From the magical way she describes the visual alchemy of the blooming periods of goldenrod and asters, to the pin-point accuracy of her scientific acumen, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been seducing readers with her wonderful work ‘Braiding Sweetgrass’. Weaving her scientific work as a botanist and professor with her background as a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, Kimmerer reveals the importance of people and plants working in tandem, and how a generosity of spirit and living is essential to our healthy survival. In beautiful fashion, she tells stories that aim to marvel in their gorgeous and moving way of intertwining science and a love of the earth. She earns this Dazzler of the Day for positing the revolutionary idea that how we treat the earth, and how we treat each other, will directly affect how we survive in the future.
“Action on behalf of life transforms. Because the relationship between self and the world is reciprocal, it is not a question of first getting enlightened or saved and then acting. As we work to heal the earth, the earth heals us.” ~ Robin Wall Kimmerer
Robin Wall Kimmerer’s richly-resonant book ‘Braiding Sweetgrass’ is a wonderful way to wind up this winter season, and I’m taking my time getting through it so as to extend its wonderful spell. Kimmerer writes stories that weave Indigenous wisdom with scientific theory, held together by her love for this earth and our place in it. Her writing is compassionate and healing, the very things we need more of, especially at the tail end of winter. It reminds me to be more careful and considerate of what we take, how we take it, and what we give back – in deeds, in love, in thoughts and in action.
“We are showered every day with gifts, but they are not meant for us to keep. Their life is in their movement, the inhale and the exhale of our shared breath. Our work and our joy is to pass along the gift and to trust that what we put out into the universe will always come back.” ~ Robin Wall Kimmerer
The tea kettle whistles from the kitchen, beckoning me to deeper warmth. Pouring the steaming water into a tea cup, I embrace the ritual, finding solace in the customary motion. The body and the mind lead one another – when the mind is stubborn and unwilling, putting the body into motion sparks the familiar sensations, and the mind follows. Alternately, when the body is not up to the motion, the mind may lead, and the desire for those same sensations sparks the movement. Taken together, the happy denouement of a warm cup of tea in hand staves off the coldness of another winter night.
“I never approve, or disapprove, of anything now. It is an absurd attitude to take towards life. We are not sent into the world to air our moral prejudices. I never take any notice of what common people say, and I never interfere with what charming people do. If a personality fascinates me, whatever mode of expression that personality selects is absolutely delightful to me.” ~ Oscar Wilde
The water in the crystal vase long ago dried up, but the roses largely held their form, still recognizable as roses, and from a distance still giving off the approximate form of their lush beginning. The rich rosy resonance has dissipated, any scent that remains is tied to decay and desiccation – a not-quite-fragrant embodiment of the word ‘faded’, the way you expect an antique to smell – dusty and ancient and dry.
Memories fade in a similar way, regardless of how many times we go over them in our heads, trying as we might to hold onto every detail of events and people that matter to us. In the end, all we have are hollow approximations of what came before, and they grow more hollow and empty with each passing hour.
“I knew nothing but shadows and I thought them to be real.” ~ Oscar Wilde
Youth fades too, and the plump full faces and skin cells of our younger years become gaunt and tired and saggy. Hair grows brittle and gray, as if being drained of life, and our senses grow dull and weak. It’s been a process that I haven’t been as bothered by as some had predicted, myself most of all. Perhaps that’s why it doesn’t seem as scary as I thought it would be. I was preparing for worse, and maybe that’s still to come. No one is spared the indignity of age if we are lucky enough to achieve it.
“But we never get back our youth… The pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty becomes sluggish. Our limbs fail, our senses rot. We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the courage to yield to.” ~ Oscar Wilde
And so we attempt to still time, to create something that lasts, a way to enshrine our memories, a method of preserving what has happened with the keen eye of what is current. This blog has come to embody the stilling of time in a certain sense, the way it freezes a moment, a memory, a photograph. These are the many pictures of Dorian Gray but in reverse – they stay the same while the rest of us grow old and whither away. It’s the way life should be, no matter how much we may rail against it.
“There is no such thing as a good influence. Because to influence a person is to give him one’s own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtures are not real to him. His sins, if there are such thing as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone else’s music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him.” ~ Oscar Wilde
In a high scratchy collar decidedly not made of silk lace, in ropes of pearls around neck and wrist, I bind myself to another past, to another world, to another life. Tethered by trinkets and all that is trite, I have tied myself to an image entirely of my own making, and even if I have devised it to be shape-shifting and morphing and boundlessly expansive, it remains limited by my own failure of imagination. It is a trap, laid carefully by desire and fantasy, made pretty and frivolous and silly so as to mask its terrifying necessity, and the only way out is to become someone else.
