I went to the wilderness two days ago, and it almost kept me. Enchanted, that's what I was. The trees blinked and waved flashing light onto my path as I was driving home. I miss tree-land.

Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in the old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are,
One equal-temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

From Ulysses by Alfred Lord Tennyson

I love these.

Lamentations 3

21 But this I call to mind,
and therefore I have hope:
22 The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases;
his mercies never come to an end;
23 they are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.
24 “The Lord is my portion,” says my soul,
“therefore I will hope in him.”
25 The Lord is good to those who wait for him,
to the soul who seeks him.
26 It is good that one should wait quietly
for the salvation of the Lord.
27 It is good for a man that he bear
the yoke in his youth.
28 Let him sit alone in silence
when it is laid on him;
29 let him put his mouth in the dust—
there may yet be hope;
30 let him give his cheek to the one who strikes,
and let him be filled with insults.
31 For the Lord will not
cast off forever,
32 but, though he cause grief, he will have compassion
according to the abundance of his steadfast love;
33 for he does not willingly afflict
or grieve the children of men.

(ESV)

Resplendent Revolution

Hello everyone, I have started a blog that deals with my findings about the 18th Century, a time that I can't seem to get enough of. I'll still be posting life-ish stuff here at Abbey Road. Speaking of, how do you guys like the new background? I realize that there's a lot of pink, which I don't really like, but there's these pieces of paper sticking out from the center that are Alphonse Mucha designs! So I think I can live with the pink if I get some Mucha.

So go visit the new blog. Nothing exciting has happened there yet, but here's the address:

http://resplendentrevolution.blogspot.com/

Enjoy!

I love the stars. I fell in love with them as a child with a small book that detailed the patterns one could find in the night sky. I fell in love with the beautiful consistency that never failed to surprise. During the day, my attention is generally focused on Earth and what immediately surrounds me. At night, when millions of eyes blink back at me, I am surprised by how vast the universe seems to be. I am surprised by how much I can't see with only two eyes that certainly don't sparkle silver.

Tonight was one of those nights when the stars reminded me why I first loved them, all twinkling and slivery-blue. Tonight I was in love.

On October 6th, I drove to Atlanta.

And there I saw what allowed me to mark off an item on my "To Do Before I Die" list. I went to a U2 concert. I cried the entire time.


(There is more to come about this experience, but this will have to suffice for now. PS This is not a video that I took. Our seats were thankfully alot better, but you can hear me singing too much on our video. Plus, this video shows a bit more of the general splendor.)

Choices, choices.

Something I said once in a dream. . .

"I don't want to miss the Scribner writing on the moor." I'm not sure what that means but I kept saying it last night in a dream and now I can't get it out of my head.

I just found out that Wallace Stevens died on August the 2nd, the day after my birthday.

Strawberry Swing

I love this. I love this song. I love this video.

'Alice in Wonderland'

I am on my way to another world for a week, so I thought I'd leave you all with a glimpse of yet another place. A place like no place on Earth . . .

A healthy dose of Stevens and other thoughts (As Mrs. Squeers would say, "Take it and thank me for it!)

Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself
by Wallace Stevens

At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.

He knew that he heard it,
A bird's cry at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.

The sun was rising at six,
No longer a battered panache above snow . . .
It would have been outside.

It was not from the vast ventriloquism
Of sleep's faded papier mâché . . .
The sun was coming from outside.

That scrawny cry—it was
A chorister whose c preceded the choir.
It was part of the colossal sun,

Surrounded by its choral rings,
Still far away. It was like
A new knowledge of reality.






1. I love the thunderstorms of the South. Nothing can make my heart quicken like these colossal walls of energy bursting at the seams- first in approaching silence and then suddenly when they shout their presence from just above you. The first delicious raindrops are heavy-laden with relief as they reach me and the earth beneath my feet. The lightning bolts fly for trees and other clouds as if they were the webs of the spirits of very great spiders. Not creepy-crawly spiders, but the sleek, shiny ones that weave the beautiful webs in zig-zaggity patterns. Banana spiders, that is what they are called. The art teacher I studied with when I was thirteen 'grew' these spiders in her garden and studio windows for their beautiful yellow selves and elegantly stitched webs, and now I see them leaping from cloud to cloud, weaving their zig-zags across the night sky. I love running back to my house in the air that is charged with the approaching excitement of winds gathering into one great army marching towards my home, rushing all around me.

