my usual Arches paper: much more absorbent and "cottony", without sizing. Although the colors immediately sank into the paper and were both harder to manipulate and less vibrant, I found I was liking the effect, the difference in feeling, and not being able to rely on a practiced technique. I painted everything until the very end with a 1/2-inch dagger brush from Rosemary & Co., and that was a departure too. Sometimes it's good to shake things up. And it's good to go places in our imaginations, and in the books we read and the drawings we do. For now, that has to suffice.

Hermit Diary 54. The Illusion of Controllable Worlds

Every morning when I get up and open the blinds near my desk, I take a moment to peer into my terrarium. It's changed since I planted it in the fall: some of the mosses have died back while others seem quite happy; the liverworts are thriving; there's a green film of algae growing on the beige shelf fungus, and the fern has put out three adventurous fronds. A small gnat seems to live inside the glass, even though it could easily escape. I think the moisture level has been too great for the lichens, and not quite enough for the moss. There's life and growth happening, as well as decay. I'm doing my best to take care of this little world for which I'm entirely responsible, drawing on a certain amount of knowledge and common sense, but the fact is...a lot of the time I'm guessing. Should I slide the top open a little more, or less? Should I mist the terrarium today, or wait? I make decisions based not only on what I see, but on the smell of the interior, the dampness on the pebbles, and the warmth and humidity I sense when I quickly put my forefinger inside, close to the soil.

This little experiment has filled me with renewed awe for the balance of life on our planet, an even greater awareness of its fragility, and the amazing harmony with which these small life forms colonize a tree stump in nature to form a garden far more beautiful and complex and self-sustaining than anything I could ever create.

I'm also learning something about myself: the strong but almost subconscious desire I had to create a little world, care for it properly, and see it thrive during this time when almost nothing in our real world -- where I am the gnat, but can't escape -- seems controllable or even predictable.

I suppose we all want that. Nobody really likes chaos, or fear, or one change on top of another to which we have to adapt. We'd like our homes to be comfortable, secure places of refuge during this time, and instead they've sometimes felt like traps. We haven't been able to pick up the glass globe in which we're living and give ourselves or others what we need; instead we've sometimes felt like hapless inhabitants looking out as some large invisible hand shakes our world around, turns it upside down, and surrounds it with toxins or threatens it with violence.

Nevertheless, this globe on my desk is somehow very serene, and reminds me every day of beauty and continuity: the moss stays green, the fern stretches and grows even while storms blow outside my window, bending trees and snapping branches with the weight of heavy snow and ice. Here, last fall's dill blossom has dried into an explosion of tiny yellow flowerheads; the brass Peruvian llama stands watch; the snail shell from Mycenae doesn't know it's traveled in my pocket across two oceans; the collection of seed pods now form a sculpture-park in miniature, but they all once bore life.

As hard as this period of time has been, I appreciate that it's forced me to slow down, and look, and think, and try some new things. This was a different sort of watercolor for me to paint, for instance, and that's good. Sitting at this desk, talking to some of you via Zoom or through this blog or various messages, I've realized more than ever how connected we all are, how much we need each other, and how much ability we actually have to support and encourage each other. We are not plants, after all, or inanimate objects, or shells that were once inhabited: we're highly intelligent and adaptable social animals whose primary purposes are to learn, to share, and to care for each other and this strange place we call home.

Hermit Diary 53. Few Words for this Horror.

I'm thinking tonight of particular photographs of yesterday's storming of the U.S. Capitol: the image of the burly white guy carrying a confederate flag through the Capitol rotunda. The image of a blonde white woman and her friend, seated on the dais of the Speaker of the House, taking selfies. A line of Capital Police on the steps, two of them jostling each other and laughing as the mob ravaged the building and milled around below them. A video of the President of the United States and his family in a tent, keeping time to loud pop music, while watching the rally on large screens, like it was a party. And then inciting that mob to unprecedented actions in the history of the country, before retreating into the White House, behind the barricades.

A friend posted the phrase that this would go down as "one of the whitest moments in American history." Many of us are well aware what would have happened if the people storming the Capitol had been black.

