Mehdi Hassan

Years ago I found your voice. If Heaven  exists, your music is it's sound. Rest in peace Maestro.

A Trip to Hulda's Garden

Ugh. Not so pretty "new" interface for the bloggists Blogger.What fresh hell? Must everything be "updated"? I am having a lot of trouble with change right now and this just looks like more bad news.

Guess I should just jump in dear reader and start where I am. On a blank page.

Beautiful time of year here in old PDX. Posie published a great list of things to do when you are in Stumptown. So go check that.

Photo by moi

Made a lovely visit to the Hulda Klager Lilac Garden with my own glorious mother and my beautiful baby boy. The gardens are open every year for a couple of weeks before Mother's Day to celebrate Hulda's legacy. When I discovered that Hulda lost everything in the floods of 1948 and had to start again at age 83, I was inspired to face my own neglected garden.

10 years ago, in a fit of rage, someone I loved took an axe to my own 100 year old lilacs in the backyard. They were at least 18 feet tall and 20 feet wide-a veritable lilac perfumed forest. I suspect they were just one more thing he could be jealous about.

My dear neighbor Hazel, who was born in the house next door, told me the lilacs had bloomed that prolifically all of her long life. My house is now at least 123 years old and the lilacs were here for most of that time. I have mourned them each spring and avoided my backyard (site of the massacre) for too long.

 My mother bought a beautiful Sarah Sands lilac, hybridized by Hulda, as a gift for me. So, I'm putting on my gauntlets and heading out to do battle with a forest of blackberry and residual heartache. Wish me luck.

For Mother's Day I painted my fingers. Early in the morning, before the temperatures climbed into the very un-Portland-like high 80's, we walked over to the Cartopia food carts on Hawthorne and ate crepes in the sunshine. It was a perfect day.

I think that you are aware my dear reader of how deeply grateful I am to have been gifted the mother I have. To share two beautiful, sun-filled days with both my mother and my son in a single week was so lovely. I do hope your Mother's Day was just as sublime.

Today's highlight, in addition to planting peppermint, pineapple mint, and CHOCOLATE mint (who knew?!) was a kind comment left by one of my longtime blog-crushes Janelle from Ngorobob House: Life From the Hill. You, my dear reader Red Tara, can imagine my fan-girl excitement! She had posted to her blog this morning after a bit of a break. Reading her post made my morning, so I stopped by hers to let her know.

Since the day I gave up monkey muffins, I have relied on writers who deliver the goods for my morning indulgence ( huge latte with honey and a google reader chaser). Janelle's blog is a favorite treat.

Another eagerly anticipated blog is Tania Kindersley's, Backward in High Heels. Like me, Tanya adores horses. She recently brought her red mare home to the far north  of Scotland. I have been planning to write about her experience with a commenter who suggested that readers were bored with her new found passion for the red mare. That she was too single-minded in her posts.

I tried to leave the following comment on her post:

Tania I wish I had commented on yesterday's post. All day my mind was humming with sympathetic joy for you and the red mare and the pony and the pigeon. I don't have an eloquent way to express it, but this coup de foudre has been what finally grabbed my attention and made me a daily reader after a long time of just occasionally visiting.

I am fascinated by people's passions. Especially those of women, as we have for so long been told to keep quiet about personal delight lest we call too much attention to ourselves.

I, too, have loved a horse and part of the joy of these posts has been the stirring of my own sweet memories. But greater than that has been the (admittedly voyeuristic) pleasure of following along as you throw caution to the wind and ecstatically follow your heart's desire. We should all be so brave and so lucky.

Thank you for such tremendous pleasure and for the honesty of your work on the blog which has come to feel like a delicious present I get to unwrap each day.I am so grateful.

For some reason I couldn't leave the post but I wanted to put it someplace to remind myself that what we love, what we are moved by, is the fuel of life. I feel so bogged down in the 'shoulds', the 'what-ifs', and sometimes even, oh the shame of it!, the 'what will they think of its?' that I need reminders and fuel.

To the women and men who write about their lives and passions and everydays I can only say thank you. And, I love you.

That's all for tonight. I'll figure out this new blogger trip another day.

I am working away on some new projects. If I can tear myself away from reclaiming my land, I'll be back to fill you in on the details.

I Fall In Love All The Time

Source unknown (possibly background fairy)

With music, with books, with making, with people, places, things. Lately, I'm in a fiery clinch  (yet again) with poetry. The death of Adrienne Rich accelerated this current conflagration. And from her work I turned again to Stanley Kunitz, Mary Oliver, Pablo Neruda, Sharon Olds, William Stafford (oh my beloved friend).

Here is a poem that plays over and over in my mind. Via 3Quarksdaily:

Grammar

Maxine, back from a weekend with her boyfriend,
smiles like a big cat and says
that she's a conjugated verb.
She's been doing the direct object
with a second person pronoun named Phil,
and when she walks into the room,
everybody turns:

some kind of light is coming from her head.
Even the geraniums look curious,
and the bees, if they were here, would buzz
suspiciously around her hair, looking
for the door in her corona.
We're all attracted to the perfume
of fermenting joy,

we've all tried to start a fire,
and one day maybe it will blaze up on its own.
In the meantime, she is the one today among us
most able to bear the idea of her own beauty,
and when we see it, what we do is natural:
we take our burned hands
out of our pockets,
and clap

by Tony Hoagland
from Donkey Gospel, 1998
Graywolf Press, St. Paul, Minn.

Lest you think I am flighty or fickle with all this constant falling (I can assure you my loves endure), I offer this as explanation - I listen to wise people and I try and try and try:

“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.”
~ Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum

Saint Patrick's Day

Happy Saint Patrick's Day - one of my Poppa's favorite holidays. I am a proud descendent of John Kelly. I take my name from his. It means warrior. My beautiful mother, his fine daughter, sent me greetings and she closed with: "May the most you wish for be the least you get; may the best times you ever had be the worst you will ever see." And love, always love.

Noirin Ni Riain



And from Sinead

I'm A Slut!

For A Lost Friend Who Grieves

Especially Wild Geese and Peonies. For Reg.

The Things You Do Endear You to Me

Oh you know I will.



I love you Valentine.