2. I love sitting in my lawn to read. In my yard I feel that much closer to all the lives that are lived all around me, but not quite lived with me. I wish that the people rushing past on the sidewalk would stop, ask me what I am reading, find out why I love the feel of grass under my feet and the smell of the air. Then I in turn can learn about them, but they never really stop. Sometimes they wave or smile, but for the most part, they just rush on. (For the record, if they had stopped and asked me what I was reading, I would have answered, "'Pride and Prejudice', for the one-millionth time." Then I would have proceeded to explain to them why it is not my favorite Austen and why Mr. Darcy is over-rated, and what the movie versions are really missing, and such.)

3. I miss flying away. I want to get on an airplane and fly through the air, through the very clouds that may later collect into the rainclouds that I love so much. I want to get on a plane filled with strangers and think of why it is that our lives are intersecting at that point and figure out where they are going and why, and eat peanuts and drink apple juice. I want to arrive to friends that are expecting and anticipating my arrival as much as I am anticipating finding their eyes at the gate.

4. I need the Autumn to arrive early this year if ever. I need it to. Really. I think I am the very most alive then. I wait the entire year for it and relish every moment of it when it dances in. Autumn dances, truly, if any season does. It is a slow and lovely dance. Like a last dance, it is the world exerting its every last effort at being alive and beautiful before the ever so distant Spring.

5. I wish that more things in my life were settled. I am still in limbo concerning the next stage of my life, but I suppose I can wait. I am trying to delight in this time of my life and the potential that it holds. Life is a delight. It is like starlight and winds and wild blackberries and luna moths and honeysuckles, but it is also just as surprising and unexpected as these things. I just have to wait for it to surprise me and love it even when it does not. I must learn to relish the everyday just a bit more and see the gifts that exist in even the most mundane of days and nights.

And with that I leave you. Happy Wednesday.

Jane

A little girl that I was lucky enough to have three progressive images of. Well, a more accurate statement might be to say that her family was lucky enough to be wealthy enough to have her picture made several times in her youth (there were 5 total). They increase in age from the top down.

This is just to say . . .

that I find this absolutely hilarious.

First some context for those of you who weren't English majors:

This Is Just To Say
by William Carlos Williams

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold


And here's the kicker:

On the day of the advent of my nephew, I bring you these gifts:

The first images from Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, along with my tidings of great joy! I am struck by both awe and excitement.
(if you are not excited about this, then you should check for a pulse)






Oh my word!

Oh yeah!

The Beatles RockBand Trailer

I am amazed. And excited. AND AMAZED.

Reading/Summer Update I

So far this summer I have read Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome and Summer. For those of you who do not know me well, you may not be aware that I am seriously affected by whatever movies I see and books I read for weeks following the said art-form (I was pretty down for a good month after I saw Moulin Rouge the first time, for example. Now I tend to turn it off before anyone dies.) Well, after reading these two works, I was struggling to stay out of the sadness that surrounds them both. Sometimes I hate feeling too much. (Honestly, Ethan Frome was far worse to me than Summer was. Summer just seems like something that occurs all the time these days.) Sometimes I love feeling too much. It is during the portions of the stories that I fall in love with the happiness of the character's lives that cause me to become too emotionally involved with the text on the page. It was when I thought my heart might explode with delight when I thought that Ethan and Mattie may actually have a chance at love and happiness in Ethan Frome and while Charity Royall waited expectantly for Harney to keep his promise to her in Summer. It was the reality that neither of those things happened that saddens me for days. Couldn't she have written the ending that I wanted? The one that was easiest?

Of course she could have, but it wouldn't have been Wharton's. She reveals the fragility of human relationships in such a beautiful way that it is devastating (as it is in our lives) to witness them crumble, in the case of Summer, or explode, in the case of Ethan Frome. We never want these things to occur, but we can savor the sweetness of the potential that lay just waiting in the beginning.


Ok, on to more pleasant thoughts. I am three-quarters of the way through Howard's End, which is a book that I love (I think this will be the fourth time through). I love Forester in general though. I am also a chapter into Hawthorne's The Marble Faun, which is one of the few works by Hawthorne that I haven't had the opportunity to read yet (my copy is a really cool looking one from the 1950's).

