A song in yellow
Dear _________
I was passing through Dalgety early this afternoon and I thought of you. I've started a short photography course (purely practical reasons - product shots for the pottery) and I was mentally taking photographs.
I saw snow-capped mountains, grey-olive fields, and boulders in improbable arrangements as though a giant had been playing knuckle bones.
The Snowy River is wide and fast now.
The drive to the monastery is Psalm 103 in visuals - 'He makes the springs pour water into the ravines, it flows between the mountains... He waters the mountains from His upper chambers...' Reading this psalm on a Saturday evening in my room, I could be flying along this road through Dalgety.
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Now I am trying to write while breastfeeding my youngest. Men go to the mountain to meet God, they push uphill in these grand gestures and brave works. But Christ met the woman at the well. There she was in the morning at her quiet chores and practical matters, and the King of Heaven visited her. He called in on Martha and Mary in their home - I wonder if they panicked about whether it was tidy enough for a king and hid something under the settee?
Sometimes when I am in these small and endless moments with my children I don't think that I am enough anymore, that I'll never do anything great again. Perhaps I worry I may never even pick up my pen again, and it is then I remember that Christ will come and meet me here too. Child at my chest, in my private prayer and pain.
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I still pinch myself that I live here. Yes, in the mountains. I climbed here too. The sun is illuminating every wheat-coloured strand of grass, everything is still, the wood heater is roaring. Did Van Gogh move to Arles from the Netherlands because the south of France was bathed in yellow in summer? I saw his Sunflowers (1888) recently, at the National Gallery in Canberra and the painting hovered, levitated off the wall. The background is startling, lemon-yellow - nothing at all dull. It sort of enters into you like light.
\I recalled writing about a Van Gogh exhibition in Melbourne and reading that yellow was part of his personal iconography. Through this hue, he described the presence of God in his work. In the The Starry Night (1889), yellow weaves and courses through the undulating sky like God's very breath, bringing the world into Being. In the town below, yellow is seen in the lit windows of homes. The church steeple, alas, is unlit. Was Van Gogh whispering that God was in nature and had left the buildings men had erected in His honour? The abbot at Holy Transfiguration Monastery mused on this for a moment with me recently. Van Gogh was not at all crazy, though he did have a tendency to eat cadmium yellow paint.
***
For a while after I moved here, I would see a city depicted in a film and I would remember that sensation: eyes, windows, movement, discovery, lives stacked on top of lives - all rushing somewhere. I missed my private thoughts in a place that is heaving with its own hurried concerns and stories. Maybe photography is good for me here, my eyes have slowed down, they are not ravenous for the next image.
It's a time to regroup and rebuild for us here. Who am I without the city and a job that allowed me to enter so many privileged rooms? Galleries and artists' homes? Who am I with my illusions of the world so utterly shattered after 2020?
Now the only wish that makes sense is to wish for more time with the ones we love. I imagine you here, at my kitchen table, unrushed and unhassled.
And I wonder if sunflowers will grow here.
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