Showing posts with label birthdays. Show all posts
Showing posts with label birthdays. Show all posts

6/20/2012

The unbearable lightness

21



translucent,
whisper soft...
five layers of hand dyed cloth
held (momentarily) by a single pin.


   We all need somebody to look at us.  We can be divided into four categories according to the
   kind of look we wish to live under.  The first category longs for the look of an infinite number
   of anonymous eyes, in other words, for the look of the public...
   The second category is made up of people who have a vital need to be looked at by many known
   eyes.  They are the tireless hosts of cocktail parties and dinners...
   Then there is the third category, the category of people who need to be constantly before the eyes
   of the person they love.  Their situation is as dangerous as the situation of people in the first
   category.  One day the eyes of their beloved will close, and the room will go dark...
   And finally there is the fourth category, the rarest, the category of people who live in the imaginary
   eyes of those who are not present.  They are the dreamers."

~ Milan Kundera, from The Unbearable Lightness of Being



Although I wrote (what then seemed quite profound) a notation along the margin of the page,
I did not understand this quote when I first read it in my mid-twenties...
nor did I understand that lives can be shaped by irrevocable choices.

The summer solstice has arrived
and a few frayed edges are lining up...



5/02/2010

Mingled yarn...

17


"The web of our life is of a mingled yarn,
good and ill together."

William Shakespere,  from All's Well that Ends Well

Just something I'm thinking about today...the way lives are knit together...how friends become friends, stay friends...or sometimes not...yet once there was a web between, binding, interwoven, unique.  Thinking too, how sometimes that web remains and sometimes it's blown away on the next season's wind.  Like loved ones who are with us for awhile...and then gone.


I took these photographs in early February.  One morning the entire hedgerow behind our pond was filled with these (seemingly) overnight creations.  I don't know which spider spins these webs, but aren't they the most marvelous constructions?  They suit my mood today as I look at them and wonder about "good and ill together."  Threads.  Mingled yarn.  Lives intertwined.



Today is my mother's birthday.  If she was still with me, she would be 88.  I can't imagine her that old.  But I like to imagine that one of those webs in the hedgerow is hers, next to mine, along with all the others we've known and loved...and have yet to know and love.  

Just something I'm thinking about today...