If you’ve been yourself for as long as I’ve been myself, you’d be tired too.
“It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style. They affect us just as vulgarity affects us. They give us an impression of sheer brute force, and we revolt against that. Sometimes, however, a tragedy that possesses artistic elements of beauty crosses our lives. If these elements of beauty are real, the whole thing simply appeals to our sense of dramatic effect. Suddenly we find that we are no longer the actors, but the spectators of the play. Or rather we are both. We watch ourselves, and the mere wonder of the spectacle enthralls us.” ~ Oscar Wilde
The first whispers of wisdom, when we finally start to listen to them, are naturally upsetting. There is no way to face the reality of this life without feeling sadness, a sense of fatality, and futility. The second whispers of wisdom, if we haven’t given up listening, are the ones we hear when we realize that we are not the end of the world, that the wonder and the horror and the glorious muck we have made of things will not end with us. That comes with its own menace and regret, but wisdom’s work is not quite done. It will follow us around until we are finally ready to listen again – and if we are still alive, and still listening, the whispers reveal the wisdom of those at peace, who have reached a certain stage of grace and happiness and contentment. The beginning of enlightenment, perhaps, if you believe in that sort of thing.
Sadly, I’m nowhere near that last bit of wisdom, however I am starting to listen again. The music is faint, but I know it’s there. Maybe it’s a song for another time, and another blog post. Maybe it’s a song you don’t want to hear. Maybe it’s a song I’m not quite ready to hear. And so I leave it here, for however long this fading corner of the internet remains in place. When we are ready for it, and I hope we will both be ready one day, may we find our way back.
Truth be told, Angela Bassett has been doing the thing for years. She easily earns this Dazzler of the Day thanks to another year of winning performances on screen, including her award-winning turn in ‘Black Panther: Wakanda Forever’. From her star-making role in ‘What’s Love Got To Do With It’ through spellbinding work in ‘Waiting to Exhale’, ‘How Stella Got Her Groove Back’, and dozens of other movie and television roles, she has amassed too many award nominations and wins to name, and she remains at the top of her game.
“You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit.” ~ Oscar Wilde
Courage and sin sometimes go hand in hand. Unlikely bedfellows, their dance is often as incendiary as their uncoupling. When two things that don’t seem to go together find union, the results are unexpected and jolting. It presents something new to the world. New things, at this late stage of life (and it is definitely starting to feel like the end times) are strange and wondrous and welcome. We each seek the thrill of a new experience, no matter how old we get.
“I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvelous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if only one hides it.” ~ Oscar Wilde
A ring and an earring dance on a saucer below the shade of a tea cup. Delicate steps of gold and pearl leave dainty taps against a landscape of porcelain, while shimmering light shards of diamonds cut across the curve of a cup. What simple magic there is to be found at the bottom of a tea cup… and beneath it.
“Knowledge would be fatal. It is the uncertainty that charms one. A mist makes things wonderful.” ~ Oscar Wilde
We say we want to know everything, we say we want to learn, but we don’t really mean it. How much peace comes from understanding? Solving a mystery rarely brings the complete satisfaction for which we supposedly strive, and the mysteries that remain in life are the only things that carry much interest. When you discover the secret of the magic trick, the magic is instantly erased. I wonder why we want so badly to excise all the magic from the world.
“In the wild struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures, and so we fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly hope of keeping our place.” ~ Oscar Wilde
A smoky candle burns beside a dried rose. A string of pearls winds its way around a silk scarf, an exquisite study of spheres, serpentine like the tendrils of some gorgeous perfume trail. Flecked with gold, the tea cup refuses to spill its secrets. When confronted with certain moments of beauty I don’t know whether to flee or cry. Beauty makes the heart hurt.
“Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.” ~ Oscar Wilde
Muted are the sights and sounds of winter. March may bring storms and wind and other such fury from time to time, the proverbial lion making its dramatic entrance and roaring its arrival, but there are still a few weeks of winter left, weeks that may likely be gray and drab and colorless. There is beauty here too, though, something I’ve only recently discovered in trying to making peace with winter. The beauty of winter, for me, is in these quiet scenes – before or after a snowstorm, when the world is bracing itself for something, or creaking a sigh of relief beneath a pretty snowfall. There’s a hush that happens unlike the quiet of any other time of the year, buffered by the snow cover and aided by the hibernation or migration of noisier summer residents.
If you look closely here, you can see the buds of the Chinese dogwood. I’m hoping the worst of the cold temperatures are over, as a spell of sub-freeing temps may mean disaster for this spring’s crop of flowers. That’s always the risk at this time of the year, and after all this time I should have learned not to worry about that over which I have no control. The buds aren’t concerned, so why should I be?
