The retreat in Bretagne was both intensive work and deep restoration for me.
Ordinarily at home I fall out of bed, feed dogs, cats, hens and ducks and unleash the latter to revel in their rôle as flower-arranging committee. I manage a few hours work in the studio until I hear the sound of a vehicle in the distance heralding the arrival of my three Polynesian princesses which is the prompt to wrap up whatever I was deep in, and head down the hill to the kitchen in anticipation of bleatings “Gumnut we’re hungry” and “please make pasta?”.
They are not actually starving and have undoubtedly partaken of a substantial breakfast at home (pancakes/porridge/toast/eggs/whatever their little hearts desire) but they very much enjoy the process of preparing food, are keen to be involved and have a fascination for the transformation of gloopy eggs and silky spelt flour into pliable pasta. They also like pretending that their little table (complete with cloth and flowers) is in a restaurant and while the pasta we have made together is writhing about in its pot of boiling salted water with a splash of olive oil, will place their orders with the kitchen (two with cheese please and one without cheese but with a little sprinkle of sea salt) and then lay out three small forks (the kind used for cake) and sometimes nip into the garden if the flowers in the blue bottle need refreshing). Water is poured into three cups, the pasta is served and for a little while there is a contented silence while it is absorbed followed by requests for further helpings. Depending on the weather, lunch is followed by painting and drawing and the reading of books (inside) or more exuberant play (outside).
In Bretagne I am not only minus my grand-daughters but also dogless and catless, which feels weird. I rise before the sun (not all that difficult when dawn is around 8am), use the bed as a soft yoga mat and sip my tisane brewed from ingredients gathered around the gîte :: rose hips (sliced and with the hairy bits removed), windfall apples (surprisingly uneaten by les sangliers*), sprigs from the Myrtus tarentina that has grown into a small tree here (kept as a tidy shrub in traditional Latvian gardens), dried leaves from Bergenia, that ubiquitous border plant (that a participant here last year described to us as Caucasus tea), lemon balm (Melissa officinalis) growing just outside my door, a couple of willow leaves (not quite sure exactly which species of Salix but good for the heart) and some ginger root kindly given to me by Geraldine, our lovely chef de cuisine. Being able to see the Atlantic in all her changing moods from the place we are staying at is absolutely glorious.
*wild boars, like the ones Obelix eats
Here’s a wee video taken on our first visit to the shore. (Something tells me I’ll be investing in a fluff-covered microphone in the near future.) Watch for the rainbow bubbles, caused not by soap but from the magical interaction between the seaweed and the oxygenated froth cast up on the sands. The colours perfectly echo the tidewanderings palette.
I make a ceremony of unwrapping my lovely new box of colours and paint a wee reference chart before beginning a series of meditative watercolour sea urchins as a means of getting to know my palette more thoroughly, watching how the paints dance with each other when they meet in puddles and how they granulate on different kinds of paper. When I can tear myself away (the pools of colour are mesmerising) I have the luxury of sluicing myself under a hot shower (that is rather more than the warm dribble I have at the farm) to prepare myself for the day.
During the retreat we explored the remarkable qualities of Persicaria tinctoria (Japanese indigo) dyeing blue moons, enhancing ecoprints and giving ourselves beautiful blue hands. We harvested water from the Atlantic, gathered windfalls from a generous apple tree and bundled toasted leaves found under chestnut trees, noted a Rubia peregrina (isn’t that an adorable name?) growing ‘at liberty’ and borrowed pebbles from the shore to use as hammers (we returned them later). The freshly harvested leaves have lasted the week remarkably well and are still yielding brilliant colour seven days after they were cut.
Excursions to the local brocante yielded treasures, so much so that one participant had to invest in another suitcase in order to schlepp their finds home. I fondled the glorious item below but forced myself to put it down again, given my immediate future holds a ferry trip as well as several train journeys and there is a limit to my dragging capabilities. It is assured of a home in Poland instead.
Our location at Tréogat is a little tricky to get to, but so well worth the effort.
On the evening we all went to the water’s edge to watch the sunset, the last of us straggling back (which included me) had the delight of seeing a ragondin (Myocastor coypus) swimming in the marsh. Louisianans may know this creature as a nutria. I wasn’t quick enough to photograph it but like “the fish that got away” it was a sizeable specimen.
The skies varied between spectacular cloud formations and sparkling stars. It was a very good week.
I’ll leave you with this poem, found here
(thank you, Nell Morningstar, for introducing me to this poet)
Becoming Seventy
BY JOY HARJO
Knoxville, December 27, 2016, for Marilyn Kallet’s 70th birthday.
