What do you find beautiful?

I've never studied aesthetics, but I know what I like to look at and what I don't like to look at.

Like to look at:

- objects and buildings made of wood, especially old ones

- trees and water (oceans, lakes, rivers)

- mountains

- children

- eyes, hands

- fire

- snowfall

- fields, in any season

- horses

- birds

- growing crops

- my husband

- my children

Don't like to look at:

- strip malls

- almost anything plastic, especially brightly colored yard toys

- dirty snow

- aluminum-sided buildings

- litter

I could think of more.

I've found that the more I know/study a topic, the pickier I become about what I like. In the last year as I've studied good photographs, I've gotten choosier about what is pleasing to me.

I also find that I like to look at things more as their value increases. For example, the barn in the photo above does not immediately seem aesthetically pleasing. But as I've driven past it on my drive the last 3 years, it has become a familiar and appealing sight, partly because the rest of the farm where it stands is so attractive.

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Like, have you noticed that someone who didn't at first seem particularly attractive to you becomes more so as you get to know them? (Or vice versa?)

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What are 3 (at least) things you like to look at, and don't like to look at?

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(I really enjoyed Jennifer's lists on her last post, which inspired this one.)

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Place

Reading the Vilhelm Moberg novels about Swedish emigrants in the 1850s has got me thinking about place. And since becoming blog friends with people around the world I’ve had a growing interest in geography. Here are some questions I'm thinking about:

- Why do people relocate? Think of emigrants who have traveled across the Atlantic (or Pacific, or wherever), for weeks or months, risking their lives (think Hmong refugees). There are some obvious reasons, such as poverty, fear of home governments or civil war, religious persecution, etc. But my friend Inge, who moved from Germany in college and stayed here. What made her choose the U.S. over Germany for residence?

- What is there about some places that we connect with on a psychological, even a spiritual level? Like when I went to Paris for the second time, after my parents died, and I felt I found my Self for the first time?

- Why do we choose to live where we live? I mean, why do we stay? What keeps me in this location, now that my parents are gone?

- Growing up with foreign students, and now getting to know blog friends in India, Finland, Hungary, Hawaii, Shanghai, I’ve seen that we are really the same in many ways. But how does our geographical location, our culture, make us different? For instance, living in a very hot climate vs. living in a very cold one. How does heat, or lack of it, affect someone’s psyche?

- How has high speed communication and travel changed how we see ourselves and the world? Why do I feel so connected with the 18th and 19th centuries? Do I long for a time when speed was not part of life?

What I’m most interested in is Place as a character in our lives. As an amateur photographer, I can’t help but notice that other parts of the world are more appealing as a physical backdrop for photographs than where I live. A barn in a Michigan field (above) doesn’t carry the same punch as a barn nestled in the Rockies or the Alps. (I don't have a photo to offer for this one.)

Is beauty a legitimate draw for moving? When Don and I retire, we’d like to move up north to the Traverse City area. Why? What pulls us there? Water of various shades of teal, rolling hills of orchards and stone buildings, tiny towns with old cottages, cliffs overlooking Lake Michigan, woods of pine and spruce, sand dunes, Native American culture. But more than just the beauty, there is also an openness, an artistic perspective where a writer, a painter, a craftsman, can live and feel at home.

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But is that all there is to feeling at home? How do we know we'll feel at rest there? What if we move, settle in, and find that there are other factors that keep us from letting our true selves run free?

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And now I think of it, shouldn't I just feel at home in myself, regardless of location?

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Barn

Do you know how many barns there are in Michigan?

Do you know how many barns there are in the U.S.?

Do you know how many barns there are in the world?

Neither do I.

But I know they are falling down, except when people find thousands of dollars to restore them, or to build a new one, like this one.

We have a tall (40'?) barn that needs its corner, which is barely standing, to be rejuvenated. It doesn't look like this one. But I love it. It's green, not red like most (and this prairie barn in Ingham County is Marilyn Monroe lipstick red, not barn red, excuse me). We'd like to restore our barn and turn one of the lofts into a studio. Lots of light. Painting easel. Don's potter's wheel (that he's going to get; he just got an $1800 kiln for $20.)

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I know loft doors are a feature of prairie barns, for when hay is elevated up to the upper level. But this looks more like our front door. And I don't think they keep hay in this barn. What do you suppose this door is for? Tell me a story.

