Tag: story

lady patience

3.31.13.5010
3.31.13 ~ Stonington, Connecticut

Exploring cemeteries is something we enjoy, even ones in which none of our known ancestors lie buried. They are pleasant places to take walks and get some exercise – we even met a couple of joggers in the 22-acre non-sectarian Stonington Cemetery on Easter Sunday.

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3.31.13 ~ Stonington, Connecticut

Reflecting on the life stories stone carvers have told with their memorial masonry…

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3.31.13 ~ Stonington, Connecticut

In the smaller sculpture (above), which is elevated on a pedestal, the woman is leaning on an upright log. In the similar, but larger sculpture (below), the woman is leaning on a pillar.

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3.31.13 ~ Stonington, Connecticut

A close-up of the same statue…

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3.31.13 ~ Stonington, Connecticut

The following engraving touched me – how much sorrow the simple word “only” conveys.

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3.31.13 ~ Stonington, Connecticut

The Stonington Cemetery was incorporated in 1849, expanding a small 18th century burial ground.  A group of Stonington leaders, many of whom made their fortunes as a result of the whaling and shipping trades, came together to design a significant horticultural and aesthetic landscape site responding to the “rural” or “garden” cemetery movement of the time.
~ Stonington Cemetery

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3.31.13 ~ Stonington, Connecticut

A majestic tree, waiting patiently for spring to begin in earnest…

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3.31.13 ~ Stonington, Connecticut

A bit of architecture to mark the ATWOOD family plot. I wonder if they could be related, as I have so many Atwoods on my family tree, though my branch settled in Plymouth County, Massachusetts.

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3.31.13 ~ Stonington, Connecticut

A large rough-hewn stone cross – I love its simplicity.

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3.31.13 ~ Stonington, Connecticut

Following the custom of Laurie Buchanan over at Speaking from the Heart, I selected the word ‘patience’ to focus on in 2013. In a bit of synchronicity I found another statue of a woman in a newer part of the cemetery, much like the ones in the older part. This stone carver gave her a name – PATIENCE. She is leaning on an upright log.

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3.31.13 ~ Stonington, Connecticut

The ship’s wheel (below) indicates a sailor lies buried here, the grave much more recent than most of the others in this cemetery. The surname sounds Portuguese to me – in the mid-1800s it was primarily immigrant Portuguese sailors who manned the local Stonington whaling fleet.

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3.31.13 ~ Stonington, Connecticut

A lovely little garden plot by the woods…

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3.31.13 ~ Stonington, Connecticut
3.31.13.5058
3.31.13 ~ Stonington, Connecticut

This anchor (below) decorates a pile, where sailors would secure their boats to the docks with ropes. I’m wondering if this stone is marking the corner of a family cemetery plot. Perhaps the plot was bought but never used, or maybe it is filled with unmarked graves.

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3.31.13 ~ Stonington, Connecticut

All true stories begin and end in a cemetery.
~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón
(The Shadow of the Wind)

beneath the snow

“Village in the Snow” by Paul Gauguin
“Village in the Snow” by Paul Gauguin

I do an awful lot of thinking and dreaming about things in the past and the future – the timelessness of the rocks and the hills – all the people who have existed there. I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure in the landscape – the loneliness of it – the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it – the whole story doesn’t show. I think anything like that – which is contemplative, silent, shows a person alone – people always feel is sad. Is it because we’ve lost the art of being alone?
~ Andrew Wyeth
(LIFE, May 14, 1965)

those songs graze like buffalo

Crazy_Horse_1972
Crazy Horse ~ 1972

When music is your life, there is a key that gets you to the core. I am so grateful that I still have Crazy Horse, knock on wood. You see, they are my window to the cosmic world where the muse lives and breathes. I can find myself there and go to the special area of my soul where those songs graze like buffalo. The herd is still there, and the plains are endless. Just getting there is the key thing, and Crazy Horse is my way of getting there. That is the place where music lives in my soul. It is not youth, time, or age. I dream of playing those long jams and floating over the herd like a condor. I dream of the changing wind playing on my feathers, my brothers and sisters around me, silently telling their stories and sharing their spirits with the sky. They are my life.
~ Neil Young
(Waging Heavy Peace)

story-telling

“Mrs. Cassatt Reading to Her Grandchildren” by Mary Cassatt

If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten.
~ Rudyard Kipling
(Rudyard Kipling, A Life)

I beg of you, you good people who want to hear stories told: look at this page and recognize the wisdom of my grandmother and of all old story-telling women!
~ Isak Dinesen
(Last Tales)

The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.
~ Muriel Rukeyser
(Out of Silence: Selected Poems)

adding to life

illustration by Virginia Frances Sterrett
illustration by Virginia Frances Sterrett

The Fantastic or Mythical is a Mode available at all ages for some readers; for others, at none. At all ages, if it is well used by the author and meets the right reader, it has the same power: to generalize while remaining concrete, to present in palpable form not concepts or even experiences but whole classes of experience, and to throw off irrelevancies. But at its best it can do more; it can give us experiences we have never had and thus, instead of ‘commenting on life,’ can add to it.
~ C. S. Lewis
(Of Other Worlds: Essays & Stories)

grave importance

illustration by Anne Anderson
illustration by Anne Anderson

If you can see the magic in a fairy tale, you can face the future.
~ Danielle Steel
(Silver Linings: Meditations on Finding Joy & Beauty in Unexpected Places)

In an utilitarian age, of all other times, it is a matter of grave importance that Fairy tales should be respected.
~ Charles Dickens
(Household Words, October 1, 1853)

kind of magic

“Lily Fairy” by Luis Ricardo Falero
“Lily Fairy” by Luis Ricardo Falero

Fairy tales were a kind of magic that protected me as a child. Not my body, bruised and battered, they protected my spirit and kept it alive … Fairy tales were not my escape from reality as a child; rather, they were my reality — for mine was a world in which good and evil were not abstract concepts. Like fairy-tale heroines, no magic could save me unless I had the wit and heart and courage to use it wisely.
~ Terri Windling
(Inviting the Wolf In: Thinking About the Difficult Story)

pomegranate seeds and stories

"Persephone" by Dante Gabriel Rossetti
“Persephone” by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

We have all of us eaten the pomegranate seed of language, and we are its Persephones in its ways of structuring our experience of ourselves and the world.
~ John Moriarty
(Turtle Was Gone a Long Time)

They weren’t true stories; they were better than that.
~ Alice Hoffman
(The Story Sisters)

Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories – and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories. We can hardly manage our lives without a powerful on-going narrative.
~ Alice Munro
(Sport & Memory in North America)

The world is shaped by two things – stories told and the memories they leave behind.
~ Vera Nazarian
(Dreams of the Compass Rose)