Spring Slowdown
On Atlanta, the Adriatic, and poetry; on tuning into the world, and turning it on
Hello Friends,
Spring in Atlanta is undeniably gorgeous. City neighborhoods are shaded by tall oaks and tulip trees while light filtered through their canopies skips across streets. Houses take backstage as front yards kick up their colorful show like a can-can skirt, from ultra pink azaleas and electric blue hydrangeas to fragrant jasmine and massive camellias. Squirrels are constant all year round, but in spring chipmunks dart from tiny holes, and at dusk it’s not unusual to see bunnies hop across lawns. Spring comes early here and takes its time stretching itself out like a cat after a nap.
For me, the trees of Atlanta have replaced my old fixation: the Adriatic Sea. I grew up in Rijeka, a port city on the northern coast of Croatia. The tiny balcony of our flat faced southwest, overlooking a steep street that led to Novi List, the daily newspaper. Above it, you could see the sparkle of the Adriatic and an oil refinery jutting out from all that blueness like a candle on a birthday cake. On weekends and holidays, we’d visit my dad’s island, Krk, where my mother and sister moved years ago. When I visit now, I stay with them in the old house on the waterfront. The view is of the sea, of the boats, and across the bay, my hometown, Rijeka.
Nothing anchors me more than looking at the sea. When I travel home, I visit my mom, my sister, and the sea. I could spend hours sitting on a random rock on the side of a craggy trail, simply watching the waters. In the long stretches between visits, I start feeling a sense of fading within myself, or maybe even of myself, like a photograph losing its essence.
In the absence of my home shore, I turn to Atlanta’s trees. In the absence of the gurgle and rush of waves, I listen to birds—the barred owls that call from the pines, the crane that sometimes swoops down the street, the woodpeckers, cardinals, blue jays, and finches. They, too, anchor me, and their rhythms help me feel the movement of time. What’s the point, though, of this perpetual desire for grounding? It’s more than relaxation. In those moments I feel at home, as cliché as that sounds, and most importantly, I feel receptive.
David Bottoms, a former professor of mine, compared that sense of receptivity to transistor radios. He thought that poets had antennas and that they had to turn the proverbial radio on and get the signal. What he meant is that we needed to pay attention to what ideas were out there and that we had to explore those ideas further.
Receptivity is essential in artmaking. It’s the habit of tuning in to the world around us. This isn’t about being surrounded by beauty. The trees don’t need to be in bloom. There doesn’t need to be a sea. What matters is mindfulness, not how picturesque the scene is (though that helps). When we really pay attention, it’s hard not to be moved by whatever we notice, whether it’s muck and rain, bare pollards, or the dark face of winter. All of it has force.
And by moved, I don’t mean just being emotionally touched. I mean feeling something awaken inside, the stir of inspiration that propels us to act, to make, to create. Interestingly enough, that act of making anchors us even further.
In his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi writes of flow as a state of energized focus and immersion in an activity where we lose track of time. It’s an engaging and satisfying way of being what I would call in the zone. He says that we can achieve flow through anything that challenges us just enough to draw us in. That can be sports, work, religious ritual, or a creative project. Whatever the task is, it should stretch us a little but still be achievable.
“The best moments in our lives, are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times—although such experiences can also be enjoyable, if we have worked hard to attain them. The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.
Optimal experience is thus something that we make happen. For a child, it could be placing with trembling fingers the last block on a tower she has built, higher than any she has built so far; for a swimmer, it could be trying to beat his own record; for a violinist, mastering an intricate musical passage. For each person there are thousands of opportunities, challenges to expand ourselves.”
I like to think of flow in terms of poetry and creative practice in general. For example, poetry changes our perception of time. Sometimes it reverses its movement or breaks it up. In a poem, time and history can collapse, like in Seamus Heaney’s 911 poem “Anything Can Happen,” where the ancient world of Jupiter and Fortuna collides with the modern day New York City skyline:
Anything Can Happen
Anything can happen. You know how Jupiter
Will mostly wait for clouds to gather head
Before he hurls the lightning? Well, just now
He galloped his thunder cart and his horses
Across a clear blue sky. It shook the earth
And the clogged underearth, the River Styx,
The winding streams, the Atlantic shore itself.
Anything can happen, the tallest towers
Be overturned, those in high places daunted,
Those overlooked regarded. Stropped-beak Fortune
Swoops, making the air gasp, tearing the crest off one,
Setting it down bleeding on the next.
Ground gives. The heaven’s weight
Lifts up off Atlas like a kettle-lid.
Capstones shift, nothing resettles right.
Telluric ash and fire-spores boil away.
In a poem time can also stand still. A moment can dilate into an impossible stretch, so much so that it rearranges the coordinates of our own identity. In other words, a poem can change us from who we were prior to reading it. Here is a heartbreaking piece that does just that for me, “Moment” by Carol L Gloor.
Moment
At the moment of my mother’s death
I am rinsing frozen chicken.
No vision, no rending
of the temple curtain, only
the soft give of meat.
I had not seen her in four days.
I thought her better,
and the hospital did not call,
so I am fresh from
an office Christmas party,
scotch on my breath
as I answer the phone.
And in one moment all my past acts
become irrevocable.
In poetry and in visual art, the rhythms and challenges of the creative process allow us to physically experience the movement of time. The act of making allows us to see time take shape, from the transformation of the blank page or canvas to a finished piece. There is a strange pleasure in seeing time unfold under our fingertips. It’s as if art is nothing but a record of existence, attempts of a person engaging their body and faculties as they grapple with whatever longings haunt them, that in whatever brief time they are given, they make something that goes beyond the self, and that their work maybe generates a wave, a radio signal, and that they, in turn, energize the world and turn it on.
Love, Andrea
Website: https://andreajurjevic.com/
I am also very much grounded by birdsong. When the clamor of my children’s needs makes it impossible for me to pay attention to anything, it’s the often birdsong, learning to recognize their songs, that helps me remember what it’s like to be “in the flow”—or at least how to get there, and that I can.
-- there was so much loveliness and inspiration in this piece, andrea, that i lost track of all the lines i wanted to praise. i love hearing of bottom's poet antennas, and the thought of art being a record of existence stays with me too.