This poem was constructed to carry any memory you want to hold close.
We
arrived
when the days
grew legs of night.
Chocolates were offered.
We ate latkes for hours
to celebrate light and friends.
We will keep going despite dark
or a madman in a white house dream.
Let’s talk about something else said the dog
who begs faithfully at the door of goodwill:
a biscuit will do, a voice of reason, meat sticks —
I dreamed all of this I told her, you, me, and Paris —
it was impossible to make it through the tragedy
without poetry. What are we without winds becoming words?
Becoming old children born to children born to sing us into
love. Another level of love, beyond the neighbor’s holiday light
display proclaiming goodwill to all men who have lost their way in the dark
as they tried to find the car door, the bottle hidden behind the seat, reason
to keep on going past all the times they failed at sharing love, love. It’s weak they think —
or some romantic bullshit, a movie set propped up behind on slats, said the wizard
of junk understanding who pretends to be the wise all-knowing dog behind a cheap fan.
It’s in the plan for the new world straining to break through the floor of this one, said the Angel of
All-That-You-Know-and-Forgot-and-Will-Find, as she flutters the edge of your mind when you try to
sing the blues to the future of everything that might happen and will. All the losses come tumbling
down, down, down at three in the morning as do all the shouldn’t-haves or should-haves. It doesn’t matter, girl —
I’ll be here to pick you up, said Memory, in her red shoes, and the dress that showed off brown legs. When you met
him at the age you have always loved, hair perfect with a little wave, and that shine in your skin from believing what was
impossible was possible, you were not afraid. You stood up in love in a French story and there fell ever
a light rain as you crossed the Seine to meet him for café in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. You wrote a poem beneath the tender
skin from your ribs to your hip bone, in the slender then, and you are still writing that song to convince the sweetness of every
bit of straggling moonlight, star and sunlight to become words in your mouth, in your kiss — that kiss that will never die, you will all
ways fall in love. It doesn’t matter how old, how many days, hours, or memories, we can fall in love over and over
again. The Seine or Tennessee or any river with a soul knows the depths descending when it comes to seeing the sun or moon stare
back, without shame, remorse, or guilt. This is what I remember she told her husband when they bedded down that night in the house that would begin
marriage. That house was built of twenty-four doves, rugs from India, cooking recipes from seven generations of mothers and their sisters,
and wave upon wave of tears, and the concrete of resolution for the steps that continue all the way to the heavens, past guardian dogs, dog
after dog to protect. They are humble earth angels, and the rowdiest, even nasty. You try and lick yourself like that, imagine. And the Old
Woman laughed as she slipped off her cheap shoes and parked them under the bed that lies at the center of the garden of good and evil. She’d seen it all. Done it
more than once. Tonight, she just wanted a good sleep, and picked up the book of poetry by her bed, which was over a journal she kept when her mother was dying.
These words from May Sarton she kept in the fourth room of her heart, “Love, come upon him warily and deep / For if he startle first it were as well / to bind a fox’s
throat with a gold bell /As hold him when it is his will to leap.” And she considered that every line of a poem was a lead line into the spirit world to capture a
bit of memory, pieces of gold confetti, a kind of celebration. We all want to be remembered, even memory, even the way the light came in the kitchen
window, when her mother turned up the dial on that cool mist color of a radio, when memory crossed the path of longing and took mother’s arm and she put down her apron
said, “I don’t mind if I do,” and they danced, you watching, as you began your own cache of remembering. Already you had stored the taste of mother as milk, father as a labor
of sweat and love, and night as a lonely boat of stars that took you into who you were before you slid through the hips of the story. There are no words when you cross the
gate of forbidden waters, or is it a sheer scarf of the finest silk, or is it something else that causes you to forget. Nothing is ever forgotten says the god of remembering
who protects the heartbeat of every little cell of knowing from the Antarctic to the soft spot at the top of this planetary baby. Oh baby, come here, let me tell you the story
of the party you will never forget, no matter where you go, where you are, or where you will be when you cross the line and say, no more. No more greedy kings, no more disappointments, no more orphans,
or thefts of souls or lands, no more killing for the sport of killing. No more, no more, except more of the story so I will understand exactly what I am doing here, and why, she said to the fox
guardian who took her arm to help her cross the road that was given to the care of Natives who made sure the earth spirits were fed with songs, and the other things they loved to eat. They like sweets, cookies, and flowers.
