onehouse

Christmas Lights: Day 12

I sent this out to my family last year as the ghost of my Christmas past. Enjoy!

Christmas Lights: Day 10

Can I call this one a little "light" humor and push the theme for this year? This just made me laugh but I'm a sucker for a good comedy of errors. About 21 minutes. 'Tis the season to not take yourself to seriously. I guess that would be every season.

Merry Christmas Mrs Moskowitz.

Christmas Lights: Day 9

Old frogs and cosmic dances for solstice:

Winter solitude--
in a world of one color
the sound of wind.

- Basho

When we are alone on a starlit night, when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat; when we see children in a moment when they are really children, when we know love in our own hearts; or when, like the Japanese poet, Basho, we hear an old frog land in a quiet pond with a solitary splash--at such times the awakening, the turning inside out of all values, the "newness", the emptiness and the purity of vision that make themselves evident, all these provide a glimpse of the cosmic dance.

--Thomas Merton

Christmas Lights: Day 8

Because Oliver Jeffers makes me smile.

                    From How To Catch a Star.

Christmas Lights: Day 7

Let there be light.

Friends of mine are in Paris this week and they visited one of my favorite buildings, Sainte Chapelle.

It's hard to know why certain places remain with us while others fade away. Christopher Alexander's The Timeless Way of Building speaks of a pattern language - a type of seeing, living, and building that appeals to the deepest parts of our humanity. Pattern language "has at its core that age-old process by which the people of a society have always pulled the order of their world from their own being." (inside book flap)

There are certain sacred buildings that I appreciate aesthetically and historically - Brunelleschi's dome, the Sistine Chapel, Saint Paul's  - that do not have much of an imprint on my soul. I remember them as artistically impressive but only mildly interesting, a "I was there" postcard sent by my memory.

Sainte Chapelle could have impressed me in the same way. It was built by Louis IX in only a few years having a lot to do with equating France with some kind of New Jerusalem during the fading crusades.Of course, this involved procuring and housing relics. Relics are interesting things. I once read an essay about dueling monasteries who would steal relics back and forth over several decades as a good relic could procure a financially beneficial parade of pilgrims. 

So Sainte Chapelle's impact as a place built for the glory of God or some such thing is only so much noise, mixed up in monarchies and associated religious propaganda as much as any sad little inauguration prayer or religious influence peddling is today. 

Many tourists also give Sainte Chapelle the once over. There are no elaborate grounds, they say. There is too much security and it is too cold and quiet. I liked such and such better. It reminds me of being at the small holocaust memorial on the tip of Ile de la Cite just behind Notre Dame. As my friend and I contemplated the significance of the space, two women rushed in with their thumbs jammed inside their tour books. They took a quick look around, shrugged their shoulders and moved their thumbs to yet another place in their holy book. There was no there anywhere for them except in checking off another attraction. There was no waiting for what the space might bring.

For me and many others, Sainte Chapelle is all about the light. The lower entry way consists of a small chapel impressive in its own right with its sharp blue ceiling and fleur-de-lis columns in red and blue. A narrow stone staircase leads to the upper chapel - a u-shaped space with thin pillars of stone holding what seems like an endless field of woven stained glass. I know that all the panels tell different bible stories but I've never been interested in what parts of the windows correspond to which narrative. I want to spend my time inside this incredible kaleidoscope and watch the light filter in and out changing in hue - deep rose with hints of blue, sometimes sparkling, sometimes holding steady as the sky changes outside. Looking straight above, another blue ceiling with painted gold stars mimic some kind of perfect night. I am now the relic - possibly holy, more probably false - housed by this expanse of light. I am both mysteriously ordered and comfortably lost amidst ancient glass and painted stars.

My favorite photo of Sainte Chapelle.

And a great panorama.

Christmas Lights: Day 6

The sound of stars:

A small clip of fiddler/composer Oliver Schroer playing along the Camino de Santiago in this composition called Field of Stars. Schroer died of leukemia in July of this year. His last words were "Well, I guess no excursions today." Maybe he found himself amidst his own field of stars hearing his very own "Fear not."

