Is life a series of storms punctuated by periods of calm, or vice versa?
I woke up yesterday morning with a pond in my back yard from the huge dump of rain we had overnight. Today the skies cleared briefly and I got out for a hike. Another storm is supposed to be on the way, and I am concerned. Climate change is real, but I need to calm down. This rain is still probably easily within normal limits. In fact, what I’m currently reading suggests it is.
Emily Carr writes, over 80 years ago:
It has poured for five days, wholehearted teeming rain…. Today, loud, boisterous wind is added. The sea is boiling over black rocks…. Every pot and pail in camp is overflowing. After the water shortage it seems so reckless to throw any away….
…Bads and goods have hurled themselves with velocity through this day…. Any hour any condition may prevail. The woods are tender one minute and austere the next, sometimes riotously rich, coldly pale in colour….
It has taken me until my 50s to start reading the work of Canada’s beloved Emily Carr. Hundreds and Thousands is a compilation of her journals from 1927 to 1945. A paperback copy given to me by a friend years ago leaped out at me from the bookshelf recently and I have been sitting by the garden window every morning to read and re-read, just bits at a time, slowly.
… The world looks round and small and complete from the top of Beacon Hill, like a toy world with no beyond…. Yes, I have thought this myself! You forget all about Asia and Europe and Africa and the rest, and the wars and famines and earthquakes. The wild flowers and the broom and the nesting birds all seem so much more important than horrible things in the newspaper. Is it selfish to feel so? I wonder too.
In her day, others saw Emily Carr as an eccentric, a “difficult woman”, a spinster. Even I, who have always loved her paintings, pictured her simply as the little round woman who didn’t get out much, kept a monkey as a pet and had few friends. I am embarrassed to say I’m only now learning the truth.
Carr was well educated and traveled, and was no misanthrope; she just tired of superficialities and longed for special companionship. She regularly entertained guests who came to see her paintings, and generously kept allowing them in, despite their lack of enthusiasm, and despite how long it took for her to gain any traction in the art world. Most people just didn’t “get” her.
She was a perfectionist, full of self-doubt, a sensitive soul in a world dominated by men and the moneyed. She was always seeking to improve—her skills, but mostly her expression, in getting closer to capturing or distilling the spirit of what she saw into a representation that did it justice. She was hard on herself, but as she aged, she cared less about what others thought, and found confidence and pride in her work. In her I have found kinship.
…What’s the good of trying to write? It’s all the unwordable things one wants to write about, just as it’s all the unformable things one wants to paint….
…Why want to paint? When the thing itself is before one why not look at it and be content? But there you are. You want something more. It is the growth in our souls, asking us to feed it with experience filtered through us.
Carr lived just outside of downtown Victoria, BC. It excites me to think I have wandered the very same streets she walked, and gazed in wonder at the very same views. She ran a rooming house in which she also lived and worked, but during the summers she fled in a caravan to the forests of Goldstream or the Esquimalt Lagoon. Today these trips in a car take less than half an hour, but back then it was a serious effort to get her caravan hauled out into the wilderness.
There, she’d spend her days at nature’s doorstep, falling in love with the trees and ferns, and practicing the discipline of putting pen to paper, paintbrush to canvas, wood to the stove, despite aches and pains, loneliness and bad weather. She had peaceful productive days, and she had wasteful frustrated ones. It am amazed to discover she experienced epiphanies just like ones I’ve had, and voiced some of the very same questions about world and self. But of course, as long as we humans have been expressing ourselves in words and pictures, we have been noting the same things, in our own myriad ways. This is a comfort.
…The first dismal rain of winter…. Everything shivering and dripping like the time between death and the funeral. War news dismal, fires sulky….
…Stop this yowl and go to your story and enter the joy of the birds. Wake the old sail up, hoist it up in the skies on lark songs. …
Trees blossom and leaves fall. Birds fly. Storms come and go. Calm escapes us. Calm returns.
SEE with a WHY 