Tag Archives: memory

Advent Day #11 – Smell

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Inhaling deeply, through the nose.   A breath meditation and a sensory celebration.  Smell is a marvelous gift!  Pleasurable, informative, playful and useful — something for which to be grateful as we count our Advent blessings. 

You Smell

Well, at least I hope you do.  I knew a young man who lost his sense of smell after a motorcycle accident.  I had periods of olfactory disability when I had chronic sinusitis.  I found those days flat and uninteresting.  I have always enjoyed the stealthiness of fragrance; it can surprise you and delight you and make you suddenly aware as if playing a game with you.  “Wow!  What is that?”  Your mother’s favorite brand of perfume, the beach grass from your childhood vacations, the star jasmine that bloomed beneath the porch.  It’s amazing how specific smells are.  Many animals identify their own offspring by scent alone.   So today, I am challenging you to become aware of and appreciate your sense of smell.  What is this season’s particular redolence?  Cinnamon.  Allspice.  Pine.  Onion.  Sage.  Vanilla.  I stopped at a spice shack the other day to buy Chai Tea Spices.  The place was a heaven of smell.  Pungent pepper and cinnamon.

There are place odors that are painful.   Hospitals and vets’ offices, for instance.  The stairwell of the parking structure in a big city.  The landfill.  Gary, Indiana in the late ’60s.  You know a few, I’m sure.

Garlic.  French fries.  Chocolate chip cookies baking.  Okay, now I’m just getting hungry.  Breakfast and then drive to Chicago for the Lyric Opera: Ariadne auf Naxos by Richard Strauss.  Dinner with Emily at the Algerian crepe place.  Never been there before.  Looking forward to smelling that!

Advent Day #7 – Memory

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One of the most fascinating gifts of the human brain is Memory.  On my Advent countdown, this is something to open with caution.  “When faced with his past, the strongest man cries.” (from a Dan Fogelberg song)  “Memory is like the sweetest pain…” (from a James Taylor song)  The question I must ask myself when I am drawn to memory is, “Is this useful?”  I could get sucked into the morose for hours, wallowing in widowhood, motherhood, womanhood, childhood.  What would I learn?  If it brings appreciation or perspective, very well.  If it gets me ‘stuck’, then it’s not so good.  Here’s my post from two years ago:

Christmas 1982

Ever had a piece of music bring up a memory, a time and place from the past, with such clarity that you felt you were actually there?  Last night it happened.  I came home from my Memoirs class, having read my essay aloud with such a rush of nervous adrenaline that my heart was still pounding.  I decided to have  a glass of Chardonnay and listen to some of Steve’s recently acquired CDs with him.  So, I was relaxing and in “memory mode” when he put on a CD of the Tallis Scholars singing a mass by John Taverner, written around the turn of the century – the 16th century.   Oh, the flood of my heart!

I was 20 years old.  Jim and I had become engaged on my birthday over the summer.  I went back down to So. Cal. to school, to continue with my bachelor’s degree in Vocal Performance.  Jim and my mother were in a Bay Area singing group together, called Renascense (or some archaic spelling pronounced ren-NAY-sense).  I came home for Christmas and was invited to one of their concerts.  I close my eyes and picture them:  Jim in his black tuxedo, ginger mustache,  the smatterings of a beard he’s grown for Rigoletto.  He is 22, teddy bear-like with twinkling blue eyes, blonde hair and a killer Italian grin.  But while he’s singing, he is an angel, mouth perfectly forming straight vowels, eyebrows imploring heaven.  He is a tenor.  His voice melts butter.   My mother is dressed in a mail order catalog nightgown, polyester, rust-colored, that has been trimmed with gold & black cord around the waist and across her bosom in an X.  Only women who have sung in choirs can imagine how absolutely ludicrous these outfits can be.  No woman looks good in a choir uniform, let alone one that has been made to look “period” on the cheap.  It is ridiculously embarrassing, but I forgive her.  She sings alto in a hooty voice that blends well.  Her quality is not stellar, but her musicianship is indispensable.

I have been so homesick away from school.  I have been staring at my diamond ring, counting the days until break.  I sit in the concert hall and look at these two people whom I love more than any others on the face of the earth, and I am so proud of them.  I’m proud of their dedication to music and their fond relationship to each other.  I admire them completely, and I am jealous.  I want to be with them; I want to be them.  I want to feel the music in my breast float to the clerestory of the church and entwine in that beautiful polyphony.  I ache for this memory.  And then the tenor line soars above the rest, and it is Jim himself, singing to me.  The recording is perfection.  I can tell that it isn’t Jim, but there are moments when it definitely could be.  My will takes over and I make it him, in my mind.   I am there, in that sanctuary, and Jim is singing to me, alive, young, vibrant with love and mystery and warmth.

