The Look of Light

Before I move on to other cities from our trip, I remember I had written prior to visiting Paris that Adam Gopnik’s memoir Paris to the Moon “makes me want to pause long enough to notice the light.”

Sunrise on the morning commute

Apart from the day after we arrived when jet lag didn’t wake us until 1:30pm (!), our days were full of walking different neighbourhoods; visiting art galleries, historic sites, and monuments; eating baguettes, macarons, galettes, crêpes; ordering a café crème and deciding I DID like coffee as long as there was sugar in it; taking pictures of colourful doors and narrow streets, returning to our Airbnb exhausted in the best kind of way.

A former train station, Musée d’Orsay is filled with Impressionist paintings. Our favourite museum in Paris.

As much as I could on a first trip to Paris, I tried to pause, to really look around me, to appreciate the ordinary along with the extraordinary, the juxtaposition of old and new, sacred and secular, to follow my favourite Impressionist painters in looking for the light. Here are some of those moments.

Strolling through Luxembourg Gardens with a view of the Pantheon

Couples dance to live music in Montmartre. This scene for me captured Paris at its most romantic.

The love lock bridge is gone but that doesn’t stop people from decorating the posts of Le Post des Arts.

I could care less about the Forum shopping mall but the ceiling fascinated me.

The enchanting Notre Dame

Classic V-shaped building and wide boulevards from the Haussmann era of Paris’s city planning

This boy stopped so I could get a picture of the door but I like it better with him in it.

The light on this galette (like a crêpe but made with buckwheat flour) makes it look even more divine! One of the best things I ate.

Dinosaur meets Eiffel Tower

Backside of Basilica du Sacré-Coeur. Did you know it has a pig gargoyle?

Hotel de Sully in the fashionable Marais district

The golden hour hitting the extravagant Palais Garnier (opera house)

I have a thing for red doors, and architecture that melds in interesting ways.

A decadent visit to Ladurée on Les Champs-Élysées

If this is what Sainte Chapelle looked like on a grey day, imagine if the sun was streaming through all that stained glass.

The view from L’Arc de Triomphe is magnificent in all directions.

La Madeleine meets Calvin Klein. Unfortunately this kind of juxtaposition was a common sight.

Moonlight over the Louvre. Bonne nuit, Paris.

Festival of Lights

The theme of light has come full circle for me this year. I began 2013 with a poem for the new year, a poem of light, and I have ended the year surrounded by over a million twinkling lights in the beautiful city of Vancouver that I moved to in May.

Here are some images from the Festival of Lights at VanDusen Botanical Garden, which you may recognize from this post on the Touch Wood sculpture exhibition that I went to in September. It was great to see the Gardens in a completely different season, or, if I may use the à propos pun, in a whole new light.

Thanks for journeying with me through another year on this blog. Wishing you much light, love, and learning in the New Year. See you back here in 2014!

A Poem for the New Year

I have a poem and a picture I want to share with you to usher in 2013.

Maybe it’s an odd choice (the poem) because it has nothing to do with New Year’s resolutions and everything to do with a new way of seeing, yet isn’t that what a new year is for? I, like many others, have external things in my life I want to see change, but I think equally important is all the internal stuff — the place I look out from when I look at and respond to the world. I don’t want this place to be static.

I love this poem because it shows movement — internally. You can tell this from reading the title. How the speaker saw light at 32 is not how he saw it at 25 or 18, and not how he will see it at 40, 57, 86. We could all write our own versions of this poem at our various stages. This is his.

Light, At Thirty-Two by Michael Blumenthal

It is the first thing God speaks of
when we meet Him, in the good book
of Genesis. And now, I think
I see it all in terms of light:

How, the other day at dusk
on Ossabaw Island, the marsh grass
was the color of the most beautiful hair
I had ever seen, or how—years ago
in the early-dawn light of Montrose Park—
I saw the most ravishing woman
in the world, only to find, hours later
over drinks in a dark bar, that it
wasn’t she who was ravishing,
but the light: how it filtered
through the leaves of the magnolia
onto her cheeks, how it turned
her cotton dress to silk, her walk
to a tour-jeté.

And I understood, finally,
what my friend John meant,
twenty years ago, when he said: Love
is keeping the lights on. And I understood
why Matisse and Bonnard and Gauguin
and Cézanne all followed the light:
Because they knew all lovers are equal
in the dark, that light defines beauty
the way longing defines desire, that
everything depends on how light falls
on a seashell, a mouth … a broken bottle.

And now, I’d like to learn
to follow light wherever it leads me,
never again to say to a woman, YOU
are beautiful, but rather to whisper:
Darling, the way light fell on your hair
this morning when we woke—God,
it was beautiful. Because, if the light is right,
then the day and the body and the faint pleasures
waiting at the window … they too are right.
All things lovely there. As that first poet wrote,
in his first book of poems: Let there be light.

Inspired by the poem, I took this photograph the other day, fascinated how light plays images like hands play sounds                                                                                     these are the faint pleasures waiting at my window                                                          the space I play, write, wonder                                                                                        this picture is my poem to light                                                                                          an entrance to the new year

keys to my world