After unsettling, record-breaking warmth during solstice week, the cold has arrived. Sheets of ice begin to stack once more upon the edges of the lakes, as polygonal and edged as discarded window glass.
I feel relieved by the coldness and a bit of overnight snow. As ambivalent as I usually am about winters here (something about which I suspect you will be hearing much more), there is something utterly wrong with a 50-degree Christmas at 44.97 degrees north.
Now, for the breath of summer. I have been listening to the Spa channel on SiriusXM. “Spa” is, I imagine, a very uncool genre that (accurately) suggests one’s demographic is “older,” and also that the playlist heavily features wooden flutes.
I hardly ever like wooden flutes. What I do like, though, is music that is subtle, slow and contemplative; especially when combined with an evocative title. Music that is like a soundtrack to your unlived lives. I tune in to the Spa channel for songs bearing names like “Gift,” “Twilight,” “Shelter,” or “Open Window.”
Such songs evoke a host of memories to tell a story; one that no other person will create in the same way. Then I can walk into this song-story and inhabit it for a while.
A song may sound like: the feeling of walking out under the open night sky in October … the lift of your heart as a flock of swans rise from a lake into the sky … or maybe missing someone who didn’t love you enough. A song can feel like weather.
There’s a song called “Dappled Shade;” an incantation of a name that launches me instantly from dark winter to a blue summer’s day, one where I lie under the fluttering leaves of a willow. I rest my mind upon a ceaseless movement that murmurs like cool water. Clouds breathe, dimming then brightening. Glimmering shadows flicker, shifting over earth and skin like smoke.
The song reminds me. How many hours have I spent like that, under willow, birch and aspen? Not nearly enough. Maybe this is one of the most important things that songs, or art, or stories can do. Call us, connect us, remind us. We are here, we are alive, we are part of the earth’s breathing.
The song reminds me of the shade cast by the four young trees I have planted at this house. Of the gigantic, two-trunked silver maple, which faithfully shaded our former home for all of the twenty years we lived there without falling upon it, until blown over in a windstorm two years after we had moved away.
It reminds me that the only urban places that look inviting to me, regardless of the architecture, are places enlivened by tall shade trees, and sidewalks dappled by leaf shadows.
It makes me think of dappled, a surface with areas of light and darkness, as a metaphor. What shape do dappled thoughts take? Uncertain, shapeshifting, fleeting; semi-solid, like sun through a butterfly’s wings.
Couldn’t our whole lives be described as dappled: inhabited by times, places, experiences of bright and dark, sunlight and shade, and all the gradations between?
Only after mulling this over for a bit did I remember that this hymn of creation by Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins (who I always forget was not a medieval monk but a Victorian) is probably where I first learned to appreciate such things dappled. (For maximum appreciation of this tumbling train of consonants and luscious alliterations singing with holy energy, read out loud….)
Pied Beauty
Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
To everyone reading, I wish you a very happy and healthy new year, in spite of it all. May we all expand our appreciation for “things counter, original, spare, strange,” because I think we will need it; and may we feel the daily presence of beauty past change, because we need that, too.
Embracing cold-dappled days,
Carmine
Isn’t Gerard Manley Hopkins a wonder?