Borderlands

Reflections on how to live in a new year

Struggling for something new, one reaches for something old. When the dawn of the new year blinds you with its brightness and overwhelms you with its demands of promises, plans, and resolutions, there are those past treasured things; a thought, a few lines that, like a tendril, wind their way out of your inner archives and paradoxically around the unknown, showing you the way.

This is the second new year in which I find myself in the foothills of the Pyrenees in the quiet artist’s mecca of Céret, France, named after the cherry trees here that bloom richly in the spring. It is a borderland that has inspired many to take to the canvas with brushes and paint: a land between cultures where, for centuries, armies clashed, language melds, and the cypresses hold vigil over the hills and the flatlands like dark candles on the horizon.

Dabbling in the portrayal of this landscape in watercolor, one encounters its many landmarks of past violence: the fortresses and the awe-inspiring cathedrals, which at times strike me as a kind of power pornography for intimidating the meek and stirring the hearts of young men to pursue bloody crusades. Still, one cannot help but behold with wonderment their endurance of time and the elements and be fascinated by the peephole they offer us into a psyche both familiar and alien.  

At a moment of the year when one feels the weight of time and the times, this borderland, which has witnessed so much madness, is a wise sage dispensing lessons in living with uncertainty. In it, time, like water, bears our colors across the page, eventually settling to form a picture we could never have predicted.

This, or somewhere thereabouts, was the starting point for a poem I wrote last year during the first week of January when I first came to this place. One could say it is the first watercolor Céret inspired in me. The impressions it expresses have only strengthened with my return to this borderland as a new year begins and, once again, all of us stand before the eternal question of how to live.

BORDERLANDS

The colors won’t be still,

meandering in water—

                           don’t look for the lines

                                                      believe anyway.

Sounds blend, accents bend

into no particular shape—

                           know with eyes

                                                      and hands.

Flags frayed at the edges

hang crooked from balconies—

                           the sun softens

                                                      all mountains.

Hills are sisters dark and patient,

piercing the gleaming windshield:

                           There is infinity in you,

                                                      they say.

On driving in the foothills of the Pyrenees in January 2023.