PUB FINERY

British pubs have a thing about flowers.  Nearly every pub is adorned with foliage and hanging baskets.  The ones that aren't are sure to be gloomy inside in my opinion.  We will pass them right by.  The ones that are seem welcoming and cheerful. And pub food is always a treat for someone who goes to Britain as seldom as I.  I don't know whether the riot of color is a sign of a tastier ale or half-pint.  But the tonic and lime, diet Coke and bitter lemon are uniformly good. This trip, our Fall Excellent Adventure as I decided to call it, I took bunches of photos of glorious pubs.  After all, there's no room to bring home souvenirs.

Some say the naming of pubs began with the Romans, others not until the Middle Ages.  Since most people couldn't read, signs were the best means of communication:  a shoe for a cobbler, a Coat-of-Arms or Rose and Crown, perhaps for an Inn.  And because the water could make anyone sick, it was good to know where to find a fermented replacement. Since every neighborhood has a pub--the local--and we lived in Bloomsbury on Mecklenburg Square many years ago, we too "have a pub."  Called The Lamb, the original meaning allegedly referred to Christ as the Lamb of God, back when all things, even a watering hole for a pint, had Christian associations.  Then again, it could have meant that sheep were once herded down the way since the street is called Lamb's Conduit.  But the most likely name source is William Lambe, who donated money for a water cistern and pipe. So much for romance. 

We remember when pubs smelled of cigarettes; you could barely see the blossoms for the haze.  But now in the spots where ordinary working folk (and we visitors) go, the fragrance and charm are not obscured.  People can sit outdoors or in and have an affordable meal and drink on virtually every corner where the rainy days and nights of Britain give a lushness to every blooming plant. 

I'm sure there's a downside.  Promoting alcohol is not a good thing.  But the greenery is a bright addition to some otherwise admittedly uninteresting urban sidewalks where the trash pickup may be spotty or late.  

What I'll do with these beguiling photos I'm not sure, but I've already an array of creative ideas.  I'm hoping that one or two of them won't be too hard.                    Nina Naomi 

WHAT INNER JOURNEYS WILL WE TAKE THIS YEAR?

Things I've found, read, thought of, or happened this past year that helped me, and I hope you: 

We don't have to try to live each day to the fullest.  Each day is full on its own.  All we have to do is notice. 

All you can control is you and all I can control is me;  then let us be at peace.

Time speeds up and slows down, shortens and lengthens according to a formula we can't change. No hour feels exactly like any other hour.   If time is the interval between two events, the interval is ever different.  There is clock time and there is felt time.  We can be at one with that; time has its own temperament.  

I can measure my life by what is going on within me, rather than by a pre-pandemic lifestyle.  What motivated me last year?  What will my projects be  this year?  You too.  What will our inner journeys be like in 2022?

We don't have to wait until we're too busy to say no.  We can say no because we don't want to be too busy. 

Our sadness can be a mild alarm signal, triggering more effort to deal with our challenges.  Sadness can send us to our tool kit:  a walk, anyone?  Some time alone, or with friends?  What action is needed?  What change to be made?  Welcome, sadness. 

Find what you do that's so absorbing that you forget the world exists, then do it more often.  

Beware of destination addiction.  If happiness is always the next  activity, the next outing, the next day--anywhere but here--it will never be where you are.  It will never be now. 

Make yourself a little world where you can be from time to time alone and perfectly at home.  

Useful metaphor (though easier said than done):  Do not let anyone rent space in your head unless they are a good tenant.

Virginia Woolf suffered from depression and died from it, yet she wrote,"Happiness is in the quiet, ordinary things.  A table, a chair, a book . . .  .  And the petal falling from the rose, and the light flickering as we sit silent."   We can look to those small things if we're depressed too.  

 A truth I've learned from experience:  you can recover from loss, even a loss that squeezes your heart with iron fists.  

Pause and look for the bits of magic that happen each day.  

Time spent caring for plants is meditation in motion.  Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of our soul. 

Every year I'd like to make my needs simpler. 

When I need a guide, God is the best one I've found.  

"I want to think again of Dangerous and Noble things.  I want to be light and frolicsome.  I want to be improbable, beautiful, and afraid of nothing as though I had wings."  If Mary Oliver could say this when she was 68 years old, we too can cultivate our own unbounded spirit.

So many years ago Rachel Carson (1907-1964) wrote, "There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature--the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter."  This is still true. 

