Category Archives: Living Deliberately

Ascent of Spring

Posted on March 19, 2016 by Sandy Stott | Comments Off

This is the spring of the year. Birds are migrating north to their breeding-places; the melted snows are escaping to the sea…The element of water prevails…What a conspicuous place Nature has assigned to the skunk-cabbage, the first flower to show itself above the bare ground! What occult relation is implied between this plant and man? Thoreau, Journal, 4/18/52

Nearby, a needle-softened slope under big pines tips just so to the south; it cups the March sun, and, after the ice vanished one night from the pond it fronts, I’ve been watching that slope. There, today, a few days early (and before the weekend’s once predicted snow), I saw spring. Or at least one of Henry Thoreau’s favorite signs of the season.

Skunk cabbage grows to be large, green and glossy, but when it first peeks around above ground, it’s hard to spot. Often it shows one or two little horns above the mottled leaves of last year, and those horns have a rich green redness that blends well with the dun ground.

What will follow? seems the question of all first shoots, and in years past, at bog’s edge, I’ve seen a whole green village of cabbage. But here, near the equinox, somehow the future seems an open question; there’s no guaranteed answer. We could tip back to winter; we could go headlong into spring; we could for a while balance in the even light, warm on one side, cold on the other.

I kneel to look and imagine the body below the horn…or it could be a nose, or even a thumb… its imagined face looks up, feeling perhaps the new warmth on this sun slope. Nothing moves visibly. “What occult (Cramer translates as hidden or inscrutable) is implied between this plant and” me?

But now the sun has warmed my back, and I feel the fibers of cloth stir; unrooted animal that I am, I grow impatient, get ready to move on. It’s all about (to) change. For both of us.

Amusing myself by getting the ‘horns’ to perch on top of a “shady.”

coda: after a few photos, I break a tip from one of the horns and rub it between my fingers, and I find the distinctive scent’s not yet taken hold either; the cabbage hasn’t risen to ripe. That too seems assigned to later.

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Posted in Environment, General, Henry David Thoreau, Literature, Living Deliberately, Nature, News and Events, The Roost, Thoreau Quote

Choose

Posted on March 17, 2016 by Sandy Stott | Comments Off

Watching a Wendell Castle Documentary at the Museum of Arts and Design in NYC

The real facts of a poet’s life would be of more use to us than any work of his art. Thoreau, Journal 10/26/57.

Whenever I encounter someone who has chosen to live or think outside the usual lines prescribed by society, Henry Thoreau comes to mind. That’s not, I realize, much of a stretch; Thoreau cast himself as outsider again and again, in part to offer those inside the lines a different perspective, another set of images to consider when it came to deciding how best to imagine and live a life.

Such a resonance was especially strong a few weeks ago, when I visited an exhibition at Museum of Arts and Design in New York. It was a snowy, late afternoon, and I had just walked along the fringe of Central Park, watching the large flakes kiss themselves as they reached the water in a chain of ponds; I was feeling especially lucky at this walk, albeit a little wet and cold.

With friends, I entered the museum, shook off some soggy snow and then took the elevator to the top floor to see the furniture designs and sculptures of Wendell Castle, an artist my friends knew of from Rochester, New York. Castle’s work has an organic, layered flair to it, and he favors rich woods. I’ve included a few photos from and the link to his website, so you can have a look. But what linked him in my mind to Thoreau was a clip from a documentary about Castle’s life.

A Castle piece from the exhibit.

In a section about his childhood and how he came to art, which is another way to say how he came to know himself, Castle reflected on some of a child’s usual routes – sports and school.

Here’s a short poem that incorporates some of what Castle had to say; it imagines the moment described in the documentary from his point of view, actually from 2 points of view, the first as a child, the second the adult subject of the film.

Choose

“I’ve got Ray.” “Okay,
I’ve got Chuck.” Chuck’s face
unscrews – he’s not slipped
to me – one from last, yes,
but not what comes next:
“You take Castle.” “Naw,
we got enough, you take him.”
I am about to be returned when
they decide, “Castle, you’re the sub,
when someone has to go,”
and they turn to the field,
their glove-hands hanging like
outsized claws, their throwing hands
free to punch and jostle, to
touch as boys will, as they step
over the lime lines that shape
a geometry of childhood.