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(I'm planning a little barn photographing outing in the country this Saturday. Hope I don't freeze.)

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Love day

I'm not waiting for Valentine's Day. You have received your first Valentine of the season (I think)!

BTW, this photo was taken December 6, which is why there's no snow. See, I was thinking of you even then. :)

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Scenes from childhood

Robert Schumann’s Kinderszenen Op.15.No.7 (Scenes from Childhood), specifically Träumeri (Dreaming) is a piece of music that sends me into a happy, quiet place. Turn up the volume, close your eyes, and listen. You’re probably familiar with it.

But it’s quite unlike my own childhood. Mine was a household of movement and bombast. Eight children, and I was the youngest. There was a lot of talking, argument, clearing of dishes, banging of pots and pans.

And not only did we have eight kids. When most had grown up, moved and gone on to lives of their own, we had foreign students live with us. At one time we had nine students from other parts of the world (China, India, Thailand), besides my parents and me. Listening to four Thai boys and one girl chattering away in singsong indecipherable words around the kitchen table was a daily practice. Then there was the 80-year-old PhD student from China. She was a character and a half, but she was quiet.

Mom played the piano at least once a day, usually noisy pieces. Not like this bit of gentleness. You’d think she would have needed the tranquility in the midst of the bombast.

But, on the other hand, maybe her nimble fingers needed to vent. Maybe she wanted to scream! She was a concert pianist who cooked and did laundry for ten people, for goodness sake. And she had been an only child. Was her personal childhood concerto more like Schumann’s? Then as an adult in a house full of noise and confusion, she yelled with her fingers up and down the keys?

In spite of all that noise, or who knows, maybe because of it, I am a pretty quiet person. So maybe this concerto really is fitting for me, if not my childhood. It’s definitely what I want to hear as a 50-year-old woman.

Portrait of my mother as a child that stands on Lesley's piano in our house

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Tell the truth

Wow, I'm suddenly writing more here.

Photo from this web site.

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At the end of one of my favorite movies, “Lost in Translation,” Bill Murray’s character whispers something inaudible into Scarlett Johansson’s character’s ear (pictured here).

After watching it and replaying it a few times, reading his lips, my conclusion is that he whispers “Tell the truth.”

Johansson’s character, Charlotte, is a writer. She graduated with a “useless” degree in Philosophy (not so different from an English degree, I suppose). She’s searching for meaning, a calling. Mostly, she wants to write.

Shakespeare wrote “to thine own self be true,” spoken by Polonius in Hamlet. And actually, Bill Murray played Polonius in Ethan Hawke’s “Hamlet” film, according to Wiki, so it would be a nice connection.

Is there a difference between telling the truth and being true to yourself?

For us who write, telling the truth can mean:

* not sugarcoating it
* writing about what we know, telling our own story
* being bold when necessary
* being original, bucking trends

Is this different from being true to oneself?

* living in reality, not denial
* living out our own story
* being bold about who we are
* being different when necessary

Telling the truth and being true -- both require thought and reflection in a slow cadence, on a daily basis. Everything around us is too crazy, too wild, too fast, too controlling for us NOT to pay attention to our own mind, our own heart. Stop the world, I want to get off! At least for a few minutes, every day.

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A long life

Just got home from a wake for an old friend. Mrs. S. was 92.

Since reading her obituary in last week's paper, I've been reminiscing about the old days at my dad's church, where Mrs. S. was a member. She always smiled, and she was so beautiful.

Everyone at the funeral home today remarked about what a wonderful life she lived. There were no tears! Not from her daughter, nor her grandkids (who were my friends in school). No doubt there have been tears this week. But not today. Not when someone as sweet and happy as Mrs. S. says good-bye. Her husband, who died just a few years ago, would have been 100 this Tuesday, the day after her funeral. Will they have birthday dinner together Tuesday evening?

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Today I saw old girlfriends I didn't recognize, some thinner, some heavier, all getting older, like me. I saw an old boyfriend who looks smaller than I remembered, another old friend, now a doctor, with whom I played an unforgettably funny Bingo game. I saw parents of my teenage friends who are hunched in old age. In each face there is something that stirs my memory. The strange sweetness of my childhood. The familiarity that is no longer familiar.

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These friends, 30 and 40 years since I've seen some of them, are living and dying, and I can't help but wonder, what kind of footprints will each of us leave? Dear Mrs. S., good-bye!

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