Gosh, it’s been a month since I posted anything. March has flown by: a month during which I lost my mobile phone and watched with bewilderment and déjà vu as both my computer and television died. This seems to happen to me every spring. It’s as consistent as the daffodils.
All of which is a sort of excuse and apology. I have a big announcement due soon, which I hope will make up for some of the recent silence here.
In the meantime, I have been in the woods.
And I have been loving Kate MacDowell’s sculpture
And remembering the story behind it
Scarce had she made her prayer when through her limbs / A dragging languor spread, her tender bosom / Was wrapped in thin smooth bark, her slender arms / Were changed to branches and her hair to leaves; / Her feet but now so swift were anchored fast / In numb stiff roots, her face and head became / The crown of a green tree…
– Ovid
A sad and violent story, but consider this…
When Daphne is turned into a laurel tree and a young man called Cycnus becomes a swan, when the fates of Hyacinthus and Narcissus offer a story behind the flowers, the subjects achieve final personality in this new form: from the perspective of creation and the life force, the shape into which they shift more fully expresses them and perfects them than their first form.
