A WARRIOR DANCES IN AUTUMN

The most important thing, when you are terribly late, is to make an entrance...

Masked warrior is my best bet tonight at the 6th Annual Willow Manor Ball, where festivities have been swinging for hours already and Tom Hanks has probably already swiped all of the caviar dressing. It helps the Warrior Style (I feel) to turn up without a date, for how can a mere man compete with this vast crinoline silhouette (no room for him in the doorway!)... 

This haute couture robe à la française is the Maria-Louisa for Christian Dior by John Galliano, and I know exactly what you are thinking... you were expecting butterflies and a riot of autumnal colour, but mes amies, that's where the shoes come in... Sophia Webster is a genius!

The hostess, Lady Tess Kincaid, is celebrating her birthday in blush pink so my gothic attire will not compete with her effect and in any case, she's been at the Guinness a while so hopefully she will simply throw her arms around me as Miloš Karadaglić heats up the floor with 'Libertango'...

The real reason I didn't bring a date is because I heard Billy Collins might be here tonight - Tess introduced me to him years ago and the thought of hearing him recite 'I Chop Some Parsley While Listening to Art Blakey's Version of Three Blind Mice' is thrillin'. He is a former Poet Laureate, and subverts the usual idea of a poet - he is witty, droll, simply magnifeek... Here he is reading for the Obamas - the video is unclear, but the words are all that matter...  
Someone is playing Autumn Leaves, moonlight fills the Scioto (I'm in Ohio, of course) and I all but forget that I can only see out of one eye (naturally I am wearing a black lace patch over my left eye). Seamus Heaney is wooing Tess beneath the trees, and I walk alone by the banks, thinking of the Native Americans who once made their home here and for the slaves who escaped the antebellum - the Scioto meant freedom. I feel no pain, only the sheer blissful relief that comes with imagination and the magic that creates virtual worlds of friendship and beauty. Happy birthday Tess! It's time to dance in the spirit of, and for, the Iroquoian warriors.

Images from: Fashion In History
Native Americans Online

IT'S (NOT) A LONG WAY TO TIPPERARY!

So, apparently...

I'm not sure I need any more gift of blarney, having been blessed with a naturally chatty tongue, BUT who could say no to kissing the famous stone?!
Am only slightly (very) terrified about visiting Ireland at a time described by my Irish friends as Baltic, but I have dreamed of setting foot in Ireland since I first read Yeats, curled up in the heat of an ordinary Indian summer... Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths... I shall arise and go now, and go to Innisfree... and most of all, listening to my grandfather and great-great grandmother singing 'It's a long way to Tipperary, it's a long way to go...', which of course it was, from Bombay...

I was chattering to a Polish taxi driver today, spilling over with excitement about my trip to Ireland; he asked me where, in Ireland... Tipperary, says I, smiling. Never heard of that one, sez he... So naturally I had to sing him The Song. Clearly he didn't have ancient relatives crooning Irish tunes through his childhood. It was something to do with the war, I think... my grandfather was seconded to the British army (a captain), my great uncle (Brigadier Jim) led the Gurkhas, and music somehow passed through the allied nations, like a gentle daisy chain, unsuspected by the enemies. Who notices the passing on of daisy chains?
Here's my mother's portrait of her father... handsome, wasn't he? And the sweetest, gentlest grandfather a girl could hope for... can't wait to make him smile wherever he is when I set foot in (jump up and down like a crazy leprechaun in) Tipperary!!

INSIDE THE GARRET, LIGHT

The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees, 

The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas, 

The road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor, 

And up in the garret, the artist, pulled at her hair, and tore...

Well, that last line is perhaps not quite in Alfred Noyes' taste... but truly it is a sight to see my mother wrestle with her latest oil portrait into the moonlit hours. The little studio in which she creates her magic can only be reached by a terrifying ladder, which, incidentally, featured in a nightmare the other night... my nightmare, that is. Mum seems to leap up those steps like a dervish. (In fact, I have never actually witnessed the climb... she seems always to be already there, at her easel...). Living with two artists has taught me much about the realities of creating art, but it has never diminished or disillusioned my relationship to art. It is, as it has always been, pure magic. I had a post surgery check-up today; the last two procedures haven't quite 'worked'. In pursuit of magic, I wandered the corridors of hospital, losing myself in the Quentin Blake panoramas we are so fortunate to possess...

Music and magic, poetry, civil rights and scholars... what more could I possibly need to salvage my battered soul, when The Blue Eyed Surgeon pronounced me "Trouble!" (moi? as if!) while concocting a new engineering plan for my eye. He even whipped up a drawing of the tube in my eye... (yes! another artist)... but I forgot to swipe it from him when the appointment drew to a close. I will tell you about it another day... for tonight, I am a torrent of darkness, tossed upon cloudy seas and I have decided the only solution is to make my hair the colour of a ribbon of moonlit purple moor. If I have purple hair, I am convinced I will be invincible! Do you not think? And the pain that awaits the next surgery will quake in the wake of my SuperHero-ness...

