Eighty years ago, my mother dedicated me to Our Lady of Perpetual Succour whose icon is on the left. In the Eastern Orthodox Church iconography, the image is known as the “Virgin Theotokos of the Passion.” This 15th century Byzantine portrayal of Mary has been housed in Rome since 1499.
I bought the Zulu sculpture on the right more than forty years ago during the Apartheid era. It isn’t a joyful sculpture of mother and child but, instead, a sad image of the oppressed. One can only gaze at it, speechless.
And now we have Gaza, Syria, Sudan, Ukraine, Haiti and more. Men killing women and children.
As I look out the window, a bird, a female cardinal, sits safely in her nest patiently waiting for her eggs to hatch.
Starting here, what do you want to remember? How sunlight creeps along a shining floor? What scent of old wood hovers, what softened sound from outside fills the air?
Will you ever bring a better gift for the world than the breathing respect that you carry wherever you go right now? Are you waiting for time to show you some better thoughts?
When you turn around, starting here, lift this new glimpse that you found; carry into evening all that you want from this day. This interval you spent reading or hearing this, keep it for life –
What can anyone give you greater than now, starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?
The rain has stopped on a warm spring day and it’s a good time for a walk to the lake and forest just five minutes from home. The Great Blue Heron sees me coming and, quietly lifting its body into the air, flies low above the water to a tree on the other side of the lake. I remember visiting its breeding place not far away where with more than ten other heron pairs it built its nest.
On the far side of the lake, a flowering pear tree joins in the celebration of spring
And beyond the lake, leaves begin to bud in the forest
Croaking sounds break the stillness by the lake’s edge: First, at my feet. Then further down the creek. Looking down, I see a large American Toad.
Then, not far away, the smaller Eastern American Toad.
In the forest I notice the quick movement of a bird as it flits from one tree trunk to another. For a moment it pauses nearby. A White-breasted Nuthatch.
There was a sadness in the cadence of her voice. Her name was ‘Beauty’ and she calmly explained to the radio interviewer that in her line of business, risks are very real, but she had children, five to feed and hungry, and there wasn’t any money, or food for that matter, in beautiful Zimbabwe.
I changed channels, to the music station where Robert Schumann’s dreamy piano piece, Kinderszenen, Scenes from Childhood, brought his Moscow audience to tears. I thought of Beauty.
Back in the interview, she talked softly about her desperate business. It was booming across the border where migrant men settled by the hundreds in squamous squatter camps, their despair only deferred by a futile hope for something better.
But for many, the only comfort was in Beauty’s one-woman house-of-joy where, in the sadness of it all, they shared a longing for home and families across the sluggish, silt-filled Limpopo.
I changed channels again. Horowitz was still playing Schumann the seventh piece now, the gentle Traumerei. It can make you weep.
Beauty’s interview pulled me back as if with clutching fingers refusing to let go. The matter-of-fact exchange masked something deeper as she sustained a self-possessed dignity, unexpected in a prostitute-come-lately.
The interviewer politely probed: What were her hopes and dreams? The question hung unanswered, suspended in breathless air like some dark cloud heavy before rain.
I attended a concert recently. The program theme was Death and Transfiguration and included works by Richard Strauss, Haydn and Claude Vivier, a French- Canadian composer. His work, ‘Lonely Child’, was particularly absorbing. I was interested in the reaction of a friend who rose to his feet to applaud the performance. He hadn’t read the program notes and knew little about Claude Vivier. His reaction, it seems, was triggered purely by the music. My reaction was also very positive, but due in large measure to my awareness of Vivier’s biography and what he was trying to express. Was it the sonic complexity, the sound that was simultaneously both dissonant and melodic that appealed to Larry? Or might it have been the part of the composition when single thunderclaps of the bass drum punctuated protracted silent periods?
In my diptych above, the conductor, Barbara Hannigan, raises her arm holding a silence in the concert hall for an uncomfortable length of time.
Then she flicks her wrist and there is a crash from the bass drum.
Then there is another long silence. One could hear a pin drop in the hall.
This is the complete antithesis of the earlier crowding and jamming of melodic and dissonant frequencies and timbres.
There is another thunderclap. Another long silence and now the audience is fully under Vivier’s control, captivated by the silence between sounds.
The bass drum reverberates again.
Is this the end, the audience wonders? Is this the last breath, the last gasp like that of a dying person who slowly takes leave? Hannigan keeps her arm raised, Are we on the verge of eternal silence?
Vivier described Lonely Child as a long song of solitude. Is this where it ends? But no, the intervals between the beat of the bass drum start growing shorter until they fade away altogether and we hear the higher pitch reverberation of the Japanese Rin Gong or ‘singing bowl’ and the tension dissipates. In the pre-concert talk we heard about the frequency proximity of C to C#. In the performance, we experienced distance through the absence of any frequency between the beats of the bass drum. And somehow this distance resonated within our psyche and we leapt to our feet unable to articulate quite why.
Vivier, I think, would be happy to know that his music was appreciated without the listener having to explain.
The time will come When I will remember Standing at the kitchen window With a bowl of cereal Looking out at softly falling snow. The now will be then And make the heart ache.
Over the years, I have wondered why it is that so many of us are drawn to nature. I think of my own experiences of entering a forest, climbing a mountain, wading into the ocean, and the strange sense of presence, of being taken into, of being embraced, that overtakes one. Discreet experiences come to mind: Walking slowly in a forest of balsam fir and deciduous trees in the Laurentian mountains of Quebec; Pausing among a cluster of mesquite and acacia trees in the Sonoran Desert; Walking through a grove of whispering pine overlooking the Indian Ocean in South Africa; Climbing up into a tall Syringa tree in Pretoria; Ambling along a dirt road under a line of Blue Gums in Australia; Climbing the treeless Beenoskee mountain above Ireland’s Lake Annascaul; Joining the Buckeye Trail not far from our Hudson home to stroll among, hickory, maple, beech and pine.
Ours is largely an anthropocentric culture, one that views humankind as separate from and superior to nature; a perspective that views non-human entities such as animals, plants and minerals as resources for us to use. It is a culture marked by the impulse to dominate. And, in our daily lives, we are caught up in a struggle between the urge to dominate and resistance to being dominated. And, somehow, this drive has a dehumanizing effect. That is why perhaps, when we enter the forest, we abandon this destructive dichotomy to find a peaceful harmony at one with nature: A non-verbal awareness.
In a recent New York Times opinion piece, ‘In the Shelter of a Weeping Beech,’ Jesse Wegman wrote about his mother who “loved all trees, but this weeping beech was her favorite. It’s hard to describe the experience of being in its presence, but she tried. In the journal she kept while she was sick, she wrote that the tree appeared to her ‘as a herd of elephants huddled together, pressing their massive bodies together, with their trunks entwined.’
Only a few months earlier, I had a similar experience standing in a grove of oak trees and tried to capture it by creating the photographic diptych displayed above. I then wrote some poetic narrative to accompany the image. Here it is:
The Final Stretch 