I Am This Woman

While drinking my one perfect cup of coffee this morning, I watched a willow tree next to a little pond. As its branches floated gracefully up and down on the breeze in typical willowy gorgeousness, I was proud that I’d taken the willow as my namesake. Half of my namesake.

What that willow taught me was a master class in beauty. As I was listening to Beck croon his saddest song on Sea Change (“Lonesome Tears”), I was noticing the bitterness and slight sting from the heat of my coffee, the shifting lines and shadows of the willow, the contrast between the large, bunchy and sharp cedar next to it and the faint rippling blackness of the pond in the background. The angle of early morning sun cut shadows on the cedar bark but merely brightened and softened the willow leaves.

I was wishing for my camera so that I could record it. And then I remembered that visual artists often sketch things, so they can get the mood and feel on paper that they see, rather than record what the (more) objective lens might see. And then I took another sip of coffee and waited.

A blue jay flew down from the willow to the ground, then swiftly up again to disappear against the stark bright drak green of the cedar.

I waited some more. A woman walked her dog, wearing a red shirt. The woman, not the dog.

Without any other way to record this moment, I thought, I will blog this. Maybe by writing some words to describe the scene, I can recapture the mood.

So here I am, inside the painting studio ready to go at it amongst 20 other painting students, some of them quite good, tapping away at my laptop, wishing that I was a better painter, a better writer, a better photographer so I could describe the beauty that I saw and felt this morning.

Ah. Yes. That’s the creative urge – to describe beauty. The beauty within and around us. That’s why we keep trying to make things, write things, draw things. Why we keep gazing at the faces of our children, why we pick up a book, stash fabric and yarn, listen to a song, take up a paintbrush or camera, and browse patterns. It is why we buy art, art supplies, string. It is why we pick up an acorn and put it in our pocket on a walk. It is why we listen to a song five times before letting it slip to the next track. It is why we keep taking snapshots of our cats, dogs, lovers, flowers.

We observe and have taken inside us indescribable beauty, but we cannot accept that it is indescribable. Surely, someone, somewhere, someday, will understand and see.

My coffee is cold now.