“How mysterious this life was, how deep and muddy its waters ran, yet how clear and noble what emerged from them.” ~ Herman Hesse, from Narcissus and Goldmund

Antennae Galaxies (NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team)*

                   

“The things that existed were so immense and so desolate. She continued to be conscious of these vast masses of substance for a long stretch of time, the clock still ticking in the midst of the universal silence.” ~ Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out

Friday afternoon. Beautiful blue skies and cool. Autumn temperatures.

Pain scale: Head 6, back 8.

So I had my first migraine since the Botox shots, and I have to say that if this is the results, then it’s well worth having someone stick a needle in my face. I took a Relpax when it hit, and within a few hours, I was already feeling better. About six hours later, I was a bit weak, but no more migraine. It’s been so long since once onset med did the trick that I just didn’t even know how to react.

Tadpole Galaxy (Arp188): Tidal Tail (NASA)

The headache I’m currently dealing with isn’t a migraine, more of a stress/sinus combo, so I’m trying to take just ibuprofen for these types to see if that will do the trick. It would be wonderful to be able to give up at least one pain medication. Just have to wait and see.

As for the back pain, well, nothing new there. Omnipresent, just manageable on some days, and then on days such as today, almost debilitating, as in turning over in bed is painful. As in trying to do one of those wake-up body stretches, arms above the head kind of thing is impossible. Consequently, I was unable do drive the kids to school this morning, and Corey had to do it. I know that sometimes he thinks that I just don’t want to get out of bed, but as I had been awake since 7, that wasn’t the case this morning.

I dreamed of candles within rocks, natural candles formed by pouring the wax into the hollows of rocks, and a quilt. I was making a quilt for my mother, and somehow I knew how to do this even though I do not sew, and I was looking for the perfect centerpiece for the quilt, something with eyelets, but the fabric store was closing. And somehow I had to include grosgrain ribbon on the quilt. It was an assignment for some class, and I wasn’t in the least disturbed by the incongruity of it all.

“In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.” ~ Cormac McCarthy

I have realized why some parts of Europe like Ireland and Wales seem to call to me: It is the commingling of the ancient with the now, being able to live in a country that is thousands of years old, that has structures that have weathered centuries, sometimes millenia, to live near these, to feel the history even as life progresses ever onwards into the future. That is what I want because that is what I feel inside—that I am a mix of the old and the new, the ancient and the present. I have always felt that I was this way. I have no explanation for it.

Messier Galaxy (M81) Hubble and Spitzer Composite Image (NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESA Harvard-Smithsonian)

Corey and I watched Valhalla Rising, a movie with little dialogue and a lot of mist. I alit on this movie in the middle of the night mostly because it starred Mads Mikkelsen, who played Tristram in King Arthur, which is enough for me but not quite enough for this movie. It is set at some point in the Dark Ages of Europe, and the plot, what little plot there was, involves a warrior who had been held captive but gains his freedom only to go on a journey into a hellish unknown. I only mention this for two reasons: Don’t watch it unless you need a soporific; conversely, watch if you are interested in a lot of landscape.

The weather is harsh, the mountains forbidding, and the conditions, unforgiving. But I still found something hauntingly beautiful about the landscape, the wide open unpopulated spaces. The movie is not an action film, but I think that it’s supposed to be some kind of extended metaphor for about what awaits us in the unknown.

The movie’s title references Norse mythology, Valhalla being that great hall for the chosen dead. Odin, who rules Valhalla, chooses those warriors who will come to him after death. And perhaps the visions that One-eye (Mikkelsen’s character) has reference the Medieval literature, most of which includes visions of Valhalla, blood, and battle. Or perhaps I’m overthinking, which I have been known to do.

“Beauty consists of its own passing, just as we reach for it. It’s the ephemeral configuration of things in the moment, when you see both their beauty and their death . . . Does this mean that this is how we must live our lives? Constantly poised between beauty and death, between movement and its disappearance? Maybe that’s what being alive is all about: so we can track down those moments that are dying.” ~ Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog (tran. A. Anderson)

So today is 11/11/11. I’ve never paid much attention to these significant dates. I mean, I didn’t notice when it was 10/10/10 or 9/9/9, etc. But something about the 11 sequence is intriguing. Eleven has always been one of those numbers for me, like 3 and 7. Prime numbers. I don’t mean to imply that I’m deeply into numerology or anything like that, but there is a certain elegance in numbers, one that has always eluded my right-brained thinking.