On the non-reading front I have worked on the big illustrating project a bit, and have a first page done already. It was some of the most intense moments of pen to paper I've ever experienced. I was truly afraid, I think. Thinking about publishing and working for an author who isn't myself is just kind of freaky.

And I made a new dress, which I think is beautiful. The fabric is muted greens and rusts and creams shaped into roses and leaves. I sewed a perfectly delightful little pale sea green velvet ribbon from the back of the neck to the bottom of the bodice (where a zipper would normally be). I think it is a rather coy little velvet ribbon, but I'm not sure why I think that just yet.

Now I'll leave you all with a long over-due dose of Wallace Stevens, who is my favorite:

DEBRIS OF THE LIFE AND MIND

There is so little that is close and warm.
It is as if we were never children.


Sit in the room. It is true in the moonlight
That it is as if we had never been young.


We ought not to be awake. It is from this
That a bright red woman will be rising


And, standing in violent golds, will brush her hair.
She will speak thoughtfully the words of a line.


She will think about them not quite able to sing.
Besides, when the sly is so blue, things sing themselves,


Even for her, already for her. She will listen
And feel that her color is a meditation,


The most gay and yet not so gay as it was.
Stay here. Speak of familiar things a while.

A conversation between myself and my brother upon seeing a lovely 110 year old house yesterday:

Me: Look at that house Gabe!

Gabe: Oh!

Me: It looks like a set of silverware.

Gabe: Yeah, it totally looks like it would just fly away.

Books I plan on reading this summer:

Sculpture II Final

These are two of the bowls I made for Sculpture II before the glaze and glass has been fired. I'll post another picture to show you all how they turn out - I get to see the finished result tomorrow morning.

Fannie

Oh my! I love these! They are from Sleepy Hollow. Sigh.

Easter Sunday 1947

The little girl with the big smile is my Grandmother. I love her.

This is silly.

I love Radiohead, but this is so funny.

Time for your dose of Wallace Stevens!

DESCRIPTION WITHOUT PLACE

I

It is possible to seem- it is to be,
As the sun is something seeming and it is.

The sun is an example. What it seems
It is and in such seeming all things are.

Thus things are like a seeming of the sun
Or like a seeming of the moon or night

Or sleep. It was queen that made it seem
By the illustrious nothing of her name.

Her green mind made the world around her green.
The queen is an example . . . This green queen

In the seeming of the summer of her sun
By her own seeming made the summer change.

In the golden vacancy she came, and comes,
And seems to be on the saying of her name.

Her time becomes again, as it became,
The crown and week-day coronal of her fame.

Tennyson's 'Lady of Shalott' to be the subject of a short film

Not only is it about Tennyson, but they are basing the designs on Waterhouse's paintings of the Lady. Head on over here and check it out. They've paid Pre-Raphaelite worthy attention to detail from the looks of things.

The Stinky Cheese Man

Read it.

I want to be real. Sometimes I think of Pinocchio with his desire to be a "real-boy" and I realize that I want that too. I mean, obviously not the boy part, but I want to feel real. Lately I have felt like I'm just watching my life slip by, observing it through a window, but not quite experiencing it. Its like I'm waiting for something to break the window and wake me up. Maybe I'm just tired. Maybe two undergraduate degrees in four years is wearing on me. Maybe I am lingering. Maybe I'm hesitant about this next section of my life. Maybe I need to have more trust. Maybe its ok if I don't know.


In this quest, I will need these things:

1. The realization that a plan has been set in motion for my life

2. The the knowlegde that the orchestration of such a plan is magnificent and not easily understood

3. Sleep

4. My friends

5. Rainfall

6. Faith and Trust (and pixie-dust)

7. Afore mentioned plan is specific to my life only. No one else can tell me what that plan is, other than the One who painted it out, so I should seek Him to know it.

8. My family's love and support

9. A potted plant

10. Music

11. The pictures of the generations of my family that I am too young to know

12. Pineapples, green apples, chocolate, sweetened tea, and scallops

13. The ocean

14. Canvases

15. A gentle breeze at night

16. Bird songs

17. A piano

18. Poetry

19. The ability to communicate in multi-faceted ways

20. The imagination of a child

21. Starlight

22. Skirts

23. Storms

24. Clovers

25. Raspberries

26. A garden

27. Love

28. A beautiful umbrella

29. Memories

30. Thistles and Dandelions

31. The smell of honeysuckles and pomegranates and orange blossoms

32. Naps in the sun

33. The books of Psalms, Lamentations, and Isaiah

34. A cape

35. My bicycle Peter

36. A new place

37. Empty pages

38. Honesty and Hope

39. My memories

Ents in the mists.

