Merry Christmas

November Nuances/Winter Prelude

Winter is... inside weather, finding again the hearth of home and heart...quiet contemplation, silent solitude, graceful subtle beauty. Healing scorched hearts, relearning peace.

La Vie en Rose

My heart weeps for Paris right now, beautiful, life-loving Paris.  x

Where does it hurt? Everywhere.

Oh, world.
Love and healing to Paris, beloved city of love and light, and everywhere there is such suffering.
xxx

Heart is a Drum

'Your heart is a drum, keeping time with everyone...'

A Change of Time

September time. Harvest moon. Blood moon. Reap and sow, gather and move on.
The air is laden with change; golden leaves, goodbye skies. Time, it is a changing.
September, a time of change. Colours aplenty.

Everywhere/To The Great Unknown

Everywhere: that blue destination on a blue-sky day. When the horizon is a gleam in your eye, an ache in your heart and the light batters it beautiful. Up and away.  Star-flung and starboard. To that place you've always wanted to go, to be. Up anchors and set sail, away, free. Wind in your hair, world in your eye. Finally fulfill the promises we make to ourselves...

September

To contradict TS Eliot, September is the cruellest month, mixing memory with desire, regret with possibility, past reminiscence with future apprehension/anticipation...

A strange month where the embers of summer burn out and the fires of autumn start to kindle...

Do I Know You?

Strange how someone can go from meaning and being absolutely everything to... just nothing.  Back to normal, to neutral, to non-existent.  Why can't their special status remain the same?

This is maybe the strangest and the saddest part of love.

Momentous

Some things matter. More than we let on. Epiphanies do occur amongst exponential ordinary blankness. Quietly. Internally. Plates of consciousness shifting and illumination appearing. Some moments are more momentous than we care to let on.

'I can see for miles, miles....'

Hysteric

 

I heard this song for the first time about six years ago, almost to the very day.

In a record store where I was browsing, in a daze from a 5-hour journey and a boy who I'd seen all those miles ago just before setting off, coincidentally. A boy who was fast becoming a looked-for event, a sunlit presence, a favourite person. Who had consumed my thoughts the whole journey long, a new narrative unfurling itself, unawares. It wasn't until this song came on in the store that I realised, in what came as a surprise to me, that I was in the midst of falling for him. Falling into a feeling of a sudden blossoming sweetness, an instantaneous golden glow of liking, like nothing I'd felt before (it happened so fast, was so astonishing to me - I'd known him for ages, but now suddenly I was seeing him all anew.) 

I didn't know it then, but now, looking back, that was my hook, line and sinker moment. This song captured it all. It was revelatory, it was rapture. That chorus. That riff with its sense of intoxicated falling, of complete immersion in a moment, the thrilling gold of a shared gaze, the giddy heart high of genuinely liking someone. That line 'you suddenly complete me...' sung in that low-slung note as an aside almost - well, it just amped up everything into instant clarification. There I was, among the shelves, stopped, stunned. Could this lovely softness, this overwhelming sweetness I was feeling  really be the first inklings of... (gulp, gosh) - love? That very moment, the defining start point of a love story which was to flare up from there, was something more real, more surprising that I'd ever felt before. I can remember it so well; it was like filling up with honeyed happiness. Yep. That was it. Honey and gold and a hysteric heart.

Years later, now when that love is all over (so quick to begin, so long to get over...) and anger and sadness and regret (bigtime regret) have come and gone,  I listen for the first time to an acoustic (sadder, slower) version of this same song and realise that that moment still exists in my memory like a goldmine,  untarnished with time. And I need only go there for half a second to know that  a love like that never entirely goes away or dissipates. Some residual feeling still lasts, no matter what time or events have passed. And always will, really. Because to feel something real like that, no matter its consequences or plot or ending, is always looked back on fondly, so very fondly.

Strange, isn't it.

(Then)

 "Flow sweetly, hang heavy
You suddenly complete me
You suddenly complete me..."

(Now)

"And these strange steps
Take us back, take us back..."

La Vie en...Gold

Oh to be in the golden vistas of sunny Provence living the French dream. <<La vie heureuse>>

I heart this piece of music. From the film 'A Good Year.' 

I love the possibility of it, the certainty, how it mimics the soaring of a happy heart... Most specifically how the orchestral waltzing bits (life in Provence) are in marked contrast to the occasional interruption of 'reality's' (life in London) hesitant harried tones. Bit like the heart versus the head; life as it could be compared to what it is; sunny vis-a-vis dull; gold glinting against grey; a complete overwhelming of certainty for a way of life versus a cynical complacency to it. Now that's wisdom.

Infinite Stars

'The sky was starry to the very rind,
his smile still burning there
like the tail of a comet
that has just blazed by.'
                                       ~Linda Pastan, 'Dreams' 

At Peace.

There Is A Light (That Never Goes Out)

You Were a Kindness...

'You were a kindness when I was a stranger...'

'When someone great is gone...' 

Forever Ago

In The Wind

'You are the purest soul I've ever known in my life....'

'I can see the glowing lights, I can see them every night, Really not that far away...'

Paul x

A Sunday Romance

Light

What unit can love be measured in? Light of course. So much light.

This is so darn beautiful from Ryan Adams. Even after love is done, you can't forget or sully its light. You're the better for it, after all. And when you sing a song of beauty (or write a poem or speak of a love honestly) well, you know that's where the truth is.

Silver Memories

Silver and sparkles in the grey ~

Hello April !

'April comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.' 

~ Edna St Vincent Millay

Oh My Sweet Ryan Adams

Harmonica heartache highs and guitar solos are still in my head from seeing Ryan Adams last week. What a show! 

Hello February

Hello lovely lilac fragile February, prelude to spring. Here's to the greening beneath the snow, the growing shoots beneath the ground, the song beneath the song... :)

Jaded But Hopeful

What a joy it is to discover a new artist - the world suddenly sounds better, new. Sharon Van Etten has such a great voice - raw and rangy, emotional hues that go up and down, plumbing a scale of blues.