Each day...

...remember who you are

So says the daily morning prompt on my calendar.  It's been dinging at me for a few years now;  every now and then I consider it seriously, but whether I barely glance or stop to ponder, it keeps me attentive to what I have become so far.

Last night it snowed, more than the forecast allowed; this scene is brightening my window as I write.

Today, for some reason, that prompt seems to nudge me a bit more than usual...perhaps because this white landscape addresses the quiet light of inside...perhaps because only five days ago I turned a new age...a double 7, when, as in the gambling life, anything can happen.

That, of course, is the theme of life itself, but it's one more frontally before us these days when the going on and going out and coming in are continually in flux.  I, for one, have settled in to whatever.  So far, that has made our next season, Spring, a state of mind long before its time.

At the moment I am reading early chapters for a friend who is writing about the settling of the Jamestown colony, but, as is his wont in writing, it begins much earlier...it opens with the teenage future Elizabeth I being imprisoned by her half-sister.  (Goodness!  I hope he won't mind my revealing that...) He's a good storyteller, and this is a good day for reading a good story.

So, to begin here, I'm thinking that I'm lucky not to be 16th century Elizabeth, her father having died leaving a legacy of discord at home and abroad, beheadings at every turn of events.  

I'm glad to be my own age...I don't mean chronological age (octagenarian life is only a few years ahead now...hmmm), but inward age.  I'm always surprised at photos of me, my gray hair finally coming in like a dusting of powder around my temples, my smiles slopes of wrinkles.  I don't think of myself that way.  But there I am.

As this birthday card reminds me, I have all the things I need by now to be who I am 

(except I haven't worn lipstick since college).

Inwardly, I am a non-age...somedays younger, somedays older.  Every day seems to be a turning toward something and yet also a stay of time, of self.  That's hardly a profound thought, I know.  But it leads me to say that at the moment my prompt, remember who you are, is opening a peace/piece of mind that belies the world's turmoil.  I'm feeling (devil, close your ears) as if so many parts of me have come to fruition.  I breathe in this life and it fills me with a steadiness I sometimes think is cushioning against reality...like this snow today, bathed in beautiful but blinding sunlight. 

It reminds me of another daily prompt I more recently put up (on New Year's Day, actually):

Nous ne voyons pas les choses comme elle sont; 

nous voyons les choses comme nous sommes.

[We do not see things as they are; we see things as we are.]

I am not naive; I am not immune to hurt and sorrow...deep sorrow, deep angst (which includes anger, too); I am not unhearing of difficulty, others' as well as my own...I imagine struggles to come.  And at root I distrust, as I always have, easy living.

Who I am is all this life I have lived...stumbling through naivety, through difficulties of mind, body and sense (some virtual beheadings, even)...through and through, on and on.  My husband and I were once on a walk in the woods after a small tornado had hit the countryside a few days before.  Our path was suddenly cut off by a hefty clump of debris.  He began to pull it apart to get through, while I looked for (and found) a way around it.  He laughed.  "Is that the way you think the world works?  Just walk around trouble..."

I wonder.  How does that resound now?

Transitionally speaking, it seems I have come not only to a verbal blank...where does this piece go from here?...but also to a bench on the path, somewhere to stop for a while and rest in what is or in what I am...as Shakespeare quips in one of my favorite comedies, What You Will.

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And by the way:  I love old movies from the '30s and '40s and also films, if they are done well, of Shakespeare's plays, so here are the two I am making sly reference to above:

Jean Arthur and Edward Arnold in Easy Living...a comedy of errors from the 'forties

Imogen Stubbs and Helena Bonham Carter in Twelfth Night...an ageless comedy of errors in which HBC, as the lady Olivia, gives the best imaginable rendition of the line "Oh! wonderful!".

I'll bet you can find a few more...

Slow time

 

Pierre Bonnard, "Corner Table", 1920

Goodness.  I could have sworn that there weren't but two weeks since I last wrote, but here it is three.  I could say that time flies, but that would be misrepresenting these past days for me.  Time, like the seasons, has slowed.

These mornings, I'm in bed long passed when, not but a month ago, I'd be up before dawn, feet slipping to the floor, the day calling out some urgency.  I still wake early, but stay under the covers, letting thoughts surface instead of me...like scenes from a movie coming into focus, memories, constructions of new and old possibility.

Then, still resting on pillows, I read some...this morning the last part of Nella Larson's Passing, which I'd picked up from the library yesterday.  I check mail, check the weather (it's cold...still below freezing), the instinct to get up and dress lagging.

Writing this post now, showered and sweatered, sitting in my chair in the front room as the sun streams across the floor, I hear the clock strike 9.  Nine o'clock.  I'd be halfway through errands or chores or art or a walk by now in the warmer seasons.

I'm slow during the day, too, the signals to the brain announcing the next thing to do with the bowing formality of a footman required never to rush.  I deliberate, do smallest things possible, one by one, walk the same routes, until I settle down to a movie and knitting, and then to bed again to read, and fall asleep.

Even this minute, words unfold between spaces you can't see, spaces of time in which I am regarding with slow intent the walls and floor around me...the art, mostly; three cards I've saved from the holidays which I can't put out of sight yet, so part of the room they've become; that sun, equally tardy, for this flash of light would have slipped around the corner of the house by now.

Yesterday late afternoon, my neighbor Maureen came over to work on what she, excited, described as a "vision card"...a collage of what we would like the new year to look like.  Spread among scissors, glue, pens, paper, old magazines, our choices of images seeming vast, but we were remarkably focused.  Hers was a declaration of voices to be heard, environments to be saved and treasured, family and community to keep.  Mine (while certainly I value those things, as well), became a window through which silver-lined visions of sky, desert, ocean, night, a smeared moon, shelter, trees (trees, of course...my own emblem...I draw or cut them out without a conscious thought).  A tray of guest-intentioned treats made its place.  Peace, a white dove with a silver branch, comes in from the left; another, silvered as well, holds the heart of a shadowy woman, its still point.  I am inside looking out to all that.  Hope is a pane of clear glass between.

Closing in on myself seems to be the theme of this wintery January.  I don't bother to wonder why.  It's just the way it is.