Jim before his Carnegie performance – 2002

Music folds time in patterns that defy chronology.  I sail far away on its transcendent waves.  It is a grace to travel toward those we love without limits.

A Flower’s Name and Nature

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I learned that the blue flower growing in my garden and all over the Wehr Nature Center woods is called scilla siberica (wood squill) and is native to southwestern Russia, the Caucasus and Turkey.  I am guessing that settlers brought it over here about a hundred years ago.  I’m tickled that we have parts of our name in common!  I am thinking more about the settlers and their way of life while I wait to hear about the outcome of my Old World Wisconsin interview.  What did they find different about the flora and fauna here?  What did they miss from the old country?  How does the emotional connection to land, a place, a “mother country” develop, and what did it feel like to venture out from there to an unknown place?

scilla siberica

Memories are sweet; what is here right now is also sweet. 

I find myself using more energy to be present with what is right in front of me.  When I retreat to my memories, I take that energy and shelter it deep within myself.  It feels like I’m hiding, in a way.  It’s not easy to allow anyone else to inhabit that place.  It’s slow and calm and secret.

I have a memory garden.  It blooms with the flowers of the old country: my babies, my husband, my house, my youth.  I like to visit it and inhale its familiar fragrance.  I am alone there. 

The world of the present is all around that secret garden.  It asks to be acknowledged, appreciated, and invited into my deep consciousness. 

I could call this my “settler’s mind”.   But there really is no division.  Here, there, then, now…it’s all fluid, connected, like the roots and rhizomes of wild flowers.

“One of the illusions of life is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive hour. Write it on your heart that every day is the best day of the year.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every day is the best day, every place you are is the best place.


 

Christmas 1982

by

Ever had a piece of music bring up a memory, a time and place from the past, with such clarity that you felt you were actually there?  Last night it happened.  I came home from my Memoirs class, having read my essay aloud with such a rush of nervous adrenaline that my heart was still pounding.  I decided to have  a glass of Chardonnay and listen to some of Steve’s recently acquired CDs with him.  So, I was relaxing and in “memory mode” when he put on a CD of the Tallis Scholars singing a mass by John Taverner, written around the turn of the century – the 16th century.   Oh, the flood of my heart!

I was 20 years old.  Jim and I had become engaged on my birthday over the summer.  I went back down to So. Cal. to school, to continue with my bachelor’s degree in Vocal Performance.  Jim and my mother were in a Bay Area singing group together, called Renascense (or some archaic spelling pronounced ren-NAY-sense).  I came home for Christmas and was invited to one of their concerts.  I close my eyes and picture them:  Jim in his black tuxedo, ginger mustache,  the smatterings of a beard he’s grown for Rigoletto.  He is 22, teddy bear-like with twinkling blue eyes, blonde hair and a killer Italian grin.  But while he’s singing, he is an angel, mouth perfectly forming straight vowels, eyebrows imploring heaven.  He is a tenor.  His voice melts butter.   My mother is dressed in a mail order catalog nightgown, polyester, rust-colored, that has been trimmed with gold & black cord around the waist and across her bosom in an X.  Only women who have sung in choirs can imagine how absolutely ludicrous these outfits can be.  No woman looks good in a choir uniform, let alone one that has been made to look “period” on the cheap.  It is ridiculously embarrassing, but I forgive her.  She sings alto in a hooty voice that blends well.  Her quality is not stellar, but her musicianship is indispensable.

I have been so homesick away from school.  I have been staring at my diamond ring, counting the days until break.  I sit in the concert hall and look at these two people whom I love more than any others on the face of the earth, and I am so proud of them.  I’m proud of their dedication to music and their fond relationship to each other.  I admire them completely, and I am jealous.  I want to be with them; I want to be them.  I want to feel the music in my breast float to the clerestory of the church and entwine in that beautiful polyphony.  I ache for this memory.  And then the tenor line soars above the rest, and it is Jim himself, singing to me.  The recording is perfection.  I can tell that it isn’t Jim, but there are moments when it definitely could be.  My will takes over and I make it him, in my mind.   I am there, in that sanctuary, and Jim is singing to me, alive, young, vibrant with love and mystery and warmth.

Jim before his Carnegie performance - 2001?

Music folds time in patterns that defy chronology.  I sail far away on its transcendent waves.  It is a grace to travel toward those we love without limits.