The Italian newspaper, La Stampa, published its front-page story today with the headline, "Once Upon a Time, there was America."

I'm afraid that sums up how I'm feeling.

Is there a road back from this abyss? Perhaps, partially. But I think a line was crossed yesterday: the culmination of four years of permissibility and normalizing of hate speech, violence, lies, militarism, white supremacy, injustice and cruelty toward everyone who isn't white or male, and total lack of respect for law and democracy.

The saddest thing is that this enormous damage to American democracy was predictable, and preventable. The pandemic has shown us how selfish, self-serving, and irresponsible a great many people are. In politics too: Every one of the elected Republicans. The administration officials who agreed to serve, and are now deserting the ship like rats. Prominent former officials who've refused to speak out.

But all the ordinary people who voted for Trump and have made excuses for his behavior are the ones who are truly complicit in this. All the people who have refused to understand that Black Lives Matter, and do something about it. All the people who refuse to believe climate change is real, and work against the clock to reverse it. All the people who continue to support drone strikes that kill brown children, or turn their head the other way when migrants are put in indefinite detention in warehouses, or children put in cages on the southern border. All the people who think they deserve good health care, but poor people don't. The people who don't think women are equal, deserving of respect, safety, and autonomy, or, likewise, the people who refuse to accept those of different sexualities and genders. I don't know. I could go on...it's a long list.

Unfortunately that list includes vastly more people than those who subscribe to conspiracy theories. It comprises all the well-meaning people who have seen what was happening, and thought it was wrong, but did nothing because they had their own problems, or, more likely, because they weren't really being hurt directly -- or perhaps even benefiting. Because they were comfortable in their own privilege.

Tonight I just want to ask each of us to look in the mirror and ask, Where was I, and where am I going to be? Because if you think Joe Biden and the Democrats alone are going to fix this cancer that has been growing for decades, of which Trump is merely a symptom and a mouthpiece, you are very badly deluded.

 

 

 

Hermit Diary 52. A New Year Begins

It snowed last night, softening and muffling the city on an already quiet New Year's Day. This morning the roads and sidewalks had been plowed, but the park was covered with six inches of soft new snow. I put on my warm coat and headed out through the banks left by the snowplows, immediately getting snow inside the cuffs of my boots, but happy to be out in it. The only colors anywhere were the red and yellow stems of dogwood, and the occasional glimpse of a bright hat or parka through the trees.

I took a few photos on my way back, and, late this afternoon, tried to capture the mood of the morning.

--

I can't say I feel exactly happy as the year begins, though like most of us, I'm hopeful for the long run while mourning what we've lost, and remaining keenly aware of the suffering of so many. For a while, 2020 is going to feel like a continuation of 2021, and here, where cases are rising and the hospitals becoming overcrowded, it's difficult not to be deeply discouraged about the government doing too little, too late, and people not following the necessary precautionary measures. Now the city is in semi-lockdown, and I'm hoping that schools and non-essential businesses won't reopen on the 11th as planned, but we shall see.

Doing something creative is my way of insisting that life continues to more forward, and I didn't want to let today go by without making an attempt. Setting up my palette and water, mixing the colors, and watching a brush stroke on plain paper become a tree, a branch, or a person, are parts of a process that I love, and which grounds me, even when I'm struggling with pictures that present a lot of problems or aren't working out very well.

Before starting this painting, I wanted to wet the paper on the watercolor block, and so I reached into my desk drawer where I knew I'd put a couple of sea sponges. The one that my hand found was very dry, and when I wet it under the kitchen tap, and rubbed the little dried cells as they expanded, I felt grit inside it, which turned out to be tiny pink shells. This was a sponge I had found on a rocky shore near Palermo, Sicily, as we were on our way to the airport to fly home, and I had never used it before for painting. Today, when I had soaked it and squeezed it out, I raised the little sponge to my nose  -- and it smelled of the sea. All the better to help create the wetness of dark tree bark, and an expanse of northern snow.

I've done a few other interior sketches and paintings during the holidays, which I'll show you some other time. Best wishes for a happier, healthier, and more optimistic New Year to all of you, and thank you for continuing to visit these pages and contribute to this ongoing conversation!

