Dec 10, 2023·edited Dec 10, 2023Liked by Suleika Jaouad, Carmen Radley
A wonderfully descriptive piece of writing from Kerri Ni Dochartaigh. Lovely.
When Covid began, my 89 year old mother went into hospital on March 5th, in Danbury, Connecticut. She died about three weeks later. I was with her all but the last five days of her stay, when I was asked to leave. I watched her take her last breaths on her Ipad, along with my sister, and daughter back in New Jersey. It was gut wrenching. An inspiring woman who walked, trekked, and explored the world over with my father collecting indigenous art and artifacts, she had a keen eye for the tiniest things-particularly four leaf clovers. They were her specialty to find and collect, much to her family's delight. Several weeks after she died, some of her grandchildren and children both in Ct. and in NJ, ALL found four leaf clovers on the same day-- several of us for the very first time. We have found, collected, and saved many since then, all pressed between the pages of travel books of places Mom and Dad have walked.
Dec 10, 2023Liked by Suleika Jaouad, Carmen Radley
When Covid first began we all were in lockdown and I live alone in NYC. My saving grace was my balcony. When the weather got warmer I began buying and collecting beautiful red geranium baskets, petunia baskets, marigolds and pink and red anemones. Then I began buying plants-fiddle faddle plant, ferns, wandering Jew, coleus. Why? There was so much unfathomable deaths in NYC and throughout the USA and the rest of the world and I was devastated like everyone else. I wanted the aliveness of these plants and flowers on my balcony and in my home. They also were in honor of all who died. Then the deepest cut my dear friend and loyal assistant, Amy died of Covid and she was gone in a flash. More devastation hitting me in my gut. Amy loved small, dainty pierced earrings, and I collected some, and with the permission of her sister, I mailed the earrings to her sister. Death was everywhere even in Central Park where they setup tents for the sick everywhere. Every day I would sit on my balcony in meditation surrounded by the aliveness and the beauty of the plants and flowers and grieve, pray, cry, and be grateful I was alive and healthy thru all of this horror. I also bought candles to pray over and to shed the physical light in my home. I will never forget!
Dec 10, 2023Liked by Suleika Jaouad, Carmen Radley
I am afraid to collect "things." I have left so many "things" behind in moves to start over, as a child told by my Army father that "we can't take those things because it will go over our moving weight limit." I collect memories. I escape to the safety of the life lived, the people, smells, sights, sounds, conversations, dear animal protectors, and the bittersweet memories of each collected bit.
Dec 10, 2023Liked by Suleika Jaouad, Carmen Radley
I'd often heard stories of an old woman who gathered arrowheads on the property my father-in-law had bought decades earlier in Montana. I was fascinated, thinking about the peoples who inhabited this land, these wild open spaces, this same ground, under these same stars. I wanted to find one too. The stories most intriguing for me growing up in the Los Angeles school district were the stories of Lewis and Clark and their interactions with the native Americans and Sacajawea. I listened and felt care about her as if I had been there at that time. Stories of the Chumash filled my head throughout my elementary educational years. My husband eventually inherited his father's property, and now we live there, and I am still fascinated by the land and the big star-filled sky. One day, while walking, I prayed. "God? Will you help me to find an arrowhead some time before I die?" I took about 10 more steps, looked down, and there it was...a perfect arrowhead, chipped and carved for small game. I stooped, picked it up, put it in my pocket, and felt my heart soar in the wonder and beauty of the part of life that is unseen...the thin places.
Dec 10, 2023Liked by Suleika Jaouad, Carmen Radley
What an incredible piece of writing, so grateful to be given so many opportunities to read pieces from a vast array of creative people! Thank you!
I collect used postcards from op-shops and second-hand markets. I stand transfixed in the moments I find them - reading a small snippet of someone’s life that I’ll never know from a long time ago. The oldest one I have is from 1918. Sometimes I feel as if I’m imposing and shouldn’t be reading the triumphs, tribulations and insights these people have found on their travels, but somehow those postcards made it to a market and then to me. I think I collect them because the things they write bridge time and space and make me feel connected to the rest of the world and the people in it. Without realising it at the time, I think collecting those postcards reminded me that everyone has a story worth telling.