It was getting late and the fox guardian picked up her books as she hurried through the streets of strife. But it wasn’t getting late. There was no late, only a plate of tamales on the counter waiting to be
or not to be. At this age, said the fox, we are closer to the not to be, which is the to be in the fields of sweet grasses. Wherever you are, enjoy the evening, how the sun walks the horizon before cross
sing over to be, and we then exist under the realm of the moon. There’s where fears slay us, in the dark of the howling mind. We all battle. Befriend them, the moon said as a crab skittered under her skirt, her daughter in
the high chair, waiting for cereal and toast. What a girl she turned out to be, a willow tree, a blessing to the winds, to her family. There she is married, and we start the story all over again, said her father
in a toast to the happiness of who we are and who we are becoming as Change in a new model sedan whips it down the freeway toward the generations that follow, one after another in the original
lands of the Mvskoke who are still here. Nobody goes anywhere though we are always leaving and returning. It’s a ceremony. Sunrise occurs everywhere, in lizard time, human time, or a fern uncurling time. We
instinctually reach for light food, we digest it, make love, art or trouble of it. The sun crowns us at noon. The whole earth is a queen. Then there are always goodbyes. At sunset say goodbye to hurt, to suffering, to the pain you caused others,
or yourself. Goodbye, goodbye, to Carrie Fisher, the Star Wars phenomenon, and George Michael, the singer. They were planets in our emotional universe. Some of my memories are opened by the image of love on screen in an
imagined future, or broken open when the sax solo of “Careless Whisper” blows through the communal heart. Yes, there’s a cosmic consciousness. Jung named it but it was there long before named by Vedic and Mvskoke scientists. And, there is
a cosmic hearteousness — for the heart is the higher mind and nothing can be forgotten there, no ever or ever. How do I sing this so I don’t forget? Ask the poets. Each word is a box that can be opened or closed. Then a train of words, phrases
garnered by music and the need for rhythm to organize chaos. Like right here, now, in this poem is the transition phase. I remembered it while giving birth, summer sun bearing down on the city melting asphalt but there we were, my daughter
and I, at the door between worlds. I was happier than ever before to welcome her, happiness was the path she chose to enter, and I couldn’t push yet, not yet, and then there appeared a pool of the bluest water. We waited there for a breath
to catch up, and then it did, and she took it that girl who was beautiful beyond dolphin dreaming, and we made it, we did, to the other side of suffering. This is the story our mothers tell but we couldn’t hear it in our ears stuffed with Barbie advertising,
with our mothers’ own loathing set in place by patriarchal scripture, the smothering rules to stop insurrection by domesticated slaves, or wives. It hurt everybody. The fathers cannot know what they are feeling in such a spiritual backwash. Worship
boxes set into place by the need for money and power will not beget freedom. Only warships. For freedom, freedom, oh freedom sang the slaves, the oar rhythm of the blues lifting up the spirits of peoples whose bodies were worn out, or destroyed by a man’s slash,
hit of greed. This is our memory too, said America. Heredity is a field of blood, celebration, and forgetfulness. Don’t take on more than you can carry, said the eagle to his twin sons, fighting each other in the sky over a fox, dangling between
them. It’s that time of the year, when we eat tamales and latkes. We light candles, fires to make the way for a newborn child, for fresh understanding. Demons will try to make houses out of jealousy, anger, pride, greed, or more destructive material. They place them in a
part of the body that will hold them: liver, heart, knee, or brain. So, my friend, let’s let that go, for joy, for chocolates made of ashes, mangos, grapefruit, or chili from Oaxaca, for sparkling wine from Spain, for these children who show up in our dreams and want to live at any cost because
we are here to feed them joy. Your soul is so finely woven the silkworms went on strike, said the mulberry tree. We all have mulberry trees in the memory yard. They hold the place for skinned knees earned by small braveries, cousins you love who are gone, a father cutting a
watermelon in the summer on the porch, and a mother so in love that her heart breaks — it will never be the same, yet all memory bends to fit. The heart has uncountable rooms. We turn to leave here, and so will the hedgehog who makes a home next to that porch. We become birds, poems.
Source: Poetry (September 2017)
Beautiful memories and discerning words. Bretagne! Because we waited for the sun to set. Because we slowly massaged the blue from the leaves amidst sharing talking and waiting. Because we savoured our food and our time without rushing. The slowness made the time we spent together long lasting and precious. And the blue skies reflected the hidden treasures of indigo. My heart is full of your teaching and guide into the Blue. Thank you
A week that again felt like just a weekend!