 

Hermit Diary 51. Books of 2020

Roberto Bolaño and Fyodor Dostoevsky

 

Books of 2020 (list at the end of this post)

Books have been my salvation during the months of isolation. I know many people have said they've had trouble concentrating on reading, but my situation has been the opposite: for me it's been a deep dive. One thing that's helped is an online book club of far-flung friends which grew out of a desire of a friend for companionship reading Murakami's IQ84 during the early days of the pandemic. Sadly, that friend decided they didn't really enjoy reading with a larger group, but some of the people stayed on with me and we've formed a cohesive and congenial group. We've mostly been reading long, challenging books together that we might not have read alone, and meeting each week via Zoom for a discussion -- and it's been great. The other reading group of which I've been a part for several years has not met regularly, so there's been a shift, but it was with that group that I read Beloved and re-read Americanah in the early part of the year.

The #1 standout of the year for me was Roberto Bolaño 's 2666, a huge, challenging, harrowing, and brilliant book I had been afraid to read on my own, but which we tackled together in the new group after completing IQ84. I am so grateful now for having read it -- it's one of those books that changes you forever, both as a reader and as a human being. I've long admired Bolaño 's writing, and completed Savage Detectives and several of his shorter novels in previous years. But 2666 is both masterwork and monster-work -- the great unwieldy sort of literature Bolaño himself said was the only literature worth giving one's life to -- that grapples with the most important themes and questions that confront human lives. A work in five parts, each one a "book" on its own, but related, it is perhaps unfinished - other fragments were found in Bolaño 's papers after his early death - but he raced to complete these parts before succumbing to his illness, and the result feels complete while leaving many questions for the reader unanswered -- which could also have been his intention.

We're currently reading The Brothers Karamazov, which is the other major fiction standout for me this year. Supposedly I read it years and years ago, but I barely remember it, so Dostoevsky's plot and characters are coming to me afresh and vivid. I'm in awe of what he attempted and accomplished, and sad about how slight, insubstantial and superficial most literature of today seems by comparison to either of these two books.

Having said that, I both enjoyed and cringed at Lisa Halliday's Asymmetry, her thinly-disguised autobiographical account of a young woman's affair with an aging writer who resembles Philip Roth, and very much liked Scorpionfish, by Natalie Bakopoulos, a novel about relationships and choices set in modern-day Athens and on one of the Greek islands. But though I've admired some other books by Rachel Cusk, I lost patience with her perturbed, blaming voice in Coventry.

My interest in Japanese literature has continued with contemporary works by Banana Yoshimoto and Yoko Tawada, tense re-readings of The Frolic of the Beasts by Yukio Mishima and Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata, and then Kawabata's new-to-me The Master of Go, which is actually non-fiction literary reportage of the highest order, about an epic, months-long final match between an elderly Go master and his young challenger who represents a new generation of players as well as customs. (If you enjoyed watching The Queen's Gambit, as I did, this book would make a very interesting counterpoint.)

Toni Morrison's Beloved, of course, is a work that ranks with the highest, and one that I was grateful to read even before Black Lives Matter became the major movement it did in 2020. I think I wrote admiringly in a previous year about Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Later this year I read James Baldwin's searing novel Giovanni's Room, and several non-fiction books about racism, all of which I recommend. I'm ashamed that I hadn't read Beloved or The Fire Next Time before now.

Three non-fiction books rise to the top of the list. One was Gathering Moss by Robin Wall Kimmerer, who brings both a botanist's and Native American's knowledge to one of the most fascinating natural history books I've ever read, and inspired me to rekindle my own interest in primitive plants, gather some moss and lichens of my own in the fall, and make two terrariums that are still doing very well in mid-winter here in my apartment. The other two are books about Greece by the great travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor, that were particularly meaningful to me because of having traveled in the same areas many decades after the books were written. Roumeli (1966) is about the disappearing tribes, villages, customs and linguistic complexities Fermor encountered in the north-central mainland, and Mani (1958) is about the fierce and independent people of the remote peninsula of the southern Peloponnese where Fermor eventually made his home, and where Jonathan and I traveled to consign the ashes of his mother to her beloved Mediterranean. Late in the year, I also read Fermor's memoir about three writing retreats in Orthodox monasteries, A Time for Silence.

