Posts Tagged: city
linger under the spring sky
The spring sky beckons to the heart starved by a winter that overstayed its welcome. “You don’t need to escape the cold any more. Come on, linger a little longer…”
Out Walking: Front Street
Bright and sunny today, but blustery still. Made breakfast then Ceri went off to the office and I had to work for awhile too. Do NOT like giving up any part of a weekend to work, but the upcoming week will be a challenge, so want to prepare for that. Later I met Ceri at Fran's on Front Street for late lunch of big salads, then we did some errands and groceries and went back to his place. Talked. He played piano. Had leftover lasagna he had frozen from last week and salad for supper. Listened to music. Had wine. Tried to catch part of SNL but conked out, feeling happy.
street art
This week I'm walking to work the "no-shortcuts" way, walking up to my office east along Adelaide Street from Spadina. It's part of the "Entertainment District" though the street with the beautiful name is rather shabby along the route I walk – it has none of the swankiness of King Street, a block south. There are some great buildings though, and construction underway in spots, and slated to begin in others, and I expect in the next few years the area will house a lot of new glass. I'll enjoy the "shabby" bits while I can!
cloudy
I’ve been in Sudbury for the past couple of days with my job. When I planned the trip, I didn’t anticipate the work that would suddenly consume me in the past week, and the relatively short travelling period – ten minute walk to the airport, 30 minute checking in and waiting, one hour flight, twenty minute collection of bag and rental car – is still a hole in the work day I can’t afford.
When I arrive it’s a luscious late summer’s day. I’m reminded that it’s really early autumn when I descend into the near-north landscape and find the annual show of autumn leaves has begun. In my mind I will the plane to hang there and let me look for awhile. I think of my father only an hour away on the island and I wish I’m visiting him instead.
I’m preoccupied with work during my stay. And at the same time I’m finding it tremendously hard to concentrate. I’d heard from some of my intuitive painting people from the workshop just past (post still coming!) that the mind would continue to want to play games and do its own thing after the experience. And as much as I hate it, I’m having to reel it in during this first big proposal since I started this job. The two-and-a-half days away are an unruly mental battle.
Today I return to the airport in Sudbury to go home and as much as it agitates me to think of time away from the document and how am I going to catch up, I’m really looking forward to that little journey in the sky. As we lift away from the earth, I’m engaged with the autumn colour, until the clouds begin to veil over the view. My half-day anticipation of colour and lakes and green fades away before my eyes and I sit back in my seat, resigned to being back in the city and work only an hour away.
My disappointment, however, washes away with the landscape when I am reminded what it is like to mingle with the clouds.
For an hour I float. I imagine I can stay here for as long as l like, up here where there are no proposals and no deadlines and my mind is free to wander wherever it likes. I wonder, is that what they were thinking of when they thought up heaven?
young man seeing
This morning I’m watching a young guy sketch people on the subway. I’m an observer of an observer. I’m captivated by his surreptitious search for detail and the subsequent concentration in getting what he sees onto the page of his sketchbook.
I get to imagining what the young man’s eyes are seeing in the short amount of time he has to create the images. Line? Space? Plane? Perspective? Or is he, like I so often am, imagining what lies beneath the surface – what is it about that changing furrow in a brow, that curl of a lip, what thoughts are washing over that face looking at itself in a window’s reflection?
The artist is young enough that I can guess he is still at the point of the former, working to strengthen his skill before attempting to convey the layers of his subjects’ humanity into his drawings. But then I also expect that the more an artist becomes accustomed to seeing, the more evident those layers become. So what is going on under those lines and planes must be evident at some level of his consciousness.
As I watch him, aspects of tunnel walls and station platforms move in shifting formations in the window behind him, and people move in and out of his space with that air of muted resignation that morning commuters always have. What I see is a young man in a bubble; a bubble in the middle of a busy transit system, in the middle of rush hour, in the middle of a big city, amongst thousands of people, most of whom are working very hard with various means to ignore and avoid the unpleasantness of experiencing each other. And I feel grateful to have encountered this one person who is striving to do the opposite – to see them.
And for that, the young man seeing is beautiful thing number 27 of 101.
these city walls
I came across this video which has scenes I can identify with my every day. These scenes ARE my every day – they're of Toronto, the city I write about all the time.
And it's funny because I could link this song's theme to a conversation I had only just last night about my experience in having been here five years now; about choosing a city and not finding a home; about not giving up on the city but quitting looking for the home.
I might be more enthusiastic about finding this video treatment of this particular song. But I have laryngitis today. I don't even know how to deal with this song when I have laryngitis.
a treasure to look upon it
I haven’t been writing much. If you’re one of my regular friends I’m sure you’ve noticed. Lists of beautiful things and posts of YouTube clips are not writing. I’ve learned to accept the dry periods and assume the “writerly collector” in me is needing this time to just collect experience. But it’s been bothering me – posting other people’s work and videos of other people are not going to bring you back, and I can’t stand the thought of losing any one of you.
Part of it is that I’ve been immersing myself in good books over my daily commute – and there’s certainly nothing wrong with that. In fact my excuse for staying with this job which is an hour’s trip from my home has always been that those two hours of travel time every day are reading time. But the problem with immersing myself in books during this time is that I’m not paying attention to my favourite subject: that little space of world around me and the people in it.
By the end of winter I start feeling trapped by it – the darkness, the extended periods of painful temperatures, the ugliness. Let’s face it – snow in the city is only beautiful when it first falls. Then it becomes dirty mounds on sidewalks and on edges of parking lots and lining curbs everywhere. I’m all about the changing seasons, I feel lucky that I live in such a climate – but by late January, I’m finished with this damned season.
I’m sure it’s all related to a lack of sunlight. In fact I know it – after an hour’s lunchtime walk in bright sunlight today I felt heady, almost drunk. And the move to Daylight Time this past weekend has flipped some internal switch – I get to evening and find daylight and I’m noticeably happy. Lots of my friends are still complaining about that lost hour of sleep – I’m practically giddy for it; I’d gladly sacrifice two hours to have Daylight Time back again.
I wish I was one to write myself through a down or difficult period. The last few months of hunkering against the weather, coming out of the subway after work into the dark, the sequestering away from humanity and losing myself in other peoples’ stories – have all caused me to close off, and thus close off that well of stories.
During today's lunchtime walk I stopped and looked ahead at a length of sidewalk on which there was no snow, no ice, no slush, no puddles; just a clear sidewalk under a sunny sky. And when I stood there looking at it, I felt a sense of freedom I haven’t felt in more than a month, a welcome desire to get back outside of myself.
That sidewalk, with the feeling of freedom the sight of it gave me, is beautiful thing number 24.
As I walked on, one of my favourite song verses ran through my head:
You say you'll give me a highway with no-one on it
Treasure, just to look upon it
All the riches in the night
U2, from Rattle and Hum, 1988
Let’s call that little simple little verse, with its image so humble and idea so rich, beautiful thing 25, and my theme for escaping the bonds of winter.
above ground
You know, certain parts of most of my days are focused on me getting above ground again. This video made me think about the coming above ground part. I should always view it as rising to the new, and to not expect. Like a goldfish?
(This video encouraging me to see like a goldfish: beautiful thing seventeen.)
It's late winter. Bloody hell. But I'm finding beauty. Are you?
published in the beautiful Bella Grace!
