A Time To Build

 

Everywhere I turn I am now greeted with the friendly signs of spring – the cornflower-blue sky, daffodils, hyacinths, buttercups, amaryllis in my sitting room, oyster-catchers in the fields and lastly but not least, the sound of wireless playing Classic FM in my neighbour’s garden. There is nothing icy about the sight of spring. As we move away from the dark shadow of winter, the Mother Earth becomes more generous and her gardens give no hint of meanness.

It is also a time to rebuild and restore all the little jobs around the houses, the gardens and the villages that were neglected during the winter months. If one lives close to nature, one has to learn to work with it and live with its irregularities. 

The new ladders were recently installed around the harbour. As the saying goes, time and tide wait for no man. When the engineers arrived an hour late, the tide was already in the harbour and it was too late to take out the old rusty ladders. So, they sat and waited.

A time to build - a new ladder after it was installed at the harbour.

The crane lifted one boat after another from the land and dropped into the sea water as if it was celebrating a baptism at sea ceremony.     

When I go out for a walk in the early morning, the unhurried air of tranquillity fills the village. If I see my neighbour’s boat fishing out in the sea, I would make sure to wave from the distant hill. I can imagine his benign, shining face, like a beam of light from the lighthouse to a lost voyager, smiling at me from the sea. 

On a calm morning, the sun’s rays get higher and flood the land with their illuminating light. The light is so bright and white that it is impossible to see or describe. It must be what it feels like to be in a paradise. We have no words to describe it. 

In The Divine Comedy, Dante’s descriptions of hell are more convincing than his evocations of paradise. Perhaps, a ray of light in front of me is mystical like Gustav Dore’s illustration of the light that Dante sees in the paradise. Even a modest little fishing boat of my neighbour can look celestial from miles away when lit by the long beams of an early morning’s sun.

The oyster-catchers are back in the fields

I have been busy with my spring decorations for Easter. I am replacing my quilts with brighter and warmer spring colours to match the colours of the flowers outside. Although we still need to light the fire in the evening, the sitting room is warm enough if it is a sunny day to sit and read without the fire. 

The Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935). He is one of my favourite poets of all time. I always look forward to reading his poetry in the morning after I come back from my walk.

While I am happy to do my morning reading of poems by Pessoa or prepare a story board for this blog or for my journal, Gordon disappears into the kitchen to make bread.

Gordon makes his bread in the kitchen while I spend in the company of Pessoa

Gordon lives up to the every sense of the word – a companion, based on the etymology of Latin: com means ‘together with’ and panis means ‘bread’. So, a companion is one who breaks bread with another. Making bread is a true symbol of the companionate life.   

Job versus work

I have been re-reading a book that I read many years ago by the American poet Donald Hall titled “Life Work” from 1993. The book is a meditation on the nature and philosophy of work. During my college years, I was inspired by Hall’s poetry and prose about his home in rural New Hampshire. He was a great fan of a baseball game and wrote about the beauty of this sport. He wrote movingly about his wife after she died and the main themes in his poetry deal with loss, grief, solitude and love.

I love reading the American poet, Donald Hall's memoirs and a series of autobiographical writings published under the title of his farm, Eagle Pond in Wilmot, New Hampshire, America.  

My favourite book by him, which I often re-read, is called “Eagle Pond”. It is about his life on the farm “Eagle Pond” in Wilmot, New Hampshire. His stories about his family and his poetic observations of the passing seasons are magnetic and magical. 

He lived in the same house where his grandmother was born in 1878 and it was a quintessentially New England home, a white clapboard house with green shutters. I find a parallel in his childhood with my own when he went to spend his summers with his grandparents and he wrote about this experience in his first autobiography book in 1961 titled “String too short to be saved”.  

Donald Hall's Life Work, published in 1993 distinguishes between a job and work. His idea of work is "a state of absorbedness" and a calling. It is different from doing a job.

Hall’s book titled “Life Work” helps and inspires me over the years as a guide when I feel lost or stuck in my creative process. He wrote, “Work. I make my living at it…There are jobs, there are chores, and there is work.” Work for Hall is something blissful and pleasurable. 

It means sitting “long hours at the desk, joyfully swimming in the language…enjoying the acts of pen on paper…words and sentences uncoiling down the page in purple, felt-tipped, illegible, revisionary rapture.” One is no longer aware of the time when one finds work that is enjoyable.