In the Mani near Anatoliki. Pen-and-ink in my Greek sketchbook, 2019.

To my surprise, I felt lukewarm about Virginia Wolff's To the Lighthouse, and never finished The Voyage Out: I'm sorry but while appreciating her modernist approach to point-of-view and female perspective, I found them both tiresome, although I love her non-fiction and essays, and liked Mrs. Dalloway more than either of these novels. Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera was just as good as it had been the first time around.

I was impressed and riveted by David Foster Wallace's essay This is Water, and his long essay on Dostoevsky and his biographer Joseph Frank, and it made me think perhaps 2021 is the year to attempt Infinite Jest, and certainly to read his essays in Consider the Lobster, which concludes with the piece on Dostoevsky. I will leave you with a quote from Wallace's essay, with which Bolaño would almost certainly have agreed:

“The big thing that makes Dostoevsky invaluable for American readers and writers is that he appears to possess degrees of passion, conviction, and engagement with deep moral issues that we here, today, cannot or do not permit ourselves...

“It’s actually not true that our literary culture is nihilistic… For there are certain tendencies we believe are bad, qualities we hate and fear. Among these are sentimentality, naïveté, archaism, fanaticism. It would probably be better to call our own art’s culture now one of congenital skepticism. Our intelligentsia distrust strong belief, open conviction. Material possession is one thing, but ideological passion disgusts us on some deep level.”

Will the pandemic and the paroxysms of political tensions and change finally alter this fact about modern American literature? Perhaps 2021 will be too soon to tell, but I eagerly wait to see.

And, last but not least: what have you read in 2020, and has it been easier or harder than usual? Please send me your lists! Here's mine:

** are this year's standouts; *books I liked a lot but not in the top tier; # books read with my book club

 A Legacy of Spies, John le Carré (in process)

**Gathering Moss, Robin Wall Kimmerer

**The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky # (in process)

A Time for Silence, Patrick Leigh Fermor

Make Ink, Jason Logan

The Road to Santiago, Cees Nooteboom (in process)

Inés of My Soul, Isabel Allende (dnf)

Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez # (rereading)

*Scorpionfish, Natalie Bakopoulos

The Voyage Out, Virginia Woolf (dnf)

To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf #

Asymmetry, Lisa Halliday

The Emissary, Yoko Tawada

This is Water, David Foster Wallace

**2666, Roberto Bolaño #

The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin

The Four, Scott Galloway

False Spring, Darren Bifford

How to be an Antiracist, Ibram X. Kendi

Moonlight Shadow, Banana Yoshimoto

Kitchen, Banana Yoshimoto

The Frolic of the Beasts, Yukio Mishima (rereading)

When Things Fall Apart, Pema Chodron (rereading)

*Snow Country, Yasunari Kawabata

**The Master of Go, Yasunari Kawabata

The Woman of Porto Pim, Antonio Tabucchi

*1Q84, Haruki Murakami (rereading) #

Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Stout

*Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie # (rereading)

Coventry, Rachel Cusk

**Roumeli, Patrick Leigh Fermor

The Writer and the World, V.S. Naipaul

*Giovanni's Room, James Baldwin

**Mani, Patrick Leigh Fermor

**Beloved, Toni Morrison #

 

Hermit Diary 50. Christmas music from our choir

Here are two musical offerings for this Christmas season by the Cathedral Singers of Christ Church Cathedral Montreal -- a lullaby written by our director of music, Jonathan White, and a lively carol. As always, I'm delighted to be part of this group and glad we've managed to maintain some enthusiasm even though it's painful to all of us not to be able to make music together or present it in the usual way. (Both of these videos sound better with headphones and look better full screen, but do watch however you want!)

Merry Christmas!