Rose of Galaxies (Arp273) (NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team)

I’ve never had a deep affinity for math, except for geometry, which I love to this day, but the idea of trying to determine the next number in the sequence of pi does not fascinate me; just as I’m certain that people interested in calculating pi are not necessarily interested in words in the same way that I am. Nevertheless, I respect numbers, am intrigued by sequences, find the complexity of it all rather mysterious.

Take the Fibonacci sequence (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, etc.), which intrigued me before Dan Brown employed it. I wrote a post about the Golden Mean a couple of years ago. What I find most fascinating about the Fibonacci sequence is its appearance in nature: the perfect blending of science and art, the means and the method. Am I rambling? Probably.

I suppose it boils down to this: The mysterious, the truly mysterious has an explanation on one level, but remains mysterious on the other level. Consider the sunflower . . . Fibonacci. An aloe plant . . . Fibonacci. An artichoke . . . Fibonacci. Larger? Spiral galaxies.

Yes, the mind is zooming today, from one thing to another, no apparent connections. The only link is the mystery.

“Suddenly I began to find a strange meaning in old fairy-tales. Woods, rivers, mountains, became living beings. Mysterious life filled the night. With new interests and new expectations I began to dream again of distant travels” ~ P. D. Ouspensky

Actually, these things of which I am speaking are not so unrelated. Consider, I made the mistake of assigning Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to a class of freshmen. Ah, the follies of youth. I was a graduate student at Virginia Tech at the time. Now, of course, I realize that very few 18-year-olds know anything of the darkness that can lie at the heart, know little to nothing of the journeys we make into the unknown with little to guide us besides some vague idea of a mission.

Messier Galaxy (M101) Composite Hubble Image (NASA and ESA)

Consider the artichoke heart: My friend Mari once wrote of how her father would steal the heart of the artichokes from his daughters, saying to them that they would not like the heart, when of course, the heart is the tastiest part. When eating a fresh artichoke, something I did not do until I was 18, we peel away the leaves, each one subsequently smaller than the previous, and we arrive at this heart, covered with a protective layer of fibers.

To get to the heart, we reveal a natural Fibonacci sequence, but how many of us are aware of that? And then the heart, it is covered, and if this is our first time, we know nothing of its substance, so we can be convinced that we won’t like it.

And One-eye, knowing nothing of the journey he makes with the Christian Vikings, arrives in a New World that is completely foreign to him, and at the heart of his journey is only more darkness. And Marlow, who journeys into the unknown of Africa, finds at the end a darkness that is almost unfathomable.

“Ishmael gave himself to the writing of it, and as he did so he understood this, too: that accident ruled every corner of the universe except the chambers of the human heart.” ~ David Guterson, Snow Falling on Cedars

Coiled Galaxy (NGC 1097) Spitzer (NASA JPL-Caltech)

We all make our own journeys near and far, figuratively and literally, and some of us arrive at something that is unknown yet sweet and delectable nonetheless, and some of us arrive only to find that we have not found that for which we thought we were searching, that we have found instead something quite different, something dark and forbidding.

And then some of us, never make the journey at all, remaining stagnant at the first 1 of the sequence, unable to build upon what came before, either from fear or ignorance, or a combination of both, and because of this, we are never able to finish the quilts that represent out lives even though we thought that we knew how.

Our personal histories guide us, but they do not necessarily define us. The smoke from the bridges that we have burned can leave us with the most bitter of tastes. But fire also cleanses and renews. And I am reminded of my favorite line from Michael Ondaatje: “The heart is an organ of fire.”

More later. Peace.

*All images are from the NASA Galleries found here.

Music by Brooke Waggoner (just discovered her), “Come Love, See My Hands”

                   

Usk

So we’ve moved out of the years.
I am finally back upstream
and, but for their holiday grins
on every bookcase, the boys
were never born, it was a dream.
Here is where my past begins

in a garret beside a bridge,
woken by birds pecking moss
from the dark. The river’s clear.
It will not turn to sludge
till it reaches you and the mess
of streets I hated, endured

only because you were there.
My windows are full of leaves.
There are mountains in my skylight.
Perhaps you would like it here.
It is the same river—it moves,
perhaps, towards the same light.

 ~ Paul Henry

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“. . . Accident ruled every corner of the universe except the chambers of the human heart.” ~ Snow Falling on Cedars movie

  

Cardinal in the Snow, New Hampshire

“The snowfall, which he witnessed out of the corners of his eye . . . struck him as infinitely beautiful.” ~ David Guterson, Snow Falling on Cedars

Bare Limbs on Snow by L. Liwag

Well, I was wrong. Put one down for the record books. Apparently the meteorologists called this one accurately: Hampton Roads got snow—a lot of snow. And it’s still coming down. Actually, at the moment, ice is coming down, but another band of snow is right behind the ice.  