Christmas Lights: Day 5

Our first heavy snow came a week ago. After hosting dinner for a friend's family, I took a midnight walk around the block to have a look at our newly painted neighborhood. The clouds were hanging low and the light from the streetlights bounced from snow covered ground to cloud and back again. I didn't have time to adjust the camera and everything from that one block walk came out eerily lit, orange and blurry. I kind of liked it though. This is how I saw it between the snowflakes on my glasses and the fog from my own breathing rising in front of my face.

Larger in all it's blurry glory here.


Christmas in Songs: Day 5
Christmas in Kids' Books 2006 Day 5
Christmas in Pictures 2005: Day 5

Christmas Lights: Day 4

Reposting Counting Stars from last year as I think of those calls from my uncle each advent season.

Christmas Lights: Day 3

Pond Inlet facing Eclipse Sound and the mountains of Byot Island.
Once called Tununiq, place that faces away from the sun.

Repost (2004)

I have a friend who is doing some northern nursing in Pond Inlet on Baffin Island. For the last several weeks, they have been coming out of their twenty-four hours of dark. I get the light report from week to week. "The sky is navy now, not black." "There's a bit of lighter blue around the mountains." "I saw a faint band of pink today." And finally, this week, "I saw the sun! It came up and went down but I saw it!"

When I lived in France, the French would quote me a proverb as I struggled with my language skills, "Petit a petit, l'oiseau fait son nid." "Little by little, the bird builds its nest."

Little by little...

I think over again my small adventures
my fears
those small ones that seemed so big

For all the vital things
I had to get and to reach

And yet there is only one great thing
the only thing

To live to see the great day that dawns
and the light that fills the world.

- Old Inuit Song

Journeys of simplicity, Traveling Light with Thomas Merton, Basho, Edward Abbey, Annie Dillard & Others, Philip Harnden

Christmas in Songs: Day 3
Christmas in Kids' Books 2006 Day 3
Christmas in Pictures 2005: Day 3

Christmas Lights: Day 2

One of my favorite layouts from an old version of Beyond:

"A long time ago, when I was a very small child visiting my grandmother at her cottage on the beach, something happened after which nothing else could ever quite be the same. It must have been a glorious night for someone to have said, "Let's wake the baby and show her the stars."

My grandmother came into the room, untucked the mosquito netting, picked me up, and carried me out onto the beach. That was my first awareness of night, and my first vision of stars and of the Milky Way, trailing clouds of glory across the sky. And my first intuitive flash of knowledge that there is far more to everything than the dailiness of the everyday world. That first sight of the heavens stretched across the ocean and brilliant with stars was, although I was no way nearly old enough to call it that, my first numinous experience. And I will never look at the stars and yawn.

Adults may be weary with indifference, with noninvolvement, but no child is indifferent. Awareness of life and of the world around us is acute when we are children and, if we are blessed, will remain acute all our lives. Let us never stop asking questions, of ourselves, of each other, of God.

When I was a solitary child growing up in New York City, I was, like all children, full of questions. And I found early, as soon as I could read easily by myself, that the best answers to my questions came not directly but through the stories I read. It was in story that I found hints of the meaning I sought: not fact, but meaning. Like everybody else moving out of very early childhood, I wanted to know what it's all about. Why are we born? Does my life make any difference? Does it matter? Does anybody care? Old, old questions. They've been around through the rise and fall of civilizations. But we have to ask for ourselves.

Why do human beings make war? was another of my most anguished questions. Why was my father (who was mustard-gassed in that war to end war) slowly and agonizingly coughing his lungs out? Why are nations still lining up against nations, and often in the name of religion?

Why did my heart ache with beauty when I saw a little sliver of a new moon above the building on the far side of the courtyard, as I stood looking out my bedroom window? Who were they, the young man and woman on the roof of the apartment building on my left? They were holding each other tightly and kissing as though afraid of being torn apart. What was their story? Whose voices were those I heard, laughing uproariously with the joy of being? Whose sobbing was it that I heard, coming from somewhere else in the echoing courtyard? What was this incredible business of life all about?"

Trailing Clouds of Glory: Spiritual Values in Children's Literature
by Madeleine L'Engle (Author), Avery Brooke (Author)

Christmas in Songs: Day 2
Christmas in Pictures: Day 2
Christmas in Kids' Books: Day 2