Mondays & Waterways

I’ve just returned to my desk in the icehouse loft after meeting with Glen and Tony on the west deck. It’s Monday morning, beginning of the work week, riddled with scheduling and coordination challenges. But we’ve chugged through deadlines and priorities, assembled a working strategy (of sorts), and agreed to keep in constant communication as hours turn into days turn into a week. There’s something about the first hours of the first day of the work week that promotes optimism, that supercharges me. So much opportunity. So many objectives. And time. Still. But not for long. It strikes me that Mondays and waterways have certain similarities.

Both are Mondays and waterways beginnings. Yet both are also integral parts of a bigger continuum.

Mondays & Waterways

Mondays
are headwaters
for new weeks,
and waterways 
are points of embarkation 
for new journeys.
Both suggest direction,
a sense of movement,
even progress.
Both return
to their birthplaces.

Mondays,
filled from still pools 
on Sunday, 
flow into a current
of productivity 
only to drift 
into the weekend, 
to revitalize 
and begin again. 

Waterways, 
whether lethargic ponds 
or rivulets swollen 
into rivers 
by rain and runoff, 
are pulled 
toward a distant sea 
to evaporate, 
to rain down, 
to recycle 
adventures anew.

Sometimes turbulent 
and sometimes tranquil.
Sometimes meandering 
and sometimes cascading. 
Sometimes barely filling 
and sometimes flooding 
their contours. 

Always flowing, 
resisting stagnation, 
insisting on movement, 
current pulling us onward.

Wild Continuum

This wild continuum of Mondays and waterways flows from our morning meeting into the icehouse with me as I return to write and edit. Like a tide incoming, following some mysterious metronome powered by moon and magic, the surf lifts me above the race from today to tomorrow to Friday. I feel connected to the flux and flow. I feel connected to the icehouse. To Rosslyn. I stare into a pair of paintings by Kevin Raines that hang in the vestibule. Deluge Descent. And an untitled watercolor that brings the viewer into a silvan brook-scape. Or, the brook into the icehouse. Both, all, connected.

The experience of home is about being connected. — Kevin Raines (Source: “A Path of Many Guides: Painting a Way Home, Spring 2022 Lyceum Series: Making Home, The Grange, March 1, 2022)

[…]

[Kevin Raines’] singular portrayals of thriving places within the Blue Line concurrently welcome the Adirondacks’ natural environment into Rosslyn *AND* welcome us into the places he paints.

Thank you, Kevin,… for imbuing Rosslyn, Susan, and my lives with gentle wildness. (Source: Kevin Raines: Painting Home)

More images now of Kevin’s waterway paintings (including a marsupial archive on the reverse of the painting above that includes a canoe and paddlers in the painting above.) This connection to waterways — Susan, Carley, and my connection — permeates our Rosslyn lifestyle. Even inside our home and icehouse. Via view. Via art. The former, at the top of this post, were quick snips from that view this morning.

Mondays. And waterways…