Last Wednesday I finished up a lovely, five month, freelance stint. I enjoyed my quiet-car-train-commutes, and being in the beating heart of Chicago for many hours of the week, and especially learning from and working with the smart, creative people on this particular team at Leo B./Arc.
And then Thanksgiving, shared with dear friends who can laugh and cook like nobody else. And after that a frenzy of nesting–or rather cleansing the corners of my nest with help from the kids and Greg. Ah, there’s the back of that cabinet, the bottom of that drawer, the basement floor!
Now I’m thinking about what’s next. Advent. And also writing.
Most immediately, I’m reflecting on the work of my friend, the painter Louise LeBourgeois. I’ve loved looking at her water/sky paintings for years, and now she is having a show called “Light Through Water” at the Dolby Chadwick Gallery in San Francisco. She’s asked me to write a piece for the show’s catalog.
Here is an image with which I’m spending time, called
Water Apparition #471.
These kinds of phrases are passing across my computer screen as I begin to cobble together this essay:
Intimate scale. Vast expanse.
And:
The elements of haiku:
1. Simplicity 2. Timelessness 3. Silence 4. Nature 5. And a “turn”: that revelation that comes between the conjunction of two images.
Clouds come from time to time—
and bring to men a chance to rest
from looking at the moon.
Basho also said this: “The poet gets inside the object . . . ”
Louise is an avid swimmer who enters the waters of Lake Michigan at all times in all seasons in order “to dive directly into her fears” (“my small self in that big lake”—she said that, too).
I am thinking about how we get inside the unknown. I am imagining those old maps, inscribed with phrases like “there be monsters here.”
There be answers, too. Or if not answers, perhaps a moment for reflection. Now. And now.
Here is Louise’s website. I encourage you to dive in.