Dec 10, 2023Liked by Suleika Jaouad, Carmen Radley
This is a difficult prompt for me as everything that I bring home I love. Ironically the oldest member of the household is a snake with a lotus---that I purchased in Berlin in the 1960's. Some years later, my house burned down and only me, an errant boyfriend and the snake survived. Ah yes, maybe I collect bells, no dad of the dead figures on bicycles. Oh yes, the few pictures of my mother that exist-framed by a wonderful art gallery in Lambertville-whose owner had early onset Alzheimer's. Ah yes, I have a cross that belonged to her from Iceland-- and religious artifacts--My friend Julia Zegar--says you have space fill it---collections by another name is love.
Dec 10, 2023Liked by Suleika Jaouad, Carmen Radley
Thank you for today’s prompt. Suleika you and Jon would be the best parents. If parenthood is something you decide on there is a very lucky child waiting.
On collecting! I’m always grateful for the little gifts left by nature that I find on walks. This summer I collected lots of feathers. I have a plastic bag full of feathers. Feathers are special gifts. I also found moth wings, a rabbit skeleton, rocks. I will amass the smooth stones I find on the beach. I wonder how many years it took for the ocean to make them so smooth and almost translucent. And sea glass is also a precious gift. I also take pictures. Lots and lots of pictures. I have thousands of captured moments. So I can say I’m a collector of moments. Almost all are natures moments. Frozen moments. Because nature is never still. Life is never still but always moving. But I can return to my photos of that captured moment and it will bring me back to how I felt in that moment.
I love my crystals. I’ll buy crystals that catch my eye. I love looking at the facets and lines. I don’t know if I believe they are magic but I believe everything captures and holds energy. I keep revisiting a day in Westerly that was magical. So much life around that day. There was a feeling of collective harmony. I collected those memories in pictures that a revisit often, that day will never happen again in the same way. Those pictures are soothing during the winter blues.
I feed the wild birds in the cooler weather. I love them all but wrens are a favorite. The wrens had a nest in a post in my backyard this summer. A wren also got into my house this summer. That was a surprise. I left the door open and it found its way back outside. It left me a tiny feather. I love those sassy little birds. And they imitate a rattle snake as a defense. Wrens are a favorite. Lots of animals are favorites. But wrens keep showing up in my world.
Dec 10, 2023Liked by Suleika Jaouad, Carmen Radley
At this stage of my life, I am getting rid of things. There are things I have collected but I want to make sure have good homes. Birds nests. Vintage oil lamps. Really cool vintage clothing (that’s not trendy right now!) but I just want to feel the lightness of being. Family heirloom jewelry. Don’t get me wrong I loved having these things and collecting these things they brought much joy. But I am in the state of mind is to give it all back. Be light.
Dec 10, 2023Liked by Suleika Jaouad, Carmen Radley
I think one thing the pandemic continues to teach us as we see our lives changed, many loved ones still being taken, so much heartbreak shared; is the need to prioritize loving and caring for each other as human beings - all brothers and sisters. One family who needs each other.
Also, wanted to find a place to tell you how stirring I found both ‘American Symphony’ and the recent ‘Architectural Digest’ interview/profile with you and Jon. They’re so different in scope and platform but share one common, powerful, radiant and central theme - the amazing bond of respect and love the two of you share. As gorgeous as the cinematography of the film and the structure and contents of your Brooklyn home both are … they exist only as backdrop to the tangible, unbreakable stream of unconditional love flowing like a circle from one to other and back again. I felt it was a privilege to be let into that intimate ongoing conversation in both places. Thank you for that gift.
Dec 10, 2023Liked by Suleika Jaouad, Carmen Radley
When my son was 17 he hit and killed a woman while he was driving home from his part time job. He was hurrying back to be off the road because his junior permit had a curfew and his boss had kept him too late, so he was driving too fast in the turbo charged Saab that I had begged his father not to get him. He was driving on a 4 lane road divided by a grassy median coming out of a small town lined with hotels and restaurants. A family was crossing the road to get from their hotel to a restaurant on the other side, where there was no crosswalk or lights. He never saw them. He hit one of them but didn't know what had happened until he screetched to a stop and saw. I was living 2 hours away in Philadelphia, and his father who lived close was away for the weekend. He sat in the back of a police car absolutely horror stricken and gutted for a long time until they reached my mother to come get him. It was just an unbelievable nightmare all around - for the family who lost a beloved member, to watch the impact of it on my son, my own suffering for what he, and the family were suffering.