On the way to breaklefast

I am so excited!

I am heading to a place that has palm trees

. . . so here is a picture of my Great-Grandfather in a place that also has palm trees. He was a pretty silly guy, I think we would have gotten along quite well.

James Joyce: “Epiphanies (def): The revelation of the what-ness of a thing; the moment in which the soul of the commonest object seems to us radiant”


Lovely.

Strange and wondrous sights of this morning. . .

Here's what all I saw before my first class today:


A bird growing out of the wall of the library.

A flower in my pancake at breakfast.

A giraffe (and a moose) in the window. Of the third floor.

READ MORE STEVENS. please.

Contrary Theses (II)
by Wallace Stevens

One chemical afternoon in mid-autumn,
When the grand mechanics of earth and sky were near;
Even the leaves of the locust were yellow then,

He walked with his year-old boy on his shoulder.
The sun shone and the dog barked and the baby slept.
The leaves, even of the locust, the green locust.

He wanted and looked for a final refuge,
From the bombastic intimations of winter
And the martyrs a la mode. He walked toward

An abstract, of which the sun, the dog, the boy
Were contours. Cold was chilling the wide-moving swans.
The leaves were falling like notes from a piano.

The abstract was suddenly there and gone again.
The negroes were playing football in the park.
The abstract that he saw, like the locust-leaves, plainly:

The premiss from which all things were conclusions,
The noble, Alexandrine verve. The flies
And the bees still sought the chrysanthemums’ odor.

In two weeks, this is where you'll find me

"An art school is a place where about three people work with feverish energy and everybody else idles to a degree that I should have conceived unattainable by human nature."
-G. K. Chesterton

Please let me be one of the three.

Coldplay - Life In Technicolor ii

This is fantastic!

Northern Lights

I will see this with my own eyes one day.

I love being alive.
Isn't air wonderful?
Isn't breathing glorious?
Isn't frosted, crystalline world beautiful?
Isn't God good?
Isn't today a new and spectacular day?
Yes.

Thoughts

Grad school is hanging rather ominously over my life right now. I just wish I knew where I am going for sure. Its funny how exciting not knowing can sometimes be, and how it sometimes can be a rather life-sucking feeling. I suppose it is my attitude about it. I just don't know.

The snow kissed my face all day yesterday, a million little freezing kisses, and the air stung the back of my neck, which is a pleasant feeling over-all. It reminds you that you are alive and can feel.

I was driving the other day and I got caught up in that feeling of whooshing by other people and their lives without giving any thought to them. I don't think I like driving at all, I'm convinced that it really does de-humanize you.

I saw an old map that featured the Island of California. I wonder if that map maker had ever even been to California. If he had, I'm sure that he would have noticed a particular lack of ocean between California and the rest of the United States. There were also sea monsters, but even they are more believable.

I get to be with my brothers and my friends tonight. I love them and pretty soon I won't get to see them very much at all, because I'll be far away, so I am savoring every last moment.

I miss the flowers and the leaves. Winter seems to be reigning extra long this year.

Sleep
Sleep tonight
And may your dreams
Be realized
If the thunder cloud
Passes rain
So let it rain
Rain down on me
Mmm...mmm...mmm...
So let it be
Mmm...mmm...mmm...
So let it be
Sleep
Sleep tonight
And may your dreams
Be realized
If the thundercloud
Passes rain
So let it rain
Let it rain
Rain on me

"MLK" by U2

Andrew Wyeth 1917-2009

Andrew Wyeth has passed away. It is sad that he is gone, but it brings to mind the question of if a great artist can ever really die. I'm of the opinion that they live on through their works, a sort of tangible immortality.

I am making decisions that will affect the rest of my life and it is scary. What? Who? When? How? I don't even have the slightest idea.

But He does, which is a comfort un-ending.

I came upon a waterfall today.

I am moving far away soon.

I am going to see things that have belonged to centuries of royalty tomorrow.

I have a family.

I saw a butterfly.

Hm.