champagne bottle top love
i met my husband in prague when we were both living there 9 years ago. we fell in love in the land of castles and cobblestones, a romantic backdrop for the real fairytale that is ours.
ian dreamt up charming ways of wooing me in our early days. after christmas and new years, a carpet of champagne bottle tops covered our stomping grounds, and in the months following those holidays i would find little champagne scenes in surprising places. these tokens of love are some of my prized possessions.
i lost them this past year. i tore the house apart searching for them, looking in the same places many times, knowing i must've just missed them. though i counseled myself in "letting go", i have grieved their passing in random moments, crying for their loss.
ian is in istanbul right now, but before he left, he found those little treasures. they now comfort me in his absence.
between the whites
my husband, ian, is an artist. his current work is a series of charcoal self portraits – intense and magnificent - that are 7 feet high and 5 feet wide. he starts with a big white paper and spends 3 focused months creating each piece. using his hands or sponges or self-made tools, he rubs and grinds charcoal into the paper’s surface. I am continually astonished by what he can create out of burnt wood and white paper.
what mystifies me is that he’ll sometimes take a black lump of eraser in his hand and remove days of hard work in order to start over. but he says that the paper has a memory. though he can take it back to white, the grit of the paper has changed, inevitable altering the piece. and what was in fact important was what was learned between white and white.
I’ve been thinking of my new year, my fresh start. I can wipe my slate clean every year so that the surface is pure as the driven snow, but underneath I am still marked by my past. the old me informs the new me.
it seems that life - the love, the pain, the growth - lies between the whites.
Šťastný nový rok
i have long loved this leonard cohen lyric:
Ring the bells that still can ring Forget your perfect offering There is a crack in everything That's how the light gets in.
May this new year crack your shell wide open.
sun salutation
*happy solstice*
in my yoga class last night, i was reminded of the following poem, "the sun never says", by the sufi poet, hafiz:
Even after all this time
the sun never says to the earth, "You owe Me."
Look what happens with a love like that.
It lights the Whole Sky.