"This Essential Thing"...

I am reading Night and Day, which is taking me quite a while.  I also am reading two more novels.  Moving back and forth among my books, as the mood takes me.  Woolf's is the most dense though.  Her character Mary's thoughts seem to me to reflect Woolf's own view of the world:
          "In the eyes of everyone she detected a flame; as if a spark ignited spontaneously at contact with the things they met and drove them on.  The young women looking into the milliners' windows had that look in their eyes..."

Do we still come alive at the idea of a fashionable outfit,  I wonder.  We missed the era of hats, and maybe that is too bad.  Can we conceive of the purpose of a hat anymore?  Sometimes hats become fashionable for a while, especially when there is a royal wedding, but how many of us wear hats on a regular basis? Well, to get back to the novel, Woolf is not thinking particularly about hats, or old books, but about what motivates us to movement.
       "As she put her hat on, she determined to lunch at the Strand, so as to set that other piece of   mechanism, her body, into action. With a brain working and a body working one could keep step with the crowd and never be found out for the hollow machine, lacking the essential thing, that one was conscious of being."
At this point, Mary decides her motivation is not to be happiness.  However, she is struggling to articulate exactly what it will be, as the idea hovers within reach, but cannot be grasped completely. Just that there will not be happiness. Happiness does seem to become a difficult state to reach, especially at this time when women are fighting for the vote, and beginning to question the status of marriage.  Marriage having been seen until this time as the proper state for women, and hence the dwelling-place of happiness, iti most have been a disorienting thought to see that there might be more.  If one was not interested in material goods, or in acquiring objects, no wonder that happiness might no longer be seen as a goal.  Where would happiness now lie?

Even today, how many of us have the space for a room of our very own?  Even carving out a charming niche, like this one may be difficult to do. 

I don't think mine could ever be this neat.  

Well, it is good to know that love, and men, could still be part of Woolf's  world, even if not always equated with happiness. 

     "A glow spread over her spirit and filled her heart with brightness."

Whether or not though, this is the essential thing ....

The light becomes distilled...

In winter, every moment of sunlight seems so precious, because there is so little of it. We hunger for it.  But the is sky beginning to lighten a little more every morning now.  The more light there is, the more it enters into the eyes and angles  down into the heart, which then, like a prism, reflects it back outward, making miniature rainbows in the mind for the soul to feed upon.  Concentrated light-essence. I think eyes shine more and the heart glows too.

Every season has its own palette.  Winter and spring are the pastel seasons. Winter is white, with palest pastel hues.  Palest sunsets, and fleeting.  Palest pinks,  softest blues, most delicate lavender, always with a white horizon..  Spring keeps white in the form of spring flowers like paperwhites and narcissus, but now yellow and green enter the picture, with green coming to the fore.

 

 

A Light exists in Spring by Emily Dickinson

A Light exists in Spring
Not present on the Year
At any other period --
When March is scarcely here

A Color stands abroad
On Solitary Fields
That Science cannot overtake
But Human Nature feels.

It waits upon the Lawn,
It shows the furthest Tree
Upon the furthest Slope you know
It almost speaks to you.

Then as Horizons step
Or Noons report away
Without the Formula of sound
It passes and we stay --

A quality of loss
Affecting our Content
As Trade had suddenly encroached
Upon a Sacrament. 

Winter grows more beautiful as she ages. We can love her more as she prepares to leave us, I think, because our collective ancestor memory remembers her great power when she is in her prime,even if now we can burrow down under the covers and turn up the heat and pretend otherwise.

Spring, brings back with her our childhood, and is the more endearing for it.  The memory of being taken care of is so sweet.  I suppose that is why the palette of spring is the one we also choose for baby clothing.

It's time to welcome back the light.

window-framed memories...

I have not been having so much luck with buying picture frames lately.  I supposes it's partly because I don't know exactly know what I am looking for, and partly because what's out there is so generic.  I want something unique, but what?
I am thinking that I will definitely get a digital picture frame for the photographs I mean to take soon - an ever-changing display, I think, of the different seasons as we pass through them.  Digital pictures- never really needing frames, I suppose. They really focus the viewer in on the image. 
We, or at least I, spend more time looking out of windows, during the winter season than any other.  Really, come to think of it, I am a winter weather watcher.  The other seasons find me outside, but not this one so much. 
So I was imagining, what we winter-weather, or other weather watchers, must look like to the ones who might be observing us from the outside.  Can you remember looking into a window at someone?  (And not as a peeping tom!) What might we look like to someone catching us staring out the window.  I see me as looking pensively at the view.  Wouldn't that be almost a universal look?  Although some might be waiting for something to appear, most of the time, I gaze out the window to admire or to reflect on the scene outside.  I can always see trees, and often the moon travels its way around the house, from back bedroom to the dining room, and then the living room window.
I took some pictures of windows this last summer, and printed three of them out,windows of  older houses. But because they have,of course, window frames, I find it difficult to decide what picture frames to set them in - frames within frames, you see. 
Maybe, that's what I should be looking for --- picture frames that look like window frames.

I truly love this picture, which I found online somewhere. The dear older woman, who reminds me of a dearly departed auntie, with her two cats,  and yet there is a bird perched there.  Her expression is most interesting - as though she did not expect the photograph, and there is something nice and "witchy" about it, in a good old wise-woman way.  The window is opened and she looks at us, not bothering to smile, but studying us also, or so it seems.  This picture says summer, and brings the memories associated with the season back with it.  Welcoming auntie, warmth of wood, roaming cats, curious bird.

 

This was taken this past summer, at  Fort Edmonton. The warmth of the brick walls, the scent of the flowers, the knowledge that what's in this building is preserved from the past ... look at how the bricks are set directly beneath the white-framed windows - a pleasing pattern for the eye. Maybe that's what I need to find when I look for picture frames, a pattern suggesting the natural structure that the frames themselves belong to. 

Winter continues...

At this time of the year, with the holidays now past, we enter that long period before spring.  Whoever chose the end of December to be a time of reflection and rest was wrong.  Up in this northern country, holidays should happen at the end of January.  There is still so much of this season to get through!

I repotted some of the plants I picked up in the grocery stores last month.  They want to keep growing, so they have brand new pots and soil.  I am curious to see how they will do, because usually they only last a few weeks, and then wilt away. 

I reread Memoirs of a Russian Lady; a book a purchased back in the 80's.  I see it has been put back in print recently.  I love the pictures in this book.  As my own ancestors lived in this country three or four generations ago, I like to imagine what it would have been like to live there.  This book depicts the lifestyles of the people then.  And winter, well, winter has the same flavour in Russia that it does up here in northern Canada.

A  snowy laundry day.   Washing, ironing, mending, folding, and storing in the linen cupboards.  Look at how large the windows are! 

Imagine those long winter days, and then the evenings lit up with the soft glow of these lamps.

 The living room? in the apartment has a large round table for tea.  Many comfortable seating areas.  The ceilings seem to be quite high in all these homes and apartments.  What a wonderful place to read all afternoon.

 Another winter afternoon,snow falling,  with the ladies engaged in quiet pursuits.  Note the small lapdog on the armrest of the chair.

 

A priest's home in the countryside.  The servant is barefoot.  The tea from the samovar is served in glasses, rather than cups.  

 

It looks like spring is on its way. What a rough ride for these passengers.  Still, it must have been an invigorating ride, what with winter gone!

Canadian and Russian climates must be very similar.