The merest of starts

I wore a pair of my great-grandmother’s Alice Fischer earrings yesterday, as I did on Friday. This family connection was something I must have subconsciously felt I needed in the wake of the past week’s many tragedies. 

Fischer, the designer, was a friend of my great-grandmother's who was trained as a ceramicist in Vienna, held at a concentration camp in Morocco during the Holocaust, and, following safe passage to the US, settled with her partner in Woodstock, NY in the mid-1940s, where she resumed her artistic calling. She was sufficiently successful that her jewelry was copied, and some of her buttons, which graced a bespoke dress from Henri Bendel, were on the cover of a 1945 issue of Vogue (more images of Fischer's jewelry here).

I think of those whose lives are lost due to hate and violence - and those whose lives are forever changed but who survive, like Fischer, and go on to add more beauty to the world.

I sought beauty yesterday afternoon. I wanted to nap, and indeed often on Sundays we take that small indulgence for 45 minutes or so, somewhere between returning home from church and beginning to think about the week ahead, with all the mundane details of cooking, laundry, and other things that tend to take up so much literal and psychic space in our lives.

But the fine spring day beckoned. I am perennially smitten by the season: the car-alarm cardinal calls, the bulbs from Easters past, redbud trees about to burst. And Carson wanted to plant some seeds in our garden. So I transplanted some herbs that had weathered the winter; harvested some brussels sprouts that had also, inconceivably, weathered the cold only to grow larger. We planted watermelon seeds in small compostable cups, with the hope that they will germinate soon.

We made the merest of starts. 

We’re terrible gardeners, cursed with lofty goals and expectations but little practical knowledge and even less dedication. And it occurs to me that so often, I make the merest of starts with other things. But even the merest of starts can feel great. 

I want to be someone who pauses to acknowledge beauty, who creates beauty, who learns everyday. And often that means that other things fall away. It's more important that in my spare time, I'm down on my knees contemplating this bleeding heart in my garden than, say, dusting. 

I admire those people who exhibit real dedication to their craft. I suspect I'll never be one of them, that I'm fated to keep making the merest of starts. Perhaps I am something of a dilettante, but I want so very much from my short time in this life, and given the obligations of work and everyday life - grace though there may be in those - that dedication is hard for me to fathom. I want so much, and the list is nearly endless, but it includes the bleeding heart appreciation; listening to weird time signatures; belting out bluegrass harmonies; falling in love with baby foxes in our neighborhood. Falling in love with people and their stories.

Noticing beauty. The merest of starts. Falling in love with the world, again and again and again, amen.

Namaste,
Kelley