I’ve known Elizabeth Brown-Shook since were were both in a summer Bible school, and after sharing that kind of trauma one can’t help but bond with someone. She accompanied me on many a ride to and from Empire State Youth Orchestra and Choir rehearsals, and I still remember her singing back-up to ‘The Immaculate Collection‘ back when Madonna dominated my airwaves. During high school, she was an indefatigable defender of positivity and school spirit, which was directly at odds with my persnickety and stubborn defiance of both, and she’s carried the same smile with her through adulthood. She’s seen more than her fair share of tragedy and hardship, so whenever I find myself complaining about some ridiculous thing, I think of her and her grace and perseverance, and am instantly reminded to return to a position of gratitude and thankfulness. For those reasons alone, she is crowned Dazzler of the Day – and for a whole lot more of how she dazzles, check out her linktree here for more of her eclectic endeavors.
There were works that came before and after which came close to perfection – ‘Confessions on a Dancefloor‘, ‘Erotica‘, and ‘Like A Prayer‘ are all solid entries in the Madonna canon – but ROL was a masterpiece form start to finish. Even her best albums have at least one clunker, while ROL has none. And so we hit play on the wondrously-whirling title track, which exuberantly reminds of all those moments when we feel like we just got home:
The ‘Ray of Light’ album taught me many things, and continues to do so. First and foremost was the idea of being present and living in the moment. For far too much of my life I’ve focused on planning and plotting and what was going to happen next. That makes for a well-organized existence, but zaps a lot of spontaneous enjoyment and fun out of each day, even if it was designed and planned to be enjoyable and fun. Some things in life cannot be planned, and if you’re a Virgo that’s always a little disappointing. Learning to appreciate the present moment was a key stepping stone on my road to becoming a little happier. The totality of the ROL album helped me to see that.
Twenty-five years have passed since this Madonna moment played out, and the work has stood the test of time. Its themes are universal and its lessons are continuously resonant. For all of its racing tracks, there is a Zen-like calm to its trajectory that makes ‘Ray of Light’ more like a musical meditation than a mere collection of songs. That journey is a trip worth making again and again.
He first came to unassuming light with his understated but anchoring performance in ‘The History Boys’, and since then Russell Tovey has been turning in one surprising performance after another, in work that varies from ‘Looking’ to ‘American Horror Story: NYC’. He and his body have been featured here previously in this gratuitous post, but this marks his first crowning as Dazzler of the Day.
At the heart of every artist is the drive and desire to create and to connect. Different artists do it in different media, and those who cross the boundaries to understand how different types of art bleed into each other have a wisdom that leads to work that can be richly resonant. Karel Barnoski’s latest effort, ‘Surrounded By Light’ is a prime example of an artist who focuses on a single instrument – in this case the piano – which somehow becomes a vessel for mapping out a tapestry of emotion.
Beginning with the bright, hopeful ‘Rise’, a little preamble to the proceedings, ‘Surrounded By Light’ locates Barnoski where he feels most alive: painting with the piano, coloring with the chords, and shading with the surety of his nimble fingers across the keys. The title track eases things into contemplative motion, slowing and distilling the proceedings to a wistful, almost bluesy territory – the place where music transforms into feelings, becoming more than the sum of the sound, and landing in a glorious mix of emotions – that precise moment before an abstract painting becomes a mess, stopping just short of that at the place of brilliance. Barnoski clips his songs at just the right ripe moment – a sign of maturity and genius in an all-too-often overwrought and overextended world.
Knowing when to pause and invoke silence is the unappreciated secret to so much of music, evidenced by ‘Grace’, where the space in-between the notes holds the exquisite tension and anticipation of promised release and elegant resolution. Another secret to great music is allowing the listener to make their own journey, leaving enough room in the songs and their titles to allow multiple readings to shade every experience differently. ‘Message’ might be a missive, a rumination, or a warning; ‘Drift’ could be a trip, a wave, a wind, or a loss.
Barnoski’s music evokes colors and light, shadows and shimmer, drawing a soundscape with strokes of sound that lift and bounce along as they do in ‘Held’ or undulate wildly and wonderfully as in ‘Sway’, each finding a way to sonically craft a world rich in texture and possibility.
When an artist so deftly creates music that merges and demands the conjuring of mental images, it creates a connection with the listener that pierces the heart in a way that a stand-alone image or song, taken on their own, can never quite achieve. ‘Surrounded By Light’ is that sort of music – it asks nothing from us other than to be heard – it is the plea and unanswered prayer of the artist – and the beauty of that, in the generosity of spirit and shared experience, is what touches me most here. It defies explanation and description – it can only be felt, as in the magical waves of ‘Mystic’ and the closing contemplative elegy of ‘Complete’.