But something interesting started happening for me in the few following weeks - I felt like I was entering a kind of transcendent state out of so much trauma, like I was seeing everything so clearly with new sight and understanding, my vision was literally clearer. I would just "know" things were going to happen and they would. There was a kind of surreal peace and sense of connection to everything while simultaneously feeling devastated. And then this: I started finding feathers everywhere. But not just randomly - I'd find a duck feather where there were no ducks, a cardinal feather placed just so on a railing, a blue jay feather right on the step of my house as I was leaving. It was happening so much it was almost beyond comprehension, but I also knew it was a sign that other forces were with me during this awful time, and it gave me comfort. I saved every one of them, and gave great thanks each time I found one. Birds have been messengers for me in many ways through my life - I have more unbelievable stories I could share, but this is my sharing for this prompt.
Dec 10, 2023Liked by Suleika Jaouad, Carmen Radley
Heart shaped rocks found in nature. It started as something fun and whimsical between my daughter and me, and now that she's gone, it's one of the ways I stay connected with her. The ricks feel like little "hellos." I have piles of them. 💜
Dec 10, 2023Liked by Suleika Jaouad, Carmen Radley
This morning's writings caused me to take pause and look around our home. We have a large collection of the Blessed Mother Mary, paintings and figurines, but this collection came to us by default from my wife's mother. We have many, many stones and crystals, gathered over the years, their colors and vibrations in jars or spread out here and there throughout the house. We also have many feathers and even the wings of birds . . . a turkey, a falcon, a hawk . . . birds that were found on our property in the mountains, whose wings were lovingly preserved by a local native "grandmother". Whose wings I hope to pray over and make smudge fans from one day, adorning them with beads and leather. Why so many wings, I never collected them consciously but now I think they represent flight and freedom, freedom from being trapped in a body that is fraught with pain (I have chronic inflammatory disease) and flight one day to another dimension where I will join those who have flown away before me.
Dec 10, 2023Liked by Suleika Jaouad, Carmen Radley
What an extraordinary excerpt. Thank you so much for sharing it here. This author is new to me, and I’m grateful to know about her, as I am for your thoughts, too, Suleika.
As for me, I have never thought of myself as a collector of things, as an accumulator of objects. Somehow, and I’m sure incorrectly, collecting has always sounded, to me, calculated, a deliberate and focused act, and I feel anything but deliberate or focused about the objects I love. Yet my home is filled with things I have gathered for as long as I can remember: rocks, rusted metal, zuni fetishes, hand dyed yarn and textiles formed from natural materials, things that surround me with their beauty even on the worst of days. So, on reflection, it seems to me there has been, on an unconscious level, some inner purposefulness in this gathering of objects. Looking at them as I write now, I see that they all slow me down, that their handmade or nature-shaped qualities ask me to take notice of their history and, so, bring the continuum of time inside the linear walls of my home. Beyond these objects, or maybe through them, I also see that what I collect, mostly, and without even realizing it, are thoughts and ideas. I’m inspired by a person, an event, a sentence, a visual image, and it sticks to me, each one weaving itself into the fabric of how I see the world, support myself and insulate me from its roughness when that is, sadly, and often, called for. Like the objects, they are good friends, and, so, an affirming comfort.
Dec 10, 2023Liked by Suleika Jaouad, Carmen Radley
In my youth I collected eggs. Marble eggs, painted eggs, stone eggs, enameled eggs, oval and hard eggs, cold, cold eggs. I used to keep them, display them, in an oval shaped wooden bowl. The mystery of ovum hidden away. Protected evolution of life. Under and within. A thin shell. The beginnings of life. Now that collection is packed away. And I am collecting memories. Another kind of creation is going on another season of life.
Dec 10, 2023Liked by Suleika Jaouad, Carmen Radley
Beautiful. Thank you. This prompt got me thinking. I have never thought of myself as a collector. My partner's mother worked for the Bureau of Printing and Engraving in Washington, D.C., so he learned a lot about how money is printed. He became a coin collector. That's what I thought of as collecting, but reading this piece today, I realize I collect all sorts of things, for all sorts of reasons. For example, I have a lovely glass container filled with sand and shells from beaches I have visited all over the globe. It reminds me of all the beaches I have loved and, if I get really still, I can feel the warm sun on my skin and the sand beneath my feet.
