nest

"Thus the dream house must possess every virtue. How-ever spacious it must also be a cottage, a dove-cote, a nest, a chrysalis. Intimacy needs the heart of a nest. Erasmus, his biographer tells us, was long in "finding a nook in his fine house in which he could put his little body with safety. He ended by confining himself to one room until he could breathe the parched air that was necessary to him.""

I write a lot from bed, and always have. I think Colette did this, perhaps only at the end, when confined to her bed that was pushed alternately to and from the open window, depending on the French season. I find comfort in it.

I keep thinking about Annie Dillard needing to shut the blinds in her studio every day, even though they look out onto beautiful forest land. My blinds are closed, but I think I may need to stop the click-shuttering of memory slides in the back of my head, the colors blur together, I hear them turn over one by one, like my Dad's early first "digital" clock that he dismembered so you could see the numbers turn over on themselves, just the innards of the clock, working away in regular whirring increments, numbers on a spool.

With tests looming, I am trying to calm myself down. I am trying to remember landscapes that opened up around me in my past, places that responded to the immensity of space within me. I am calling up that feeling of response, the first time I drove around the curve of canyon into Taos, NM.

The basin opens up before you as an immeasurable plain, and a kind of vertigo sets in, like being underwater and feeling the shelf of sand drop off darkly and without warning. I am remembering the highway that seemed to have no end, when I first started college, first drive to school in Santa Fe, and I remember thinking "How will this landscape change me"? What will I become here? Its strange, even at that young age that I understood how landscapes had serious effects on a person, and that my choice of that particular high desert one was most painstakingly made.

Inviting that much space into my life at such a malleable age has turned out to have a reverberative and long half-life, shelf-life, pantry-life. I was watching old movies last night, and some of the Civil War footage, and thought "I want lace curtains one day." You know, the kind that you see as you drive by old farmhouses, the kind you see at the onset of dark on the prairie, the ones wavering just so as you drive by and think about the concept of home. I miss this feeling. I still feel homeless in New York most of the time, and fight it.

I am trying to make myself strong, trying to not feel the alien terror of anonymous places like airports with dirty carpets, subway tunnels with sulphur smell rising from the grates, giant warehouse stores brimming with flourescent lights, constant change of place to place. I am excited for a time when I can have a house again. When I visited my sister last month, my favorite part of her house was the old 1930's wooden back porch, old screens still latched strangely, set up for summer cross-breezes and set above the backyard with a view of the neighbor's houses curving upward.

I thought that this was a place that felt like home. This is where I would have spent my entire adolescence, with a stack of Virginia Woolf books strewn across the dirty floor, notebooks of scribbled ideas, packets of seeds, bizarre almanacs and books on how to make your own herbal elixirs, homemade jam. What we agreed on, was that it felt like "home", to both of us. It had those qualities that we remembered growing up, tactile wooden smell, creaking screen doors, privacy, space to dream, access to inside/outside, free but still safe.

As a teenager I used to sneak out onto the roof aoutside my bedroom window and smoke cigarettes. My father would get furious b/c the roof itself was not in the best shape and me sending the entire front porch to the ground would have been kind of a bummer. But I couldn't help myself, and mostly just sat there while the cigarette dwindled away unsmoked. I was looking at the huge elm and maple trees outside, moving silently overhead. I was thinking about something C.S. Lewis had written, on learning of his wife's terminal disease, that there was nothing more beautiful than the image of bare branches against a night sky.

I am still trying to find my right place in the world, but just recently it has dawned on me, I am ready for a Home.

bird & bowery

The Song Taught to Joseph

by Ray A. Young Bear

I was born unto this snowy-red earth
with the aura and name of the Black Lynx.
When we simply think of each other,
night begins. My twin the Heron
is on a perpetual flight northward,
familiarizing himself with the landscape
of Afterlife, but he never gets there...
because the Missouri River descends
from the Northern Plains
into the Morning Star.

One certain thing though,
he sings the song of the fish
below him in the mirror
of Milky Way.

In this confrontation,
the gills of the predator
overtake me in daylight near home;
in this confrontation,
he hinders my progress with a cloud of mud he stirs.
Crying, I ask that I not feel each painful part
he takes, at least not until I can grasp
in the darkness the entrance
of home.

Vergano 'Americano' Chinato

My goals regarding wine have to do with precision, details, buoyancy (of mind to absorb), softness, laughter, and serious resolve. I am trying to focus. I am trying to be more precise and set, more exact and less general, less poetic. I am eternally grateful to the people around me that know more about wine than I do. I am trying to raise my knowledge and communication in ways that are crystalline, that are set in facts, that are scientific.

This, however, as a day that is ending, as a day that is an END, as a quiet and reflective day full up with emotion, I give myself the gift of blurred vision, edge-vision, a full-sensory passing through my day. And I am trying to just let it pass,,,, let the day pass,, let the day end. I am wading through the difficulties of what Rilke called Evensong, the hinge between day and night, the rising panic like smoke from the plains, the liminal moment that opens to dark.

I am trying to be quiet and arid, to remember the edge of desert towns where I have lived, and let myself become free.

I am sitting in an almost empty apartment, it is getting dark outside, and I am waiting for two last hours before I can leave, and go to my next home.

I have never felt more homeless in my life. In the midst of this, and the silence, the refrigerator hum, the lowering dusk, the panic around the edge of my day, I am deeply comforted.

I didn't realize that when I finally opened the Vergano 'Americano' Chinato (grignolino, import Louis/Dressner) it would taste like Home. I didn't really know what to expect, but I was not prepared for the rising of old scrim slideshow scenes, for the loud whirr of my grandfather's slide projector, the plastic smell of the slides and the rising dust in projector light. I was not prepared for old Christmas shades, yellow from the opened oven, yellow from the candles on the table, steam from brewed coffee, smudged smoke, laughter.

Nose: Cold mandarin orange, powdered red sugar/spice, orange peel.
Palate: Light syrup morello cherry, clean orange, white plum, orange blossom, cold oil, cinnamon bark, nutmeg, star anise, and whiff of something darker, ground bark, sandlewood.

There could not have been a better day to open this phenomenal chinato. It has the subtlety of projected color-light, it is quieter and more complex than I could have imagined. It is these few quiet and cold days of January, marking the death of someone I loved dearly. It is not the loud brash brass of Christmas Day, it is the after-image, the faded photo in the sun, it is liquid emulsion lifting quietly into air.

Thank you to my friend who gave it to me, and thank you other invisible shades surrounding. Here is to precious things, to discarded things, to dust in the wind, to pollen, to herbs drying on racks, to wind through sieves, images on the backs of our retinas that still burn.