I turn
again to go, then look out
at the camera documenting me,
its convex lens unblinking,
and draw my own lines, say,
“So I learned
to choose
myself and Art
was the field
where that
happened.”

I like to think of Henry Thoreau choosing himself too, as it seems, artists do – when he chose to write; when he went to Walden; when he returned. When he went out each day to walk his own lines across the near world.

link to Castle website and more about the artist and his work: http://wendellcastlecollection.com/index.cfm/do/WCC.wendell_castle_modern_designer_furniture

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Posted in Arts, General, Henry David Thoreau, Historic Preservation, Living Deliberately, Nature, News and Events, The Roost, Thoreau Quote, Walden

Spring Water

Posted on March 13, 2016 by Sandy Stott | 2 comments

This morning I got my boat out of the cellar and turned it up in the yard to let the seams open before I caulk it. The blue river, now almost completely open (i.e. excepting a little ice in the recesses of the shore and a good deal over the meadows), admonishes me to be swift. Thoreau, Journal, 3/8/55.

Often, we arrive at a season’s edge the way we revisit an old clearing. What, we wonder as we draw near, has changed? What’s the same? And so we go primed for comparison.

Still, when it comes to favorite places, we go too harboring a secret hope – may it be the same as I remember; may time and winter’s passage have been gentle, unremarkable; may I live again in this happy place. In a way, those hopes sum to another: may I feel the same in this place. Today, after loading the boat on top of the car (having reinstalled the roof-rack yesterday), I plan to go to the sun-inflected harbor with that hope.

That calendar winter endures even as its meteorological twin has vamoosed is fodder for street conversations across town. Even the piled residue where dutiful neighbors raked snow from their roofs dwindles to mere white accent. And little collapses of dirt along the trails show that frost is heaving from the ground; a few green shoots, freed from the straitjacket of frost, eye the sun.

And so, a little before eleven, Geoff and I set out for our nearest local launch site. Even as we raise the boats to the car’s roof, we can see the wind in the overhead pines; they wave vigorously. “Well,” says Geoff, “that’s the forecast. We’ll stay close to shore.”

At Simpson’s Point, we don’t even bother to get out of the car. The water’s roiled with whitecaps, and the wind blows directly on to the concrete tread that lets trailered boats into the bay. Next, we try Mere Pt three miles south along the peninsula. It’s rougher, and the seasonal dock we might shelter behind to launch is…well, seasonal…and so, not there.

Wind-ruffled bay

There’s enough prep time for paddling our kayaks, especially in cold water (today, a nearby buoy reads 39 degrees) to feel like an investment. So, we go a little farther afield, over to Lookout Pt. There, we know a little comma-shaped cove faces north, and so we’re pretty sure we’ll find enough shelter from the south wind to get into the water without being wave-battered.

Here, the south wind streams unimpeded up the bay, and it is honking (the same buoy that gave me the water temperature records a steady 20 knots, with gusts to 25). The water froths with whitecaps. But our little north-facing cove’s only shivered by the wind, and the water looks, as cold water will, crystalline.

North-facing cove, wind-shivered, clear water

We gear up, tote our boats to the waterline and lever ourselves in. I ease off the sand, and, by the time I’ve attached my sprayskirt, the wind’s taken me 50 yards north. After months out of my boat, I feel the little wobble of rebalancing, and then, as I begin to paddle, angling toward the east shore, everything settles – the water lifts and jostles, and I make the hundred, familiar adjustments, relaxing down into sea and cadence. Soon, now out of the cove’s lee, I’m a part of the waves rather than subject to them. Geoff joins me and we run down fast with the wind, sliding and surfing down the waves.

An hour later, after exploring some small coves and cliffs still garbed with scraps of remnant ice, and after eliciting complaint from a large flock of overwintering Canada geese, we turn and fight our way upwind at a knot or so. The work is warming, pleasurable, even as the gusts nearly stall us. One sharp, green wave lifts before me; I press forward and it breaks over my bow and washes along the whole boat. It is the day’s spawn and the season’s baptism.

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Posted in Environment, General, Henry David Thoreau, Living Deliberately, Nature, News and Events, The Roost, Thoreau Quote