Bell Hooks, whose death we are mourning, said, "Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving.  When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape."   Such consideration this shows.  And such appreciation of solitude.    

Forgiving makes us feel free and light.  Let's forgive those we can, even ourselves. 

 

 

 

 

SUMMER TIME AND THE LIVING'S NOT EASY

 

The children are back to school where we live, masked and excited to return.  Tomorrow it's my turn to pick up.  Only a few more days of summer, but not a summer of yore.  I don't think many will look back on these last 10 weeks with nostalgia.  With the unvaccinated, the Delta variant, wildfires and floods, many of us feel grateful for the vaccine but tense nevertheless.  Nightly I feel sorrow for the Afghans on the tarmac and in hiding who need help that's not coming.  We haven't done our best.

Margaret Renkl, a Southern nature writer, quotes poet Mary Oliver: 

Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?

In a NYT essay Renkl reminds readers that in the midst of grieving what we have wrought, we should still appreciate the good there is. She names the bumblebees, goldfinches, red-tailed hawks, black-eyes Susans and mock strawberries--all fauna and flora that lie outside my North Carolina door.  

Remember the song from the musical "Porgy and Bess," Summer Time and the Livin' is Easy?  Ms Renkl says that for no creature on earth is the living easy.  I agree.  Not for the baby birds nesting in the wreath in my courtyard, not for the chipmunk under our deck who avoids the resident hawk in peril of his life, not for the unvaccinated who drive this pandemic, not for the rest of us. We have a dear South African friend, a widower, whose girlfriend has declined the vaccine; he now has break-through Covid. No, the livin' is not easy. 

The UN report on climate change (AR6 Climate Change 2021) sets our task clearly before us.  Our guilt is inescapable. 

But to ignore the good that we experience everyday is to trudge with head down, missing the stars.  We cannot move forward without minding the beauty that is.  You have to prize something to want to save it.  Our democracy, our diversity, our earthly home . . . .  "Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also."  Matthew 6:21

Perhaps I'm looking for a way out, permission to find occasions for joy even though others are suffering.  But perhaps that is healthy.  To find moments of joy even when we ourselves are suffering.  Only then can we work hard to preserve the good.  

 

 

EMBRACING THE ORDINARY

How do you capture the beauty of the world around you? A friend of ours tills the soil, plants and tends the roses, photographs them catching each drop of moisture on each velvet petal, then turns the photographs into greeting cards and makes gifts of them.  So start-to-finish hand-made with care.  

A family member has taken chisel, hammer, wrecking and pry bars to an outdated bathroom and is creating a place of natural beauty for invigorating showers.  Making a place of joy for their morning and evening routines.  

I try to garden in spite of the deer and pesky squirrels.  And fill the house with plants to clean the air, add humidity and promote sleep.  I like to photograph what I find beautiful and meaningful, simple things like the shadows on snow in the photo above. Or the close up of tiny pine cones, or the icicles dripping from the mossy rocks.

Many people write.  My husband is one of those, capturing the truth, the sadness and the difficulty of everyday life.  All of us I suppose keep the beauty of life in our memories and that may be the best way--noticing and remembering.  And imitating.  Somewhere I read, be like a tree:  flexible, adaptable, resourceful, bending with the wind and springing back after a storm.  Or like a houseplant:  calm and steady.  

All of this fits an idea that I've been coming across about embracing the ordinary, that once we learn to enjoy ordinary things we can stop searching for bigger and better.  Peace and contentment find us more easily.  We can enjoy the rose we planted, the room we renovated, the words we've written, the memories we treasure--all ordinary things to do.  When we appreciate the ordinary the world looks more special doesn't it?  That's what I want to do more of this year.  You too?  

WINTER LIGHT

    January 2020, 8 a.m. Winter Light Cornwallis Road

"When one sees the tree in leaf one thinks the beauty is in its leaves, and then one sees the bare tree."  

 The Bare Tree by Samuel Menashe (1925-2011), American poet

"I prefer winter and fall, 

when you feel the bone structure of the landscape -- the loneliness of it; the dead feeling of winter.  

Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn't show." 

Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009), American visual artist

"There is a privacy about it which no other season gives you.... 

In spring, summer and fall 

people sort of have an open season on each other; 

only in the winter, in the country, can you have longer, quiet stretches when you can savor belonging to yourself."

Ruth Stout (1884-1980), American author and gardener