For Donald Hall, work is similar to a special calling in life. It is an innate gift and a strong inner impulse. It is something we have to do with all consuming endeavour. When he is writing poetry, Hall explained: “In the best part of the best day, absorbedness occupies me from footsole to skulltop. Hours or minutes or days – who cares? – lapse without signifying.” 

Jobs, on the other hand, are tedious and lack soulfulness. Hall wrote: “Reading proof is a chore; checking facts is a chore. When I edit for a magazine or a publisher, I do a job.” But when he sat down to write a poem, he “could get to work.”

This is where the members of twitterati (sparrows) gather inside the creels at the village's harbour.          

Hall hinted the fact that in life he often had to do jobs in order to get to work - especially, the type of work he cared about, he was passionate about and he was happy to spend for hours. There is a very good line in Hall’s book which has full of epiphany: “because I loved my work it was as if I did not work at all.” 

I feel the same way about writing this blog and my journal. It is never a job or a chore. It is a destiny where I find my fulfilment and a place of sanctuary where my inner critics are completely silenced.

A Lonely Impulse of Delight

Our excursion to the next village to escape from the sea mist and to go for our favourite cliff walk.

There are still places near my village that one passes by on the way to somewhere else, quiet, forgotten villages at the dead-ends of roads, small communities that go on with their own daily and seemingly uneventful lives, with hardly any recognition from the urban pilgrims. 

This morning the sea mists came rolling in out of nowhere and the weather suddenly changed from bright and sunny to foggy and cold. It was one of those mornings that had about it a pleasant hint of melancholy which felt as if it could last forever. We did not know when the mist would be lifted again. The sound of the village itself was as quiet as a siesta.

We decided to go for our favourite cliff walk in the next village hoping that there would not be any fog. One has to take chances, an essential coastal way of life. The weather can be varied from one village to the next depending on which direction the wind blows or the position of the contrary sun peeping from the sky.

The roads were still quiet and I was able to visualise all the splendour of the trees enhanced by the misty and atmospheric background. It was as if I have caught something of that vanished world. It is a great miracle that the trees are still there, standing tall, despite the threat for many times, by man as much as by nature. 

When we reach to the top of the hill, the sky was full of magnificent mixture of clouds and mists. It gave us the sensation of floating above the submerged land of mists and clouds, a Dantean view of Paradise. 

An old road sign - motionless and rusty…it stands as if time did not exist anymore.

When we reached to the top of the hill, I had the sensation of floating above the clouds and the mists like the wanderer from a famous painting by Caspar David Friedrich. I stood by the roadside watching the clouds and nostalgically recalled a line not from Byron's Manfred but from Yeats' poem: "A lonely impulse of delight/drove to this tumult in the clouds".

I asked Gordon in the car if he knew or studied the meaning of this following line - "A lonely impulse of delight/drove to this tumult in the clouds" from Yeats’ poem, “An Irish Airman Forsees His Death”.

It opens: “I know that I shall meet my fate/Somewhere among the clouds above”.

The poem talks about heroism and sacrifice. The narrator explains that it is not law or duty that makes him fight ("Those that I fight I do not hate"). It is not for the sake of the publicity or fame that drives him to this dangerous mission. Rather, it is “a lonely impulse of delight” that drove him to “this tumult in the clouds”. “A lonely impulse of delight” evokes the act of heroism as the solitary sublime. 

It was a worthwhile excursion as the sky was clear in the next village. We watched the bright blue sky and the sight of the village church's tower in awe. 

There was no wind and the whole world seemed not only flat instead of round but also motionless. I could not think of a better view than this view from the cliff walk. It was as if the already expansive landscape had been put under a magnifying glass. 

Everything looked crystal clear in the sharper quality of light. The bells from the church tower were ringing and filling in with their reverberating sound into this serene and spacious landscape.

We seemed to have entered into the secret world, the world of tides, clouds and seabirds that extends far beyond our native shores.        

There are times in our lives we can also be driven and motivated by "a lonely impulse of delight" in a small, humble way not for the attraction of the grandeur or the reward but the innate desire to act in the best interests of other people and not just ourselves. 

As I walked back to our car, a solitary and airborne seagull came to circle above my head before it flew further away from me towards the clouds.