This week, I want to focus on what has been holding me recently. And ask you, what is holding you?
When the world is hard, I hold tightly to beauty and delight, to whimsy. As a life preserver. Keeping me from going under. Buoys in the sea.
I have touched grass, rolled down a hill, – okay, maybe that was two weeks ago.
I have screeched to a stop on the side of the road, to purchase an Actual Folly at an antique store. A ridiculous, cast iron, Victorian fern terrarium. Which I shall paint hot pink. My husband said it is definitely not for the front porch. Definitely a back port sort of thing.
I have been in full whimsy mode. Every flower, every blade of grass is precious, and I want to see down into them – up from the inside of flowers, down with my camera into the grass. Looking up through the leaves of trees, or through to deep inside the forest where slivers of light are creating lace curtains.
We went to the race track this weekend and I got to zoom around on our golf cart with the daughter of a race friend’s girlfriend. This girl is eight years old and an excellent driver.
I showed her how I like to photograph nature – and she started taking shots down low, in the flowers, up into the trees, clouds, the sky. She said, “I’m starting to see how you see things. I like it.”
Recently, I drove like a crazy woman across town to get to the bookstore before they closed to purchase Maggie Smith’s newest book, Dear Writer, on the day it was released. It felt important.
In one of the sections I’d just been reading, she talked about teaching poetry to grade school kids. The curriculum called for putting on a pair of wildly decorated glasses – to illustrate the point that poets use their poet eyes to see things. She didn’t opt for the glasses. She told the kids they all have poet eyes, and that kids are natural poets because of the way they see things. She said something like, grownups have to remember how to be poets. Children already know.
My little eight-year old friend and I talked about that. Every photo she took was poetry. Every fairy house we imagined putting in a tree was creativity on high alert. We found trunks of trees that need a little bear family to live there. We found a cave in the side of a hill that absolutely needs to have a dragon and a chest of gold. I have two weeks before we’re at the race track again, and I’m searching for twigs to put together with a glue gun so we have fairy houses for our fairy tree. I have an old box with a variety of little creatures – they will be guardians at the entrance of the forest (a spreading tangle of foot high foliage – with an opening – and we need some horsemen stationed there).
Sometimes I think I get along better with children. Or maybe people who haven’t grown up exactly. Something about going from one delight to another. Oh, look at that. Did you see that? What do you think about this? We should – a wild banter of half-baked ideas and suggestions, outlandish hijinks, and egging one another on to more and more fun – not very many adults can stay happy in that kind of conversation – meandering without any clear transitions.
Alive and spirited and childish.
Then it dawns on me that my dad was always threatening to write a book called, “My Fight Against Maturity,” by Tim Arensmeier. Anyone who knew him is familiar with this phrase and his lifelong commitment to not getting stodgy. He was a free spirit. He and I and everyone in his orbit traversed Narnia together gleefully.
What is holding me together is looking at things close up, down in the beauty of something growing, feeling a kinship with another poet’s words, and watching a child see herself as a storyteller, a poet, and start sending me pictures of the way “We See Things.”