We haven’t had snow like this for many years, and just think, it’s even more snow than what we saw in Ohio in December, but not more snow than we saw on that fateful trip to Ohio in the December blizzard.  

I hear a few brave souls outside, and earlier, before the ice, a few of the younger neighborhood kids were rollicking, but funnily enough, Tillie, the Lab, wouldn’t set foot outside until Brett bundled himself in layers and went outside with her. A couple of times, she stuck her snout outside the door, and then brought it back in and looked at me balefully as if to say, “you’re kidding, right?” The only dog brave enough to go outside by himself initially was Alfie, the smallest Jack Russell, who promptly sank and became covered in snow up to his flanks. The fat one went out a few steps and then turned around and came back inside. Now that Tillie has braved the unknown, she wants to go back out, but no one is up for playing in the ice.  

“The heart of any other, because it had a will, would remain forever mysterious.” ~ David Guterson, Snow Falling on Cedars

Fosso Innevato (Snowy Ditch), Italy

Another benefit of the snow is that I slept, really slept. That wonderful muffling effect that a heavy snowfall has on all ambient noise must have allowed my body to achieve a state of complete restfulness, because I got a great night’s sleep, even though I didn’t fall asleep until about 4:45 a.m. My body feels cold but not tired.  

Corey is about to build a fire in the fireplace so that we can contribute to the Greenhouse Effect. Unfortunately, it’s that or walk around the house in coats because it’s damned cold in here, but at least we haven’t lost electricity as so many others affected by the storm have. So we take the bad with the good, but hey, I slept . . .  

I’ve had a few new readers stop by and leave comments, which is always nice. Just wanted to take a minute to express my thanks as comments let me know that someone is reading.  

Last night, I dreamt of hats, straw hats, straw hats with big brims specifically. I was trying them on in some kind of rest stop store, kind of like the old Stuckey’s restaurants that used to dot the highways. I also dreamt of bow ties, Jack Nicholson as a military officer, and learning that Corey had spoken to his commanding officer in French.  

Strange, most strange. In another part of the dream, I was speaking to a woman who was putting together the program for the Opera House, and I was giving her printing tips. I told her that I used to do this kind of thing for the Museum. Also most strange. I don’t discern any great meaning behind these snippets, just found them interesting.  

“When they looked out into the whiteness of the world the wind flung it sharply at their narrowed eyes and foreshortened their view of everything.” ~ David Guterson, Snow Falling on Cedars

Kiosque du Jardin de Ville (Kiosk in City Garden), France

I plan to spend the rest of the day wrapped up in a blanket, reading a book. It’s the perfect day for it.  

Since I began this post, the wind has begun to blow quite hard outside, making the wind chimes clang repeatedly. It’s kind of haunting, actually: just the wind and the chimes. No sounds of traffic, people, dogs. Nothing. I guess everyone who was feeling adventurous has had enough of the snow and ice and gone inside. That and the fact that it is darkening rather quickly may be the reason for the seeming silence.  

When I saw the snow in the middle of the night, I began to think of songs that would be appropriate. Oddly enough, Samuel Barber’s “Adagio in G” popped into my head, but it’s such a solemn song that I don’t want to use it with today’s post. I think that I thought of that particular song because of a movie that I saw years ago starring a younger Ethan Hawke. Barber’s Adagio was featured in the movie previews, but not in the movie itself.  

The film, A Midnight Clear, was the story about two WWII units stranded in a snowstorm, one American and one German. The units reach an unspoken truce, but ultimately, the film ends tragically. I don’t think that the movie was very popular, but I remember seeing it with my friend Mari during one of our regular weekend movie outings.  

If I remember correctly, Hawke also starred in Snow Falling on Cedars, a weak adaptation of David Guterson’s beautiful novel of the same. I really don’t remember that much about the movie, but I vividly remember the cover of the book, which was a black and white picture of fog draping the cliffs surrounding Puget Sound. Odd how memory serves us.  

The book was beautiful, almost lyrical, in its portrayal of the complexities of the human heart, love, betrayal, and truth. The movie was beautiful in its cinematography, but hard-placed to convey the depth of the novel’s characters. However, with few exceptions, Peter Jackson’s adaptation of Lord of the Rings being a prime example, that is almost always what happens when adapting a book to a movie.  

Today’s post feature photographs of snowy images from different places: Italy, France, New Hampshire, and Ohio.  

More later. Peace.  

Annie Lennox’s version of “Whiter Shade of Pale” seemed like a good fit.