I know, it isn't Valentines Day. BUT I ran across this post with this poem.
and, well it just fit. The post is from www.icelines.blogspot.com.
I've been trying to "rein in" the collections of things I have. Not because I don't just love everything I have, but because I'm running out of space to keep all the treasures.
Some of my collections are for "someday I'll create ------" and some are for just looking at.
I even take out my treasure trove of fabrics and unfold and iron and re fold and put away. Yes, I do
quilt (in the wintertime when the gardening is done), but not all the beautiful fabrics are for cutting and stitching. I have collections of old scissors and of steel hose nossels and rubber stamps and, and, and.
Tuesday Poem - Pablo Neruda
Today being Valentine's Day in the North Western hemisphere (lingering still in the South?), I thought I'd post a favourite love poem -
Ode to Things by
Pablo Neruda. Having been a collector of odd and unusual things for much of my life, I'm in a process now of shedding and simplifying. This is in part about releasing the past and in part about freeing up space (of the internal and bricks-&-mortar kind). Neruda's poem might at first seem at odds with the process I'm describing, and yet. . . well, I imagine I'll always be passionate about tools and the objects we share our lives with. Birds' eggs, old builder's levels or a rusty ship's chain can bring me to my knees. There is a certain sacredness in these everyday objects, touched as they are by life, imbued as they are with it.
Neruda's
Ode to Things seems to me to be more about the beauty of things
per se than it is about ownership of them. I love this man - my Valentine's Day declaration?! - for the many ways in which he calls us to attention, exhorts us to appreciate the beauty in a pair of scissors, salt-shakers, a ship, the ocean. . .
by the hand of man, every little thing:
on their handle or surface,
the trace of a distant hand
in the depths of forgetfulness.
this one because it rings,
as the softness of a woman’s hip,
that one there for its deep-sea color,
and that one for its velvet feel.
or the plants of the jungle and the field,
those things that leap and climb, desire, and survive.
to tell me the whole story.
Not only did they touch me,
they were so alive with me
that they lived half my life
and will die half my death.
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