GRACE

In this fading light
while the crickets sing,

A chant rings out
aboriginal, whole -

Keeping tune with the rhythm
of the humming gong -

Of the bell that brings me
home.


© Shaista Tayabali
Bergerac, 2012

How can it be that I have gone and come? I left on my in breath, and I have arrived on my out breath. How can it be that only this morning I was on Plum Village soil and whisking my skirt along with a frisky French white butterfly, and now I step into the doorway of my little house in the garden and a white butterfly pranced around at my feet, flirting outrageously near my cheek before sidling off to you. Watch out for him!

The girl that I was belongs to ether now. In her place, something firm has grown roots and spread branches, from which fall green curtains of mists and memories.

So much to share. Will it suffice to say it was perfect, from the first person I met waiting outside the airport with the name Padma, meaning Lotus? To emphasise the depth of her name, a tattoo of a lotus adorned her right foot. My beautiful blue room was named Mulberry, and had a hot water shower! The unexpected thrill! The loveliest of roommates, from Israel, Canada and Romania, and the heartbeat of compassion that wove its thread around every one of the thousand retreatants.

I have arrived. I am home. But from the moment I arrived in Plum Village I was home too. Some of the time I was sick, but I was tended to carefully by strangers who were not strangers. A cup of hot tea in the morning, made by a loving new friend while you are still snuggled under the duvet - now tell me, does it get better than that?!

Books Actually

“I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! -- When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.”
~ Jane Austen, from Pride and Prejudice.

On the 200th birthday of Charles Dickens, I wanted to share something of bookstores and libraries - I recently stumbled across some of these collections online so they are not places I have visited, but isn't the internet brilliant for couchsurfing? In Paris, there is a bookstore called Shakespeare & Company, which looks delicious...

To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you, and hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations - such is a pleasure beyond compare ~ Kenko Yoshida wrote that some time between 1283 and 1350. What would he have thought of a movie palace being converted into a reading room? This is the Librería El Ateneo Grand Splendid in Buenos Aires, Argentina, which uses theatre boxes for reading rooms...

A good book should leave you... slightly exhausted at the end.  You live several lives while reading it. William Styron, who wrote that in 1958, would perhaps have approved of the Poplar Kids' Republic in Beijing, China - cosy nooks for naps everywhere!

I quite like this quote: "Tell me what you read and I'll tell you who you are" is true enough, but I'd know you better if you told me what you re-read ~ François Mauriac.

There is a bookstore in Mexico which has a trail of greenery wrought around the books, and a tiny one I love in Singapore, which is endlessly quirky, called Books Actually. Bookstores are becoming magical places, but some libraries are really extraordinary, like this ornate cathedral to books in Coimbra, Portugal...

or the University of Salamanca library in Spain, which is brilliantly colourful...

Of course, the college libraries in Cambridge hold a special place, like Wren's and Queen's...

but my favourite bookstore/library was tiny, cramped, dark, dusty, and very likely long destroyed. We used it during our childhood trips to Mahableshwar, a favourite colonial hill station. The librarian was terrifying and extremely strict. The books and comics were crammed together in cupboards, but the ecstatic illusion of feeling one could choose anything and take home plenty, has lasted all these years. I wonder if my brothers remember... I shall have to ask! Meanwhile, am off to hospital tomorrow for a very long day of infusions - and the kindle shall serve as my magical portable library.

Images from flavorwire via and via 

CONFIDENCE (An Abstract Theory)

I Write My Face
Upon My Age
In Lines
Of Poetry -

I Right My Wrongs
Up On The Stage
For All The World
To See.

© Shaista Tayabali, 2012
image prompt: red spot II, wassily kandinsky, 1921, magpie tales
poetry prompt: dverse

The Magic Exhalation

So, according to trusty, reliable Jonathan Cainer, reader of the stars, today, Armistice Day, is also a symbol of rebirth in the magic of numbers aligning. 11.11.11. Apparently, Mars is about to leave my sign, pointing to a moment of exhalation. Does Mars explain my hectic activities this year? Perhaps. But don't we all exhale in autumn? And yet my cherry tree is still leafed! I am watching it every day, drawing my own inconclusive conclusions from the bright teardrops determinedly, bravely, hanging on. I read this the other day, in one of Adriana Trigiani's books,
Autumn is my favourite time of year; it seems to say "Let go" with every leaf that turns and falls to the ground and every dingy cloud that rolls by overhead. Let go. (So hard to do when your nature tells you to hang on).

Mars and Jupiter, eclipse and numerical alignments aside, I think I can let go this year. I made many dreams come true, just by hanging on. One of my sweetest achievements has been the music of your friendship. I spent years in isolation thinking I was alright... I had books! But as Anne of Green Gables discovered, it is the friendship of soul mates that really gets you through. Books aren't hollow, but they just aren't enough. And I am glad I lived long enough to discover that truth.

When the leaves do finally drop, and pool outside my window, I shall let them go, each and every one, and embrace winter, knowing that before they sink fully into the damp earth, each leaf will carry with it one of your wishes, and shall return in spring, to fulfil them.

In the right light, at the right time, everything is extraordinary. - Aaron Rose