Good Morning!
The fog is in and the temperature is brisk, so I succumbed and turned the heat on for a few moments. I apologize to those of you who may be sweltering.
I read Mark Doty's book, Firebird last night. It is a memoir, about growing up in the 50's and 60's and deals with, among other things, his recognition that he is gay. I couldn't stop reading it until I finished so that is my recommendation. The book is rich in his re-creation of his own life and the history of the times.
His family moves a great deal as his father is rather out-spoken on the job. He writes the following about their move to Tucson and his mother's sudden interest in painting, which is the first time she has had something of her own outside family and home.
"In my mind, as least, there is some link between this sudden flowering of desire to fill page and canvas with form and color, and my mother's new love, which is the desert itself: shift of light and shadow, blue and gold, the soft austerity of arroyo and foothill and mountain. The desert is sparse and intensely alive at once. Suddenly this vivid place, for which she has no precedent, has won her allegiance, for the first time she seems to have found a landscape that speaks to her deeply, that in some inexplicable way hers. When you love a place enough, it seems almost to be inside you, as if it were the physical equivalent of an inner life."
May your inner landscape be full today!