I used to think that artists felt things differently from other people, that they somehow had access to deeper parts of the soul that the rest of us could never understand. As I listen to a song like ‘Self’ I’m no longer so certain we can separate and categorize people in such broad strokes – what I do know is that there are some works of art that speak to people in a universal way; they touch and tug at the heart because they evoke something primal at the core of being human.
These blues are not the sad and sorrowful sort, but rather the bright and hopeful tints seen in the sky on a recent winter morning. While we’ve had some snow of late, with more scheduled to come, we have arrived at March – the month in which spring comes with all its bluster and tumult. Far from being out of the woods, it’s still a good place to look ahead and focus on the coming spring and summer seasons, and that does my heart good.
As antsy as Andy and I are for the weather to soften and the sun to appear in full force, I’m taking a moment to appreciate the beauty of a winter morning. The wind has been kind enough to leave some of the snow on the pine boughs, mirroring the scattering of clouds in the sky. Considering how beauty works so wondrously makes me believe the world is more than a bunch of random acts and images. There is purpose here, and design, and meaning. It speaks to all the senses, even the metallic taste in the air signaling snow on the move.
“That’s the thing with a diary, though. In order to record your life, you sort of need to live it. Not at your desk, but beyond it. Out in the world where it’s so beautiful and complex and painful that sometimes you just need to sit down and write about it.” ~ David Sedaris
Whether you break the time down by acknowledging that I am teetering on the upper side of middle-age, or do the math that the two decades of this website have documented about half of my adult life, this website would only document about half of my existence.
In fact, that doesn’t even come close. Had I posted all of my diaries and journals since the Garfield-the-cat one I had in grade school, you still wouldn’t be able to get more than a slight glimpse into my life. Whenever I read biographies or autobiographies, I always find myself wondering about all that isn’t said – and that’s a tell on myself. The vast majority of my life is lived off-line; I come here to regroup and summarize, and to try to make sense of specific parts of it. Then I share that with the world, in as palatable a form as possible while eliciting some silver thread of entertainment. Through that process comes a sort of catharsis, a way of talking abut things not that far removed from therapy, but void of any guidance or challenging questions that therapy so helpfully provides.
“I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.” ~ Oscar Wilde
“The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it.” ~ James M. Barrie
Putting my messiness down in words here has absolutely helped me figure certain things out over the last two decades. Aside from the simple documentation of what went down on any given week, I can look back and see how various events shaped and influenced various moods, and vice versa, then better deal with similar incident in the future. Life is repetitious in many aspects – too often we get bogged down in repeating our own actions and reactions without realizing what we might change or learn from them. Seeing it here, in printed searchable format, I can analyze and become better – and isn’t that the whole point?
But even that’s going further than necessary: most of the time the act of putting it down, regardless of follow-up analysis, is enough, and I’ve been consistently surprised at this when it happens. It just came up when I was reminded of my childhood friend Jeff who ended up committing suicide in high school. That incident, and that lost friend, haunted me for years – far longer than this website has been I existence – and try as I might, I could not shake it. I never revealed that, however. I had written a lot about it, without noting how much it had affected me in the ensuing years. Last year I did just that, and in heaves of relief and regret, I put it all down in this post. Ever since that moment, the ghost has never returned, and I haven’t thought of Jeff in that way for months. Far more happily, when I do think of him, it’s not in a frightening, this-must-be-blocked-immediately-and-forcefully-because-it-hurts-too-much way. Rather when I pass his old house or our elementary school, I find the hurt has for the most part healed – never fully forgotten, but no longer the debilitating force it once was. When I formulated all of that into words, the relief was instant and tangible.
Similar catharsis came when I wrote this letter out to the first man who ever kissed me. Tom had been my first gay experience, and for all of the romantic innocence I exhibited at the time, and all the foolish first-steps of finding my gay footing, it was not the wonderful and fabulous foray into the community of which I might have been secretly dreaming. In fact, it was fraught with doubt and danger, and Tom did nothing to offer guidance or advice – in fact, he clearly and coldly told me he wanted nothing to do with educating anyone, and since he had to find his own way, he thought everyone should. It took me years to forgive myself for not standing up to such a selfish stance in that moment, and then more years to forgive myself for thinking I had to forgive myself. In the end, it was the simple writing of his name in a letter which set that ghost free. I haven’t thought of him since then, until trying to conjure this post in fact, and now it no longer hurts to recollect that time in my life.