I collect art, too, I suppose. Nearly every piece that hangs on our walls was acquired on a trip, or from a precious friend/relative/child. Symbolism, and the memories they evoke, surround me. My latest piece, a gorgeous photo of Mt. Saint Michel, in France. It hangs above our bed to remind me of the awesome power human beings have to transcend limitations.
During COVID lockdown, the natural world around our house transformed. We were visited by coyotes, foxes, deer, a nest pair of Northern Spotted Owls, and a pair of Red Shouldered Hawks. Despite the heartbreak and agony of that time, these creatures served as a constant reminder of life and renewal. I photographed them and started collecting feathers - even a tiny hummingbird nest that blew out of a tree and landed at the base of our driveway. When I gaze on these items now it reminds me of a magical time, when the animals came to visit.
Finally, I have been thinking about Facebook as a kind of collection. I don't post my daily activities, or even most of my adventures, but I think of it as a place where all the people I have known, past and present, live. I don't have to worry about losing my address book or rolodex (remember those?) because my people are reachable through Facebook. Since my myeloma diagnosis, this collection has become deeply symbolic to me, a reminder that I am not alone, that I am held in community.
Dec 10, 2023Liked by Suleika Jaouad, Carmen Radley
A small treasury of hearts lie scattered on the table among photographs and candles and plants. I hadn't noticed that I had had such a diverse collection of them - hadn't deliberately set out to gather these symbols of love - one a heart-shaped rock, one made out of crystal, another of blue glass, a tiny silver charm and one of porcelain with the Gaelic word for love, grá, imprinted on it. But when I dusted around them yesterday, I wondered what had been the catalyst to summon them and when they had started arriving. Then I remembered.
A few day after surgery, a tumor just removed from my spinal cord, my body partially and temporarily paralyzed, my skin completely numb from the clavicle down, I lay in my hospital room, the walls awash in sherbet colors from the sunset, my sister at my bedside feeding me cherry jello. We were quiet - the dregs of anesthesia and the grip of painkillers made my brain thick and slow. In that pink twilight, my sister asked me, "What do you think this all means?" I didn't have to wonder what she meant. I had been asking myself the same question since the diagnosis of cancer inside my spinal cord. I pondered for a few minutes, my mind opaque as though padded with lint. Then a moment of clarity. " It's about love," I said. "It's about receiving love."
Now, thirteen years after that flash of insight, I see that my skin has taken on what had ailed my heart for decades - my skin is permanently numb and on fire with nerve pain in the same way that my heart was numb and in pain for most of my life. My body stopped me in my tracks, literally, so that I might finally allow others to love me and to let that love heal me. And that is when the hearts began to arrive - shells on the beach shaped like hearts, rocks, key chains, tree ornaments - many of them gifts, most of them found with my own eyes. So I tend to the collection - they are an altar of sorts - an altar to my healing, to my vow to let love in, to not walk numbly through the world, even though I cannot feel it with my skin.
A wonderfully descriptive piece of writing from Kerri Ni Dochartaigh. Lovely.
When Covid began, my 89 year old mother went into hospital on March 5th, in Danbury, Connecticut. She died about three weeks later. I was with her all but the last five days of her stay, when I was asked to leave. I watched her take her last breaths on her Ipad, along with my sister, and daughter back in New Jersey. It was gut wrenching. An inspiring woman who walked, trekked, and explored the world over with my father collecting indigenous art and artifacts, she had a keen eye for the tiniest things-particularly four leaf clovers. They were her specialty to find and collect, much to her family's delight. Several weeks after she died, some of her grandchildren and children both in Ct. and in NJ, ALL found four leaf clovers on the same day-- several of us for the very first time. We have found, collected, and saved many since then, all pressed between the pages of travel books of places Mom and Dad have walked.
When Covid first began we all were in lockdown and I live alone in NYC. My saving grace was my balcony. When the weather got warmer I began buying and collecting beautiful red geranium baskets, petunia baskets, marigolds and pink and red anemones. Then I began buying plants-fiddle faddle plant, ferns, wandering Jew, coleus. Why? There was so much unfathomable deaths in NYC and throughout the USA and the rest of the world and I was devastated like everyone else. I wanted the aliveness of these plants and flowers on my balcony and in my home. They also were in honor of all who died. Then the deepest cut my dear friend and loyal assistant, Amy died of Covid and she was gone in a flash. More devastation hitting me in my gut. Amy loved small, dainty pierced earrings, and I collected some, and with the permission of her sister, I mailed the earrings to her sister. Death was everywhere even in Central Park where they setup tents for the sick everywhere. Every day I would sit on my balcony in meditation surrounded by the aliveness and the beauty of the plants and flowers and grieve, pray, cry, and be grateful I was alive and healthy thru all of this horror. I also bought candles to pray over and to shed the physical light in my home. I will never forget!
