5:10 pm
The wind wraps a thick-corded hand around the house and hums. Moving shadows—must be the neighbor’s trees—pass bars of light and dark over the kitchen table through the blinds. I have a pot of chili to make for a party on Saturday, but what I really want to do is curl up in bed with a book and listen to the wind. But I won’t; I’ll bow to the quotidian (laundry, packing) and honor anticipation (a party!) and carve my way through the wind-thick evening.
Warmth layered under still chilly air, like a woman’s wrist flashing free of its sleeve. Yesterday’s sudden spring snow has all melted away. Even though the air under the shadows has a forbidding bite, people take off hats and jackets and even sit on the lawns, in full sun, as content as if this were an equatorial beach and not the mercurial transition from winter to spring in New England.
I’ve woken up to birdsong every morning since Saturday, song before the full happening of dawn. Notes suspend in the cerulean glow, astonishingly loud and bright. I can’t quite believe that spring has arrived, again, not as a gradual thaw but more like a violent rupture. For weeks, there were no birds and there was no warmth. Then on a day unexpectedly, there was not simply one song or one bird, but a chorus of them, breaking the blue quiet into tens of dozens of brighter shards. Snow receded by the hour, watering the streets and churning to mud on the campus quads.
Robins in the yards, crocuses up through the grass. Gloves left at home, and the thin hunkered endurance required to get through the winter months shrugged off like a coat. I open and close my bare hands as I walk down the street, as if I could grasp the warmth, elusive but tangible, slipping through them.
Rain darkens the streets and dims the sun’s lamp. I take off my hat, feeling the rain’s speckle on my head.
Morning, milky-soft. A cardinal flits in the woodland strip behind the garage. Green nubs push up through the winter-pressed loam.
Long winter, full of blank weeks broken by the bitter days. Snows that fell a foot at a time, then froze in grimy banks along the streets. Days when I paid the extra 50¢ for milk at the upscale convenience shop because it was too cold to walk the extra five blocks to the Stop & Shop.
Now crocuses are opening like children’s eyes in the front yard and daffodils stretch their green arms all along the sidewalks. Trees are tipped with sticky purple or brushed with gauzy yellow. Spring, stalwart, persistent, is laying siege to winter.
All fall and winter, I didn’t write. Not posts, not poetry, not journal entries; I sent emails (the new long-form epistle) to a few close friends on a daily basis, and I hunkered down. I finished one semester and started another all in the cold gray blanket of winter. I took standardized tests, filled out applications, submitted them, and then spent the wait on Sanskrit, Tibetan, and the small communities I work with in New Haven. Winter was a hibernation, like it usually is—but the past 18 months have been one long reduction in my creative metabolism, regardless of the season, an internal winter. Gradually I’ve turned my energy more and more to the classroom and my sanghas, until (honestly) I wasn’t writing or photographing much at all. I miss the creativity, but I also chose to focus myself on other areas, in part as preparation for possible graduate school. Open hours became the open pages of dictionaries and glossaries. I’ve bent to foreign grammars and classic texts, and felt my hours bent by them.
Now, a change of season, internal and external. I was accepted into the Master’s of Divinity program at Harvard Divinity School, and I’ll be moving to Cambridge in June. A very new life, in some ways. An apartment instead of a community-based sangha. Full-time graduate student life, and not simply the earnest but side-line participation of an auditor. A return to basic spiritual questions: what is faith? What is practice? What is the dharma to me? What am I in the dharma? A new city, even if I won’t be leaving New England and her winters. Hopefully, as I shuffle my responsibilities and obligations around and have, in some senses, a chance to shape a different kind of daily life than I’ve had in New Haven, I’ll also be able to return to writing and photography on a daily basis. There are other changes too, still only intimated at, unfurling through the spring and summer, the long internal winter opening into what may be an equally long and newly verdant spring.
Afternoon fog, disorientingly warm. Sidewalks reappear like arms from under dirty lace and the air cloys, smelling of dirt and water.
Rain, cold and sodden. Summer’s early monsoon always feels like this, a sudden shrugging off of early affection. Flowers melt into mud.
Several weeks ago, Venerable Hojin, an ordained priest from Zen Mountain Monastery, came down with Ryushin Sensei, the abbot, to lead a workshop on campus. Ryushin Sensei was giving a Dharma talk that evening, but Hojin was facilitating an introductory workshop to spirituality and art.