That’s the power of a diary when done with care and intent and deliberation. It’s not enough to write the daily machinations of a day – one has to write what one fears and does not yet understand, and in the release of that comes a certain exoneration. It’s a tricky process, however, at least for me. I’ve written about many things over the years and they will continue to haunt and nag at me – only when I hit at the specific issues, and the things I’ve hidden even to myself, does the release and magic happen. Knowing what that is, and what it feels like, is what keeps me doing this.
“In the diary you find proof that in situations which today would seem unbearable, you lived, looked around and wrote down observations, that this right hand moved then as it does today, when we may be wiser because we are able to look back upon our former condition, and for that very reason have got to admit the courage of our earlier striving in which we persisted even in sheer ignorance.” ~ Frank Kafka
“Keep a diary, and someday it’ll keep you.” ~ Mae West
“If in my youth I had realized that the sustaining splendour of beauty of with which I was in love would one day flood back into my heart, there to ignite a flame that would torture me without end, how gladly would I have put out the light in my eyes.” ~ Michelangelo
Mythology is rife with imaginative portraits of humans whose quest for glory leads them to dire ends – Icarus, Narcissus and Prometheus come to mind. There are also Biblical stories where humans’ ingenuity and intelligence sparks an unexpected triumph, such as in David and Goliath. (Figures that sort of hubris would come from the Bible. Are we deities or not? Are we divine or merely human?) I’ve been happy to be merely mortal – a human with hubris, haughtiness, and hell sometimes in my heart – and I contain all the folly that every human has contained since we were created. That means I’ve had the vanity and self-deception to assume that a personal blog could become a work of art.
“If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn’t seem so wonderful at all.” ~ Michelangelo
Making a blog into a work of art is perhaps a silly notion. When I consider the great works of art that have survived the centuries, a blog is unlikely to ever be counted as one of them. To that end, I have failed miserably, and will continue to fail in that quest. Making myself into a living work of art is also a ridiculous endeavor. I will fail at that too.
Yet in the effort, I hope you will find some shred of nobility. In the trying, may you see the striving. In the attempt, may you find the hope. If Icarus never fell, how would we know we could fly? If Prometheus hadn’t dared to capture fire, how would we learn to burn? If David hadn’t stepped forward to face Goliath, how would we muster the nerve to try?
“Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it. ” ~ Michelangelo
For all of the twenty years this website has been in existence, I have striven to find myself – the man I truly was, the one beneath all of the fluster and bluster. Chipping away at our own thick stone to reveal the tender interior is not only the province of sculptors and artists, but the quest of every human being remotely interested in getting to know themselves. In certain ways, that is the purpose of life. Some may call it vanity, some may call it self-obsession, some might deride it as ego – and all of those play their necessary part – but only when we discover and know ourselves can we look into the soul of another human and possibly hope to see what is truly there.
“The promises of this world are, for the most part, vain phantoms; and to confide in one’s self, and become something of worth and value is the best and safest course.” ~ Michelangelo
Admittedly, I am no David. Nor am I Goliath, or Prometheus, or Icarus. Far too afraid for far too often to be any of those characters, and far too flawed to have achieved what they did in spite of their folly, I’m only beginning to learn to be comfortable in my own skin. Such a lesson takes longer than twenty years, and the few things I know now at 47 wouldn’t have been dreamed or designed when I was 27. That’s why I’m still doing this. There is so much more to know. The two decades encapsulated on this website are the merest wisp of my life. You think I’ve revealed everything? You haven’t seen anything. We’re just getting started.
“To know each other is the best way to understand each other. To understand each other is the only way to love each other.” ~ Michelangelo
A streak of amber would-be-warmth if the rest of the world wasn’t conspiring entirely against it.
The carcass of a seagull, desiccated and hollow, sits forlornly on the beach – a veritable embodiment of the shells our bodies are. At odds with all other memories of seagulls, and a disconcerting juxtaposition of all my memories of beaches, it somehow brings peace to us.
Brutally ruinous winter has ravaged this crux of land and sea, sending tourists to warmer climes and natives to their hearths, while we stand unbothered and alone in the wind and the sand and the flying flotsam of ice and salty water. The tip of the tongue can still taste life in the air that way – in its salty, mineral, most basic elements – clinging to the chapped lips and waiting to be devoured.
There, with the entire world and twenty years ahead of and behind me, the sea birds soar beyond the beach that still holds their missing brethren. A fleeting thought of panic rises, when it all feels useless and futile, then it falls away as the ocean laps gently, as the wind takes pause, as the sun feels like it will return after all.
In the winter of 2003, I started writing it down here.
