Streaming Pillow. Maria is cranking out some sweet stuff for the last Pig Barn Art Gallery Show, “Anointing The Goddess,” June 23-24, ll to 4 p.m. at Bedlam Farm. It’s a combination art show and farewell to the farm, which is up for sale. We are moving to Florence’s house sometime this summer or fall. Lots of good stuff at the farm. Six great artists. Collages, quilts, photos, paintings, notecards. Simon, Lulu, Fanny. Frieda, Lenore, some sheep and Big Red. And me. I’ll be talking at the artist’s reception at 1 p.m. Saturday. Mary Kellogg will be here to read a poem or two. Mary Muncil will be around to say hello. Connie Brooks will be here selling my books on behalf of Battenkill Books and I will be here to sign them.
We love the farm and are very pleased to be able to host a farewell to it that people can share. Rest facilities and food available at nearby Gardenworks. No dogs please. No ball or stick throwing please. Hope to see you.
Today is our second wedding anniversary, Maria and I. This morning she brought me some daisies, and I brought her an Iris and I am sneaking into Cambridge today to pick her up a table for her jigsaw puzzles (oops – she just leaned over my shoulder and read this..oh, well). We are going out to dinner tonight, but we are postponing our anniversary celebration until July because there is just too much going on in our lives today to take a break.
It is almost impossible for me to write well about Maria, and what she has done for me and my life, or how precious and wonderful our time together is. Maria brought me back from the dead, out of the darkness and loneliness, out of the shadows and into the world of light and love. A new world. It is as if I fell in love with the sun and it came to live with me and as if by magic, the tears turned to laughter and my heart overflowed with joy. There was a wonderful reason to get up every morning, and reasons to look forward to every minute of every day. Maria’s love, her smile, her gentleness, her creativity lights up every space in which she appears, opens my heart, and brightens every space I move through.
Everywhere I look there are flowers, notes, quilts, totems, altars. It is hard for me to believe someone like this can love someone like me. I see that I have never been loved in my life, not really, and I had no idea what it was like or what it meant. It is life itself, the greatest gift, the reason the world endures. When I began taking photographs five years ago, every single one was a love letter her, and everyone still is. How lucky I will get to die with her next to me.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote “I love you not for whom you are, but who I am when I am by your side,” and that is the most powerful thing about Maria – that I love her more deeply by the day, but in her radiant presence I am beginning to love me as well. When we came together, we were both so broken. We are becoming whole together. We will soon get to make a new home together, the most natural thing for us.
In my photographs I have begun to capture the power of this gifted and radioactive jewel. I have not tried to capture her courage and honesty, her strength and compassion and her ever ascending creative arc. Maria has taught me what it means to be a human, to be alive. Her smile melted my fading and encrusted heart when I first saw it, and melts it still. Every day, she opens me up, dares me to live, anchors my restless soul. Happy Anniversary, beautiful and blessed spirit. Every day of life with you is the most precious gift.
