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“Noticing is a creative act” — David Perkins, Harvard University

Jun 04

Notes to Match a Jagged Spirit

Dana Jennings is a New York Times editor who for many months wrote a Times column about his experience of having prostrate cancer. (Jennings has written a wonderful book about the power of music: Sing Me Back Home: Love, Death and Country Music.) In one column he provided a playlist of songs “to have cancer by.” Jennings said that each time he played one of these songs, he did so “in optimism and healing.” Here are his suggestions:

Dana Jennings’ “Blue, Bluer, and Bluest” playlist:
  • “Hallelujah” by Jeff Buckley
  • “Moanin’ at Midnight” by Howlin’ Wolf
  • “School’s Out” by Alice Cooper
  • “Hurt” by Johnny Cash
  • “The Weight” by the Band and the Staple Singers
  • “Leviathan” by Mastodon
  • “Kind of Blue” by Miles Davis
  • “Soul Man” by Sam and Dave & Kelley Jemison
  • “Sweet Old World” by Miles Davis
  • “I’m so Lonesome I Could Cry” by Hank Williams
If I were making a playlist today in the spirit of Dana Jennings, I would include these pieces:
Elizabeth Neeld’s “Notes to Match a Jagged Spirit” playlist:
  • “Beyond the Missouri Sky” by Charlie Haden & Pat Metheny“
  • Still Crazy After All These Years” by Brad Mehldau Trio
  • “Boulder to Birmingham” by Emmylou Harris
  • “Part III Adagietto Fifth Symphony” by Gustav Mahler
  • “Drowning Man” by Darden Smith
  • “Yo-Yo Ma Plays Ennio Morricone” by Yo-Yo Ma
  • “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” by Cowboy Junkies
  • “Downtown Church” by Patty Griffin
  • “All Is Well” by Ollabelle
  • “Help Me Make It Through The Night” by Kris Kristofferson
  • “There Is a Balm in Gilead” by Mahalia Jackson


May 28

Quinquennial

Discovered this morning: a new favorite word.

Quinquennial

Just try saying this word—quin…quen…nial

This feels so strange in my mouth that I say it again and again just for the unusual physical sensation.

To pronounce quinquennial requires me to scrunch up my face, widen my mouth, and form the sounds almost in the middle of my mouth! Strange. Really strange.

Do you suppose this sensation of saying a brand new word that I am today finding so interesting and even amusing is the experience children have when they are first learning language?

Think of a toddler who has just learned the word boo. Boo…booo…boo…booo.

The little one repeats the word as she slaps her high chair tabletop or as he holds on to walk along the edge of the couch. Is this new word a fun sensation in the child’s mouth and to the child’s ears? Based on seeing quinquennial for the first time in my life this morning and saying the word again and again, I like to think that today’s experience is a relishing for me as an adult of the same kind of fun sensation little ones have when they learn to say boo.

By the way, the definition of quinquennial was almost beside the point. But I did look it up. Probably won’t have to do that for another five years!



May 28

Looking and Seeing

On a whim, I decided to take a photograph every day this year and post it on a website called Shuttercal.com. The unexpected consequences of this quick decision have been positive and completely unexpected.  For one thing, I now have a much clearer distinction between looking and seeing. I’ve looked at things in my house for years, for instance.  Not until I set a parameter one month that every photograph I made during those thirty-one days had to be an interior shot did I really see things in my house.  Where did that tiny yellow bird come from in the folk art painting on a little enamel stamp box that has sat right in front of my eyes on my desk for years?  Who had ever seen the lake-like depth of color—green, blue, purple, black—in the hand-thrown glass marbles that my aunt and I use to play a board game when we are visiting?  And what to account for so much beauty that exists in the speckles of the granite counter in our kitchen, pray tell?



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