It is still raining. There is a poem I keep trying to find that I read years ago that starts something like:
The rain has washed the sky away and the clouds away and all the birds away
But the trees stand. The trees stand…
Only, there aren’t many trees here. A few olives, two noble firs encased in the marble of the main plateia.
It is melancholy. I promised myself afternoons in the sun and lots of work and instead there has been my first illness in a year, and days and days and now weeks of grey, and I’m not taking a hundred classes like I always did before because I wanted to focus on singing, so I find myself unoccupied and angst-ridden.
It’s gloomy to read about, I know, and it feels dangerously decadent, succumbing to all this grey. That’s how it always is, when you have the least to be depressed about, you find yourself listening to Nirvana and the Cure and glowering at the incessant barking dog next door and sleeping in until noon everyday because with all the rain there’s not a compelling enough reason to get up early and get moving.
That’s the key, though. The fact that feeling this low doesn’t feel like a permanent state, but a luxury – like, I have the gift to grumble and shake my fist at the sky and “bemoan my outcast state” for a week or two because I don’t have anyone to take care of but myself and so I can wallow a little bit, get it out of my system.
And I am working, slowly but surely. Writing a little, reading a lot, singing. I made an etching this week, a totally throwaway image but great practice to learn the process.
I came back to Paros for three reasons. I wanted to “get back to the work” – to get all the postponement and sorrow of the last year out of myself to clear the way for me to create again. I wanted Josh and I to get a break together, a little honeymoon to get all the separation and sorrow of the last year forced into the past and give us a chance to relax together. And I wanted to get away from the house in Crestline so that we could return to it fresh, ready to make it into our home.
The work is coming slowly. And Josh and I have had a lot of time to talk and enjoy each other’s company, but it still feels like we haven’t gotten a chance to relax. I hope that comes soon. And lastly, progress is apace on the Crestline house thanks to Karl and Jenn and our friends and family so I know we will have a wonderful home to return to. So Josh and I are looking outward a bit, out of this wet rainy bit of marble floating on the sea to other parts of Europe, planning little weekend trips and giving ourselves a chance to explore together. It is all good. It is all luxury. The sun will come back soon.
V
a wind has blown the rain away and blown
the sky away and all the leaves away,
and the trees stand. I think i too have known
autumn too long
(and what have you to say,
wind wind wind – did you love somebody
and have you the petal of somewhere in your heart
pinched from dumb summer?
O crazy daddy
of death dance cruelly for us and start
the last leaf whirling in the final brain
of air!) Let us as we have seen see
doom’s integration………a wind has blown the rain
away and the leaves and the sky and the
trees stand:
the trees stand. The trees,
suddenly wait against the moon’s face.
e.e. cummings
Chimneys, from Sonnets – Unrealities