A couple of nights ago, my sweetheart Gary spirited me away to a nearby bookstore for a tea & dessert & reading session in the bookstore’s café. Working on this Advent blog has—happily—had me pretty much living between my drafting table and my computer for the past week, and I was in deep need of an outing. Once through the door of the bookstore, Gary and I each went in search of some printed goodies to consume along with our dessert. When I caught up with him at the café, I had a trinity of treats in hand: a Get Fuzzy treasury (I’m a huge fan), Maira Kalman’s latest book (lots and lots of her paintings, very cool), and the latest issue of Selvedge, a magazine whose acquaintance I made just a couple of months ago.
I mention Get Fuzzy because it’s my favorite comic strip (which will tell you a few things about me); I’m a bit of a Satchelvangelist and I like to support that crew in whatever small way I can. I mention Maira Kalman because I think her books are charming in a wonderfully funky way. I’m especially fond of her books about Max, a very cool and suave dog of the city; the books are ostensibly for children but give adults plenty to love.
The main reason I’m bringing all this up, however, is mostly to tell you about Selvedge, not because I think you’re going to rush right out and subscribe to a (very pricey but worth it) magazine about “Textiles in Fashion, Fine Art, Interiors, Travel and Shopping” (as they subtitle it) but because, as I savored it along with my tea and lemon-raspberry dessert in the café, I was reminded of how much I need the kind of sustenance that I found as I pondered its pages.
I don’t do much work with textiles (as an artist, I mean; I do have familiarity with certain aspects of textile media as, for instance, a habitual Wearer of Clothes), but Selvedge feeds my eyeballs and my soul in wonderful ways. It’s one of the most artfully designed magazines I’ve ever come across. Published in London, it’s geared toward an international audience, which helps widen my view. The latest issue focuses on Nordic textile traditions, stirring some good memories of the trip I made to Scandinavia about half a lifetime ago to visit a friend who had lived with my family as an exchange student from Norway.
Aside from all the treats for my eyes, I can hardly tell you how much I loved opening a design magazine that uses the word Advent on several occasions. One of the contributors, the photographer Anna Kern, comments on how her “favourite Christmas tradition is the advent calendar”; her mother made one for her, and now she’s making one for her young daughter.
Today’s Advent door found its inspiration in a window that I spotted in the pages of Selvedge. A beautiful creation of leaded green glass, the window reminds me of how I need to seek out the loveliness that is present along the path—and often well off it. I can’t just trust that moments of beauty are going to find me as I pursue my fully scheduled route, even if it’s a happy path that I’m wearing deeper and deeper into the carpet between my drafting table and computer. Thankfully, moments of unsought beauty do present themselves with unaccountable grace, but sometimes I need to remember to come to the surface and take a look around.
Tea, and dessert, and some beautiful pages in the company of someone dear: that’s what brought me to my senses this week. What brings you to yours? In these Advent days, when we are so intensely and sometimes so busily focused on this thing called incarnation, how are you seeking moments of beauty, grace, and respite for your own incarnate self?
An Illuminated Joy
December 10, 2007 at 8:06 am |
Oops! I’m behind a few days. Thanks, Jan, for being at your table and computer for all of us so consistently! I’ll have to look for Selvedge as I love textiles. However, answering your question, I was able to attend church after 4 weeks of nursing this foot and being unable to go. Interesting how being deprived of something I take for granted, suddenly makes me long for it and it becomes that moment of beauty, grace and respite in a fresh, new, tea and dessert kind of way.