Ven. Hojin is a painter by training, and she continues to work mostly with paint. She started us out with a color exercise, intended to help us engage color in a more nuanced, and very importantly, attentive way. Working with watercolors on postcard-sized pieces of good paper, we were instructed to chose one color and fill the paper with it. The picture below is a close-up of that workshop’s first exercise.
I hadn’t played with a set of watercolors since I was in elementary school. Lots of the usual demons came out to play along with me: the “I don’t know how to do this” demon, the “Hers is better than mine” demon, the “I don’t want to do this if I don’t make something good” demon. Ah, demons. Always around, wanting attention. I try and think of them as small, hyperactive pets, or ill-behaved but basically decent children.
After the watercolor session, Ven. Hojin led us outside and instructed us to find colors in the environment. She showed a piece she had begun earlier on her way to the campus: splotches of deep maroon and violet occupied a corner of the paper. They were flowers and leaves she’d found on her way, and rubbed into the paper. Away we went, too, in search of color. That workshop opened me up to paint and to color in a radically different way. When I make photographs in color, I don’t consider the color as a quality of an object that I can draw out on its own and work with as a singular subject. I did an entire photo-poetic journal one winter around the theme of red, but red was the theme, not the subject. I was attracted to this practice of color, even though I wasn’t very pleased with my first results. I really enjoyed playing with the watercolors, though, especially with the relatively simply injunction to work with one color at the beginning.
Today, I needed to make some cards to send people. I tried painting a couple but really didn’t like what resulted (“too much thinking,” which turns out to be as much a problem with paints as it is for me when making photographs or writing; more intuition, more attentiveness, less artifice, is not only a very different process but also a very different piece). So I took paper and fingers and eyes out with me today, and found colors. I started with a tulip tree and some dandelions. I added pansies, daffodils, periwinkle, red maple, grass, forsythia, and more whose names I don’t know. The results are as you see here. The first picture is today’s exercises piled one on top of another on the kitchen table; the two photos below are close-ups of two different pieces.
In between making the piece above and the one below, I attended Friday prayers (jummah) with the campus community. In the wake of the tragedy in Boston, I’ve been struggling as I struggled 11 and a half years ago to make sense of things, and to find constructive and healing ways to address my own pain and confusion, as well as reach out to the greater faith community. I asked our Immam if I could attend Friday prayers, and he invited me to come. What happened in Boston—I’ll be honest. I don’t want to go into it. I went to jummah out of sorrow and hope and the belief that by being together and praying together something positive will result. The Muslim Students’ Association coordinator, a young woman, brought an extra scarf for me to cover my head, in a plain beige.
The call to prayer and the chants pierce straight through me, every time. I watched the women pray. The physical postures of prayer, so different in the details and so similar in the general attitude, moved me to reconsider and re-enliven my own physical prayer. It also delights me to no end to look at the various colors and patterns of their headscarves. I live in a largely monochromatic or at least visually restrained religious environment, and it fills me with a child-like pleasure to see the many-colored scarves the women wear, and to both watch them pray, and pray with them. I can’t be anything but a bit of an outsider, but they invited me in, made a space for me. Afterward there was a community lunch, and a small group of us (including the young Jewish classmate who emailed the Students’ Association coordinator, a friend of his, to find me a hijab!) chatted and nibbled. Then I left to go drop off my alumni auditing application for next fall, so that I can officially audit courses.
All along the street were colors and more colors. A whole world of sticky pigments I’d never explored. What amazes me yet again in looking at the pictures is how textured and layered the pieces can become. In some ways, plants behave like pencils; in other ways, like paint. I mostly played around with “brush” stroke direction and layering colors, and working with my timidity and fear of making something “bad” by making big, bold strokes and creating large patches of color before filling in with other colors. The color of a petal or sepal isn’t always the color you get on the page. A lot of experimentation and discovery happened today, which was exciting. I’m incredibly grateful to Ven. Hojin for introducing me to this; it’s replaced the camera on some outings, asking me to understand the essence of something as not manifest through its form, but through its color. It’s also encouraged me to make journal entries that are color-scapes instead of notations, the various plants used in the making of an exercise serving as the cues for where I went, and what I saw or touched.
On the warmed stone, a couple. Supine, she breaks into the most intimate angularities: head against his hips, legs bent against her torso.
A feathered drapery of ornamental cherry blossoms rustles in the wind. On the lawn, a thin woman mutters to herself, dangling a cigarette.
如 (thus) 是 