I am afraid to collect "things." I have left so many "things" behind in moves to start over, as a child told by my Army father that "we can't take those things because it will go over our moving weight limit." I collect memories. I escape to the safety of the life lived, the people, smells, sights, sounds, conversations, dear animal protectors, and the bittersweet memories of each collected bit.
I'd often heard stories of an old woman who gathered arrowheads on the property my father-in-law had bought decades earlier in Montana. I was fascinated, thinking about the peoples who inhabited this land, these wild open spaces, this same ground, under these same stars. I wanted to find one too. The stories most intriguing for me growing up in the Los Angeles school district were the stories of Lewis and Clark and their interactions with the native Americans and Sacajawea. I listened and felt care about her as if I had been there at that time. Stories of the Chumash filled my head throughout my elementary educational years. My husband eventually inherited his father's property, and now we live there, and I am still fascinated by the land and the big star-filled sky. One day, while walking, I prayed. "God? Will you help me to find an arrowhead some time before I die?" I took about 10 more steps, looked down, and there it was...a perfect arrowhead, chipped and carved for small game. I stooped, picked it up, put it in my pocket, and felt my heart soar in the wonder and beauty of the part of life that is unseen...the thin places.
What an incredible piece of writing, so grateful to be given so many opportunities to read pieces from a vast array of creative people! Thank you!
I collect used postcards from op-shops and second-hand markets. I stand transfixed in the moments I find them - reading a small snippet of someone’s life that I’ll never know from a long time ago. The oldest one I have is from 1918. Sometimes I feel as if I’m imposing and shouldn’t be reading the triumphs, tribulations and insights these people have found on their travels, but somehow those postcards made it to a market and then to me. I think I collect them because the things they write bridge time and space and make me feel connected to the rest of the world and the people in it. Without realising it at the time, I think collecting those postcards reminded me that everyone has a story worth telling.
This is a difficult prompt for me as everything that I bring home I love. Ironically the oldest member of the household is a snake with a lotus---that I purchased in Berlin in the 1960's. Some years later, my house burned down and only me, an errant boyfriend and the snake survived. Ah yes, maybe I collect bells, no dad of the dead figures on bicycles. Oh yes, the few pictures of my mother that exist-framed by a wonderful art gallery in Lambertville-whose owner had early onset Alzheimer's. Ah yes, I have a cross that belonged to her from Iceland-- and religious artifacts--My friend Julia Zegar--says you have space fill it---collections by another name is love.
Thank you for today’s prompt. Suleika you and Jon would be the best parents. If parenthood is something you decide on there is a very lucky child waiting.
On collecting! I’m always grateful for the little gifts left by nature that I find on walks. This summer I collected lots of feathers. I have a plastic bag full of feathers. Feathers are special gifts. I also found moth wings, a rabbit skeleton, rocks. I will amass the smooth stones I find on the beach. I wonder how many years it took for the ocean to make them so smooth and almost translucent. And sea glass is also a precious gift. I also take pictures. Lots and lots of pictures. I have thousands of captured moments. So I can say I’m a collector of moments. Almost all are natures moments. Frozen moments. Because nature is never still. Life is never still but always moving. But I can return to my photos of that captured moment and it will bring me back to how I felt in that moment.
I love my crystals. I’ll buy crystals that catch my eye. I love looking at the facets and lines. I don’t know if I believe they are magic but I believe everything captures and holds energy. I keep revisiting a day in Westerly that was magical. So much life around that day. There was a feeling of collective harmony. I collected those memories in pictures that a revisit often, that day will never happen again in the same way. Those pictures are soothing during the winter blues.
I feed the wild birds in the cooler weather. I love them all but wrens are a favorite. The wrens had a nest in a post in my backyard this summer. A wren also got into my house this summer. That was a surprise. I left the door open and it found its way back outside. It left me a tiny feather. I love those sassy little birds. And they imitate a rattle snake as a defense. Wrens are a favorite. Lots of animals are favorites. But wrens keep showing up in my world.
Hope everyone is having a wonderful season.
