Flakes now mix with the sky's tears, and hardly a car passes by the two room library here in the Westminster West village. Earlier, my truck had skidded into the parking spot reserved for the "librarian". Saturday mornings, the library, open 10-12, is run by volunteers. I don't really expect anyone to come by due to the weather. I have 4WD on my pick up truck, and with only a half mile to drive, I didn't expect any real driving issues, either to get here or get home.
I have just finished shelving returned books, and now this candy store of words, images, knowledge, and fantasy are solely mine. I take, from a whole, an abstraction of any book I choose. There is a collection of art books now moved closer to the circulation desk, and I pick one up by Georgia O'Keefe: One Hundred Flowers, edited by Nicholas Callaway, and Steven Sloman, who was commissioned to make the plates for the color transparencies for the book.
Maybe it's this mid-winter moment. Maybe it's Mercury in Retrograde. Maybe it's my pre-birthday introspection that brings me deep in. Abstractions are another type of edge. Perspective shifts and gets sliced. To take the literal out, and free fall into sensual reality shifts, the details now become their own world.
The poppies, bright yellow-orange, sway in the breeze ever so slightly. I reach down to touch a petal and within its velvety softness, I wish I could eat a piece of cake, like Alice in her Wonderland, and shrink to a size where I could curl up inside the petals and rest for a bit. The sun would warm me, the petals would shelter me from the breeze. I walk past the small flowers and keep along the trail that leads up the hillside and then back down towards the ocean cliffs and beaches. Waves break around the protruding rock cliffs and rush in towards the shore as people on surfboards ride and flip along the crests. I close my eyes and listen again, then open them and the world begins yet again.
A new friend asks, ".....does the moment to moment experience take precedent over everything else.....?"
Abstracted from the rest of the sentence, this question propels me to look at the line between selfishness and selflessness. Is it always about the "me"? Can it not be? Even puffing out our chests with selfless intent, isn't it still just about the "me"? Don't we always want to curl up in the velvet?
So, I said to myself — I will paint what I see —what the flower is to me, but I'll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking time to look at it—"
Georgia O'Keefe
"About Myself," 1939
"I will paint....what the flower is to me....I'll paint it big...and they will be surprised......," she wrote at the end of her book.
No one is looking....we are busy in our big lives, our social calendars calling to us everyday. The velvet petals need to large, they need to caress the nose, engulf it, take a syringe and shoot the scent up the nose. Then we step back, in surprise, and say, "Whoa......it's a huge flower!" The flower has to puff out its chest —and say, "It's all about me! Look down, for a change! Stop, smell the roses!"
And so we stop, inhale, listen, see, feel, touch, hear what is around us, and we are nourished.
“Oatmeal” by Maeve Wander Amoroso (age 5)
OATMEAL
Does this ever happen to you?
You don’t eat your oatmeal
But your oatmeal eats you?
—from 2016 Rattle Young Poets Anthology