 

Hermit Diary 49. Star

Christmas in my house would hardly be Christmas without a paper project or some sort of ornament-making, and this bizarre year is no exception. A while back, I became fascinated by mathematical origami models which are constructed using identical folded units that then are assembled into a shape, and over the years I've made a number of stellated octahedrons using Japanese papers in various combination of prints and solids.

This year, though, seemed like a good time to tackle the Bascetta Star, a model created by an Italian mathematician, Paolo Bascetta. The repetitive folding and concentration of origami are calming and meditative for me, and the process of making this star was a perfect antidote to the news.

Although each star requires 30 modular units, compared to the octahedron's 12, the folding goes fast once you understand how to do it and memorize the steps. And the assembly was actually easier than the octahedron, and way easier than the finished product would indicate. If you want to try, it's fun, and you'll end up with a pretty spectacular object that could even be hung with a small bulb inside. I made two -- this larger white and blue one, from 6 3/4" square sheets in different shades of blue and green with white on the reverse side, and a smaller red and gold star ornament from double-sided 3" squares.

 

This is the basic unit, folded from one square of paper. You can download a .pdf with instructions from Paolo Bascetta's website, and see other 2- and 3-dimensional origami pieces he's designed.

Three units joined together to make one "point". At first I thought you needed to make a bunch of three-unit modules, but that's wrong; in the final assembly, you make only one of these, then add one unit at a time in the same way, and in a particular order, until you've added all thirty. There are a number of videos out there, but I found this one on YouTube the best; it explains the assembly process very clearly, including how to hold the growing star and count the points so that you don't get confused!

Let me know if you try it -- I'd love to see what you make.

Hermit Diary 48. Color to the Rescue

There is nothing greyer than a northern November, before it snows. And then, when the dark days and long nights of November stretch into December, and the sun feels like it's on permanent holiday in Patagonia, so far away that it's forgotten us entirely, I'm not the only one who has trouble. I don't suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder in a clinical way, but it's a rare person living this far north who isn't affected at all by the lack of light, the wan sky, and the monochromatic dullness of the city and the bare trees. And that's in  a "normal" year: in 2020, these factors are combined with the isolation and fatigue of the pandemic, dread rather than anticipation of the holidays, and the knowledge that we're only at the beginning of what's sure to be a long winter.

While it's still relatively easy to walk, I'm trying to get outside every day, and I'm also doing a daily online program of stretching workouts, because I know that moving my body helps my mental as well as physical health. We cook a lot and eat well, and although we're often awake for hours in the night, we eventually go back to sleep, so I don't feel physically tired. Our feline companion is a delight and a comfort. I'm quite busy. But I admit: I'm very sick of living this way. 

As I wrote a while ago, color helps. I'm trying to wear brighter colors, and to get out our most colorful ceramics and textiles for our home. We don't plan to put up a Christmas tree, because our houseplants have taken up all the room we've got, but there are little lights and a few ornaments on the rubber plant-that-is-now-a-tree, lights outside our terrace, lights on an evergreen garland above the bookshelves.

And I've been drawing and painting. I was one of those kids who could happily spend hours arranging her giant box of crayons, and even now, just opening my box of watercolors gives me a little rush of delight. I hope I never lose that pleasure at the sight of an array of colors, and the endless possibilities they represent. The other day I got a delivery of a set of colored tissue papers, maybe for gift wrapping, maybe for collage: it cost something like $7, and looks to me like a world of pleasure. I also sorted through a bunch of old origami paper, pulling out a whole set of blue shades to make a ten-pointed folded star (more on that in a subsequent post). You don't have to be an artist to incorporate some "color therapy" into your day: it can be as simple as spending a half hour scribbling with colored pencils, making abstract patterns with watercolors, sorting your lipsticks or eyeshadows by shade, or your neckties; organizing your closet, your yarn, your table linens or towels. You have my solemn guarantee that it will make you feel better.

We're all having to dig deep right now, and many of us are struggling with loss as well as anxiety and uncertainty. The holidays are going to be a mixed bag -- a break in the usual routine, perhaps, but nothing like the holidays we normally share with family and friends. What's the hardest for you, and what's helping? Let's tell each other.