The Sidebar: Into the Mists + The Color Green, My Cookbooks & An Asparagus Stir-Fry
With thanks to Van Morrison, Mary Oliver, and coffee
The Old Poets of China
Wherever I am, the world comes after me.
It offers me its busyness. It does not believe
that I do not want it. Now I understand
why the old poets of China went so far and high
into the mountains, then crept into the pale mist.
— Mary Oliver, from Why I Wake Early
Into the Mists
He promised me he would disappear back into the mists. If I wasn’t interested. Which I wasn’t. Or not so very much, anyway.
But my heart leapt at this poetry. Words from a lawyer, who, from everything I could glean from the internet (which was very little) seemed, well, lawyerish. Not necessarily the sensitive type.
And yet here was an email out of the blue from this man who waited patiently — for months no less — after the first advance was rebuked, after mutual friends proposed the idea of him to me, and I said, “not now” — to ask me for a cup of coffee.
If he truly intended to disappear back into the mists, I wanted to know what he’d seen there and why he’d been there.
Might I — if I stretched my imagination — want to disappear into the mists with him? I’m pretty sure I did not entertain that thought.
But it was February, and by all accounts, my return email hedged my availability by claiming that I’d have to be terribly anti-social not to have time for a cup of coffee in the middle of the winter on an Island out at sea. In other words, I thought I was being ha-ha funny by saying, in so many words, that I couldn’t think of an excuse for saying no.
We had coffee. We got married. (A few years passed in between these two events.)
Since then we have been in and out of the mists, together at times, at other times alone, but always with our hands outstretched to each other.
The thing is: the mists – both metaphorical and physical – are not a bad thing. They are just otherworldly and sometimes obfuscating. Meaning you can be wandering in circles, bewildered, and yet enveloped by wonder and calm at the same time. To be in the mists is to be away from the rest of the world – and at the same time closer to the spirit, wherever that lives, in your heart or in the universe.
The mists, as Mary Oliver writes, can offer a great relief from the noise of life.
Technically, mist is tiny droplets of water hanging in the air. These droplets form when warmer water in the air near the earth’s surface is rapidly cooled, causing it to change from invisible gas to tiny (barely) visible water droplets. Mist differs from fog in one simple way – visibility. With fog, you can see less than 1000 meters away; with mist you can see further.
We have both mist and fog on Martha’s Vineyard, especially in the springtime when the air temperatures finally warm up a bit but the ocean is still stone cold from the winter.
This morning I drove to work in the fog, its kitchen curtains filtering the bright morning light and turning the pines and fence posts into a slideshow of silhouettes as I drove by.
Yesterday on our walk down to the pond, along the big hayfield and past the hedgerows of bittersweet (still dormant) and wild roses (beginning to leaf out), the mist put a lovely sheen on everything. The wind picked up and the invisible droplets began to move sideways, popping against our faces like bubbles from a child’s bubble wand. Across the field, the mist – or I should say the afternoon light refracted through the mist – painted a cow and her calf in soft brush strokes, as if they (and we) were inside an Impressionist painting. Everything is softer in the mists.
Those who come to live on an Island embrace the mists. The seclusion, the romance, the mystery, the beauty, the uncertainty.
The soundtrack (at least for we two as we float in and out of the mist)? Van Morrison’s Into the Mystic (which he originally titled Into the Misty). A blurring of love and spirituality – the seeking and the finding so similar after all.
Let your soul and spirit fly into the mystic – or the mists.