At this stage of my life, I am getting rid of things. There are things I have collected but I want to make sure have good homes. Birds nests. Vintage oil lamps. Really cool vintage clothing (that’s not trendy right now!) but I just want to feel the lightness of being. Family heirloom jewelry. Don’t get me wrong I loved having these things and collecting these things they brought much joy. But I am in the state of mind is to give it all back. Be light.
I think one thing the pandemic continues to teach us as we see our lives changed, many loved ones still being taken, so much heartbreak shared; is the need to prioritize loving and caring for each other as human beings - all brothers and sisters. One family who needs each other.
Also, wanted to find a place to tell you how stirring I found both ‘American Symphony’ and the recent ‘Architectural Digest’ interview/profile with you and Jon. They’re so different in scope and platform but share one common, powerful, radiant and central theme - the amazing bond of respect and love the two of you share. As gorgeous as the cinematography of the film and the structure and contents of your Brooklyn home both are … they exist only as backdrop to the tangible, unbreakable stream of unconditional love flowing like a circle from one to other and back again. I felt it was a privilege to be let into that intimate ongoing conversation in both places. Thank you for that gift.
☮️❤️🌷
When my son was 17 he hit and killed a woman while he was driving home from his part time job. He was hurrying back to be off the road because his junior permit had a curfew and his boss had kept him too late, so he was driving too fast in the turbo charged Saab that I had begged his father not to get him. He was driving on a 4 lane road divided by a grassy median coming out of a small town lined with hotels and restaurants. A family was crossing the road to get from their hotel to a restaurant on the other side, where there was no crosswalk or lights. He never saw them. He hit one of them but didn't know what had happened until he screetched to a stop and saw. I was living 2 hours away in Philadelphia, and his father who lived close was away for the weekend. He sat in the back of a police car absolutely horror stricken and gutted for a long time until they reached my mother to come get him. It was just an unbelievable nightmare all around - for the family who lost a beloved member, to watch the impact of it on my son, my own suffering for what he, and the family were suffering.
But something interesting started happening for me in the few following weeks - I felt like I was entering a kind of transcendent state out of so much trauma, like I was seeing everything so clearly with new sight and understanding, my vision was literally clearer. I would just "know" things were going to happen and they would. There was a kind of surreal peace and sense of connection to everything while simultaneously feeling devastated. And then this: I started finding feathers everywhere. But not just randomly - I'd find a duck feather where there were no ducks, a cardinal feather placed just so on a railing, a blue jay feather right on the step of my house as I was leaving. It was happening so much it was almost beyond comprehension, but I also knew it was a sign that other forces were with me during this awful time, and it gave me comfort. I saved every one of them, and gave great thanks each time I found one. Birds have been messengers for me in many ways through my life - I have more unbelievable stories I could share, but this is my sharing for this prompt.
Heart shaped rocks found in nature. It started as something fun and whimsical between my daughter and me, and now that she's gone, it's one of the ways I stay connected with her. The ricks feel like little "hellos." I have piles of them. 💜
This morning's writings caused me to take pause and look around our home. We have a large collection of the Blessed Mother Mary, paintings and figurines, but this collection came to us by default from my wife's mother. We have many, many stones and crystals, gathered over the years, their colors and vibrations in jars or spread out here and there throughout the house. We also have many feathers and even the wings of birds . . . a turkey, a falcon, a hawk . . . birds that were found on our property in the mountains, whose wings were lovingly preserved by a local native "grandmother". Whose wings I hope to pray over and make smudge fans from one day, adorning them with beads and leather. Why so many wings, I never collected them consciously but now I think they represent flight and freedom, freedom from being trapped in a body that is fraught with pain (I have chronic inflammatory disease) and flight one day to another dimension where I will join those who have flown away before me.
What an extraordinary excerpt. Thank you so much for sharing it here. This author is new to me, and I’m grateful to know about her, as I am for your thoughts, too, Suleika.
