the color of my soul

husband's bestie has sold his place and is moving away at the end of the month. he's a truly lovely person, a retired pilot, and i will miss him because he's been a staple dinner guest at our house for over a decade, but husband will miss him even more. in fact, i'm a little worried about husband without him. a young couple has bought his place and the wife is apparently a fellow american. husband has briefly met them, but i haven't. they won't be the same, but if i've learned one thing, it's that things don't stay the same and you have to be open to what comes next. 

i've been reading a lot of new substacks of late and many are focused on the new years resolution genre. i guess it's just that time of year. a surprising number of them quote rumi. kind of weird how appropriated his work has been by the gratitude/self-help set. i can't decide if it's good that it pushes it to a wider audience or if it somehow cheapens it. maybe it's a bit of both. but anyway susan cain asks in the new year's edition of the quiet life, what color is your soul now? what color do you want it to be? which she doesn't attribute to rumi (though she does quote him in the stack), but marcus aurelius, "your soul takes on the color of your thoughts."

affected by the time of year, i think my soul is currently that wintery nordic greyish blue. it's not a terrible color for your soul to be. it's peaceful and quiet, if a little cold. it seems a little lighter and more tending towards the blue than the grey after yesterday's scream in the forest. it feels in tune with the slight slowly returning after the solstice. i think the color i want it to be is a sunny, bright yellow. and that will surely come with summer and the buzzing yellow of the canola fields. and it will no doubt pass through that brilliant light green of the first beech leaves as they unfurl in the spring on the way there. our souls aren't just one color, but the whole spectrum and that color can change with the season or even from day to day or minute to minute. but susan is right, that it's worth thinking about what you're feeding your soul. and currently, i want to feed mine light. 

art journaling lately

a limited palette. a feather as a brush. painting with acorns. white and gold gel pens. my art journal as of late. a kind of meditation. letting it carry me where it will. payne's grey. astoriabraun, bordeaux. ink.

slow sunday stretches to the wee hours of tuesday

it was raining steadily, if gently, all day sunday. that was fine, as there was plenty of tidying up to do inside that's been sadly neglected as we spend all of our waking hours outdoors. the monotony of the rain and the grey skies gave the day a slowed-down feeling. the slow feeling didn't let up that much even as we spontaneously decided to watch the world cup finals, as it was an awfully long match with very little scoring. if it hadn't been for twitter, and laughing with friends, i'd have nodded off.

a rainy quiet day leaves me feeling introspective and so it was only fitting that i came across this piece on virginia wolff in the new yorker. she had this notion that there was always this place inside of us which we hide, even from ourselves. she even embraced this hiding, like a gift of sorts, a core which we keep eternally as a surprise. i'm not sure that i agree that we hide these places from ourselves so much as that we are unable to articulate them, even to ourselves. i would argue that we know very well they're there, and the keen observers of us around us sense them as well. but there is something at our core that's inarticulable (i think that's possibly a word that i just made up), something that might well be the very stuff of who we are. and we probably come closest to it when we are alone with ourselves and our own thoughts. and maybe it's even why we crave time alone, to be closer to ourselves.

one of my favorite quotes of all time is from one of barbara kingsolver's early novels (the bean trees, i think), she says, "you never know how inside of themselves people are." i think that's what virginia wolff was getting at as well and perhaps the reason she had to end it all is that she couldn't really stand the revelation of self there at her core. she couldn't face that it was as inexpressible as it is. for a writer, the inexpressible must be the very worst thing. or maybe the fear of finally expressing it and getting to the bottom of it and having no mysteries left there in the core. or just the raw, naked, stark truth of who we really are at the base of it.

see. i told you the rain made me introspective. and there are times when i just have to write these things down in order to illuminate what i really think about them. and sometimes that writing only gets me part way there. thank you for reading.

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on a lighter note...

i really love this food blog.

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and how fabulous are these moody family portraits?

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and you thought LEGO was just a toy.

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are americans really too stupid for GMO labeling?
a congressional panel thinks so.

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here is a really great and thorough account of the project i've been working on since march.
i might have mentioned that i love my job.

not ready

summer is too fleeting and feels even more so when it comes only in fits and starts. we had a few really nice days...eating outdoors, playing outside, soaking up the sun and now it's back to rain, rain, rain. it's actually ok, as i have plenty indoors to do, but i want to be outdoors and there's lots to do there as well. i'm not ready to let go of summer. i'm just not ready.

strangely, this evening, after chilling us with a steady drizzle all day, the western sky was the most amazing shades of pink and orange. absolutely lovely! and somehow made even lovelier by the fact that it was still raining. the cold drops and warm sky were just those sort of opposites (like feathers and stones) that speak to my very soul.

at least this sunset was at 10:22 p.m., which means i haven't yet begun to feel the light's retreat, tho' it's been nearly a month since the solstice.  i'm grateful for that. i'm just not ready.

our pooka leaves tomorrow to visit friends and go sailing with them for ten days or so. i know she's going to have so much fun, but i'm going to miss her. i feel acutely that i need to enjoy her this summer, while she's this age - still a child, not yet a teenager. i want to hold onto that so tightly, at the same time as i know i cannot.

i'm just not ready.

in so many ways.

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one of the coolest things i've seen in a long time. 

there's even more about it here.