As for me, I have never thought of myself as a collector of things, as an accumulator of objects. Somehow, and I’m sure incorrectly, collecting has always sounded, to me, calculated, a deliberate and focused act, and I feel anything but deliberate or focused about the objects I love. Yet my home is filled with things I have gathered for as long as I can remember: rocks, rusted metal, zuni fetishes, hand dyed yarn and textiles formed from natural materials, things that surround me with their beauty even on the worst of days. So, on reflection, it seems to me there has been, on an unconscious level, some inner purposefulness in this gathering of objects. Looking at them as I write now, I see that they all slow me down, that their handmade or nature-shaped qualities ask me to take notice of their history and, so, bring the continuum of time inside the linear walls of my home. Beyond these objects, or maybe through them, I also see that what I collect, mostly, and without even realizing it, are thoughts and ideas. I’m inspired by a person, an event, a sentence, a visual image, and it sticks to me, each one weaving itself into the fabric of how I see the world, support myself and insulate me from its roughness when that is, sadly, and often, called for. Like the objects, they are good friends, and, so, an affirming comfort.
In my youth I collected eggs. Marble eggs, painted eggs, stone eggs, enameled eggs, oval and hard eggs, cold, cold eggs. I used to keep them, display them, in an oval shaped wooden bowl. The mystery of ovum hidden away. Protected evolution of life. Under and within. A thin shell. The beginnings of life. Now that collection is packed away. And I am collecting memories. Another kind of creation is going on another season of life.
Beautiful. Thank you. This prompt got me thinking. I have never thought of myself as a collector. My partner's mother worked for the Bureau of Printing and Engraving in Washington, D.C., so he learned a lot about how money is printed. He became a coin collector. That's what I thought of as collecting, but reading this piece today, I realize I collect all sorts of things, for all sorts of reasons. For example, I have a lovely glass container filled with sand and shells from beaches I have visited all over the globe. It reminds me of all the beaches I have loved and, if I get really still, I can feel the warm sun on my skin and the sand beneath my feet.
I collect art, too, I suppose. Nearly every piece that hangs on our walls was acquired on a trip, or from a precious friend/relative/child. Symbolism, and the memories they evoke, surround me. My latest piece, a gorgeous photo of Mt. Saint Michel, in France. It hangs above our bed to remind me of the awesome power human beings have to transcend limitations.
During COVID lockdown, the natural world around our house transformed. We were visited by coyotes, foxes, deer, a nest pair of Northern Spotted Owls, and a pair of Red Shouldered Hawks. Despite the heartbreak and agony of that time, these creatures served as a constant reminder of life and renewal. I photographed them and started collecting feathers - even a tiny hummingbird nest that blew out of a tree and landed at the base of our driveway. When I gaze on these items now it reminds me of a magical time, when the animals came to visit.
Finally, I have been thinking about Facebook as a kind of collection. I don't post my daily activities, or even most of my adventures, but I think of it as a place where all the people I have known, past and present, live. I don't have to worry about losing my address book or rolodex (remember those?) because my people are reachable through Facebook. Since my myeloma diagnosis, this collection has become deeply symbolic to me, a reminder that I am not alone, that I am held in community.
A small treasury of hearts lie scattered on the table among photographs and candles and plants. I hadn't noticed that I had had such a diverse collection of them - hadn't deliberately set out to gather these symbols of love - one a heart-shaped rock, one made out of crystal, another of blue glass, a tiny silver charm and one of porcelain with the Gaelic word for love, grá, imprinted on it. But when I dusted around them yesterday, I wondered what had been the catalyst to summon them and when they had started arriving. Then I remembered.
A few day after surgery, a tumor just removed from my spinal cord, my body partially and temporarily paralyzed, my skin completely numb from the clavicle down, I lay in my hospital room, the walls awash in sherbet colors from the sunset, my sister at my bedside feeding me cherry jello. We were quiet - the dregs of anesthesia and the grip of painkillers made my brain thick and slow. In that pink twilight, my sister asked me, "What do you think this all means?" I didn't have to wonder what she meant. I had been asking myself the same question since the diagnosis of cancer inside my spinal cord. I pondered for a few minutes, my mind opaque as though padded with lint. Then a moment of clarity. " It's about love," I said. "It's about receiving love."
Now, thirteen years after that flash of insight, I see that my skin has taken on what had ailed my heart for decades - my skin is permanently numb and on fire with nerve pain in the same way that my heart was numb and in pain for most of my life. My body stopped me in my tracks, literally, so that I might finally allow others to love me and to let that love heal me. And that is when the hearts began to arrive - shells on the beach shaped like hearts, rocks, key chains, tree ornaments - many of them gifts, most of them found with my own eyes. So I tend to the collection - they are an altar of sorts - an altar to my healing, to my vow to let love in, to not walk numbly through the world, even though I cannot feel it with my skin.